PM huffs and puffs but he’s blowing down a Maori house

SO THE Government is back from Hawaii and promising great things. In particular, an extra $12 million for apprenticeships.

More apprentices would be a fine thing, of course. But is this really the best new idea John Key could think of to launch the political year? Here he is, reenergised and ready to go. He wants a new start after the grinding messes of 2012. This year he’s action man and no prisoners will be taken.

The wind roars and shakes the trees, but it is empty.

The main strategy is exactly the same as last year’s. The centrepiece is a selldown of state assets, which will do nothing to change the Government’s net debt and little to stoke up the economy.

There will be a lot more trouble for the beneficiaries, but there will be no great savings there. The unemployed are on the dole because there aren’t enough jobs for them, not because they’re skiving.

The spectacular targets set for the bureaucracy will not be achieved, because most of them are simply unrealistic. The Government will continue to prime the pump by spending a fortune on roads, but it is clear that this has failed to stop unemployment from rising to serious levels.

It will continue to labour to meet its self-imposed goal of a return to a budget surplus by election year, although this is just magic-number economics and has no meaning at all.

So the PM will huff and puff and the Government will keep on doing more of the same, only with more apprentices.

The PM’s new let’s-get-cracking tone misled some of the pundits into thinking that the nice guy had turned back into the smiling assassin he allegedly was as a forex trader. But this so-called decisiveness and brutality is a myth. True, he kicked a couple of nonentities out of his Cabinet. He moved the unnoticed David Carter, against his will, to the Speaker’s chair. But he left the biggest Cabinet disaster (Hekia Parata) exactly where she was before, running the education system.

Except, of course, for giving Novopay to Steven Joyce, who knows something about computers.

There is here a weird parallel between mid-term National and the Maori Party. The leadership is stuck and it has no great leader-in-waiting to turn to, or even in prospect. National’s fortunes depend entirely on Key, and Key’s best days are past.

With the Maori Party, the future depends on Te Ururoa Flavell. Now Flavell is a serious man and his heart is with his people. He is also as dull as porridge and has none of the charisma which both Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples once had.

At least Turia knows when her time is up. Poor Sharples hasn’t a clue. So charmed and dazzled is he by the great white chief that he has forgotten everything that matters. The Maori Party has hitched its wagon to a stodgy Right-wing Government whose idea of economic strategy is to build roads and cut business costs. The workers do not figure. Most Maori are workers. So why is the official party of the Maori in bed with an anti-worker government? The Government that boasted Hollywood wants to work here because our unions are kaput?

The Maori Party got into bed with its enemy, forgot the real interests of its voters and has now lost the reason for its existence. So it will die, no matter who its next leaders turn out to be.

The Government will continue to prime the pump by spending a fortune on roads, but it is clear that this has failed to stop unemployment from rising to serious levels.