Expect going to get heavy in the coalition stakes

Sure, the going will get heavy in the coalition stakes. But David Slack rates these guys as stayers.

‘‘Is there any sound more depressing than racing on TV?’’ one of my favourite Twitter people asked this week. ‘‘Reminds me of burnt toast and worn slippers and dark orange shag carpet and cigarettes.’’

She wanted to know if there had been a minister of racing before. Yes. Then, as now, that minister was Winston Peters.

‘‘Dad has Trackside on the TV and a radio going at the same time. Does my head in,’’ someone else wrote. If you’ve never had money riding on it, never had your hopes tied up in the colours, never been up before dawn for trackwork, never leaned over a stable gate and admired a champion, it can make less than no sense.

But I grew up with it, loved it. Dad’s family was a racing family. Bred them, raced them, rode them, lived for them. I still love the smell that hits you as you come through the racecourse gates. For tens of thousands of people it’s a way of life, and some of them were telling me this election: ‘‘Winston is our only hope.’’

In Australia, racing is thriving. Here, not so much. They want to see big change and they suggest that by overhauling the administration you could release more than $50 million a year for fresh stakes money to reinvigorate the business. They say Winston had the wool pulled over his eyes last time by vested interests. This time it’ll be different.

Stand by for change. Stand by for reform and innovation and intervention, because that’s how things will be now. A person might feel like ringing up the radio station or stabbing at the keyboard demanding to know ‘‘Why should I pay for this? How does this help me?’’

The answer is: it may not. Then again it just might, in ways you may not have considered. Your petrol tax might be used to pay for a ‘‘trolley’’ – to use Judith Collins’ description of light rail to Auckland airport – and you might never use it. But every tax dollar that goes to public transport potentially takes the car in front of you off the road, and the one behind you as well, and you wouldn’t mind that would you?

‘‘You must be happy,’’ my neighbour said to me, grinning, the day the new government was sworn in. I told her I was. She told me she wasn’t. She thinks it will all come flying apart. Well, yes, it could. But the warm expressions the new prime minister and deputy prime minister had for one another at that swearingin suggested a genuine respect and understanding that could carry them a long way.

Their clear intention is to take care of so many who have been neglected in large and small and grievous ways, and it might be a child without shoes in Manurewa and it might be a couple in Heathcote Valley treated appallingly by EQC and it might be a teenager denied mental health care, and it is a long list and they have a lot of catching up to do.

We move from a government that made a virtue of staying out of things, to one that believes in getting involved: in tackling child poverty; in regional development; in all manner of things; in horse racing.

Not everyone will like it, but the size and enthusiasm of the crowd at Parliament grounds this week suggests that plenty do. So many people, despondent for so long, have been smiling, recalling times when it felt like this before: in 1972, with Norman Kirk; in 1984 with David Lange. There’s a feeling that change can, at last, happen. And of course, people are also remembering it can all fly apart.

This is almost certain: whenever you try to do something new, something will go wrong. It may go wrong unexpectedly, it may go wrong catastrophically. The mistake, when it happens, is to let the people who didn’t want to do it in the first place use that as reason to give up. Without change, you can never get better.

This government will need good ideas, and it has them. It needs capable people, and it has those too. It also needs resolve and cohesion. None of that seems lacking.

Right now they look like a pretty decent bet.

We move from a government that made a virtue of staying out of things, to one that believes in getting involved.