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The Key Interview --- Some Thoughts

Sunday did not begin auspiciously. We had agreed to interview Mr Key early. At 8.30 --- so he could get a 10.00 a.m. flight to Wellington. Through either our stuff up or in Mr Key's office, the Opposition leader arrived at 7.30. I got in just before 8 to find him in the Green Room with a press secretary quietly reading the Sunday papers. Shortly afterwards John Roughan and Vernon Small arrived and we were then treated to a fascinating 20 minutes from Mr Key as he explained (almost non stop) his own analysis of the American financial crisis and why it had happened. Along the way we got some revealing insights into the way Wall Street works and the mindsets of the traders in the markets. It was the kind of view only a top insider could give. Today I have been talking to a former National MP who is close to Mr Key. He argues that the Opposition Leader has one of the sharpest minds he has ever met. That is not a view I have shared up till now. What I have seen of Mr Key has been pretty much what the public has seen; a warm, relaxed, sometimes bumbling person with a mind for numbers. But his talk in the Green Room revealed a different side and which today meant I could understand what the former MP meant. The other problem I have had with John Key was also addressed on Sunday. (Which is why I think our interview was an important one.) Mr Key does not give much away in interviews. Indeed if you go back through our transcripts of interviews with him before he was Leader (2005 and 2006) you find a remarkably consistent set of ideas --- about the need for an egalitarian society which has greater economic growth so we can bring our wages closer to Australia. Of course what has been missing from all this has been how we might do that. But on Sunday he came much closer to integrating his vision with some practical policies. The former MP suggested to me that the proposal to use the Cullen fund for investment in New Zealand could be critical in this respect. Note that  Mr key twice referred to Temasek, the Singaporean state investment vehicle which owns companies all over the world. It is the operational arm of Singapore Inc. (It owned a large slice of Brierleys back in the 90s.) At the same time note also his obviously strongly held view view that the National Party is at its best when it is not an extremist party. What it seems to me he is suggesting is that New Zealand might be able to get scale into its capital markets by using the Cullen fund. The fund could provide the kind of sizable investments that are currently simply not possible from the relatively small investment funds that operate within New Zealand. The Round Table (and ACT) will vigorously disagree. Some will recall the ill fated Muldoon Think Big programmes of the 1970s.  But if it could provide th investment that is so obviously lacking here at present, it might just be a winner. It would certainly be radical. And it  would certainly confound my impressions of what a Key Government might do.