KEY POINTS:
New Governments usually do something in their first few days or weeks that defines their character. Helen Clark's Cabinet restored the state's monopoly of accident compensation, Jim Bolger's put a "razor gang" to work on public spending, David Lange's devalued the dollar, Sir Robert Muldoon killed a public superannuation fund, Norman Kirk cancelled compulsory military training.
John Key has put disparate bills through Parliament under extra-ordinary urgency.
If the aim was to demonstrate a commitment to election promises, it would have been sufficient to introduce the bills before Christmas for normal and proper legislative scrutiny in the new year. In most cases it is hard to see a need for rushing them through. Many are window-dressing, enacted in fulfillment of promises that would add little to existing practices.
Legislation on education standards and testing falls into that category, so does the bill instructing judges to remember that crimes against children are dealing with the particularly vulnerable, which passed unopposed as the House continued sitting under urgency last Saturday.
A few items on the Government urgent list need to be there. Tax cuts timed for April 1 have to be legislated now. With fears of unemployment rising in the new year, the relief package announced yesterday could not be delayed. But both those measures are essentially a response to a recession which hopefully will not define the Key years.
If the Prime Minister was invited to nominate one part of his programme that he hopes might characterise his Government's life, it would probably be the broadband network he wants to bring to every home computer.
It is emblematic of the more highly developed economy he envisaged. But the promised infrastructure has not taken legislative form yet. Unless something is done in that direction before the House rises for the year, his Government's definitive first steps will probably be remembered as disparate, hasty, shallow, lacking coherence.
It is the programme of a party still finding its purpose in office. Mr Key came to power on a promise of "change" but in concrete terms he proposed little more than a change of Government.
The most substantial moves his Government has made since taking office have been the probationary employment law, giving employers 90 days' immunity to actions for unfair dismissal, and the cancellation of the obligatory biofuels quota imposed by the previous Government on oil companies. But it will surely do more than rebalance labour relations or backslide on climate change.
Sadly, the international economy may frustrate Mr Key's hopes of taking the New Zealand economy to a higher level in the next few years. Declining consumption in export markets is likely to be felt within the country next year and it could be a long, slow climb back to the sort of buoyancy the country and the world was enjoying when the National Party leader talked of "leveraging" higher growth.
If instead his Government has to steer the economy through a long trough, its relief package yesterday may turn out to be its hallmark.
The package is not distinguished by any new idea. Even the housing component appears not to be on the scale of mortgage assistance that might have been expected from comments during the campaign. The infrastructural stimulus that the campaign led us to expect has yet to materialise.
While the petty legislation of its first week has been frenetic, National has been feeling its way on the problems that are really pressing. Is that to be the pattern of the next three years?
