Just Left

Targets

Ryall, the new Minister of Health, has said he wants to apply a target for waiting times in emergency departments.

Targets are seductive for politicians mainly because of the way politicians deal with the public: through the mass media.

A target will provide a clear reference point, an easy sound bite, and can scratch whatever itch is niggling away in the body politic at the time.

The damage they cause of course is that resources flow to hit the target, regardless of whether that is the best use of resources or not, and unless the flow is a large one, the damage often goes unnoticed to the public.

It's not good that people wait a long time for emergency care. Nor is it good that drugs are expensive, or primary health care costs too much, or that dental care is left to the market.

Fixing any of these is mainly a resource issue, unless you believe that somehow half the health budget is being wasted. If you believe that, go to your local hospital, find out how, and report your findings to us all.

What plans does National have to massively increase resources in the public health sector, to address the waiting time issue?

Hmmmmm....

Quite curious

Our new government is saying and doing some odd things. I think it was on the radio sometime this week (listened to from afar by RadioNZ's excellent podcasts) but it might have been on stuff or nzherald, some commentator noted that unusually for a new government, the Nats have been winding up expectations rather than damping them down.

There are sporadic examples of this, but the most curious one I have seen so far is Bill English's comments as published in the Herald:

Mr English said that in the past, the long-term average of numbers migrating was about half of what it was now. Present levels were concerning. "We would hope in the future those peaks are significantly lower than where they are now.

"[Migration numbers] are driven significantly by the difference in growth between New Zealand and Australia. At the moment that's quite a big difference, so I don't see them slowing down in a hurry."

This is strangely silly from English. If his analysis of the reason for the drift (which I think he means to say is the gap in income levels, not growth levels (since we've grown faster than Oz over the past decade until recently), then by definition there is nothing in this parliamentary term he can do about it - or probably the next.  there is nothing National can do, or that any party can do, or that any business can do, which would miraculously put per capita incomes in NZ much closer to those of AU in any short timescale. That's the simple truth.

Why then is he creating such a hostage to fortune? I don't know, but I would be interested in any thoughts by anyone else who thinks that they do.  He is not the sort of person who generally would make a mistake, so there must be some logic to it.

The other curious thing that has caught my eye is the damage that National has already begun to cause New Zealand internationally. The silly and thoughtless policy to suspend the ETS, pretend some MPs can discern the truth of the science, and even talk about a carbon tax, will have been strongly challenged at the APEC meeting by some of his more sensible fellow leaders, and by Gordon Brown who he also flew to visit in the UK.

If Mr Key is serious about pandering to his business backers by shredding the ETS, then he cannot be an effective advocate for New Zealand tourism in the wealthy markets where issues of sustainability and dealing with climate change are having real effects on people's travel decisions - and where government policies are doing the same.

If Mr Key is serious about the environment, then he cannot undermine New Zealand's climate change reputation.

What he will need to learn, and fast (for New Zealand's good, though politically it would be good if he didn't get this), is that unlike in opposition, he is now responsible for policy and for its effects. He is welcome to segment his message if he likes, and to say one thing overseas and another domestically, but foreign powers don't much care what he says, or in fact what anyone from New Zealand says.

They will, instead, judge us on what we do.

Saying your politicians should judge climate change, ending a perfectly sensible ETS (in breach of your own election promises, which NRT and Public Address have discussed), and speculating about a massive reversal of policy towards a carbon tax, is damaging and wrong. It will hurt our economy and our people to no discernable good end.

Here's hoping that on his return to New Zealand, when Mr Key can resume his first in-country week as PM, he has a bit of a think and ditches the nonsense that ACT has tried to tie him to.

Yes, indeed, curious times for the new administration.

It might want to rush a bit less and think a bit more, for its good and for ours.

the end of the Washington Consensus

If anyone was in any doubt about the impact the financial crisis is having on the world and on world politics, one only has to look at what happened in the UK on Monday to get the answer: big changes are on the way.

Had you suggested even a year ago that a UK New Labour government would signal a new 45p in the pound income tax rate on high income earners; increase payroll taxes for public services; ramp the budget deficit up to 118 BILLION pounds sterling and cause part of that by a cut to the VAT rate.... you would have been dreaming, in fantasy land.

But then a year ago, if you had suggested that the United States government, sort of in the hands of the Republicans, would offer $700bn as a bailout of the banks, followed a month later by $800bn more purchase of distressed assets, I and everyone else would probably have suggested you had gone barking mad.

The simple fact is that for thirty years the West operated in a fantasy land of its own making. We thought we could borrow and hope forever, to bridge the gap between rising expectations of living standards, and lackluster per capita economic growth.

People, smart people, honestly thought that liberalising markets was always the right thing to do - even in finance, and that even the creation of more and more assets that were more and more distant from the real economy was good for finance and good for the rest of society.

The events of the past year or so, which have really come to the fore in the past few months, put paid to that for once and for all. The whole neo-liberal framework of "leave it alone" is now shown to be what those of us on the left generally argued it was: bankrupt.

People have now come rather hurriedly to the realisation that it is only the State as the embodiment of the public interest that can withstand the shocks and unravelling that is to begin. Which is why the debate in Britain today and in the United States during the whole course of the Presidential election campaign highlighted rather more fundamental differences than has been the case.

Briefly, in democratic politics we now have a social democratic view that says the state must intervene to protect the public interest, and we have a neoliberal view that says we should keep the state in its box, except for the current crisis.

It gives me great comfort to belong to a party and a movement whose principles are the right ones to deal with this crisis and to make sure that the recovery from it is designed with the public interest in mind, rather than the financial interests of those who gambled and lost being protected once again.

Of course, at home in NZ it is a bittersweet intellectual victory, because we've just lost the ability to put those principles to work. The upside is that the work of the past nine years has so changed the National Party that it has little choice but to work in the framework of moderate, social democratic values that the New Zealand public support.

The extent to which the new government remains true to what they said in the campaign, as opposed to the rather more savage and offensive liberal extremism that still beats in the chests of National's true believers (and their ACTivist sidekicks), is the extent to which it has a chance of winning the next election. Any deviation back to the horrors of 1990s extremism, ignoring the lessons of this financial crisis, will do NZ great damage, and lead to a very big repair job for the incoming Labour government.

Our task as an opposition will be to spell out clearly why it is that our values are the best fit for generating the recovery New Zealand needs once the storm has passed, and why, unlike any of the other parties, our arguments are actually ones that a) will work in practice, and b) we believe in.

...

Been travelling for work, it's conference season. The next conference is in India. I am not convinced it is worth going there, given yesterday's horrific events. Maybe home early which would be fantastic.

New Ministry

.... my full comments will have to wait. I can give the Tories credit for what looks like it might be a focus on infrastructure. But some of the other appointments are miserable to say the best, particularly the vile Ryall in Health.

A bit distracted travelling for the next wee while, but change is coming to Just Left, more news on that soon.

Financing elections

It's a funny thing about governments that sometimes they forget to pay attention to the basics. Last year's passage of a flawed Electoral Finance Act is a good example.

I had a dream about electoral law reform. It was that we could build a solid public consensus based on wide deliberation, public engagement and so on, perhaps with a citizens' jury, that would lead to great transparency and public funding for political parties.

Instead, Labour took as a proxy for that engagement the fact that it could secure a majority of votes in the Parliament. The government I supported ignored the important convention that such changes should be broadly based. The law itself was badly drafted. We were punished for it, and I am afraid, rightly so.

Where do we go next then? Well, I think that we do need spending limits; we do need some public funding; we do need transparency; and we do need functional restrictions on third party financial involvement with elections.

We also need two guiding principles: that the scheme should assist, not hinder, public engagement with elections and campaigning, and that it should be based on a widespread agreement about how best to proceed.

So I hope that as the new government comes to review the Act next year, it seeks to use mechanisms beyond the Parliamentary ones of a select committee review. The existing review should be carried on or supplemented. There is nothing bad about doing a citizens' jury. Perhaps a white paper would be good. Maybe a series of public meetings around the country to debate the issue.

And I hope that at the end of it we can come up with a workable law. We should not overstate the problems with the Act as it is, in substance it has actually worked OK, but the politics around it means it needs to be rethought, and there are some defects in it that need substantial improvement, which can now happen.

Congrats to Phil and Annette

I wish Phil Goff and Annette King all the best in their new roles as Leader and Deputy Leader respectively of the Labour Party.

In my opinion, the logic of their choice is impeccable. The new government needs to be held very strongly to account from day one, and the experience those two have of working in Opposition is key to doing that. It also helps that they are strong Parliamentary performers, so will be able to engage both in the House and out of it.

A common concern will be that they are both 1980s vintage politicians, and that they are both from the right of Labour's caucus. These days I am relaxed about the latter (having grown past my more radical days, much to some people's disappointment...), and I don't see the former as a concern at this point. The factions in our party barely exist, and the unity that has developed under Helen's leadership is so strong that it will trump any concerns I have about it. As for age, what we need now is experience. They have that in spades and will use it well.

Two other appointments are noted in the media, Clark for foreign affairs and Cunliffe for finance, are also excellent. David has a great grasp of the issues and is a fresh face in that leadership team. Helen, of course, is possibly the best foreign affairs spokesperson one could hope to have.

This new team has a big job. Their task is to rebuild Labour's connections with those communities it had drifted from; to recast a progressive agenda for the second decade of this century; to rebuild and revitalise the party organisation and structure; and to hold to account a new government with a solid majority.

Note: Goff statement here.

Congrats and Worries

I should have been blunter about this yesterday: congratulations are due to the centre-right. They achieved a clear victory in Saturday's election, and now have the responsibility of taking New Zealand ahead on the agenda they campaigned on: an agenda that is perhaps the first enduring legacy of Labour's work.

It is a moderate, cautious and centrist mandate. The campaign provided plenty of chances for a different mandate to be sought but it was not. Just as Labour came to government in 1999 with a cautious mandate for change, so has National in 2008. They must stick to it, regardless of what the right wing fringes of National, or the people in ACT, would actually like to do instead.

I'm going to accept, unless or until I see evidence to the contrary, that National will govern in line with its mandate and its promises. If that is the case, then my key worries so far are these:

• ACC - the competitive experiment in ACC failed last time and it will fail again this time, pushing up costs and reducing service quality from our accident insurance scheme. However it is a totemic, ideological change that the right will insist on, regardless of the evidence. So ACC is at risk.
• Public services - NZ's core state sector shrank in terms of staffing from something around 85,000 in 1990 to about 26,000 by 1999. That is why our incoming government found the public service almost unable to do anything, and vast numbers of consultants in use. Things are better now, and the public services now have the capacity to deliver. If National does reduce the numbers by several thousands, the only outcome will be poorer services and more stressed-out front line workers, who will lose the corporate support that they need to do their jobs well.
• Labour markets - the "no rights at work" legislation that National is planning for workers' first ninety days on the job will undermine employment security, especially for younger New Zealanders. That's a shame, but it's what they campaigned on and so they will presumably do it.

Those are the most significant concerns I have about the new government at the moment. I will be very, very pleased if no more major ones emerge, but I don't trust them (obviously), and would not be surprised of the cautious mandate they have been given gets twisted at least in some areas down a more damaging and radical direction.

Recovery

As you can imagine, I've got a lot of catching up to do and thinking and conversations to have in mulling over last Saturday's election results.

On a personal level I am pleased I doubled Sir Roger Douglas's candidate vote in Hunua. That was not a surprise but was a relief all the same. When we have the final results I will be able to assess more fully how our campaign went.

Nationally, obviously I am not happy with the result. How could one be, when a government that has been pretty damn good loses? The story of that loss and my views as to why it happened will keep, but let me put it this way: last week, I thought we would end up doing much worse than 34%.

Aspects of the situation are causes for cheer.

The bloody awful Winston Peters is finally out of our Parliament. No longer can he have that platform for the campaigns of hate and deception he has too often rained down upon innocent heads. His absence leaves all of us better off. Long may it continue.

Labour has some excellent new MPs who are really going to make a mark in this 49th Parliament and beyond. Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson, Carmel Sepuloni, Clare Curran, Kelvin Davis and others will punch above their weight, and show above all else that Labour's renewal is well under way.

As I get my head around Helen Clark's sudden and shocking resignation as Leader, I'll write about that. Today is not the day, other than to note the immense pride I have in the work she has done over fifteen long years to heal a wounded and broken Labour Party, and to make New Zealand a place we can be proud of. We owe to her the fact that we will be punching back at the Nats from the first day in Parliament, and for our unity and cohesion through a very tough campaign.

Low moments? Helen's departure; the result in Auckland Central; Stevie Chadwick's loss in Rotovegas; the thought of many friends now being jobless.

The one great thing is that the people have made their decision. The decks are swept clean. A holiday can begin, and then the work of renewal, with a new Leader, new party officials, and new energy to get back into a position to implement the progressive agenda.

More later.

Go Obama

If Obama isn't elected President of the United States tomorrow, I'll fall over with shock.

Can't wait for the victory speech!

"Mary"