Michael Cullen's announcement yesterday that he is to take on a senior role on the NZ Post board draws a curtain on the political career of one of Labour's most talented operators.
Michael is a smart, funny, warm and caring man who is already clearly one of my party's more successful finance ministers. It is his vision of a more productive, fairer economy and his passion for sorting out the government's books that mean this global crisis is having less of an impact on Kiwis than it would otherwise have done.
Even National government ministers are now being more open to acknowledging just what a mess we would have been in by now had it not been for those massive surpluses being used to repay debt, instead of being hashed into huge tax cuts we could never have afforded. It's politics, so it is too much to expect them to be gracious about it, but the facts tell the story plainly enough.
It is going to be strange not to see him in the House holding the new government to account.
The other farewell of course is that of Helen Clark. I'll write something about that after her valedictory speech, which is this afternoon.
Update, 9 Apr at 4pm: had to laugh at this. I should read what I write more carefully. Ironic understatement doesn't always work on a blog!
I think that Dr Cullen was one of our best. The scale of change he implemented is probably second only to that implemented during the First Labour Government.
I don't count Roger Douglas as a good Labour finance minister. His preposterous reforms made this one of the most savagely unequal in the developed world, and the social dysfunction and economic legacy of that - years of slow growth, crime, high unemployment, poverty, diminished productivty, underinvestment in infrastructure, massive overseas debt - scarred an entire generation.
Those failures and the ideology that drove them have nothing to do with Labour's mission; that legacy means that he cannot be deemed a successful Labour finance minister at all. I am very pleased that the rest of the Labour Party eventually came to recognise how wrong he (and by extension they) was and were, and has since undone much of the damage of the Douglas era through a rather successful fifth Labour government.
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