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  ENGLISH CULLEN AND AGENDALabour’s plainly on a roll. So much so that Michael Cullen is now flying to Auckland next Sunday to be on “Agenda” rather than simply doing his interview remotely from TVNZ’s Wellington news base. And why wouldn’t he? Labour clearly stole a march on National yesterday with the deposit guarantee scheme. In a way Dr Cullen and Helen Clark answered the same call that David Skilling did with his set of proposals to deal with the economic crisis. It was good to have David on the show yesterday and he certainly didn’t let the presence of Bill English cause him to hold back on his argument that neither party had offered anything substantial to deal with the crisis at that point. You can read a full transcript of his interview on the transcripts page and it is worth reading. Bill English stayed on after the programme and we (David Skilling, John Roughan, Vernon Small, myself and Bill) had a healthy debate in the Green Room. What became clear is that Bill’s policy is to present as low a target to Labour as possible. Even former National Chief Press Secretary Richard Long will ask in his Dominion column tomorrow just how effective National’s caution is in the face of the crisis. One of our staff was told by one National staffer that “they” had been pressing John Key to announce some new economic policy yesterday but he refused. Apparently the theory is that if National is to win over 40% of the vote (and thus more or less govern alone) it needs to win over the centrist voters who abandoned the party after Ruth Richardson. Therefore anything that smacks of radical thinking is out. That left Bill English with nothing very much to say yesterday morning. But David Skilling argues that there needs to be leadership through this crisis and that so far we are not seeing that leadership from either politicians or business leaders. That’s why he and Mark Weldon stepped in. And maybe that’s why Labour did what they did. The question we’re now asking is whether Dr Cullen is planning to unveil more next Sunday morning on “Agenda”. |
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