Book an obstacle for Government
Allegedly, Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics has been preventing the election campaign from focusing on the ‘‘real’’ issues of concern to the public.
That claim is pretty ironic, given the ample evidence in Hager’s book that the orchestration of scandals and media sideshows — rather than policy discussion — has been one of the main goals of the collaboration between the Prime Minister’s office and National’s agents out in the blogosphere.
All year, distractions and diversions have been the aim of the game.
The sudden conversion to the politics of substance has been driven by the Government’s desire to talk about something else, anything else, than the content of Hager’s book.
Even so, the policy debates last week didn’t seem to be panning out any better for the Government. Its pet ‘‘Investing in Educational Success’’ project – which will pay good teachers and principals to work across groups of schools – was vetoed by the same primary school teachers who would be vital to its implementation.
At the New Zealand Educational Institute conference, 93 per cent of primary teachers expressed ‘‘ no confidence’’ in the scheme, and nearly 75 per cent opposed any negotiations to reach a compromise.
This could well render the project unworkable. After all, the scheme is envisaged as a voluntary one whereby schools agree to form the clusters across which the ‘‘ super teachers’’ and ‘‘ super principals’’ would operate.
Currently, the scheme is budgeted to cost $359 million over four years. At the NZEI conference, teachers expressed their strong belief that the millions in question would be better spent on caring for the physical, mental and behavioural requirements of New Zealand’s special needs children, and on combating the classroom effects of income inequality.
Still, it was not entirely bad news last week for Education Minister Hekia Parata.
In stark contrast to the NZEI position, secondary schools teachers voted to negotiate on a compromise version of the same scheme. Why the big difference? To some observers, the previous row over the imposition of national standards in primary schools has created a climate of distrust and suspicion – among NZEI members at least – towards the Government’s plans for the education sector.
In other words, trust is just as essential in getting policy implemented as it is in determining which leader, or political brand, is more popular in the polls.
On another key policy front, the Government has now unveiled its housing assistance plans for low and middle-income earners.
Largely, the policy involves tinkering with Kiwisaver in order to boost the size of the deposits available. However, to derive the main benefits from the scheme, applicants have to be earning below certain incomes, the house price has to fall below a certain cap, the applicant needs to have been contributing to Kiwisaver for five years and needs to be building a new home, rather than buying an existing one.
Obviously, the applicants will also have to be able to service the subsequent mortgage. Nothing in the policy directly addressed the speculator-driven price of housing.
Trust matters. It determines how policy is received, and evaluated. Chances are if the issues of honesty and good governance raised by Hager’s book are left unaddressed, this seems bound to affect how all the Government’s policy offerings are likely to be perceived for the rest of the campaign.