Editorial: Key's made a strong start

OPINION: US President Barack Obama and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, both elected a year ago, share a readiness for self-deprecation.

Mr Obama got big laughs when he said he would spend his second 100 days in office setting up a foundation to celebrate the achievements of his first 100 days. Mr Key recently praised youngsters at a riding school for aspiring to represent New Zealand in show-jumping at the 2016 Olympics, then jested to their parents "and you'll be able to watch it all on Maori television".

Expectations of Mr Obama were impossibly high, however, not only in the US but around the world. Expectations of Mr Key were much more modest. Hence we have been pleasantly surprised to find he has an easy rapport with New Zealanders of all stripes. In Cabinet he is reputed to be decisive with a strong sense of what will be acceptable politically.

That's a useful skill for a PM, because New Zealanders are hard to please. They want the state to look after most problems but they resist the prescriptive nanny state approach that was the undoing of the Clark Government.

Some people (including Local Government Minister Rodney Hide) complain the Government hasn't done anything. But the thrust this year was to get the country through the recession with the least possible discomfort while overseas credit rating agencies were closely monitoring budget decisions lest too much debt be piled up. Anyway, there is no appetite among New Zealanders for a radical shift of the sort instigated when Sir Roger Douglas was Minister of Finance in the mid-1980s.

The Government's accomplishments are not slight, nevertheless. Labour's emissions trading scheme has been modified, for example, and an overhaul of the highly contentious Resource Management Act is under way. Big investments are being made in infrastructural programmes to improve our roads and the national power grid and to give us a better broadband network. The Government has introduced national standards to education and a raft of law and order measures; it is tackling the ACC's funding difficulties; it is restructuring the district health boards with surprisingly scant public fuss. And it is revisiting the vexing foreshore and seabed issue.

An outstanding achievement politically has been to work comfortably with both the Maori Party and ACT.

There have been inevitable stumbles. The Richard Worth affair blotted the Government's performance within just a few months and massive ministerial mismanagement was exposed by the debacle over the televising of the Rugby World Cup.

But Mr Obama's whopping approval rating of 69 per cent on Inauguration Day has fallen to 51 per cent, whereas opinion surveys in this country persistently show National polling better than it did on election day last year. This reflects an impressive acceptance of what Mr Key's government has done. But he came to office during a recession and has governed through a period of economic torpor and rising unemployment, making his own public approval rating even more remarkable.

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