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NZCPR
Guest Forum
Mike
Butler
27
February 2010
Politics,
Parties, Voters
Sixteen
months after winning the 2008 election, Prime Minister John
Key and the National Party have increased in popularity,
according to the latest opinion polls.
The polls
were published before Housing and Fisheries Minister Phil
Heatley’s resignation after signing off an incorrect
spending declaration, the second minister to go from the Key
Cabinet.
Key
registered 58 per cent backing as preferred Prime Minister,
according to the latest Herald-DigiPoll survey. This was the
highest preferred Prime Minister rating since August 2005,
when Helen Clark had 59 per cent support.
National’s
current support of 54 percent is up from the 45.5 percent vote
achieved in the 2008 election, according to the ONE News
Colmar Brunton opinion poll published last Sunday.
Key seems
to be on a permanent publicity parade, following the pattern
of Clark, although he does it more naturally, apparently more
at ease than his often-awkward predecessor. For instance, last
weekend he was seen posing in Art Deco garb with fellow MPs in
Napier, and cycling around a new bike track at St Mary’s
School, Hastings.
He is adept
at email marketing, has a Facebook page boasting 18,495
fans, and regularly tweets on Twitter.
His
popularity has increased despite rejecting a referendum result
that showed nearly 87.4 percent of voters do not want a light
smack to be a criminal offence. Key’s action displays a
“we know best” mentality that was the hallmark of the
previous administration.
Another
unpopular move by Key would be the forests-for-votes deal that
he entered into with the Maori Party to get the Climate
Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill
passed into law. This has not apparently tarnished his image,
although it follows an atrocious political process that
subverts representative democracy.
This
law was passed before the “climategate”
leak of emails from the University of East Anglia showed that
the prestigious agencies involved in leading climate change
science were breaking official information laws, arbitrarily
adjusting raw data, hiding the reasons for those adjustments,
and contriving to lose the original unadjusted data so that it
could not be independently checked.
The
National Party campaigned on cutting tax, yet 16
months down the track, the Key administration has found that
big government is a hungry beast and is looking at ways to
increase tax. A rise in GST to 15 percent is under
consideration, showing a U-turn on an election promise not to
touch GST. Moreover, property investors have been targeted as
a source of extra tax.
National
also campaigned on curbing
government spending, but the
Key government increased core government spending to
$62.3-billion, up from the 2008 budgeted amount of
$61.9-billion, despite a highly publicized line-by-line
review of departmental expenditure.
The
Key government set up the 2025 Taskforce to investigate how to
close the income gap with Australia, but Key rejected the
taskforce’s recommendations as too radical, thus indicating
he is likely to continue a somewhat ad hoc approach.
The
National-led government often reminds us that we are facing
the most serious financial situation in many years. The
question remains whether anyone in that government will be
clever enough to draw on the wisdom of coalition colleague Sir
Roger Douglas, who successfully dealt with economic challenges
a generation ago.
The
architect of Rogernomics has a proposal for a capital tax of
0.08 percent that he says would
reduce
expenditure by $15-billion, reduce the deficit by $7-billion,
reduce personal tax to 16.66 percent, and get rid of company
tax. Property investors could be better off under such a tax
rather than lose the capability of claiming depreciation.
Looking to
the Opposition, Phil Goff, who has the thankless task of
leading the remnants of a Labour team dumped from office after
nine years in power, has the support of only eight percent as
preferred Prime Minister, according to the ONE News poll.
Labour’s support sits at 34 percent, down from the 33.8
percent support gained in the 2008 election.
Goff’s
''The Many Not the Few'' speech about capping public service
chief executives' salaries had less impact than his speech
accusing the Government of making "shabby deals"
with the Maori Party, which was criticised as playing the race
card.
Ministerial
financial indiscretions, apparent policy U-turns, and
ill-considered Government reactions could all provide suitable
ground for an effective opposition to cultivate, but the
Labour Party has so far not succeeded in making much headway.
The Greens
dipped under the 5 percent threshold in the latest polls, down
from 6.4 percent in November 2008, meaning that without an
electorate seat, if there were an election now they would not
be in parliament. Minus veteran environmentalist Jeanette
Fitzsimons and activist Sue Bradford, and with a home
insulation scheme being rolled out, the Greens have difficulty
making an impact, even though co-leader Russel Norman has had
abundant air time to comment on just about anything.
Winston
Peters emerges from the political wilderness periodically to
comment, as he did after Maori Party MP Hone Harawira’s
racially offensive outburst.
ACT is
hovering around 2 percent, down from 3.7 percent in 2008, and
as a tiny party in coalition with, and having similar
interests with the National Party, struggles to differentiate
itself.
ACT leader
Rodney Hide
appears consumed with his role as Minister of Local
Government, especially with putting together the Auckland
super city. Heather Roy has disappeared into delivering
speeches on consumer affairs, defence, or education. David
Garrett has championed the Three-Strikes bill against repeat
violent offenders. John Boscawen has campaigned
against the Electoral Finance Act, and anti-smacking
referendum.
ACT
is the only party in parliament to oppose emissions trading.
Hide, who studied environmental science, pointed out that on
the basis of questionable science, the Key government is
hitting Fonterra with a $100-million-a-year bill, which will
cost the average dairy farm $10,000 a year extra, and which
will hike fuel and power costs to every business and
householder in the country.
The
presence of five ACT MPs in parliament comes with Hide winning
Epsom and comes courtesy of the curious MMP system. Hide was
seriously embarrassed into paying back expenses after
publication of details of an overseas trip he took with his
girlfriend on the public purse.
The Maori
Party has stayed on its message of Maori control of all things
Maori and is hovering around 2 percent support. Co-leaders
Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia got Key to fly the Tino
Rangatiratanga flag on Waitangi Day, has brought the Whanau
Ora one-stop welfare shop for Maori families for Cabinet
approval, and is pressing ahead on it’s flagship repeal the Foreshore and Seabed Act
policy despite the antics of colleague Hone Harawira, who
single-handedly generated 752 complaints to the race relations
conciliator.
The
presence of five Maori Party MPs in parliament depends on the
anachronistic parallel Maori electorate system that distorts
the proportionality of parliament, and means the party’s
influence goes way beyond the 2 percent support it has.
Peter Dunne
of United Future and Jim Anderton of the Progressive Party
both retained their electorate seats so remain in parliament.
They are rarely seen on television and the popularity of both
remains at less than one percent.
Sources:
2008
election result, http://www.elections.org.nz/record/2008-election-official-results.html
Poll
records growing support for Key, NZ Herald, February 13, 2010.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10625894
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