Dialogue: Direction should be plain by now

A year on from the election, what is this Government about? It is one of those questions nobody should need to ask.

Last weekend, at Labour's first national conference since coming to power, its main ambition seemed to be re-election.

And the way to get re-elected, it believes, is to keep its promises, control public spending, avoid minor embarrassments and do nothing that might be unpopular.

I am not sure that will be enough.

Maybe it was enough in the 1950s and 1960s when the country was one of the richest in the world and economics was a matter of riding the peaks and troughs of commodity prices.

But as far back as I can remember, governments have faced the need to build a better economic base and successful ones gave the country a sense of what they were doing about it long before their first year was out.

Even the Third Labour Government, whose focus was not initially economic, was cultivating a more assertive national spirit obvious to all.

The Third National Government came in to manage a shaken economy and gave the ordinary bloke to believe the country was in strong hands.

The Fourth Labour Government spent a frenetic first year introducing just about all sectors to competitive markets. The country knew it was going somewhere and gave it a second term.

The Fourth National Government set about cutting public spending and bringing competition to the sectors Labour had left sheltered - unions, schools and health services.

Like or loathe it, the direction of those governments was clear from their first steps. This one remains an enigma to me.

Michael Cullen told the conference to be patient - Labour couldn't do all it wanted to do in one term. Well, it has just about completed the election card, so what now? Where are we going? I don't think the Administration knows.

We've already had several themes ventured. Right after the election it seemed the new Government might be defined by a new national spirit in arts and broadcasting.

A great deal of money was given to the higher arts but not much seems to be happening. In broadcasting, TVNZ was given a more public-spirited charter but it is a pale and slender thing. The arts are instructed to be elitist and popular at the same time, television seems to be expected to cater to minority interests in prime time and be profitable. It is not clear.

There came "closing the gaps," a task every bit as hard and urgent as getting the economy onto a higher gear.

In the Budget all ministries were ordered to give their work a Maori dimension. But a few months later the Government realised that selective help for Maori would not be popular. The gaps to be closed are now the general income differentials, and Maori on the lower rungs are to rise with the rest - maybe.

If closing the gap between rich and poor is to be the distinguishing mission of this Government, it has taken its time to get started. Next Friday it will finally begin charging income-related rent to state-house tenants, who may thereby lose other forms of assistance.

The defining feature of the Government's term is probably the fall of the dollar. It happened in unison with other currencies against the greenback but in this country it brought a loss of business confidence that eventually shook the higher floors of the Beehive.

For a while the Government seemed to think investors were obliged to obey an election result. By the time that penny dropped, it was a bit late to generate a constructive sense of crisis around the currency, which would have given the Government a defining purpose, an entirely valid one. The depreciation forces the public to face our inability to earn a first-class living standard.

Not many are taking a holiday overseas this summer. If we are living in envy of overseas lifestyles two years from now, and nothing the Government has done helps get us back up there, forget re-election.

Its response is still fuzzy. It is willing to support particular industries and firms with, so far, research subsidies and export credit guarantees. But the sums it has set aside are derisory. It is not serious.

Jim Anderton excepted, the cabinet has no business sense and no confidence that it can, or should, pick winners.

And despite its first retrograde steps - reducing competition in accident insurance, wage bargaining and education - it does seem to be committed to a competitive, open economy.

At Apec last week, the Prime Minister announced that tariffs would be removed for products from the world's 48 least-developed countries. Her address to an Auckland Chamber of Commerce lunch on Thursday could have been given by an economic liberal.

She was astounded, she said, to return from Apec to criticism of the concession to least-developed countries.

"If we cannot compete with products from the likes of Chad, Somalia and Bangladesh," she said, "we won't even survive in the Third World. We are heading for the fourth."

A question from the floor asked what her Government was doing to make this country more competitive.

She was caught momentarily, then muttered something about the business forum, commerce and upgrading the economy.

She knew the question should not need to be asked.