Bill English

There is talk that Grant Robertson is loyal deputy…even David Shearer is indignant about the rumours that his Deputy is about to roll him:

He appeared most irritated at suggestions [on The Standard] that Mr Cameron had been installed in advance of a leadership takeover by Mr Robertson.

“I speak to Grant three or four times a day on the phone. We’re in and out of each other’s offices when we are in Parliament together, all day.”

I’m not so sure that he should take comfort in that.

If David Shearer took a good  look at New Zealand political history he would have cold shivers running up his spine.

Rob Muldoon was Jack Marshall’s deputy, he knifed him on 4 July 1974.

David Lange was Bill Rowling’s deputy, he knifed him on 3 February 1982.

Jim McLay was Muldoon’s deputy, he knifed him in 1984, after National lost the 1984 schnapps election.

Jim Bolger was Jim McLay’s deputy, he knifed him in 1986.

Geoffry Palmer was David Lange’s deputy, and he took over in September 1989 as Lange gave up.

Helen Clark was Mike Moore’s deputy, she knifed him on 1 December 1993.

Bill English was Jenny Shipley’s deputy, he knifed her in October 2001.

Based on recent political history David Shearer has much to fear from Grant Robertson, who was raised politically under the tutelage of Helen Clark, one of the plotting deputies who rolled their leader.

Based on New Zealand political history it really the role of the deputy to roll the leader.

The fact that his deputy (and their people) are talking to you means nothing.  The interesting thing will be when the House goes back.  The numbers of MPs popping in and out of each others office late at night.  The corridor action that is going on.

If I was Shearer I’d ensure my programme keeps me in Wellington next week.

One weird thing about David Shearer is his distinct lack of loyalists.  See, when the in-Parliament chattering behind closed doors occurs he needs to have his loyalists countering.

Well, who counters for Shearer? It isn’t Robertson….and Trevor Mallard is running his jihad against John Banks, not watching Shearer’s back.

News is everywhere that David Shearer has officially selected Alistair Cameron as his new Chief of Staff.  Or has he?

From where I sit it looks very much as though Grant Robertson has selected HIS new Chief of Staff.

Let’s have a look at a few aspects of Alistair and you decide if he is ‘somewhat’ aligned to Robertson:

1. Worked with Robertson in Beehive days
2. Was the architect of Teletubby Hobbs’ train wreck (Oooh, can’t wait for that with Shearer)
3. Is an active member of the rainbow faction
4. Is great personal friends with Robertson and his partner, Alf.

Oh yes, he sounds like a Chief of Staff who will have the best interests of Labour’s Leader at heart. Or should that be the Deputy Leader?

Let’s then look at his suitability for the role.

Positives:

• Grant’s mate

Negatives:

• a lawyer specialising in ETS and climate change
• Questionable political management skills as was part of Hobbs trainwreck
• Close friend of Robertson so will undermine Shearer’s leadership
• No mongrel
• Chair of AIDS Foundation
• Never worked in Opposition

It should be noted that in recent political history that a change of Chief of Staff has always preceded a coup.

Bill English had Sue Foley and then briefly Glenda Hughes before Richard Long came in. Shortly there after Don Brash knifed Bill English.

Richard Long remained as Chief of Staff until Wayne Eagleson replaced him and then John Key knifed Don Brash.

So there is certainly a political precedent for a change of Chief of Staff leading shortly thereafter to a coup. The interesting part therefore is upon, that is the the coup…which is certainly shaping up to be a 3 way battle between Shearer, Robertson and Cunliffe.

Time to invest in popcorn futures.

David Shearer promised to be “thrifty”. David Shearer’s promise to be good guardians of the public purse didn’t even last 3 months.

Basically they have promised to spend an additional $2billion without a thought or care about how it is to be paid for.

Labour continues to make expensive spending promises it could not afford without borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars more from overseas lenders, Finance Minister Bill English says.

“In the past week, it has proposed doubling paid parental leave entitlements, which would cost taxpayers another $150 million a year.

“And today, Labour’s leader confirms he backs research and development tax credits, which would cost at least $300 million a year. He claims this could be paid for from a new capital gains tax, but that’s not possible as Labour already concedes this would raise little extra revenue in its first few years.

“This from a leader who says he will be thrifty with taxpayers’ money, but in reality wants to spend more, borrow more and tax more.

“Together, these two Labour promises alone would amount to almost $2 billion of more debt over a four-year forecast period. Labour has clearly learned nothing from its past extravagance. Less than five months since the election, it is already going back to its bad old habits.

The best part though is listening to Labour justify it by banking on Bill English delivering surpluses in the years ahead. These are the same surpluses that their Finance spokesman poo-poohs as fictitious as he lambasts National for poor fiscal management.

Labour can hardly bank something that they say won;t happen. One thing is sure though, the surpluses will never happen under labour because they will have spent them long before they ever get control of the Treasury benches again.

the new labour party under David Shearer is the same as the old Labour party…borrow, tax and spend…there is certainly no hope any longer.

ᔥ NZ Herald

Bill English gets Politician of Week for telling Sue Moroney to shove her silly paid parental leave bribe back from where she pulled it. Good luck calling Bill English anti-family when he has a full sevens team in his family.

Finance Minister Bill English confirmed this afternoon that National will veto a bill to extend paid parental leave from 14 weeks to six months.

He said the Government would have to borrow more money to fund it just at a time when it was trying to reduce its deficit.

“We have maintained paid parental leave and we currently spend about $150 million [a year] on it,” he told reporters at Parliament.

“But we are still two or three years from getting out of the woods on the deficit so we think it is a bit soon to be trying to expand entitlements when our big challenge has been to maintain them as they are.”

Mr English said Labour specialised in trying to get political benefit without showing the real cost by saying it would take 10 years to implement.

“That’s just misleading the public. The fact is doubling it will cost another $150 million a year. You’d have to borrow half a billion over the next three or four years. We’re simply not willing to do that.”

Expanding entitlements at this stage would be ”getting a bit ahead of ourselves when we are still $10 billion away from clearing our overdraft.”

“We’ve got to get on with that and be fair to everybody in achieving surplus and people can have those choices once we get there.”

Eddie/Mallard at The Standard is writing up a storm about a civil war that simply doesn’t exist and dreaming up factions that are a figment of Eddie’s fevered imagination…or is it Trevor Mallard’s fevered imagination.

Eddie/Mallard believe that the factions are:

• the Collins faction – socially conservative, the party’s Christian wing, economically pure (ie neoliberal) but not overly strong economically apart from on decreasing government spending;
• the Brat Pack – socially conservative but also more economically conservative, incrementalists who see the object of politics as being in power, transforming the country gradually, as a glacier carves a valley;
• the Boag/Key faction – socially liberal, economically neoliberal, old guard, who also want power for the long-run – their next star after Key is Hekia Parata;
• the Joyce faction – socially liberal, small business mentality that the rules should be bent or discarded when they get in the way, not really ideological economically but probably tending to the libertarian way.

Where to start…The Brat Pack ceased to exist a long time ago. Tony Ryall does his own thing these days, Nick Smith is damaged goods, Roger Sowry left parliament three elections ago leaving Bill English as the last man standing. The Brat Pack was also a creature of Michelle Boag’s but she is about as popular as herpes right now. Bill English fell out with her a long time ago.

Bizarrely Eddie/Mallard suggest that there is a Boag/Key faction…this is specious. John KEy is his own man and not one to fall for the machination of Michelle Boag, even if she continues to claim that it was she and not my old man that recruited John Key to National. There simply isn’t a Boag/Key faction as Eddie/Mallard presumes. If there was then Bill Birch wouldn’t have been dispatched with a message for Boag telling her to wither and die, and to do it quietly, which was delivered last week.

There isn’t even a Collins or a Joyce faction. Again these are largely a figment of Eddies/Mallards imagination.

Anyway the post suggests that Stephen Joyce and Hekia Parata are the dream team to take over from John Key.

There is are several major flaws in that thinking.

Neither is liked by their peers which is more important than the wishes and dreams of Eddie/Mallard. Also both are List MPs. Stephen Joyce won’t stand in an electorate due to his campaign manager duties and Hekia Parata has tried and failed twice to win a seat.

hard working electorate MPs won’t countenance a duopoly of List MPs leading the party. If they can’t win seats then they shouldn’t be leaders.

Like Trevor Mallard, The Standard never lets the truth get in the way of a good story. Basically The Standard exists in a parallel universe inhabited by few others beyond the deluded Trevor Mallard.

I was driving through Tokoroa today when Question Time started, and I nearly ran off the road with Question 1. Bill English was on fire.

Especially when asked about confidence in ministers by Grant Robertson:

All I can say is that the Prime Minister has more confidence in his Ministers than the deputy leader of the Labour Party has in his leader.

Michelle Boag together with Bill English led National to their biggest election loss in 2002. Mr Twenty One Percent had a fair bit of talent for failure, but he wouldn’t have been able to fail with the skill he exhibited without Boag’s totally inept presidency.

Boag left the party with a rumoured million dollar deficit because she was always all talk and no action as a fundraiser.

Rather than retiring gracefully after wrecking both the parliamentary wing and the party wing, Boag’s shamelessness lead her to brazenly turn up to all manner of events with her supercilious, to the manor born attitude.

Boag maintained an air of owning the party, working closely to network where she could and extract value from those networks. She was, is and always has been completely shameless, sticking the knife into an MP or a candidate one day, then introducing them to her corporate clients the next.

Now we also know that Boag used without permission anyone she remotely met in order to name drop them to get what she wanted.

Murray McCully is cutting the bloat out of MFaT:

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) has confirmed it is cutting around 300 staff as Finance Minister Bill English says it’s crunch time for the public sector.

MFAT’s chief executive John Allen this afternoon said it would be cutting 305 staff.

The news came as English said Kiwis were about to see the public service change.

English said the Government had last year told public sector chief executives to look at their own operations and ”tell us how they could be improved to deliver better services with little or no new money”.

”We gave them time to do that. We’re now at that point. That means we’ll see quite a change in how public services are delivered.”

Allen said 600 MFAT staff would have to reapply for their jobs in new specialist roles. The ministry has 1340 staff, half of which are offshore

He also confirmed changes to remuneration including offshore allowances. Staff would be asked to make a “nominal contribution” to their living costs overseas.

Only Labour could complain about axing bureaucrats:

Labour’s Foreign Affairs spokesman Phil Goff said the MFAT’s cuts were disastrous at a time when New Zealand’s national interests were at risk from an unstable world.

Hmmm…I seem to remember a certain Prime Minister telling us we lived in a benign strategic environment. Has something changed. But the real question that needs to be asked of Phil Goff is “If not now then when would be a good time to cut staff?”

I’m not sure what David Shearer’s advisors are thinking after the first week back in parliament finished on Thursday.

They certainly won’t be lauding it as a huge success, that is unless they are following National’s playbook on leadership minimisation that they last used when Don Brash was their leader.

Back then, after he rolled Bill English, National’s brains trust thought up a way to protect the thoroughly intelligent policy wonk who was in reality politically dim.

Their method was a  couple of tame questions focussing on areas of Don’s expertise and then more questions by other “stars” of the caucus would enable them to avoid the inevitable scrutiny that would eventually trip up the affable leader.

It didn’t work because back then Labour just ignored him and waited, and waited until the inevitable lack of traction and then pounced, bashing him up one side and down the other in the house. Don Brash had to change, he was forced into it by Labour.

Then came Orewa.

I don’t think David Shearer has got an Orewa speech in him. I just don’t see it. But right now he is being protected, or is it perhaps ignored by his caucus. The questions he asked in the house this week were tame, weak actually, ineptly delivered and ineffectual. Even Trevor Mallard refused to call him his leader instead preferring the term “colleague” in what can only been a calculated slight against the leader.

Labour’s caucus isn’t united. They simply weren’t cleaned out as badly as National was in 2002. The factions still exist. Now there is the oldies faction. You know they still have control because Annette King is still fronting against Steven Joyce on NewstalkZB. Trevor Mallard struggles to his feet to defend the young ones and Winston and Phil Goff is sitting there looking over Shearer’s shoulder with Darien Fenton scowling at us all as though we were the enemy.

Right along the opposition benches too is Winston Peters who after this week can claim the title of Leader of the Opposition, not because of his performance, which was dreadful but simply because Shearer ceded control of the opposition benches to Winston and his motley crue by being missing in action.

About the only things that David Shearer hasn’t done which Don Brash did is work his way through the skirt relentlessly, described his favourite dishes made with corned beef or washed his undies in motel sinks. Things are going to have to change otherwise Labour is ceding their role as opposition to the fools of NZ First.

Right now from where I am looking at it, David Shearer and Labour certainly look like Don Brash and National prior to Orewa.

Mike Williams has written about Labour’s strategy, or rather, the lack of it:

It also points to a very basic strategic error by the Labour Party’s campaign planners.
It seems that Labour’s strategists decided that it was pointless and possibly counter-productive to attack John Key on the grounds of his stratospheric popularity.

This was probably right but the next decision, to leave Leader Phil Goff largely out of campaign publicity, was plainly a serious mistake. The Party Vote is presidential in nature, and no matter how your leader is scoring in the “beauty contest” it is essential that he or she is top-dead-centre in any campaign.

I take the attitude that Phil Goff was much more saleable than Labour’s strategists assumed, and I think that Goff proved this point late in the campaign.

In Te Atatu, the contrast between the two big parties’ approaches was plain.
National’s hoardings featured John Key and Tau Henare’s smiling faces with the slogan “Party Vote National”, whereas Labour heavily promoted its candidate Phil Twyford without any apparent attempt to feature Goff, or promote a party vote for Labour. The result was entirely predictable with Twyford scoring a heavy victory over Henare and National taking the all-important party vote in the electorate by a country mile.

The same happened all over the country. It was not a local phenomenon.

I think Mike Williams is talking about Trevor Mallard and Grant Robertson when he talks about the “campaign planners”.

Probably the most irritating aspect of this approach is that it exactly duplicated National’s 2002 election strategy and produced the same result. If we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it (or something like that).

Yep, Labour nicked Bill English’s playbook and then implemented it flawlessly with almost the same result.