Dialogue: Solid, honest, godly - and he's a bloke

By GARTH GEORGE

I have to hand it to Jenny Shipley. When the chips dropped, she went quietly and with dignity, expressing disappointment rather than anger at being rolled.

I can't see her acting like some in recent memory who have gone kicking and screaming with resentment and bitterness and spent the rest of their fortunately brief political careers doing their damnedest to torpedo the efforts of their successors.

She will be remembered as this country's first woman Prime Minister, but for nothing else as she joins the ranks of others who were promoted into the nation's top political position, found it beyond their competence and who left nothing but a footnote in back issues of Hansard.

The best thing about it is that it has allowed a male to reclaim one of the nation's top positions of influence - and a real man at that. For a start he's a Southlander and there are no men more practical, productive, persevering and principled than those who come from the far south.

Mr English is a man of the land, but also a man of high education and economic literacy, so we can expect him to understand both the theory and the practicality of matters economic, which is more than can be said for most in Parliament today and in recent yesterdays.

He is young, and there will be many who will hold that against him. But the longer I live, the more I realise that it really is a young man's world; that young men today seem to have much more to offer than they did when I was one of them.

Much as I acknowledge that with chagrin, I see it around me every day as journalists who weren't even born when I entered the trade exhibit a grasp of complex issues and an ability to express them simply and comprehensively to an extent that from time to time astonishes me.

I have always prided myself on my journalistic skills, but I have to concede that some of these young guns of today would have left me for dead.

Probably most important of all, Mr English is a family man and a born and bred and still practising Catholic, which means he must have more than a nodding acquaintance with God and must know that there is much more to life (and to politics) than money, property and prestige.

One might even expect that he has absorbed sufficient basic Christian principles to be able to become a leader of honesty, integrity, energy, vision and compassion. God knows, if this nation ever needed men of principle in positions of influence, it is now.

I sincerely hope that Mr English can at least return the National Party to its rightful place as the natural party of government. To do so he will have to take it back to its right-of-centre roots.

And I mean right of centre. The centre is a no-man's land of dissimulation, double-speak, fence-sitting and compromise, in which politicians try to be all things to all men and to please everybody, but end up pleasing nobody and getting thrown out.

Helen Clark and her ugly sisters and cowed, dutiful brothers will find that out eventually but not soon enough, unfortunately, unless God grants Mr English a miracle or three.

The National Party must return to those principles that gave it the Treasury benches nine years out of 12 for years and years - particularly the principles of private enterprise (not privatisation) and individual responsibility which reward hard work and recognise the right of every adult New Zealander to be and do what they like within the bounds of the law.

It must root out the free-marketeers who have corrupted the principle of private enterprise beyond recognition and return to the policies by which wealth-creation means that everyone, and not just an elite few, is better off.

It must root out the social engineers who would try to create a utopia by changing everything and everyone to suit their concept of what the world should be like and how the people in it should behave, reducing us all to the status of pawns to be shuffled about an ideological chess board.

National must distance itself as far as possible from that mind-bending mumbo-jumbo and leave it to Labour's socialist dogmatists, who will never learn that the only person you can change in this life is yourself and that any and all attempts to change others are futile.

The party must regain its understanding that the responsibilities of Government are clearly defined and can never be abrogated - for defence, law and order, health, education, welfare and infrastructure - and that the purpose of wealth creation is that all those be not just adequate but first-class.

Meanwhile, let us pray that the elevation of Bill English signals the beginning of the end of the era of the matriarchs.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz