KEY POINTS:
The quietly spoken yet inquisitive David Parker looks more your chardonnay socialist, while Clayton Cosgrove's more stroppy persona suggests blue-collar beer drinker.
Whatever their favourite tipple, the two Labour Cabinet ministers should not have been wanting for drinks during the social at the Labour Party Congress last night.
It was not so much the pair's rejection of the bid by Canada's state pension fund for a 40 per cent stake in Auckland Airport that struck the right note for the first day of the congress.
The veto by Parker, the Land Information Minister, and Cosgrove, an Associate Finance Minister, was expected. It is the wholesale nature of that rejection which will have pleased delegates and sends the Canadians home without bothering to mount an appeal.
The pair's decision puts some firm markers in the ground about what Labour, as a centre-left party, now expects of foreign investors should another overseas bidder come knocking at the airport hangar or another strategic asset (electricity line company Vector?) goes on the block.
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board sold itself as a passive investor. But the more maple syrup it poured to sweeten its bid, the less likely it was going to be approved.
The bid was fatally flawed in the ministers' minds as such a passive investor offered little in the way of benefits to New Zealand in terms of more jobs, more technology, more exports, and so on.
The wider political impact of the decision is to make the demarcation between Labour and National, which would have approved the Canadian bid, more visible.
John Key sounded far more like a National Party politician than he did a month ago when National's stance first came under the spotlight. He talked of the "terrible message" Labour was sending to overseas investors with its ad hoc, last-minute changes to investment rules. In other words, here was an example of Labour demonstrating poor management of the slowing economy.
Despite shareholders missing out on a cash windfall, Labour argues that the retention of the airport in New Zealand hands is ample demonstration to voters of the benefits of hands-on economic management.
