NZ POLITICS DAILY: National soft on student loan interest

Meanwhile, Labour continues to swallow its own dead rats, with leader David Shearer announcing today that while Labour believes firmly that governments should continue to make contributions to the "Cullen Super Fund" during recessions, it will drop this policy because "New Zealanders told us they were uncomfortable about the rate of borrowing. We have listened".

For more on this see Danya Levy’s Labour in Super Fund u-turn and Alex Tarrant’s Shearer says Labour will delay policy. In contrast to John Key’s relatively upfront pragmatism (“It may not be great economics, but it’s great politics"), this backpeddling from Labour is blatant pragmatism disguised as a democratic impulse.

Both examples raise the important philosophical question of whether we want political leaders and parties to show leadership, campaigning on what they really believe in and try to convince us, or whether they should primarily reflect the will of the people.

Instead, modern political parties seem to exist largely on a diet of dead rats, regularly considering which principles to cast off in the pursuit of popularity and avoidance of controversy.

Danyl Mclauchlan has blogged about this and asks what National-initiated polices the current Labour Party are likely to swallow in their bid for re-election in 2012 – see: Left-wing dead rats.

In an interesting comments section on this post, David Farrar responds to Mclauchlan’s challenge with these questions: "Will Labour promise to repeal the three strikes legislation? Will they promise to restore the vote to prisoners? Will they promise to scrap national standards? That’s three which I’ll be interested to see if Labour touches. Also will Labour hike tax rates? Will Labour restore public sector staffing to 2008 levels?"

Other suggestions include the reversal of GST rise to 15%, the reversal of voluntary students association legislation and the full re-nationalisation of the energy companies. 

The banksdotcom scandal rolls on with further damaging stories being published each day. The latest can be found in Danya Levy’s Dotcom man's trip to bank cheques and Andrea Vance’s Campaign advertising gift in spotlight. 

Meanwhile, on an unrelated but very important Kim Dotcom issue, David Fisher has found that Crown lawyers were aware Dotcom court order was unlawful.

And on the increasingly hot issue of anonymous political donations, Labour has come out to defend their existence – see: RNZ’s MPs agree anonymous donations have a place. Also worth reading is an indepth blogpost by Paul Buchanan – see: Showing The Money versus Making Numbers Work.

How is the media performing with their coverage of the Banks scandal? Media watcher John Drinnan is impressed – especially with the coverage from TV3 and the Herald - see: Shearer dinner date bad look. 

Drinnan says that the "reporting of the teapot tape, the SkyCity deal and the John Banks-Dotcom donation are examples of a healthy news media".

He also reports on the increasingly contentious issue of lobbying, revealing that "Labour leader David Shearer attended a dinner party with his wife at the home of long-time Sky TV lobbyist Tony O'Brien".

Also on media issues, Vernon Small reports TVNZ7 scrapped in favour of repeats channel.

Other items of political importance or interest today include:

• David Farrar pronounces ACT - dead 4 May 2012, aged 18, charting Act’s troubled life as the unlikely child of a National and Labour politician "born in 1993 to Roger Douglas and Derek Quigley, in one of the nation's first 'queer' marriages", an increasingly troubled tween and adolescent and its ultimate decline into an "irreversible coma". Farrar concludes that even Act’s friends ‘know it is time to turn off the life support, and let ACT die.’ Over on the Whaleoil blogsite, former Act MP David Garrett is blogging a ‘tell all’ series of accounts of the Act Party, with the first post: Decline and Fall – the final ACT? (Part I).
• The increasingly liberal stances of the Herald continue today with an editorial calling for the Government to Open arms to boat people.
• The hikoi hits Wellington today. What will it achieve? According to Chris Trotter, ‘activism for activism’s sake is simply counter-productive’ and the march will cause damage to the cause – see: A "Pessimistic Reformist" Considers The "Aotearoa Is Not For Sale" Demonstration.