KEY POINTS:
The National Party juggernaut is starting to hit a few bumps. John Key has had an extended honeymoon where he has had an adulatory media for so long you'd think he was running for sainthood rather than Prime Minister. National was always going to have to put up policy but what Labour desperately needed was the opportunity to expose National's more unpalatable policy detail. To Labour's relief, this is now happening.
National health spokesman Tony Ryall blundered big-time at his party's health election policy launch. He revealed that a Key-led government would lift the cap on doctors' fees, except it wasn't written in the policy. Key's panicked cover-up will raise voters' suspicions about whether they are being told the whole story.
Key's belated defence that fees wouldn't go up because patients could move to another doctor is incredulous. The media will now pay closer attention to National's policy details.
The mishap followed hints by Bill English of asset sales, and Labour couldn't believe their luck. Labour's claim National would sell off our assets to fund tax cuts would have made a lot of the soft middle vote sit up. For anyone around when Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson were selling off the family silver, any party advocating the sale of our remaining public assets will be pilloried.
National's right-wing ideologues will try to soften this agenda by calling it private-public partnership. But don't be fooled. It will result in public asset sales to overseas corporations.
Of course the right-wing ideologues and corporations know a large number of juicy public assets are at regional and local level. That's why the local body elections have been getting attention from employer groups, big business and large property investors. Many of these players would love to get their hands on our port, airport, transport, water, and anything else they can rent back to us forever at a hefty profit. When voting in the local election ballots you should have received by now, read carefully where candidates stand on asset ownership.
The mayoral races around the Auckland region, as usual, attract the most media interest. It's no secret I support Willie Jackson for Manukau City and John Tamihere for Waitakere City. Whatever the results, it certainly gives voters in those two cities a real choice of leadership.
But I must say, it is very hard to get excited about the Auckland City race. One expects heroes and villains in mayoral elections, but this year seems to be a non-event between two reject mayors: John Banks (heavily defeated in 2004) and Dick Hubbard (who is quite possibly on his way to becoming a reject mayor - the third since 1998). I put Banks and Hubbard in the pro-asset selling camp.
You'll remember when the region's mayors tried to get the Government to postpone local government elections this year. Their secret plan was to abolish the regional council and replace it with a Great Auckland Council, with a small membership of three Mayors, who would appoint business representatives presided over by a Lord Mayor. An email written by Bob Harvey had him offering to take this role. For this honour he offered to transfer half of his city to the North Shore and the other to Auckland City.
More ominously, its brief was to divide up the region's public assets. I can only conclude they would have been hocked off to the highest bidders. It was only the public exposure by Mike Lee - the chair of the Auckland Regional Council - that prevented it from happening.
Prime Minister Helen Clark was put in the embarrassing position of having to deny she knew anything about it, even though it was clear her Minister of Auckland Affairs, Judith Tizard, was in it up to her eyeballs.
Be under no illusions - if the business-backed, right-wing politicians are elected, then we will see a concentrated effort by business interests to snap up our public assets. Already there are forces gathering and sniffing around Auckland Airport and the Ports of Auckland.
Lee, with Bruce Jesson and Pam Corkery, was a major player in seeing off the right-wing asset strippers back in the early 1990s. For the last 15 years, Lee and his close ally, Paul Walbran, have held senior elected roles on the ARC and behind the scenes have fought off ongoing campaigns to wrest our assets from public ownership.
In some respects, the fight for the mayoralties isn't the real game. The Government intends to amalgamate much of the region anyway. The mayors we elect this time will really be their respective city's advocates in redesigning our region into some sort of integrated governance structure. But having Lee and his allies dominating the Auckland Regional Council will give us all some comfort that we won't see any carve up of our public assets or infrastructure.
The National Party has shown its hand in testing the public mood for asset sales. A strong vote for all the centre-left candidates in the region will ensure that any secret campaign to privatise assets will be thwarted at the local level. For those of you who haven't voted, fill out your ballots and mail them back promptly. A strong vote for candidates opposed to asset sales will send a strong message to Key and English to back away from the failed policies of the 1980s.
