Politicians haunted by ghosts of policies past

If a week is a long time in politics, then something that happened 16 years ago is several geological time zones removed from the present.

So it was not surprising to hear Transport Minister Stephen Joyce - an MP for all of eight months - dismiss as "ancient history" the references by 25-year veteran Jim Anderton in Parliament yesterday to the botched privatisation of New Zealand Rail back in 1993.

Taken in isolation, Joyce's remark was harmless. Unfortunately for him, barely half an hour earlier, his superiors, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, had been indulging in their own version of political archaeology. Fortunately for Joyce, no one seemed to notice his minor faux pas.

The Prime Minister is nothing if not a quick learner. Having left a political vacuum last week which Labour happily filled by flaying the Government for not doing enough to stave off the rising number of redundancies, John Key was utterly determined to avoid a repeat this week both inside and outside Parliament.

Rather than allow his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday afternoon to meander again into dangerous territory - as happened the week before - Key prepared for it with an announcement that the Cabinet had decided to give district health boards far more flexibility in contracting out elective surgery to private hospitals.

The proactive attempt to dictate media coverage through to yesterday's sitting of Parliament was somewhat frustrated by Monday night's news that the Line 7 clothing company had gone into receivership.

That gave Phil Goff renewed reason to keep hounding Key on jobs. In Parliament, the Labour leader made sarcastic reference to Key's boast last week of having saved the "iconic" Fisher & Paykel Appliances. What action would Key take to help the "iconic" Line 7? Unlike Fisher & Paykel, Key replied, Line 7 had not sought to take up Government aid offered by the nine-day fortnight scheme.

Goff pressed on, only to stumble into a trap. One of the handicaps of being in Parliament for 28 years - 15 of them as a minister - is that Goff will inevitably have said one thing in Government but another in Opposition.

Sure enough. Goff asked why National had axed the successful work-finding Enterprising Communities scheme, yet found $35 million for boot camps which had a proven track record of failure.

Sure enough, National's researchers had found Goff being quoted as saying Labour would encourage young offenders into the armed services to gain discipline, self-esteem and trade qualifications.

"Excellent idea," the Prime Minister yelled in triumph. Never mind that Goff's statement had been made in 1996 - about the period, politically speaking, when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth.

By now, Goff had had his fill of Key's back-to-the-future tactics. "If I can bring the Prime Minister back into the 21st century ..."

Some hope. The next question saw National's Craig Foss asking Bill English if he had seen any reports that took a realistic view of unemployment during a recession.

Funnily enough, he had. One such report had stated: "There is in some quarters a temptation to address the problem of unemployment with simplistic answers. In reality, there are no quick-fix solutions."

And who had said that? Well, Goff, of course, some time in the late 1980s when he was Minister of Employment. Digging for such gems may be positively neolithic. But in the cheap-point scoring atmosphere of Parliament - if nowhere else - dragging up the past can prove mightily effective.