Strange Priorities for a 'New Zealand Political Icon'

Sir Roger Douglas was heralded as the great white hope of the ACT Party at the last election. He was parachuted into the number 3 spot on the ACT party list, ahead of anti-EFA campaigner John Boscawen, and Sensible Sentencing Trust misogynist David Garrett.

One has to admit (whether you agree with his politics or not) Sir Roger has an impressive track record. First elected to parliament in 1978 1969 as the Labour MP for Manurewa Manukau, appointed Minister of Finance by David Lange in 1984, drove the economic reforms of the Fourth Labour Government. Once he fell out with the Labour Party, he left and formed the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, otherwise known as ACT New Zealand. Few people can lay claim to have had such a role in building (for better or worse) the New Zealand that we know today.

While life on the ACT Party back benches under MMP must be a far cry from the front benches of the Fourth Labour Government, Sir Roger has been keeping himself busy by making comments regarding the direction of the Government - comments that I imagine neither John Key nor Rodney Hide have found particularly helpful.

So it was particularly interesting (and quite telling) to see that Sir Roger is now the sponsor of Heather Roy's Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Private Members Bill*.

When New Zealand is in the midst of economic recession, the man that many right-wingers proclaimed to be the greatest Minister of Finance New Zealand has ever seen - a neo-liberal economic genius even - is relegated to sponsoring a bill which determines whether or not university students' associations should have compulsory membership.

Sir Roger is now a mere MMP tool of the party he founded. How humiliating.

POST TEXT: My opinions (as a student and a student president) on students' association membership are well documented online. While I don't think this is a priority in the current economic climate, I am no longer a student so don't feel I have a right to say whether or not students' association membership should be compulsary or not. I hope any comments posted here are in regards to the role Sir Roger plays in the National/ACT government, and not a VSM/CSM debate.

* Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of Private Member's Bills is that they are sponsored by non-Ministerial MPs, hence why Roy has handed this to Sir Roger. If this is correct, it is a strange reflection on ACT's prioirties. When plenty of other legislative issues are being dropped in the name of the economic recession, ACT has chosen to use one of it's three Private Member's Bills to wage an obscure freedom of association crusade.

Comments

[Anita]

If you had a private member's bill that you were kind of fond of and you had to hand it over to a colleague, if your choices were Douglas, Boscawen and Garrett there could be only one answer.

[Jordan Carter]

Jeremy, wasn't Douglas elected earlier than that, to the seat of Manukau in 1969?

[Jeremy]

Anita: Personally, I'll give it to Boscawen. He doesn't have the baggage that Douglas does, and he ran a pretty solid Mt Albert by-election campaign. He seems like a safer pair of hands.

Completely agree re: Garrett though.

Let's put it this way, I wouldn't have written this post if the aforementioned bill was in Boscawen's name rather than Douglas'.

Jordan: my mistake, noted and corrected.

[Graeme Edgeler]

They're now called members' bills, rather than private members' bills, but you've got it basically right.

There is the difference that given they are in a governing arrangement with National, they have other options. One of ACT's big pre-election policies was "three strikes" but Garrett doesn't need it as a members' bill because he got Simon Power to introduce (a form of) it as a government bill.

Maybe the other things Douglas really wants are being dealt with through government processes rather than legislative ones? Also, members bills aren't best used as a mechanism to address discrete changes - the detail rich economic stuff Douglas might be interested in advancing possibly needs the policy grunt of a Treasury of MED behind it.

[Clint Heine]

Err, how does sponsoring making union membership voluntary fall out of the category of the values that ACT have always supported?

Key has made it clear he doesn't want Sir Rogers support, so he is doing all the little things that will help us in the long run. Not every MP gets to go for glory all the time and this bill isn't such a small thing - something you ex Union presidents like to remind students every year :)

[peteremcc]

Clint, I think Jordan was making the point that for Roger, shouldn't there be more important issues.

Of course, Jordan forgets that all Member's bills are subject to a veto by the minister of finance if he deems them too expensive, so there isn't really much point in submitting those kinds of bills in the first place.

[Jeremy]

Petermcc - I wrote this piece, not Jordan. Your first statement is correct. While ACT's take on VSM has been clear for years, I would have thought that Douglas (personally) would have had bigger fish to fry.

In terms of the minister getting veto over members bills - do they really? I may have confused matters here, but why didn't the Labour Minister of Labour (Dyson?) veto Mapp's 90-days-no-rights bill? Besides, since when did Roger Douglas care what Bill English or John Key thought/did?

[dave]

Douglas' treatment is very similar to a certain Labour MP who was handed a members bill to front that aims to entrench the Maori seats. The MP is a Maori.A former minister, now a humble list MP who doesnt say much in Parliament. He is the most invisible Maori in Parliament. But he is a Maori and that's why he is fronting it.

[George Darroch]

People aren't always rational. They often think that student politics is terribly important ;)