Dealer takes two

The trouble with compromising, see, is that you can find yourself compromised.

The trouble with failing to compromise is you can find yourself paralysed, neutralised, euthanised. So good luck with that.

As you may have noticed, the election and the MMP system have delivered us a new Government.

Bill English’s call to cut out the middle man failed, so National needed to cut a deal with the middle man.

Labour offered Winston Peters a better deal. Too good or not, it sufficed

It’s arguable that all the uncertainties of working with Labour, and peripherally even the Greens, struck Peters as preferable to all the likelihoods of working with National.

But don’t make too much of that. The call was surely based more on what was vividly gettable right then rather than what might be problematic in the future.

National is now saying plaintively what it was previously saying proudly. It was the party with the greatest number of votes.

Labour, NZ First and the Greens can simultaneously say that their own collective support was greater still and represented a majority call for change.

The new Government isn’t inherently unworkable, but it will take a great deal of work to hold itself together. Let’s not forget the centre left had remarkably stable heyday during Helen Clark’s three terms. Nor that it had hell of a time, before that, under David Lange.

In some ways the contrast came down to the circumstances under which they took power. Clark’s Government ascended at a time of economic growth. Lange’s at a time of economic crisis.

So what are the circumstances this time? Here it gets suddenly disconcerting. We’ve been given to understand, have we not, that the economy’s pretty good. Maybe not for the ideal reasons, but still.

And we still have National leader Bill English raising expectations by maintaining the line that the economy is so strong it allows a generational opportunity to deal with longstanding problems.

But Jacinda Ardern to some extent, and Peters to a striking extent, are injecting a bleaker outlook.

Peters speaks of matters beyond Government control. He predicts spurious attempts to blame the new administration for these. He talks of mitigating the impacts.

This wasn’t the sort of rhetoric we were hearing during the campaign. It might be little more than the Muldoonist trick of conjuring dark prospects so that when a grey reality is delivered, people are a tad relieved.

That won’t be the case this time around. We voted on the assurances of altogether brighter. Still, thank goodness there’s no pre-existing hole in the budget.