PANEL DISCUSSIONS

HOSTED BY PAUL HOLMES

In response to POLITICAL MOMENT OF THE WEEK

PAUL HOLMES
So, what do we make of them, the battle of the speeches [Shearer and Key], the two speeches? The main differences, Bernard?

BERNARD HICKEY - interest.co.nz
Well, again, with the government we have trying to just incrementally move along here and there. A few tweaks, a few fiddles, muddling through. The Opposition is at least trying to put forward a vision of what New Zealand could be doing differently, although without too many magic bullets to do it. So, again, two politicians trying to cater in a MMP environment for an electorate that doesn’t like big vision or big change.

PAUL No, but I don’t think it’s quite fair to say bungling along. He had quite specific numerical targets for the public service sector.

BERNARD But not a massive change. Nothing like we saw in the early 1990s or even from the mid-80s on. This is an incremental-change government - deliberately - and many of his suggestions made sense. People would look at them and go ‘Yes, it’s good idea for the government to interact with people online.’

PAUL I thought Shearer’s speech was good. He talks about how we muddled along as if we’re always going to have a supply of lambs. We’re not actually a very good exporting company only… only… Where did I write it down? Somewhere. Only 900 companies sell more than 5 million abroad.

CLAIRE ROBINSON - Political Analyst
You can’t fault David Shearer for trying to step ahead and actually look for some vision. Personally, coming from Massey University, I have a little bit of trouble with his new New Zealand vision because I think he’s nicked it from us. It’s our strategic direction and has been for a year. But, I mean, we’ll let him go on that one for the moment. But I think that we have to just stop focusing on the short term solutions and be starting to think about the big challenges, the long term challenges, and at least he’s signalled that Labour is interested in that discussion.

PAUL But why can’t we be Finland? He mentioned Finland.

CLAIRE Well, that’s great. If we’re Finland, that’s great, because they’ve designed their nation.

PAUL That’s what Sir Paul Callaghan’s been saying. We already make good dough out of widgets, gadgets.

CLAIRE Of course. We need to be investing a lot more money.

BERNARD And the frustrating thing about what John Key said and what the government’s been doing is they seem to have given up, in a way, on trying to create something different than just more dairy farms.

PAUL I don’t quite know where it all takes us. It doesn’t take us in a new direction.

CLAIRE We can’t keep going.

KEITH LOCKE - Former Green Party MP
I couldn’t see much difference between the speeches.

PAUL And I was going to ask you that. Is there an eerie similarity between the two men?

KEITH Yes, well, a lot of Shearer’s speech was what you might call light blue in the sense that John Key could have given it all the generalisations about education etc, and there as a bit of light green there. A clean, green, clever new New Zealand. The colour that was missing, I think, was red, in that there was very little about- There was almost, when I was looking at it, a sort of a John Cleese moment - ‘Don’t mention the workers. Don’t mention the unions’ - in the context of these big port, meat workers.

PAUL The red didn’t help them last year when they came in with 27%, that’s the thing.

KEITH Yeah, but if they go for the mishy-mushy centre and sound like Key and there’s no clear points of what they’re for, they’re not going to get more support from the voters.

CLAIRE What Labour needs is a circuit breaker, just like Don Brash’s Orewa speech, and this speech wasn’t that circuit breaker moment. David Shearer isn’t yet very comfortable speaking in public. He needs to do, I would say, dozens of speeches this year to become confident in that space to become a really good performer.

KEITH Labour’s strategy seems to be to win the battle of the good guys. We’ve got Nice Guy Key, Nice Guy Shearer. Our nice guy can beat your nice guy. I mean, you’ve got to actually have some policy there.

PAUL But I thought that was very interesting that he says, ‘If it’s a good idea, we’ll have it. Thank you,’ said Shearer. ‘If it’s a bad idea, don’t want it.’

BERNARD It’s the battle of the pragmatists. And New Zealanders are distrustful of big visions. We’re sort of tired, not just tired but against what we saw through the mid-80s and early 90s.

PAUL And Shearer, to be fair, acknowledged that. He said, ‘You’ve heard this all before.’ The lamb burgers. God knows what.

CLAIRE Well, it doesn’t make good media, and the media are much more after specific policy initiatives rather than addressing some of these big issues.

KEITH And the idea of having a Nokia and that - the Greens have put out the idea of using particularly the energy companies to try and really get us at the forefront of green technology and energy. Something like that. Well, what’s Shearer coming up with? What’s his idea of a Nokia? Anyone can talk about it.

BERNARD And what’s slightly frustrating from both is that neither are identifying these huge success stories that are bubbling up from within New Zealand.

PAUL Oh, well, he did a couple.

BERNARD And there are companies in New Zealand now connecting to this huge market via the internet, for example, or doing amazing things with technology. Sometimes they’re being sold off to foreign companies, and maybe what we need to focus on.

KEITH And are they going to be backed by this new major department of Steven Joyce’s or not?

PAUL By all the new money we’ll borrow very cheaply, Keith.