A year of fiasco and farce – and still Key dances on merrily

IT’S BEEN a great year for political farce. In matters large and small the Government’s plans have fallen into confusion. The most spectacular fiasco was Dotcom, an epic of absurdity that disgraced every official body that took part in it.

But education was just as bad. The Accident Compensation Corporation, it seems, has an unofficial policy of sending copies of personal files to random strangers. Foreign Affairs tried to restructure itself and produced a shambles.

The Government’s flagship policy, a sell-down of state assets, collapsed under an entirely predictable legal challenge from the Maori Council. Now it waits upon the decision of the Supreme Court. Other big Government projects hover in limbo. John Key’s pokies deal is stuck in secret negotiations. The Government has hollowed out the emissions trading scheme and turned its back on Kyoto.

It’s a sad mess all around. And even when something did get done, it was done half-pie or badly. Judith Collins has torn the tripes out of alcohol reform. The really necessary changes – a boost in the purchase age, drastic restrictions on marketing and availability, and stiff price increases – have been shunned. The Government can’t even change a law which allows people to drive drunk.

Even obvious decisions, such as the sacking of Hekia Parata, have been left to drift through the summer. John Key’s political gold begins to lose its glister. The charm always had its dark side. His boyishness and bounce can just look dopey. Nobody minds if he does a bit of gangnam dancing on Radio Yawp. The trouble is that when you’re PM they tape you doing it and play it to everybody later.

In this case the evening news showed him horsing around in the studio at the very time the secretary of education had quit and the hapless education minister was spinning in the wind. It was good that Lesley Longstone resigned. The officials had simply made too many messes – Christchurch’s broken schools, the court case over Salisbury special school, the never-ending Novopay disaster – for her to carry on. But Parata will have to follow.

You would think this would be obvious to Key. The great populist knows you don’t stick with ministers who infuriate the voters. But the PM has weird blind spots. He harmed his Government and his own status by not sacking John Banks over Dotcom and the ‘‘anonymous’’ donations. He didn’t need to do this: Banks was entirely expendable. So is Hekia Parata. So will he make the same mistake?

Beneath all these catastrophes is the slow-burning failure of the Government’s economic policy. Here, there has been no sudden collapse, no unexpected explosion, just a steady erosion and rot. Unemployment stands at 7.3 per cent. All of the Government’s optimistic forecasts about it have proved wrong. The current account deficit – a measure of the country’s external solvency – reaches alarming levels. The stampede of workers to Australia continues unstaunched. All the Government has to offer is a possible surplus in 2014 and a promise of growth. Even the surplus needed a sudden Christmas-Eve boost in petrol taxes to make it plausible. As for 2.5 per cent growth, well, let’s wait and see. After a year of fiasco and farce, how many voters are likely to swallow the Government’s promises?

John Key’s political gold begins to lose its glister. The charm always had its dark side. His boyishness and bounce can just look dopey. Nobody minds if he does a bit of gangnam dancing on Radio Yawp. The trouble is that when you’re PM they tape you doing it and play it to everybody later.