It’s offi­cial, the her­ald has lost the plot with its insane Pre­mium Con­tent policy.

I am no big fan of it, but they have really pushed the limit of insan­ity by mak­ing the text of Don Brash’s Orewa speech “Pre­mium Content”.

I bet none of the rev­enue for that goes to the National Party or to Don Brash and any­way who would pay for it when you can get it free from this site, or from the National Party web­site or any num­ber of other sources includ­ing Stuff.

Just plain dumb. 

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

In lieu of Mr Farrar’s usual ser­vice while he recov­ers from his big night out last night, below is the text of Don Brashes Orewa speech made last night (click read more for expanded post):

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Embar­goed until 1800 hours
31 Jan­u­ary 2006

LABOUR’S LEGACY:
A FALTERING ECONOMY

An address to the Orewa Rotary Club
by Don Brash
Leader of the National Party
31 Jan­u­ary 2006

 

Mr. Pres­i­dent, Ladies and Gen­tle­men. It is a great plea­sure to be back at Orewa.

 

I had of course hoped to be here this year as Prime Min­is­ter!  And we came close – but not quite close enough. But I join you this evening as the leader of a much strength­ened and invig­o­rated National Party.

 

The great boost in sup­port National received at the last elec­tion brings with it a respon­si­bil­ity that we take very seri­ously – to show that we have the ideas and the peo­ple capa­ble of address­ing the chal­lenges that lie ahead.

 

And to show that we can do that while safe­guard­ing the core val­ues and the many strengths of our increas­ingly diverse society.

 

Given our fal­ter­ing econ­omy, and a Gov­ern­ment that doesn’t seem to know what to do, it is becom­ing increas­ingly clear that National’s plan of action is what is needed.

 

In my very first speech after becom­ing Leader of the National Party more than two years ago, I high­lighted the five issues which I believed we needed to address urgently if New Zealand was to have the kind of future which all of us want, for our­selves and for our chil­dren and grandchildren.

 

Over the last two years, I have spelled out clearly where a National Gov­ern­ment would take the coun­try in each of these five areas.

 

Tonight I want to briefly restate where the National Party stands on four of the issues, talk more about one of them, and out­line some of the other key issues which I believe we need to focus on before the next election.

 

Almost exactly two years ago, at this Orewa Rotary Club, I spoke about the Treaty of Wai­t­angi and its mean­ing for 21st cen­tury New Zealanders. 

 

I argued that we should be deal­ing with all New Zealan­ders on the basis of need not race; that we could no longer jus­tify sep­a­rate Maori elec­torates; that we should rid the law of mean­ing­less ref­er­ences to “the prin­ci­ples of the Treaty”; and that we should resolve all his­tor­i­cal griev­ances by 2010.   

 

Noth­ing that has hap­pened in the past two years makes those points one bit less rel­e­vant than they were in Jan­u­ary 2004. 

 

The National Party went into the 2005 elec­tion with a clear vision of a New Zealand where every per­son is equal before the law, as out­lined at Orewa two years ago.

 

The fact that that vision is shared by most New Zealan­ders was con­firmed by the readi­ness of the Labour Gov­ern­ment to at least pre­tend to adopt these poli­cies, which they had at first so roundly condemned. 

 

But let me be very clear tonight: on our present course, New Zealand will do lit­tle more than tread water in the area of Treaty set­tle­ments and race rela­tions.  For me, this, the orig­i­nal Orewa mes­sage, is very much in the cat­e­gory of unfin­ished busi­ness – busi­ness I intend to see dealt with in my time in politics. 

 

One year ago, also here at Orewa, I spoke about the tragic human waste in hav­ing 300,000 working-age adults on a ben­e­fit, and the need to put in place poli­cies that require able-bodied ben­e­fi­cia­ries to be in work or in training. 

 

Some peo­ple claimed I was sim­ply try­ing to save money.  Well, yes, any pro­gramme which costs the tax­payer $14 mil­lion per day – roughly $50 per week for every hard-working Kiwi – does need to be looked at care­fully, and if we can find ways of reduc­ing the cost to tax­pay­ers we should do so.

 

But my main moti­va­tion was find­ing ways to free one New Zealan­der in eight – 300,000 work­ing age adults and their quar­ter of a mil­lion chil­dren – from a demor­al­iz­ing, indeed dehu­man­iz­ing, depen­dency of pro­longed reliance on tax­payer hand­outs.  I do not accept that we help able-bodied peo­ple by let­ting them help them­selves to a ben­e­fit indef­i­nitely.  We must actively encour­age and help peo­ple out of dependency.

 

This time, before the ink was even dry on the speech, Labour Min­is­ters were promis­ing action on these very mat­ters.  They res­ur­rected the idea of a uni­ver­sal ben­e­fit, with mul­ti­ple add-ons of course, to achieve even more bureau­cracy and waste.  This idea was first mooted by Labour in 1989, repeated in 2001, and dusted off again last year.  But I won­der whether any of you are able to point to a sin­gle mean­ing­ful change that has occurred in wel­fare pol­icy as a result. 

 

More unfin­ished business.

 

Eigh­teen months ago, though not at Orewa, I spoke about the need for improve­ments in law and order – about the need for more police, about the need to get tough with young law­break­ers to stop them choos­ing crime as a career, and about the need for more pris­ons and longer sen­tences for seri­ous criminals.

 

This speech, too, drew a response that, mirac­u­lously, these very items were high on the Government’s agenda.  But I haven’t noticed, and I ven­ture to sug­gest nor have many of you, any mean­ing­ful changes to the way in which seri­ous crime is being tack­led in this country.

 

We still have too few police; too many of those police are focused on gath­er­ing rev­enue from speed­ing motorists; too many crim­i­nals are get­ting out of jail after serv­ing only one-third of their sen­tence; and we still have the ridicu­lous sit­u­a­tion where some­body who takes a weapon to defend a neigh­bour threat­ened by intrud­ers ends up with a con­vic­tion, while the intrud­ers end up with no con­vic­tion and name sup­pres­sion, as hap­pened in Taranaki late last year.

 

Much more unfin­ished business.

 

Over the last two years, I have given sev­eral speeches on the fourth of my five high pri­or­ity issues, namely education. 

 

I have high­lighted the enor­mous amounts of money spent on the edu­ca­tion bureau­cracy; the huge amounts wasted at Te Wananga o Aotearoa; the arro­gant way in which the Gov­ern­ment went about clos­ing many com­mu­nity schools (and would have closed many more had it not been for the sud­den surge in the National Party’s pop­u­lar­ity fol­low­ing my speech to this club two years ago); the num­ber of stu­dents emerg­ing from our schools barely able to read and write, or do basic arith­metic; the dis­grace­ful sham­bles cre­ated by the way in which the Gov­ern­ment imple­mented NCEA, prob­lems which con­tinue to this day; and the way in which teach­ers have been hob­bled by a cease­less and sense­less spaghetti of red tape.

 

And I have spelled out how a National Gov­ern­ment would fix these prob­lems, includ­ing by pro­vid­ing par­ents with more choice about which school their chil­dren attend, by offer­ing read­ing and maths vouch­ers to par­ents whose chil­dren are falling behind, by fix­ing the prob­lems with NCEA, by enabling good schools to expand, and by giv­ing school boards and prin­ci­pals more free­dom from the suf­fo­cat­ing Welling­ton bureaucracy.

 

This is not just unfin­ished busi­ness.  The Gov­ern­ment barely recog­nises the problem.

 

And of course I have spo­ken often about how we need to help our econ­omy grow faster and deliver higher incomes; about how we need to reduce tax rates so that peo­ple have an incen­tive to get ahead under their own steam; about how we need to improve our road net­work, and reform the RMA, so that it is not such an obsta­cle to invest­ment; about how we need to sort out the prob­lems in the energy sec­tor, and get some bal­ance into employ­ment and hol­i­days legislation. 

 

The press­ing need for change has been con­cealed by very low inter­est rates inter­na­tion­ally – and the asso­ci­ated strong growth in the global econ­omy – by good grow­ing weather down on the farm, and by the boost to the hous­ing mar­ket from an influx of peo­ple after Sep­tem­ber 11. Those fac­tors have allowed New Zealand busi­nesses to pros­per – but had noth­ing to do with any poli­cies of the Labour Government.

 

But now the chick­ens have come home to roost.  Labour’s legacy is a fal­ter­ing econ­omy, and I want to spend a few min­utes tonight explain­ing the twin prob­lems we face.

 

First, over recent weeks we have seen the start of a sharp down-turn in eco­nomic activ­ity, with busi­ness con­fi­dence falling to the low­est level in more than 30 years and almost every day bring­ing another exam­ple of an export com­pany clos­ing its doors or sharply reduc­ing its staff.  A recent sur­vey in the Christchurch Press sug­gested that the South Island was already tee­ter­ing on the brink of recession.

 

Even if busi­ness con­fi­dence recov­ers some­what in the near future, there can be lit­tle doubt that the econ­omy will grow very much more slowly over the next 12 or 18 months than it has in recent years, that as a result many busi­nesses will face very tough times, and that unem­ploy­ment will rise steeply. 

 

If busi­ness con­fi­dence stays around cur­rent lev­els – and this Gov­ern­ment is doing noth­ing that might help avoid that – we are almost cer­tainly headed for a recession.

 

And unlike the brief reces­sion of 1998, there won’t be an Asian cri­sis or two suc­ces­sive years of drought to blame for it.  There is no Asian cri­sis and, so far at least, not even one year of severe drought, let alone two.  The blame for any reces­sion will lie squarely with the Helen Clark Labour Government.

 

The col­lapse in busi­ness con­fi­dence is like the warn­ing light on your petrol tank – ignore it at your peril.  Well, it is flash­ing, and the Gov­ern­ment is asleep at the wheel.

 

Despite being warned last year by the OECD (and no doubt by Trea­sury and Reserve Bank offi­cials also) that the rapid growth in gov­ern­ment spend­ing was putting infla­tion­ary pres­sure on the econ­omy – thereby oblig­ing the Reserve Bank to raise inter­est rates to try to keep infla­tion under con­trol – the Gov­ern­ment went right on spend­ing like there was no tomor­row.  In its 2005 Bud­get, it announced that gov­ern­ment spend­ing would rise more than 40% faster than the econ­omy as a whole over the next few years.  And that was before the elec­tion cam­paign com­mit­ments were added to the total – the extra­or­di­nary stu­dent loan bribe, which amounts to a give-away of $1.5 bil­lion on exist­ing stu­dent loans, and a mas­sive expan­sion of the Work­ing for Fam­i­lies programme.

 

That extra spend­ing might have sounded good when Michael Cullen and Helen Clark announced it, but they weren’t telling peo­ple the whole story – that the extra spend­ing would force the Reserve Bank to push inter­est rates still higher to the point where they are now much higher than in any other devel­oped coun­try – much, much higher.  Float­ing rate mort­gages have now risen to almost dou­ble fig­ures for the first time in a decade.

 

In some ways even more seri­ous, the fact that finan­cial mar­kets can see that these inter­est rates are likely to remain high for some time means that for­eign savers can see lit­tle risk of a fall in the New Zealand dol­lar in the near future, despite attempts by the gov­ern­ment to bad-mouth the econ­omy to those for­eign savers.

 

So the New Zealand dol­lar remains at lev­els that make it impos­si­ble for many exporters to break even, let alone make a profit.  They are forced to with­draw from for­eign mar­kets and lay off staff.

 

Not con­tent with keep­ing the exchange rate high through prof­li­gate spend­ing, the Gov­ern­ment fur­ther erodes the com­pet­i­tive posi­tion of exporters with almost every pol­icy they announce – com­pli­cated and expen­sive hol­i­days leg­is­la­tion, less flex­i­ble employ­ment laws, a less com­pet­i­tive acci­dent insur­ance mar­ket, and red tape galore.

 

The tragedy is that peo­ple will lose their jobs – and their sav­ings, as house, farm and share prices fall – because of the Government’s incompetence.

 

Painful though this imme­di­ate prob­lem will be, there is a sec­ond and even more seri­ous prob­lem fac­ing the econ­omy, and indeed fac­ing our society. 

 

And it was illus­trated for me by a woman I met 18 months ago at Napier Air­port.  She told me that she had four adult daugh­ters, and three of them had now moved to Aus­tralia.  “All my grand­chil­dren”, she told me, “are grow­ing up Aus­tralian.”   Six months ago she wrote to me and told me that her fourth daugh­ter was also think­ing about mov­ing overseas.

 

Since that chance encounter, I have met many scores of peo­ple who have told me that one or more of their adult chil­dren have moved over­seas. One woman I met on Stew­art Island told me that six of her seven chil­dren had moved over­seas – and she didn’t mean over Foveaux Strait!

 

Why is this hap­pen­ing?  Because, despite the rel­a­tively good growth in recent years, our real incomes are con­tin­u­ing to fall behind Aus­tralia and other coun­tries that New Zealan­ders can eas­ily move to.

 

When Labour took office in 1999, the aver­age after-tax income in Aus­tralia (cal­cu­lated using OECD PPP exchange rate mea­sures, which abstract from the year to year fluc­tu­a­tions that occur in for­eign exchange mar­kets) was 20% ahead of that in New Zealand. 

 

It is now 33% ahead, an income gap equiv­a­lent to $200 a week.

 

If that gap con­tin­ues to widen, as it cer­tainly will with present poli­cies, the future is bleak and we will con­tinue to lose over 600 New Zealan­ders across the Tas­man every week.  There is not the slight­est prospect of New Zealand’s achiev­ing the goal of get­ting liv­ing stan­dards into the top half of the OECD within 10 years, as Labour said was an impor­tant goal five years ago. 

 

If slid­ing down the OECD rank­ing was of purely sta­tis­ti­cal inter­est, per­haps we could ignore it.  After all, haven’t we got one of the most beau­ti­ful coun­tries in the world?  We cer­tainly do, but unless we do some­thing to arrest our slow slide, or indeed reverse it, we will increas­ingly see our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren dis­ap­pear­ing as surely as the good peo­ple of Hamelin saw their chil­dren fol­low the Pied Piper.

 

That income gap means peo­ple can get bet­ter health­care in other devel­oped coun­tries, bet­ter edu­ca­tion for their chil­dren in other devel­oped coun­tries, and bet­ter hous­ing in other devel­oped countries.

 

A tragic exam­ple of what this means is sub­sidised med­i­cines.  When you com­pare the range we have in New Zealand with the much wider range the Aus­tralians can afford to sub­sidise, it’s enough to make you sick.  Sud­denly the income gap is no longer eco­nomic the­ory – it’s a mat­ter of life and death.

 

But wait a minute, I can almost hear you say, hasn’t growth been quite good in recent years, and didn’t you just admit as much?

 

Well, in the five years to last Sep­tem­ber, eco­nomic growth in New Zealand aver­aged roughly 3½% annu­ally – not bril­liant, given the great prices we enjoyed for meat and dairy exports, but not too bad.

 

But what is very dis­turb­ing is that three-quarters of that growth has come from more peo­ple work­ing – lower unem­ploy­ment, more immi­grants, and more adults enter­ing the workforce. 

 

Lower unem­ploy­ment is a very good thing, of course, and more peo­ple enter­ing the work­force and strong net immi­gra­tion may be a good thing.  But clearly there are lim­its to how far we can go in find­ing more people.

 

What we need to see, if we are going to raise liv­ing stan­dards to Aus­tralian lev­els, is faster growth in out­put per per­son employed – in pro­duc­tiv­ity.  Growth in pro­duc­tiv­ity has accounted for only a quar­ter of total growth in recent years, and it is markedly lower than growth in pro­duc­tiv­ity in Aus­tralia and, on aver­age, in other devel­oped countries. 

 

In the final analy­sis, sig­nif­i­cantly increas­ing the rate at which pro­duc­tiv­ity is grow­ing is absolutely fun­da­men­tal to clos­ing the gap between incomes in New Zealand and those in Australia.

 

This does not, of course, mean we need New Zealan­ders to work harder.  Most New Zealan­ders work pretty hard already!  Pro­duc­tiv­ity is much higher in the United States than in New Zealand, and much higher in New Zealand than in India.  There is no sug­ges­tion that those dif­fer­ences relate to how hard Amer­i­cans work rel­a­tive to New Zealan­ders and Indi­ans.  Rather the dif­fer­ences relate to other things – the qual­ity of our edu­ca­tion sys­tem, the qual­ity of our infra­struc­ture, and how much we have to work with in the way of mod­ern tools and machin­ery.  The chal­lenge is to work smarter and with bet­ter tech­nol­ogy, not to work harder.

 

Dev­as­tat­ing though the imme­di­ate slow­down will be for the peo­ple and the com­pa­nies hit hard­est, the real tragedy – the thing which threat­ens the very exis­tence of a pros­per­ous and rel­a­tively egal­i­tar­ian soci­ety in these islands we call New Zealand – is the Government’s total fail­ure to use the golden weather we’ve expe­ri­enced in recent years to raise pro­duc­tiv­ity growth in New Zealand.

 

Of course, Helen Clark talks the lan­guage of pro­duc­tiv­ity growth.  She talks of the high pri­or­ity to be given to what she calls “eco­nomic trans­for­ma­tion”.  But what she means by this is more com­mit­tees to dis­cuss pro­duc­tiv­ity growth, more work­ing par­ties, more con­sul­ta­tions with senior bureau­crats, more gov­ern­ment pro­grammes to dole out con­ces­sion­ary loans to the selected few, a “restruc­tur­ing” of the busi­ness tax regime.

 

What she recoils from are the things that would actu­ally make a dif­fer­ence to pro­duc­tiv­ity growth through­out the econ­omy – many of them set out in black and white by the Government’s own advis­ers in the Trea­sury in their post-election brief­ing doc­u­ment, the advice con­de­scend­ingly dis­missed by Michael Cullen as “an ide­o­log­i­cal burp”.

 

For exam­ple, reduc­tion in the tax rates which affect behav­iour – the high mar­ginal tax rates (over 50% for many low and mid­dle income peo­ple) which dis­cour­age peo­ple from acquir­ing more skills or tak­ing on more respon­si­bil­ity, and the com­pany tax rate which the Gov­ern­ment seems stub­bornly com­mit­ted to hold­ing above the Aus­tralian rate.

 

Or reform of the Resource Man­age­ment Act, which slows down and increases the cost of almost every invest­ment in the country.

 

Or con­struc­tion of a decent road net­work in the Auck­land region, and the Bay of Plenty, and the Waikato, and other parts of the coun­try where the roads them­selves are a seri­ous road­block to growth.

 

Or fair employ­ment laws that enable busi­nesses to employ peo­ple on the terms and con­di­tions that best suit them and their employees.

 

Or the reform of the wel­fare sys­tem to encour­age able-bodied ben­e­fi­cia­ries to get back into the work­force.
Or, for the longer term, the reform of the edu­ca­tion sec­tor, to ensure that every child com­ing out of pri­mary school can read and write and do basic arith­metic, and every young per­son com­ing out of sec­ondary school has skills that will enable them to become a pro­duc­tive citizen.

 

The Labour Gov­ern­ment has not only failed to tackle these issues, it seems to be totally unaware of their importance. 

 

Labour is out of ideas, try­ing to get by with noth­ing more than a grab-bag of shop-worn slo­gans.  Aus­tralian tax rates are being moved well below New Zealand rates for most work­ing peo­ple, yet Labour has no response.  Aus­tralia is free­ing up its employ­ment laws, while we go in the oppo­site direction. 

 

We have the uned­i­fy­ing spec­ta­cle of a Prime Min­is­ter who is sup­posed to be lead­ing the coun­try, instead frozen like an opos­sum in the head­lights of an oncom­ing Aussie truck.

 

She just does not seem to under­stand how close we are to dis­as­ter.  With a 20% gap between our after-tax income and that in Aus­tralia, we will of course lose some Kiwis to Aus­tralia, but many will choose to stay, given our many lifestyle advan­tages and a desire to be close to fam­ily and friends.

 

But with a gap of 33%, the incen­tive to leave gets markedly bigger.

 

And with every prospect of the gap being 40% or more in three years’ time, with very slow growth in New Zealand and an aggres­sive pack­age of tax reduc­tions in Aus­tralia, the incen­tive to leave gets big­ger still.

 

Those who go will be among our most enter­pris­ing, and their depar­ture will make it cumu­la­tively eas­ier for oth­ers to go, and cumu­la­tively more dif­fi­cult to close the income gap and arrest the trend.

 

We could reach a tip­ping point beyond which it would be extra­or­di­nar­ily dif­fi­cult to recover.

 

Of course, we all know that income is not the only thing that moti­vates peo­ple.  But what if those who see big eco­nomic advan­tages in mov­ing to Aus­tralia are also fed up with the qual­ity of the health­care they get; fed up with the qual­ity of the schools their chil­dren go to; fed up with the way seri­ous crim­i­nals can get out on parole after serv­ing just one-third of their sen­tence – and what if many of their friends have already moved to Aus­tralia?  What then?

 

The National Party is opti­mistic about New Zealand’s future, and I per­son­ally am opti­mistic about our future.  But nobody can be opti­mistic about our future if all we can look for­ward to are the poli­cies of the Labour Government.

 

So none of the five key pol­icy areas which I iden­ti­fied after becom­ing leader is any less rel­e­vant today than it was then.  Indeed, some of the issues have become even more glar­ingly urgent in recent weeks.

 

By iden­ti­fy­ing these prob­lems, National has set the polit­i­cal agenda over the last two years, with Labour play­ing catch-up.

 

And not just on big issues such as the Treaty of Waitangi. 

 

·         We argued against the flat­u­lence and car­bon taxes, which Labour has only recently aban­doned. 
·         We argued that there has been a huge amount of waste­ful gov­ern­ment spend­ing. The Gov­ern­ment ini­tially denied it, but has now set up a “razor gang” to review gov­ern­ment spending.

 

And so it has gone on.

 

 

Even in quite low pro­file areas, National has been set­ting the agenda, as we saw ear­lier this month when Labour announced its plan to use a tiny frac­tion of DOC’s vast estate to help pre­serve the Kiwi camp­ing tra­di­tion – a pol­icy I advo­cated in March last year.  It makes sense to use a tiny frac­tion of our vast con­ser­va­tion estate to ensure that the tra­di­tion of the Kiwi camp­ing hol­i­day is not destroyed by surg­ing coastal prop­erty val­ues.  In this coun­try it should not require wealth or high income to enjoy a sum­mer hol­i­day at the beach. 

 

Look­ing ahead, we will be devot­ing par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to three more issues.

 

The first of these is immi­gra­tion, not least because it is inti­mately con­nected to eco­nomic pol­icy.  Indeed, immi­gra­tion has been thought of by many peo­ple as being rel­e­vant only to the econ­omy.  How do we fill gaps in the work­force?  What level of gross immi­gra­tion is needed to off­set the steady out­flow of New Zealan­ders?   How do we ensure there are enough peo­ple of work­ing age to ensure that older New Zealan­ders are cared for in their old age? 

 

But just as impor­tantly, how do we do this while retain­ing the com­mon val­ues that bind us together as a nation?  New Zealand is a lib­eral, tol­er­ant and sec­u­lar soci­ety, a soci­ety that embraces the West­ern Enlight­en­ment ideals of per­sonal lib­erty, pri­vate prop­erty and ratio­nal­ity as the basis of decision-making.  These are val­ues so cen­tral to our soci­ety that we hardly even think about them.   Immi­gra­tion can add greatly to our soci­ety, but it also has the poten­tial to under­mine the glue that holds our soci­ety together.

 

Our cur­rent immi­gra­tion poli­cies have evolved with­out seri­ous pub­lic dis­cus­sion or debate, and we will be giv­ing care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion to this issue through the com­ing year.

 

A sec­ond issue of great impor­tance for the longer term future of our coun­try is how we pro­vide for the health­care of New Zealan­ders, espe­cially when those over the age of 60 will rise from one in six today to almost one in four in 15 years time, and where many life-style ill­nesses, such as Type II dia­betes, are pro­jected to cause mas­sively increased health prob­lems of many kinds.

 

In the last few years, there has been an enor­mous explo­sion in gov­ern­ment spend­ing on health, to the point where even the Min­is­ter of Finance has made it clear that the rate of increase is unsustainable. 

 

And the Trea­sury has slammed the inef­fi­ciency of much of the spending. 

 

There is, in fact, pre­cious lit­tle to show for the enor­mous increase in money spent, with appallingly long wait­ing lists and peo­ple dying while wait­ing for an oper­a­tion, with hos­pi­tal emer­gency depart­ments not meet­ing the Government’s own stan­dards for see­ing patients in a timely man­ner, and with hos­pices and aged-care facil­i­ties under des­per­ate finan­cial pressure.

 

Health has been one of Labour’s most strik­ing fail­ures, dis­guised only by the vast increase in fund­ing.  The tragedy is that so lit­tle has been achieved with that funding. 

 

Labour has allowed a vast and expen­sive bureau­cracy to grow up, with far too many man­agers and admin­is­tra­tors rel­a­tive to “front-line staff”; they have so far taken a cru­elly restric­tive atti­tude towards the avail­abil­ity of such won­der drugs as her­ceptin, a drug which has almost mirac­u­lous pow­ers to treat cer­tain kinds of breast can­cer and which could be made avail­able for a small frac­tion of the money squan­dered last year at Te Wananga o Aotearoa; they have refused to require any improve­ments in pro­duc­tiv­ity in the hos­pi­tal sec­tor in return for very large increases in tax­payer fund­ing; and, for rea­sons which reflect noth­ing more than pure ide­ol­ogy, they would rather let peo­ple die than use privately-owned hos­pi­tals to shorten long wait­ing lists.

 

Nobody should pre­tend that mak­ing gov­ern­ment health spend­ing effi­cient and effec­tive is easy.  But I have no doubt that National could do a much bet­ter job than Labour has done with the tor­rent of extra money that has been pumped into the sec­tor in recent years. 

 

For the sake of our future, we need to do much better.

 

The final issue which I want to sig­nal that we will be devel­op­ing fur­ther this term is the ten­sion between our des­per­ate need for bet­ter infra­struc­ture and for sus­tained eco­nomic growth on the one hand and the need to pre­serve our out­stand­ing nat­ural envi­ron­ment on the other.

 

We have great chal­lenges ahead in main­tain­ing a first-world road­ing sys­tem, and with ensur­ing reli­able low-cost energy sup­plies.  We need to reform the RMA so that devel­op­ments are not unnec­es­sar­ily delayed, so that busi­ness invest­ment can expand, and so that the fun­da­men­tals that under­pin faster pro­duc­tiv­ity growth and higher incomes can be put in place.

 

But this must be achieved while ensur­ing that our nat­ural envi­ron­ment is not sac­ri­ficed for the sake of a tem­po­rary boost in incomes.

 

We must be con­cerned about pol­luted air and water, about the ero­sion of our East Coast hill coun­try, and about the threat of extinc­tion fac­ing much of our fauna and flora.

 

Achiev­ing a bal­ance here is essen­tial, and we will be work­ing to develop poli­cies that make that clear.

 

Ulti­mately, though, it is very clear that wealthy soci­eties are bet­ter able to care for their envi­ron­ment than poor ones are.  With well-designed eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies we can have faster growth and bet­ter pro­tec­tion for our nat­ural environment.

 

Ladies and gen­tle­men, over the next year, we will hold the Labour/New Zealand First Gov­ern­ment to account, and expose arro­gance, incom­pe­tence and cor­rup­tion wher­ever it exists.

 

But we also com­mit to sup­port­ing the Gov­ern­ment where it is will­ing to adopt sen­si­ble poli­cies in line with our own val­ues and principles.

 

Fol­low­ing the elec­tion last Sep­tem­ber, National now has the strongest Oppo­si­tion cau­cus in terms of num­bers, abil­ity, and expe­ri­ence in New Zealand his­tory.  We have the peo­ple needed to develop and imple­ment our policies.

 

We also have a clear vision of where we want to go, what kind of coun­try we want New Zealand to be, and – most impor­tantly – what sort of poli­cies will get us there.

 

We want New Zealand to be a coun­try where peo­ple are encour­aged to take respon­si­bil­ity for them­selves, but where those who, through no fault of their own, have stum­bled upon hard times, are sup­ported through those times and actively encour­aged to again have the dig­nity of self-reliance.

 

We want New Zealand to be a coun­try where gov­ern­ment seeks to expand the choices our cit­i­zens have, not close them down.

 

We want New Zealand to be a coun­try where there is a busi­ness envi­ron­ment that attracts the invest­ment that will boost pro­duc­tiv­ity and incomes in New Zealand, so that Kiwis enjoy liv­ing stan­dards every bit the equal of those in other highly devel­oped coun­tries.
 
We want New Zealand to be a coun­try where we ensure that every child has access to a first class edu­ca­tion by pro­vid­ing par­ents with alter­na­tives if their child’s future is at risk.
 
We want New Zealand to be a coun­try where every­body has access to good qual­ity health­care because we are get­ting value for money in health­care spending.

 

We want New Zealand to be a coun­try where peo­ple respect the rights of oth­ers, and are kept safe from those who would abuse those rights.
 
And we want New Zealand to be a coun­try where peo­ple have equal rights under the law, regard­less of race. 

 

No politi­cian should pre­sume to be able to describe the future struc­ture of our econ­omy, but with the right poli­cies we can see New Zealand becom­ing, within a decade, a dynamic coun­try with com­pet­i­tive strengths in food and fibre pro­duc­tion and mar­ket­ing, high qual­ity man­u­fac­tur­ing, indus­trial design, sci­ence, tourism and cre­ative arts, with new strengths in areas not yet imagined. 

 

Ours should be – must be – a coun­try with cities that can com­pete for tal­ent with Syd­ney and Mel­bourne, a coun­try with a com­pet­i­tive finan­cial envi­ron­ment and first-class infra­struc­ture, all matched with the unbeat­able Kiwi lifestyle and environment. 

 

And we must be a coun­try where, in spite of the diver­sity of our com­mu­nity, we share suf­fi­cient com­mon val­ues to bind us together as a nation.

 

This would be a coun­try our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren would want to return to.

 

So we have the peo­ple, the expe­ri­ence, and the vision.

 

For me per­son­ally, the year ahead is look­ing hugely excit­ing.  Some com­men­ta­tors have asked whether or not I will be the Leader of the Oppo­si­tion for the next three years.  I cer­tainly hope not! 

 

I didn’t leave a very sat­is­fy­ing job as Gov­er­nor of the Reserve Bank almost four years ago to be Leader of the Oppo­si­tion. I left that job because I was con­vinced then that there needed to be some impor­tant pol­icy changes in New Zealand if we were to have the kind of coun­try we want for our­selves and our chil­dren – par­tic­u­larly in eco­nomic pol­icy, in wel­fare, in edu­ca­tion, in law and order, and in race relations. 

 

I am even more con­vinced of that today.  My goal is to be Prime Min­is­ter of a National-led Gov­ern­ment within the next three-year period to achieve those changes, for the ben­e­fit of all New Zealanders.

 

Ends

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

There was such a fuss over at Far­rars when he linked to my photo of Dad with GWB….I thought it would be inter­est­ing to note that oth­ers who also “fleet­ingly” shook hands and had a break­fast meet­ing with GWB at the same time as Dad were Steven Harper, Stock­well Day and Tony Clement.

Who are they you ask?

Well only the Prime Min­is­ter Des­ig­nate of Canada, a sit­ting MP and a newly elected MP. Both MP’s are expected to make cabinet. 

Now who was that who wanted the bet…time to collect.

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

Watch the video Banker Ethics from Close up and you will see him meulling into a mega phone….ok it was last Decem­ber so Michael now has the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of show­ing his face less than Osama bin Laden.

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

I’m back from a lit­tle hol­i­day in the win­ter­less North, well actu­ally it was Whangaumu Bay (Welling­ton Bay) on the Tutukaka Coast.

It was beau­ti­ful place and so relax­ing spend­ing some time at the beach with the family.

We went swim­ming every­day, col­lect­ing cock­les and pips until I scouted out the locals for the tuatua spot…..man these are the best tuat­uas I have had. They were fat juicy and plen­ti­ful and no I am not going to reveal their location.

It is how­ever not easy get­ting to the tuatua beds but the reward is well worth it.

Any­way, while I was away I happeded to get the paper one day and read some truly banal jour­nal­ism in the extreme.

Deb­o­rah Cod­ding­ton crap­ping on with Win­ston Peters.

She has got to be one of the most shal­low and self serv­ing prima dona’s that I have ever had the mis­for­tune to read and her fawn­ing and lick­spit­tle way she han­dled Peters was appalling.

She starts of the arti­cle by telling us she reck­ons the only rea­son she got the inter­view is becuase her hus­band is “Mr Carruthers”….banal, trite, shit.

She tries to ask the hard ques­tions and then sooks out on the fol­low up.

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DC: In your pre-election Rotorua speech you said you “gen­uinely don’t care for the baubles of office” but Fran O’Sullivan in the Her­ald called you a “well-paid polit­i­cal eunuch tak­ing the baubles of office”. What’s your reaction?

WP: I’ve been Min­is­ter of Maori Affairs, Trea­surer and deputy prime min­is­ter who didn’t take any houses, cars and trav­elled econ­omy to try to save this coun­try money. That makes me unique in this country’s pol­i­tics but counts for noth­ing with peo­ple like Fran O’Sullivan. So here I am in my third admin­is­tra­tion, I take a house and appar­ently I’m now a vic­tim of the baubles-of-office syn­drome. But I don’t want to waste my time with her”

---

What about say­ing, Well mr Peters that may well be what you did then, but the record shows you now have a self drive car….a Ford Ter­ri­tory no less couldn’t you have cho­sen a less con­spic­u­ous bauble. Nup, she sooks out.

Instead of going on attack on what appears to be clearly ille­gally obtain pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tion she allows him to con­tinue to hold “a gun” to Don Brash’s head.

---

DC: You say you’ve got three years of inter­nal National Party emails [first leaked dur­ing the elec­tion cam­paign which revealed how the Busi­ness Round­table and Act Party mem­bers assisted Don Brash to take the lead­er­ship from Bill Eng­lish] and you’ve threat­ened to release these – should Dr Brash be worried?

WP: Entirely. These emails will end Don Brash’s polit­i­cal lead­er­ship and career.

DC: Do the emails con­tain per­sonal stuff?

WP: I won’t go that far.

DC: Will it all come out?

WP: No doubt about that. 

---

How about….How did you obtain these emails? Why won’t you release them now? What are you wait­ing for Win­ston? Nup soft cocks out again. Win­ston always chucks the mud but never is around when it all starts com­ing back.

His peren­nial effort is to have at least one or two defama­tion suits per­co­lat­ing, maybe jsut for fun.

Deb­o­rah Cod­ding­ton attempts to enter this but in the end scut­tles out of dan­ger­ous territory.

---

DC: There are defam­a­tory com­ments on the inter­net, such as those sug­gest­ing you were never sober enough to take a self-drive min­is­te­r­ial car – why don’t you sue?

WP: Well, I am going to sue. I’ve got some­one putting all the mate­r­ial together for me now and sue I will. I’ve got five defama­tion cases going right now. For the first time in my career, I’ve decided I’m not tak­ing any more of this.  

---

Win­ston always says he is going to sue…what happens….well I can’t for the life of me ever recall him win­ning one. Nev­er­the­less that is what he does…threatens, cajols and sometines does sue all at great expense to him­self and the intended tar­get, all for what…well noth­ing really.

 

What about the peo­ple he maligns and den­i­grates often under the pro­tec­tion of par­lia­men­tary privilege….no one gets to hear their side.

All in the inter­view and result­ing arti­cle has all the hall­marks of two has-beens nudg­ing and wink­ing one another and ulti­mately turns into waste of per­fectly good newsprint.

Oh well, yes­ter­days news is todays fish and chip wrappers.

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

Tomor­row, Tues­day 31 Jan 05 is a very big day in politics!

Here in New Zealand Don Brash will be deliv­er­ing is annual speech to the Orewa Rotary Club. As we all know, this speech has proven in the last few years to be the key agenda set­ter and the one to take note of.

More impor­tantly though, 31 Jan is also the date in which US Pres­i­dent George W. Bush will be deliv­er­ing his annual State of the Union address to a joint ses­sion of Congress.

Dubya’s address can be watched live via CSpan at 9pm East­ern Stan­dard Time. (3pm NZ Time on Wednesday)

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

*tsk tsk* Why do the media always do this??

A by-election being held for a vacancy is very impor­tant. It is in the best inter­est of peo­ple because those in the Hen­der­son ward deserve equal representation.

It is also the prin­ci­pled rea­son why Pat Booth felt resign­ing was the right thing to do becuase he couldn’t ful­fill his duties ade­quately due to health reasons.

Besides, to be per­fectly honest, $50,000 is chicken-feed to a Coun­cil like Wait­akere, and you can’t put a price on democracy. It shouldn’t be taken for granted either.

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

Hav­ing a rel­a­tively lib­eral out­look on most things, I man­aged to come across this press release from the Lib­er­tar­i­anz Party.

The Lib­er­tar­i­anz drug spokesman, Dr Richard Goode makes some good points about the ban­ning of BZP debate. Like Dr Goode, I don’t think the cam­paign that Jacqui Dean is lead­ing to ban party pills is the right approach.

Young peo­ple are always going to want to exper­i­ment and if par­lia­ment out­laws every stim­u­lent known to man, they will only turn to harder, more dan­ger­ous drugs in the end.

Aside from the fact that adults are per­fectly capa­ble of decid­ing what they put in their bod­ies, keep­ing BZP party pills legal give young peo­ple an safer alter­na­tive that still gives them a buzz with­out turn­ing them into crim­i­nals. With­out the safer alter­na­tive, the P prob­lem that we hear about every week would be much worse than it already is.

I sin­cerely hope Jacqui Dean recon­sid­ers the quest shes lead­ing at the moment, and thinks about the wider impli­ca­tions of what she is propos­ing. She should also remem­ber that she is a mem­ber of the party that is opposed to the baloon­ing “nanny state”.

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

Pita Sharples seems to be talk­ing sense (again). It seems his per­for­mance in the lead­ers debate (minus not know what the Cullen-fund was) wasn’t a fluke after all.

Sharples, fresh from a hip oper­a­tion, has pub­li­cally stated that Maori are too depen­dent on welfare.

---

“In the year ahead I think you are going to see a con­tin­ued attack on poverty by us. We are reminded of it daily when we go to our people’s houses. It’s poverty of knowl­edge as well as poverty of phys­i­cal goods.”

Dr Sharples said there was too much depen­dency on wel­fare in Maoridom – some­thing Labour had not addressed.

---

This is good stuff, and exactly the type of mes­sage that the Maori com­mu­nity, and the rest of the nation, needs to hear. The irony is, when Don Brash makes very sim­i­lar com­ments he is labelled as racist and a beneficiary-basher.

Sharples also says he is com­mit­ted to end­ing the gang vio­lence in South Auck­land. These are two big tasks, and my only hope is that he con­tin­ues to make noises like this and can offer solu­tions to the prob­lems he is identifying.

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

This one sure is wor­thy of a laugh. Jeanette Fitzsim­mons has declared that she wants the new Green Party co-leader to “Walk the walk”

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Ms Fitzsi­mons said the Green Party expected lead­ers to exem­plify the party’s principals.

“Rid­ing a bicy­cle and grow­ing a gar­den as Rod did or using pub­lic trans­port, using energy and resources respon­si­bly, buy­ing kiwi-made, car­ing for chil­dren and ani­mals, eat­ing healthy food, reusing and recy­cling waste,” she said.

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Is that what she meant when she went on a crazed fire burn­ing spree dur­ing a fire ban?? Just hyp­o­crit­i­cal really…

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

A friend of a friend (FOF) of mine was din­ing at a pop­u­lar eatery at a pop­u­lar beach resort on the Coro­man­del when he noticed a famil­iar face.

He how­ever couldn’t remem­ber exactly who the per­son was, so he got up and went over and intro­duced him­self. The per­son stated she was Michelle Boag and finally the penny dropped for the  FOF who then said Ahhhhh…now I know who you are….my mate doesn’t like you very much.

Upon enquir­ing who the mate was she then pro­ceeeded to launch into a tirade against him using all sorts of lan­guage gen­er­ally not becom­ing a lady….but then as some­one pointed out to me “she ain’t much of a lady”

Finally after spew­ing vit­riol for all and sundry to hear she fin­ished up with the retort. “Oh he hates me because I beat his good mate for the presidency”

The FOF then duti­fully pointed out that that wasn’t the case at he actu­ally hated her because she promised so much and deliv­ered so lit­tle, in fact the worst result for the party “ever”.

He then went and sat down and fin­ished his meal, which by all accounts was deli­cious and clearly now had been served with superb entertainment.

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

Well from the looks of this photo he is in Mel­bourne at the Aus­tralian Open.

 

 

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

More Ander­ton kiss of Death for companies.

Ander­ton waxed lyri­cal about Click Clack and Fisher and Paykel both of whom are now out­sourc­ing pro­duc­tion off­shore to com­bat the high NZ dollar.

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“There are a grow­ing num­ber of New Zealand com­pa­nies that are com­bin­ing high invest­ment in research and devel­op­ment with a strong focus on design to cre­ate bril­liant prod­ucts that the world wants.

Fisher and Paykel with both health­care and white­ware prod­ucts are the most well-known exam­ple. For­may Furniture’s suc­cess with the life chair is another. In plas­tics, Palmer­ston North com­pany Click Clack exports inno­v­a­tive food stor­age con­tain­ers to more than 50 countries.”

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If I was these guys I would shut up shop now…there is no point car­ry­ing on, once you get men­tioned by Ander­ton in a speech the chances are high your com­pany is doomed.
 

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

The gov­ern­ment is explor­ing “slap­ping higher penal­ties” on sup­posed gas guz­zling vehi­cles in a for­lorn effort to promte fuel efficiency.

Read higher taxes for “slap­ping higher penalties”

Typ­i­cal social­ist response to a non issue.

Bizarrely at the same time oil com­pa­nies are the only ones claim­ing a lower NZ dol­lar for the rea­son for their lat­est price hike.

Every one else in New Zealand is cry­ing out that the dol­lar is too high.

New Zealand because of its strange deci­sion to include fuel prices and inter­est rates in its infla­tion index is always going to be in a Catch-22 sit­u­a­tion. High dol­lar cheaper fuel but exporters tank….low dol­lar high fuel leads to increases in infla­tion, which leads to increases in interst rates which leads to increased infla­tion which leads to increases in inter­est rates……you get the pic­ture, it also leads to increases int he value of the NZ dol­lar which tanks the export lead economy.

And Cullen has no idea.

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]

The US has announced a list of coun­tries it wishes to pur­sue a free trade agree­ment with, and you guessed it NZ isn’t on the list. 

Phil Goff reck­ons that it isn’t a slap in the face…..

Well he wouldn’t would he, this gov­ern­ment is now the denial government.

We have Goff deny­ing the bleeed­ing obvious.

We have the Prime Min­is­ter deny­ing the impend­ing eco­nomic cri­sis as a “rough patch”

The Gov­ern­ment of Denial….and that isn’t a river in Africa.

Pop­u­lar­ity: unranked [?]