I often enjoy Jeff Gamlin’s articles but in your last issue he was seriously off beam in several respects.
Without getting into a debate about whether the National Party should have done even better than we did in the 2005 election – our best result since 1990 – I take issue on two points.
First, Gamlin asserts that “Labour will be hard to nail down on the economy because the basic problem facing the country is exchange rate and monetary based (the preserve of the Reserve Bank) rather than a government based fiscal one. Dr Brash is trying very hard to finger a spendthrift government as the cause of the high interest and exchange rates… But he is drawing a long bow here.”
Gamlin is wrong on two counts. The basic problem is not “exchange rate and monetary based”. It is that over the last five years productivity in New Zealand has been growing at an average rate of only 0.8% per annum, substantially below productivity growth in Australia and other developed countries. And that is a result of a whole host of factors directly susceptible to government influence – inadequate transport infrastructure, cumbersome and time-consuming processes associated with the RMA, and marginal tax rates which discourage people from getting ahead under their own steam, to name just three.
To the extent that the exchange rate is an issue – and I certainly agree that it is a major issue for the export sector – it is certainly related to an over-heated domestic economy, and that is certainly in part the result of the rapid growth of government spending. A long bow? Hardly, the OECD made this point to the Labour Government in its report in the middle of last year, and I have no doubt that both Treasury and Reserve Bank officials will have made it to the Government also.
In other words, the Labour Government must bear the major responsibility for both the immediate short-term slowdown and for the much more serious failure to improve our productivity growth over the last five years. The National Party will certainly be making those points strongly.
Secondly, Gamlin makes the rather extraordinary statement that “National is unlikely to have the same scope to differentiate itself in policy terms from Labour in 2008 that it had three years earlier” and cites as evidence that National has already “seen fit to draw back from its strong stand on Treaty of Waitangi and Maori issues.”
We certainly have not “seen fit to draw back” from our earlier position on Treaty and Maori issues: we still want to ensure that government spending is based on need not race, we still want to eliminate meaningless references to Treaty principles from legislation, we still want to abolish the Maori electorates, we still want to accelerate and then bring to a conclusion the resolution of historical Treaty claims, and we are still absolutely committed to treating all New Zealanders equally under the law.
And in a whole host of other areas we remain a very different party from Labour. We want to see fundamental reform of welfare; we want to give parents choice about what kind of school their children go to; we want to get serious about fixing our infrastructure problems; we want to reform the RMA; we want to leave more of the money people earn with the people who earn it.
Don’t ever fear that the National Party is in any danger of becoming indistinguishable from Labour under my leadership.
Copyright © 2024 Don Brash.