Q + A July 1, 2012

Panel Discussions

Hosted by GREG BOYED

In response to BILL ENGLISH interview

GREG Let’s get on with this week’s panel. Dr Raymond Miller from Auckland University is back. He was Minister of Social Development, Education and more besides under Helen Clark. He’s now vice-chancellor of Massey University, Steve Maharey. And the Auckland Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Barnett. Good morning to you all. First of all, Raymond – 10-point plan. Sounds zingy, sounds great. Is it a good idea or is it a gimmick?

DR RAYMOND MILLER – Political Scientist
Well, the government had to recapture the moral high ground after several bad weeks. I mean, there was ACC, there was class sizes, there was the asset sales issue. And the Opposition had appeared, for them, distressingly united. They had to do something. What they’ve done is cobbled together a whole lot of things that they were talking about over the last few months, and even before the election, and presented it as kind of a 10-point package. It’s really more or as much an exercise in public relations as it is in public policy, I believe. And, really, what is going to be interesting is not so much what these targets are but how they’re going to get there.

GREG The reality, though, is you lay out your 10 points, Steve. Nek minnit, 2014 and you haven’t made them. You put the line in the sand and you really are setting yourself up for a fall.

STEVE MAHAREY – Massey University Vice-Chancellor
Absolutely. It’s good government, I’ve got to say. I applaud the fact they have set out targets, but the big issue for them will be to say, “So, how do we do this? How do we measure it? And what will success look like?” These are very very difficult issues they’ve raised, so they really – I hope – are going to have to have a very good plan to make sure they can achieve these goals.

GREG When you were in Parliament, you were big on measuring social outcomes rather than just economic policy. Is this the right approach, do you feel?

STEVE Targets are the right approach. I think absolutely you have to be clear if you want to say something about benefits, if you want to say something about children at risk. You’ve got to set yourself a clear target so the public servants know what to do and so everyone knows what to do. But the proof is in what lies behind those targets. Is there a genuine plan with resourcing there that will allow you to achieve it? If you don’t, then of course you’re going to be held immediately and transparently responsible.

GREG Raymond, so drug testing for beneficiaries – what did you make of that?

RAYMOND Well, it’s something that was talked about last year. It came out of the Welfare Working Group, I believe, and during the election campaign, both Paula Bennett and John Key talked about this. It’s interesting it’s come up again in the last few weeks. But again I think it’s a way of sort of recapturing the moral high ground, to an extent, because it’s the sort of thing that people by and large will agree with, although there are groups that are going to be quite disturbed about that. But to get back to Steve’s point, I think it’s very important that public sector leaders are challenged, but it could potentially lead to the politicisation or greater politicisation of the public sector. And the other danger, I think, it what accountability is there for the politicians themselves? I know there's an election, but we’re talking 2017. Are they going to be held to account, as well as the senior public servants?

GREG Michael Barnett, if we can just bring in in here, Mike. Corin made the good point to Bill English that the jobs, of course, come from the private sector. The private sector’s not doing much yet. Pull your finger out. What's happening?

MICHAEL BARNETT – Auckland Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive
Yeah, I think I’m going to come back to the targets. And the old story – if you can’t measure, you can’t manage. So I think putting the targets in place is a really good thing. A lot of this stuff is social, and in order to be successful at it, you’re going to need jobs. And if you’re going to get jobs, we need to have an economy that’s stimulated accordingly. So to me, stop looking at Europe and saying how bad that is. We’ve got Asia right next door, and that’s where all the growth is. Next 10 years, that’s where the stimulus should come from for this economy. We should be accelerating what's happening in Christchurch. Beginning of the year, English said growth 3%. Half of it was going to come from Christchurch. Now we’re 2%. Does that mean the rest of New Zealand is failing? What we also need to do is to accelerate infrastructure investment – the stuff in Auckland that would create jobs. So whether it’s bringing Waterview back to what the original date was, whether it’s about a convention centre, this is all stuff that will stimulate and allow the private sector an opportunity to be able to employ in order to deliver.

GREG On that subject, as we also touched on, should there be incentives for people to go there, to kick-start it that way?

MICHAEL If you’re going to provide incentives for people to Christchurch, it’s predominately going to be young people, and that’s where we’ve got our biggest problem with employment at the moment. So don’t disagree with that. If we’re going to change the model, we need to change some of the thinking. Same thing applies. We’ve got all of these notches in our belts in respect to free-trade agreements. What are we doing about getting, other than Fonterra, some of these other industry sectors well represented in China, Indonesia, Malaysia and so on? We’re not doing enough.

GREG Raymond, does this government just need to be taking more risks, pushing it a bit harder? I know this is off the top of my head – I’m sure there's others – but the last thing I remember, they were saying, “Right, we’re going to do this, and this will create 30,000 jobs.” It’s the cycle track – that didn’t go that well – but apart from that, it’s, “We’re going to clear a bit of a way. You do something.”

RAYMOND Yeah, I think it does, and, I mean, this is the vision aspect, which I think is really important. I mean, you need to really incentivise people to move to Christchurch. The minister didn’t sound that convinced that he needed to do much more, but I think if you’re going to really move people in significant numbers to another part of New Zealand for jobs, you’ve got to do something about it, and I think that is an example of the sort of things the government really needs to do. It needs to take the initiative.

Q + A July 1, 2012

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

Hosted by GREG BOYED

In response to EUTHANASIA debate

GREG Michael, if I can start with you. Euthanasia – does it come down to a simple right to choose, or is there more to it than that?

MICHAEL BARNETT – Auckland Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive
I think there's probably more to it than that, and to me it’s not just about those that are tired of life. I think Maryan’s in the right place when she's looking terminal determination. I have to say that when I look back a hundred years and look at the technology that we’ve put in place and the new medicines that we’ve put in place that actually prolong life, we’ve got the opposite happening, and I think being able to manage the prolonging of life with some input from the person who may be terminally ill seems reasonable to me.

GREG But when you get right to the end of the line, to that point, Steve Maharey, who’s it for?

STEVE MAHAREY – Massey University Vice-Chancellor
I think the issue we’re talking about is a question of power. I remember when I was lobbied in 2003 over this by a senior doctor. He convinced me that Maryan’s approach is right because what he said was, “Look, this is an issue that should be left in the hands of doctors. In other words, we want the power to do this.” And I think what's happening now is increasingly people are saying, “Well, so do we want some power as well, and we want some mechanism that’ll allow us to the decision at the right time in our lives, and we don’t want the medical profession to have all that power.” After all, we have to remember this is something that is happening. People are making decisions about keeping people alive or not – whether they should make heroic interventions, for example, during surgery. Those decisions currently rely on the medical profession, and I think these days people are saying, “We want to have some choice as well.”

GREG Those decisions are made the other way as well. Let’s face it. It’s not out there, and it’s not talked about a lot, but they’re made the other day, probably every day of the week, aren’t they, Michael? You yourself have had a very public battle with your health and with cancer. Your point of view on a personal level on this is what?

MICHAEL I guess I had a look at it and one of the things that became very very profound for me was I got to a point where I wasn’t afraid of dying, but I realised how much I wanted to live. If I had been told that I was terminal, I think I would have wanted to exit in a way where I could do it with dignity and pride and maintain a little bit of me.

GREG Would you have changed your mind had that decision been presented to you five, six years beforehand?

MICHAEL I don’t know.

DR RAYMOND MILLER – Political Scientist
Yes, it’s interesting, because I think from Maryan Street’s comments, it’s not just the terminally ill, but the incurably ill that might be covered by this legislation. That becomes a profoundly difficult issue, not just because it impinges on people’s moral values and indeed many religious values, but also because it impinges on personal experience, and if she's successful on getting this bill through – and don’t forget it’s a private member’s bill and it has to go into a ballot – it will be the third time this has been dealt with in just over a decade. And what it means is this is seen as a very difficult issue. When it was last voted on in 2003, Labour was split. 45 voted for it; 46 voted against it. So political parties— These are conscience votes. Political parties are all divided on this issue, as well as the general public.

GREG On that very subject, talking to Maryan Street before we did the interview yesterday, she said a couple of people who voted against it initially, she's spoken to them since, and they’ve changed their mind. We could be in for a bit of a shift on this.

STEVE I think people have shifted, and I think it does come back to that point that the world has shifted now and people want some control over their own lives. They want to rely on the medical profession, as Michael was saying. But at some point, you want to be able to say, “This is my choice too, not just the choice of people who are around providing me with treatment.”

MICHAEL Accompanied by strict conditions and, you know, a shared ownership of the response. I think the world has changed.

Q + A July 1, 2012

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

Hosted by GREG BOYED

In response to MARK LISTER interview

GREG Mighty River Power – modest return seems to be the subtext, doesn’t it? It’s not quite the zing-dinger we first thought it was, Michael.

MICHAEL BARNETT – Auckland Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive
I don’t think it’s going to be a biggie. A couple of quick points – I think the government has done really badly on promoting this. This is a great opportunity. People have been throwing spare cash into second houses and rental houses, and we’ve been trying to get them away from it. They don’t trust the finance sector. They don’t trust the sharemarket. Here’s an opportunity to partner with government in a utility to get a good long-term stream of income from them. I think it’s a great opportunity for New Zealand, just being sold badly.

GREG Raymond, the more money – that’s going to put, I imagine, a lot of people off. Most people think, “I’ve put my $1000, my $2000, whatever, and that’s it and I’ll get the dividend and I’ll get whatever, not be asked for more money.”

DR RAYMOND MILLER – Political Scientist
Exactly, and I think people’s expectations will have to be lowered quite considerably. They’re going to do better, perhaps, than they will by putting the money in the bank, but they’re not necessarily going to— The interesting thing about all of this too is of course it’s been a lightning rod issue in New Zealand politics for 25 years. We’ve been debating this back and forth, this whole question of privatisation. And what this interview, I think, suggests is that it’s probably not going to be the great boom that its advocates are saying. Neither is it going to be the end of civilisation as we know it. It is something that has not been managed well. It does have some potential, but I think we have to have realistic expectations.

MICHAEL It’s going to be a safe haven, though. It’ll be a safe haven.

GREG Steve, we can pretty much take it that there will be demand for Mighty River Power. Onwards for the other power cos, Air New Zealand, is that momentum going to carry through for all of them?

STEVE MAHAREY – Massey University Vice-Chancellor
Oh, I doubt it. I think this is a difficult idea, because most of the assets that probably were worth selling have been sold. There may be one or two others that we could talk about, controversially, but I don’t think these would have ever been front-rank to sell. Mighty River’s got some positive aspects, because, for example, it may have some geothermal it could do around the world and make some money, so investors may get slightly more than they actually do bargain for. But as you move down the track, you get less and less certainty about raising some money, and you move into some very difficult territory. I think touching Air New Zealand, for example, would be a lightning rod at the moment, and probably not something they could easily sell at all.

GREG Politically, though, Raymond, as we said, it was always going to be a big hurdle to jump. Ostensibly, they’ve jumped it now. How do they keep this momentum going forward?

RAYMOND Well, I think this is where it becomes particularly difficult and the management of it’s going to be interesting, because they have to get a good return on Mighty River Power. They have to show that it’s oversubscribed. They have to show that they’re not selling off the family silver for much less than its true value. And therefore I think they’ll proceed at a relatively slow pace through the sales process, but it’s the first one that’s going to be the real test, and if we think of international economic events that’s going to impact negatively on it, then the government may well pull back from continuing the sales process.

GREG And of course you add Fonterra to this mix as well – or you will be able to add Fonterra to this mix as well.

MICHAEL Could well do. Back you up here – I’ll predict the book will be full. I don’t think they’ll have any trouble selling this at all, so I think just managing it, making sure they get the rules and regulations right around it, giving the market comfortableness I think is going to be about the big steps over the next six months.

GREG We’re hearing September for Mighty River Power. How many, realistically, can they sell before 2014?

STEVE Well, I think it’s going to depend on Mighty River. If it goes well, then perhaps they could move faster. But I do think it’s going to become very sticky after this, because this particular asset has got some merit. But after that, it does get a little bit more sticky, and so selling it’s going to get harder and harder and harder.

GREG Winston Peters said just a couple of weeks ago this is the point where the government lost the next election. What do they have to do now for him to be wrong?

RAYMOND Well, I think they have to be sensitive to public opinion, to some extent, to the market. They don’t want to forge ahead too fast or too hard. They want to get it off the agenda before the 2014 election as much as they can. There is this referendum which may or may not come up. If it does, they’ll want to get that out of the way as soon as possible, I would think, because they don’t want it being debated at the 2014 election. It’s just an indicative referendum, but for them it’s going to be a pain in the neck if it’s still being talked about in 2014.

GREG Steve, do you think the government is starting to have a bit of danger and going forward, are you worried about that?

STEVE Yeah, I actually don’t think much has changed with the government. They have been a government that’s relied very heavily on John Key over the first three years to iron out the problems, and he was magnificently successful. I mean, he’s a class leader, this leader we’ve got at the moment. But that’s started to run out a bit. I think people are starting to say, “Look, we want to see some growth.” You’re hearing people like Michael, who, during the first three years, was pretty tolerant of the fact you’ve got to get your house in order, but now the business community is saying, “When’s it going to happen?” So it’s getting harder and harder.

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