What if the Government is right?
Ihad a disturbing thought this week. What if the current “Cluster Government” is right? It is possible. Despite a lot of public service and job cutting. Despite evidence of slow economic activity in many sectors amidst ongoing domestic cost inflation. Despite a lot of people like me expressing concern, opposition and outrage about social, economic and environmental issues. Despite the open threat to Te Tiriti and other human rights.
What if they are right?
There are two respects in which this is possible.
The first is a simple political numbers game. The Cluster could turn out to be right in that they might again garner enough voting support to stay in power on one or more occasions.
This would require them to hang together. Given that this will be preferable in their eyes to being hung separately my guess is they will try very hard to do so. One can already see that there is no level of embarrassment, even open disagreement, which they will not swallow to stay in position.
It would also require them to be able to convince their current support base to stay with them. It seems to me very possible that a diet of tax cuts, social service cuts, Tiriti rights cuts, and environmental protection cuts could achieve that.
They are not wrong to say that many people voted for that even if they may not openly admit it now.
The second respect in which they may be right is less obvious but more deeply seated.
It might well be that case that the core economic model of the colony is so broken that the only way to restore and grow incomes and future wealth for their voting base is to turn up the heat on resource extraction, labour exploitation and inequity.
The colony has historically earned its “standard of living” from resources exported to a shifting series of colonial masters. We have not deteriorated in this sense only because of lax left-wing governments but far more because we are, in a global economic sense, what used to be called “yesterday’s papers”. Unless we serve up more resources and get in line militarily.
So if you are politically “right” and hold a narrow enough moral view of what being “right” means, you can see how it could work. If so, you would step on the gas. And they are.
Anyone who opposes this obviously right view will be posed as an opponent of progress and prosperity and a promoter of division and discord. A picture all the more easily painted for not being wrong in the sense outlined above, and for being consistent with the “revealed preferences” (as economists call them) of enough of the voters to keep winning to a horizon beyond their expectations of their current roles, even if you have Winston Peters’ or Keith Richards’ longevity.
The dangers to this otherwise positive picture for those comprising the Cluster are not about being wrong but about being unable to deliver. When I think about this I cheer up a bit.
So far, like a toddler madly scribbling over someone’s homework, or a dog eating it, the Cluster is showing genuine ability to destroy things and also a dogged determination to complete their initial shopping list of “things we agree on”. Mostly these things are what their predecessor did which advanced the interests of equity and nature. That is, shall we say kindly, a not inexhaustible list. They will get this done.
But you can already hear the rumblings about delivery. Those robust champions of progress in the commercial world who at election time only needed “change” and “freedom” to advance, turn out in fact to also need “certainty” and “support”.
Like lazy greyhounds released from their starting box (wasn’t the Prime Minister going to stop that practice?) they won’t run until the bunny goes past to incentivise them adequately.
Setting that up takes longer and is less certain. We may be “open for business” but business may not be open for us. When gloom deepens the doubts will set in. We may not get a “winter of discontent” but we will get a “winter of disappointment”.
The danger will be that with its one track mind the Cluster doubles down, goes harder and faster. The destruction will be greater. But they may still be right from their point of view.
It is a disturbing thought.