Sunday 30th October, 2011
Q+A panel discussions.

The panel discussions have been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be watched on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A, 9-10am Sundays on TV ONE. Repeats at 9.10pm Sundays, 9:05am and 1:05pm Mondays on TVNZ 7

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GUYON ESPINER
Let’s bring in the panel. Dr Jon Johansson from Victoria University is our regular political analyst, and this week former ACT MP and Herald on Sunday columnist Deborah Coddington, plus former Labour and Alliance Party strategist turned political columnist, John Pagani. Thanks for joining us. Deborah, if I can start with you. Were you surprised that Labour came out with this idea of raising the retirement age?

DEBORAH CODDINGTON - Former ACT MP
Well, very surprised, yes, because it’s actually ACT policy, and Labour’s picked up on it. Just two years ago, Andrew Little and David Cunliffe were virtually saying, ‘Over our dead bodies would we raise the retirement age.’ So while some people are saying it’s bold policy, I would say that it’s desperate policy. And if they flip-flopped on it before the election, you’d wonder whether if they did become government whether they’d stick to it and go back on it. I don’t think it should be a political football. I think that the electorate should have more than four weeks to think about it.

GUYON But, Jon Johansson, it always has been a political football. Is this gonna work at all for Labour? It does seem strange positioning from them in a way.

JON JOHANSSON - Political Analyst
Yeah, I understand that. I mean, it’ll work if their narrative succeeds in, you know, throwing their attention on, ‘We are willing to make tough choices in these difficult conditions.’ I do think it’s significant, because now that one of the main parties has raised this as a piece of rational policy making, it’s gonna happen. It’s inevitable.

GUYON It’s like capital gains, isn’t it? I mean, once one of the big two gorillas, if you like, put it on the table, it’s gonna happen.

JOHN PAGANI – Political Columnist
You can’t go back in three years and say, ‘Now we do think it’s sustainable after all.’

JON And whether it’s post Key, well, that’s neither here nor there, but I think we are now closer to seeing the inevitability of that policy.

GUYON John Pagani, you’ve been pretty close, obviously, to the Labour Party. Were you surprised that they came out with this? It looked like quite a late move in the piece.

JOHN Yeah, I would have preferred to have seen it happen six months ago for the simple reason that it wouldn’t sound like it was something to do with the election. But there has been a lot of thinking right back to KiwiSaver in 2007 about how you deal with the ongoing savings problem. And there’s a division there because, you know, the National government fundamentally believes that the economy will look after itself and people should make personal decisions about their future, and the Labour Party is always gonna believe that you should provide in some structural way, through a collective provision, for the welfare of the economy and people. And so there’s this division about how you deal with those problems-

JON That’s why the compulsion side of it is the one part of it that really surprises me, because that also fuels that other narrative about Labour, which is-

GUYON Do you think, Deborah Coddington, that they’re going to be accused of that sort of ‘Nanny state’ thing if you force people into it?

DEBORAH But if you take KiwiSaver, or Cullen fund as it was then, a retirement think tank run out of Auckland University last year overall showed that even when we weren’t borrowing to put into it, when the government wasn’t borrowing, overall it didn’t make money. It lost money for tax-payers. So if Labour’s gonna borrow money-

JOHN And to believe that, you have to believe that those millions of people who are going into KiwiSaver would have saved anyway, and, I mean, most of us know that’s just not true. I’ve got a KiwiSaver-

DEBORAH Yeah, so have I.

JOHN -that I’m putting money into that I wasn’t saving before, and so there must be-

DEBORAH It’s still unfair, though, John, because it’s only compulsory for wage and salary earners. It’s not compulsory for the self-employed. So it’s still not fair.

JOHN Well, that’s interesting, cos that’s one of the differences from the 1996 scheme to answer your question earlier about what’s different from the referendum that was rejected. That replaced New Zealand superannuation. This is something that goes on top of New Zealand superannuation, and that makes both more sustainable.

GUYON OK, can we just finish this segment? I just wanna go round the houses here on how we think the campaigns are going, because they’ve been quite different, as we’ve discussed this morning. John?

JOHN Look, I think they’ve seized the initiative with a pretty bold policy announcement, and that’s got people talking, which is what Labour needed to do. They needed a disruptive policy announcement, and they’ve got it. I think the distraction over the launch, you know, I find it hard to understand why there wasn’t a big campaign launch.

GUYON Jon Johansson? The no campaign launch with the sort of absent leader wandering around lonely by the lake? I mean, is that working for you?

JON Well, I’ve been arguing that logic for months, so I’m bound to say yes.

GUYON To get away from the personality, presidential concept?

JON Yeah, because it doesn’t necessarily de-emphasise leadership. It de-emphasises Phil Goff. And they’re trying to present rejuvenation through policy and leadership through team. So it’s a legitimate tactic. But my last thought, Guyon, is, yes, with the policy on the super they’ve thrown the Hail Mary. Who knows where it’s going to land.

DEBORAH Yeah, I don’t think it matters now that they didn’t have a campaign launch, because they’ve thrown these things in and they’re giving voters choice.

GUYON Can you win an election without emphasising your leader, though?

DEBORAH Yeah, I don’t think that matters so much, because National has such a hugely strong leader. You know, 70% preferred.

GUYON All right, we better leave it there.

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In response to MINOR PARTIES’ LEADERS’ DEBATE

PAUL HOLMES
Our panel this week Jon Johansson, Deborah Coddington, and John Pagani. Any standout people in that debate?

JOHN I thought Metiria Turei was a level up from the others, to be honest. I think she looks- I was on this programme just after she got the leader’s job and I thought she looked weak and didn’t have enough to say. Tonight she had an incredible amount to say.

JON Her opening was very good.

JOHN Her opening was good.

DEBORAH She’s prepared and polished, and it’s-

JOHN It’s almost unfair to the Greens to have them there, because they’re a middle-sized party now, not a minor party like the others.

DEBORAH Yeah.

PAUL She was certainly on song, wasn’t she? She was on message.

DEBORAH Always on message. Yeah. But she doesn’t do the actual debating. She sort of descends into squabbling a bit. But Peter Dunne is always very good on these things. He comes through as the reasonable, measured sort of thing, and then you sort of- It’s surprising that there’s only Peter Dunne in parliament. A party of one.

JOHN What I like about the minor party debates is the sincerity of them coming through, because they’re not giving you focus group-tested, polished messages. You know, we see the snap from the major party leaders when they do all that. But these guys, you know, they’re talking about things that they really believe in, which is why they’re there in the parties.

JON Fairness and choice, feed the children – some of these are some pithy- Feed the children, I thought, that resonates, I think. And it’s interesting how Pita Sharples talked about being the authentic Maori candidate, but in actual fact, when you sit there as an observer, Hone reeks of it, you know? He really does.

PAUL Reeks of what?

JON As being the authentic voice of Maori.

PAUL But a complete absence of numbers from him. I mean, what’s it gonna cost to feed the children breakfast and lunch?

DEBORAH Hone can say whatever he likes, really.

JOHN Well, he can tell you the values that he’s going to stand up for. I thought one of the interesting policy things that came through, though, was Pita Sharples saying that the Maori Party support asset sales so long as iwi can buy them I think Maori Party voters are going to be very interested to find out that he wants to sell off the power companies and what’s gonna happen to their power bills. He’s gonna have some explaining to do.

JON And that actually gets to that core schism, too, where you have the Maori Party being perceived to be the vehicle of corporate Maori and Hone being the vehicle of the masses.

PAUL Of the poor.

JOHN It’s a legitimate ideological divide, actually.

DEBORAH It’s interesting none of us have mentioned Brash, so I will, and I know he never listens to advice. He never did when he was leader of National. He doesn’t now that he is leader of ACT. But he has got to stop kicking off on the negative. Did you notice that? His first words were negative, gloom. You felt yourself going, ‘Uh. Uh. Uh.’ (LEANS FORWARD)

PAUL Well, that’s a big motivator for him, though. You know, we do have some frightening, ugly numbers. 100,000 people have left to go and live in Australia.

DEBORAH But you do not lead off with all negative numbers.

JON And that sort of format actually just is never going to suit Dr Brash, because visually he’s distinguished as actually looking way old compared to the rest of them.

DEBORAH He did look very old.

PAUL This business of the asset sales. We’ve had this discussion before on this programme. I mean, who cares about who owns Contact Energy?

DEBORAH Who knows what energy company they’re with, unless they pay the bill, and when they do know what energy company they’re with, how do they know who owns it?

JOHN I care about rapacious overseas owners of power companies racking up my power bill and siphoning all of my money overseas, wrecking our export industries in the process. That’s what I care about. I care a lot about that.

PAUL What about rapacious New Zealand-owned energy companies?

JOHN Well, at least then the money’s coming back to us. My locally owned lines company gave me a $300 rebate last year. How’s that gonna happen when it gets flogged?

PAUL We were talking about youth unemployment, and I didn’t get particularly convincing kind of answers on youth unemployment, because if there was a solution, I supposed we’d be doing it already. But the International Labour Organisation, the ILO, issued a statement last week. They warned of a scarred generation developing, which, at best, has become disheartened for the future - this is young people - and at worst has become angry and violent. Now, you’ve said on this programme before that this is a lost generation. Do you agree with that?

JON Yeah, I do, and what worries me is the time-bomb component of it. Once you feel alienated through adolescence into early adulthood and you have that frame, only bad things are going to come of that. You’re disconnected from your society and from your democracy. It is a national tragedy, and we’ve only got four weeks to really try and talk about this better, that we have nearly 30% unemployment, and higher in pockets of this company, of young people. It is waste.

PAUL It’s awful.

JOHN You know what, old people have been going on the TV to worry about what young people are gonna do forever, and the truth is, you know, what they want is much more short-term things. They just need some-

JON Yeah, but why the hell aren’t they on iwi fishing boats? You know, why have we got foreign slave labour with everything bar the oars, and young Maori sitting there with nothing to do?

JOHN That’s a good question for Pita Sharples saying they’re gonna own the power companies. You know, look what happened when they got the fishing quota - they charter it all out.

DEBORAH But don’t you think that if you have a young person and he or she has essentially been trained and they’re just out of school that they should have a training wage for a short term?

JOHN Absolutely.
PAUL I just want to move on to the first of the big debates tomorrow night between John Key and Phil Goff. What will they be doing? How will they be preparing for this?

JOHN They’ll take them extremely seriously. This is an inflection point in the campaign tomorrow night. It’s a possibility to once again disrupt the whole story about what’s happening. Look, it’s really hard for Phil Goff to break through in it. When I was having a look at how well John Key performed in 2008, he thrashed Helen Clark in the debates, and it was an important point. Tomorrow night I don’t think that’s gonna happen on either side, but, you know-

DEBORAH I think John Key’s gotta be careful not to look smug. He’s got to be relaxed and assured, and Goff’s got to be careful not to look like when he’s in the House debating, when he tends to get a bit shrill.

PAUL (TO JON) A very quick word.

JON It’s the opportunity we have when New Zealanders are actually paying attention, and I hope what we’re going to see is some really solid scrutiny of what these individuals think.

PAUL I thank the panel very much indeed.

ENDS

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