John Armstrong: 2025 report too extreme to promote

John Key. Photo / Dean Purcell

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of yesterday's report from the Don Brash-chaired 2025 Taskforce is that the panel has delivered exactly the kind of extreme right-wing-policy prescription its critics had predicted it would.

So extreme is the market-driven mix recommended by the taskforce that even Act MPs who instigated its establishment may blanch at some of its findings - Sir Roger Douglas excepted, of course. For the former finance minister, the report amounts to the "unfinished business" still to be completed when the public's appetite for such "big bang" reform wilted in the early 1990s.

The political market for market-oriented solutions is now tiny. That, however, seems to be of no consequence to the taskforce, which insists there is no alternative to following its set of recommendations holus-bolus if the Government's "aspiration" of bridging the gap between the incomes of New Zealanders and those of their Australian cousins is to be met by the target date of 2025.

But with only a small audience finding the suggestions palatable, Brash's hope the report will spark a "national conversation" will be in vain. Instead, the report's blinkered thinking has simply made it that much easier for politicians to dismiss it out of hand.

It is a missed opportunity. Sure, the panel's brief was to come up with solutions it thought best and leave it to the politicians to worry about implementing them. But a more politically calculated approach would have seen ideas floated more in the realm of the politically possible than just the production of a Business Roundtable wish-list.

That would have made it more difficult for the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister to pooh-pooh the findings of something from which National has always been careful to keep some distance, given it was part of the price of securing Act's support on confidence and money supply after last year's election.

Indeed, John Key and Bill English may have actually been grateful for some practical ideas as to ways and means of getting what they call a "step change" in the New Zealand economy.

But barring the references to a dual tax system which would see tax on company income much lower than personal tax levels, the report shows a poverty of vision when it comes to adopting ideas which have worked elsewhere in boosting investment and entrepreneurship.

It is not as if the taskforce can plead ignorance. The PM has made it patently clear he will have no truck with any Douglas-like "big bang" agenda, especially one requiring National to break a string of election promises.

Key will not be seduced by the taskforce's talk of "successful" political leaders being the ones capable of finding ways of taking the public with them when they make "courageous" reforms. Neither will he be fooled by the report's assertion that the apparent belief that far-reaching economic reform means inevitable electoral suicide has simply not been the experience in New Zealand.

Tell that to Ruth Richardson. She was dumped as finance minister after the National Party leadership held her 1991 Mother of All Budgets as responsible for National's near defeat at the 1993 election. The only difference between Richardson's magnum opus and that produced by the 2025 Taskforce is that the latter would be the longer suicide note for any party thinking of following it.