KEY POINTS:
Helen Clark is today sunning herself in Brisbane with new Aussie Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. She might like to ask him what part high interest rates played in Australian voters deciding to dump John Howard's government.
Rudd would tell her that interest rates had a huge role in
the past two campaigns and Howard's failure to control them may have been the deciding factor in this election. For Labour's sake she had better listen.
Happily insulated from the realities of life by a salary and allowances in excess of $350,000 a year, Clark seems oblivious to the suffering of many New Zealand households.
In fact, I am sure Clark and Michael Cullen are smugly delighted that, since Labour took office in 1999, 150,000 more New Zealanders have become officially rich, with income that puts them in the top marginal tax rate. Many of these filthy rich are basically broke, because the top rate cuts in at a mere $60,000.
The increasingly loopy Cullen seems incapable of understanding that someone earning, say $65,000, has very little disposable cash, especially after paying the mortgage. His miserly refusal to grant any meaningful tax cuts has cost Labour support and you can guarantee he will be easily outbid by National next year when he opens his moth-eaten purse and gives us a few cents of our own money back.
Hip-pocket issues will decide the next election in this country and right now many crucial floating voters are finding that pocket is empty, largely thanks to the Government's financial policies and the Reserve Bank's obsession with keeping inflation down even if it means strangling the economy, driving the dollar higher than Mt Everest and pushing mortgage rates into double digits.
Those same folk will have noticed the number of stories in the past week showing how much better off they would be in Rudd-land. They would earn and save more, often nearly twice as much as they do here.
Helen might like to ask Kevin over a beer by the pool how come Australia is doing so well?
The weird thing is that Australia should not be that much richer than New Zealand but it is. Yes, it has the luxury of sitting on top of a rich pile of minerals but New Zealand actually earns more from its humble farms than Australia makes from mining.
The black years of Muldoon gave Australia a head start over us, the Lange-Douglas era briefly slowed the decline but then for another 20 years we stagnated while the Australian economy steadily grew larger.
Kevin Rudd's simple answer would be that, over the past three decades, Australia has been better managed than we have been.
It's as though someone let Wellington's Capital and Coast District Health Board run the whole country for 30 bumbling, incompetent years. That, by the way, is another sign of a government in freefall. Labour's had eight years to get the Wellington Hospital system sorted and it's failed. Tomorrow Cabinet will finally get around to doing what it should have done at the turn of the millennium and try to fix the place. United Future's Peter Dunne, himself a former Under-Secretary of Health with a long memory, describes Capital and Coast as remaining "essentially dysfunctional, lurching from crisis to crisis" from its inception in 2000.
The only upside in the hospital debacle is that, should the entire Cabinet be struck down with some dreadful debilitating illness on Monday, ministers will be treated by the increasingly lethal Capital and Coast DHB. Good luck, guys!
Further evidence that the wheels are coming off the Government can be seen with almost daily PR disasters: Mallard in the dock, Mallard misled by his department, Mallard unable to say the word "sorry". Then there's Cullen screaming words like "scumbag" and "prick" across the House - that's always a good look.
Meanwhile, Ombudsman Mel Smith raises a small point. He has found that under Labour the issues of crime and justice have become highly politicised, the system is suffering low morale, a loss of public and political confidence and rapidly rising costs. Smith recommends a Royal Commission into the whole criminal justice sector.
Could there be a bigger indictment of how the Government has managed the police and justice portfolios?
The story of the past eight years has been of a Government that has grandstanded on politically correct trivia and used the politicised machinery of the public service to put a rosy spin on its reign while beneath the surface the important infra-structure of government has slowly rotted with neglect.
Perhaps Helen could also ask Kevin if he has a room for another four million Kiwi migrants.
