Of course one would have had to be living under a rock to not realise that election time has rolled around again. The first leader's debate (well….. of the two main parties) was last night, and probably didn't prove much except reasserting my annoyance that those who dumb themselves down the most generally are seen as "connecting" the best. Sticking with the new theme of this blog, there really wasn't much said about transportation, which was a pity. I guess the closest we got to it was with Helen Clark talking about "bringing infrastructure development forwards" if necessary. I'm not quite sure exactly what that means, but finance minister Michael Cullen gave hints that might eventually mean an electrified rail link to the North Shore – a pretty fantastic project that I've always thought was probably in the 20 years away basket. If we end up getting something like that brought forward, then hell bring on the economic recession!
So anyway, what's my take on the 2008 election? Well, I guess the natural starting point for looking at this election is to analyse the results of the 2005 election. I went into detail on that at the time, but essentially National did recover from a disastrous 2002 election to post a pretty good result, only being narrowly edged out by Labour. Then a while later Don Brash was replaced by John Key as leader, after a series of complete and utter messes, and it seems like ever since John Key took over as leader National have been way ahead in the polls. I guess it's not necessarily particularly surprising for this to be the case. Only one New Zealand government has enjoyed four terms in office since World War II, and it really does seem like the country has either a 6 year level of patience or a 9 year level of patience with a government. National governed from 1975 to 1984, Labour from 1984-1990, National again from 1990 to 1999. The typical New Zealander who doesn't really care that much about politics probably just gets sick of seeing the same faces on TV over and over again, or thinks that every little thing that is going not quite perfect in their lives could be fixed by a different government.
So basically, my viewpoint over the past two and a bit years has generally been that, while Labour has done a great job since 1999 and has been our best and most effective government for a heck of a long time, the general populace seems like they're just getting a bit bored of them, and want someone new. It does seem a bit of a stupid reason to toss out a government, particularly one that has managed the country damn well, but then my faith in the average New Zealand isn't particularly high unfortunately. This situation led to my own indecisiveness about whether to vote Labour or Greens. Obviously I prefer a Labour led government to a National led government, so the easiest way of ensuring that happens would be to vote Labour. However, throughout the last couple of years the Greens seem to have come up with some really fantastic ideas – particularly relating to public transport – even though I'm still a bit wary of the extremeness of their economic policies (not quite sure how you could do away with income tax and replace it with resource taxes for example). I suppose that a vote for the Greens would be my way of saying "hey, well actually I'm not particularly happy with the way the world's going at the moment, and you guys are the only ones who seem to truly understand the long-term problems we face, and the only ones who really have some ideas about how to do something about them."
Interestingly, in the last week or so the financial crisis that seems to have finally reached New Zealand (even though we didn't really play much of a part in causing it) seems to have given Labour a fresh opportunity. A couple of polls last week showed it was closer to National than at any stage of the last couple of years. It seems like the 'average New Zealander's' appetite for change may be rather reduced in a situation where there is so much uncertainty. Maybe people are starting to realise that Labour have done a pretty decent job handling the economy over the past nine years. While National continue to criticise a lack of economic growth yadda yadda yadda, maybe people are realising that National hasn't really offered much in the way of doing things better – except for the same old mantra of tax cuts. Interestingly, National's final announcement of their proposed tax cuts last week was met with a pretty average response: people finally realising that in order to keep the much improved social services they had enjoyed throughout the past nine years, including important policies like working for families (which has apparently lifted 130,000 children out of poverty, a pretty amazing achievement in the space of 4 years), you couldn't actually make huge tax cuts without ending up needing to borrow masses of money.
So it's interesting to see where things go from here. There have been a lot of policy announcements for the country to digest – and on top of that nobody really knows whether the economic crisis is just starting, already as bad as it'll get, or even that it hasn't really started yet.
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