Bill English (left) is back in boot camp, while Sir John Key is off tilting at windmills.
Bill English (left) is back in boot camp, while Sir John Key is off tilting at windmills.
Well, National got the boot camp they campaigned for - they just didn't expect to be the ones in it.
But boot camp - aka the Opposition benches - needn't be a bad thing. National graphically demonstrated they're in desperate need of some good old-fashioned basic training.
Any government that wilfully, disingenuously, pumps the line that the "economy" is doing great while great chunks of the milieu in which it operates have turned to custard is living a big-time lie. (It must be wilful and disingenuous, because no one - not even Nats - could possibly be so dumb as to believe a national "economy" somehow exists independent of its constituent members and environment.)
So for years now we've had a government crowing about a crash-hot "economy" when negative social statistics, quality of life and environmental standards have been going through the floor. False economics, writ large.
The new Prime Minister demonstrated at least some grasp of the situation when she remarked that one could hardly gloat about a growth economy if that meant growth in homelessness also.
Ms Ardern could have taken ace film director Taika Waititi's lead and mentioned a lot more. Mr Waititi said he didn't feel particularly proud to be a New Zealander, given our domestic and child violence rates, working poor and relative poverty, poisoned lakes and waterways, youth suicide, and so forth. For his troubles he was branded a "traitor".
It seems dysfunction is OK as long as you keep mum about it. But when documentary-makers come from the other side of the world to feature not our spectacular scenery but our spectacular waterway pollution, you know the cat is well and truly out of the bag.
Yet you've got to feel a bit sorry for the Beehive Baldrick, Bill English - he just can't seem to get it right.
As National leader in 2002, he lost bigly. After getting the old heave-ho and a subsequent eight years crunching the numbers for Trader John, he got a second bite at the cherry.
Bill pondered long and hard, and came up with a cunning plan. He cunningly thought that if he won big instead of losing big, then he'd be on the money. Brilliant! So Bill went out and won big. The only glitch was he still lost.
It was a rude reminder that picking up most individual party votes guarantees nothing in an MMP parliament. Changing the system to reflect the wider constituency is what MMP is all about.
Meanwhile, his old boss, John Keyote, has ridden off to tilt at windmills in Oz, and, while he's at it, to collect some spoils of war. He knows where they are. He should. He helped put them there. In his case, he gets to do it as chairman of ANZ Bank, one of the main beneficiaries of the New Zealand property blow-out his government helped create.
Frank Greenall
As we speak, the "Big Four" Australian banks (ANZ included) are ecstatically clipping the tickets on the multiple exorbitant mortgages now bloating their counting houses - the same crippling mortgages now facing any prospective home owner in any NZ metropolitan area.
I few months back I advised not to be too surprised if Key soon turned up on the board of Bank of America. I wasn't too far off. ANZ is part-owned by J P Morgan, one of the "Big Four" American banks, of which Bank of America is also one.
But Sir John will have to be careful. Like his previous private employer, Merrill Lynch, ANZ is so mired in financial malfeasance accusations and lawsuits it could end up being branded a criminal organisation. And we know what happens to Kiwis in Oz who consort with criminal gangs.
ANZ is also a frequent finalist and twice winner of the Roger Awards, which recognise "The Worst Transnational Corporation[s] operating in New Zealand".
