Retrofitting The Workplace

Will Labour’s proposed Fair Pay Agreements do the business?

- Jane Clifton

The rule in politics goes that your enemy’s enemy is your friend. It’s way more vicious, though, when your enemy makes friends with your friends. It’s called “up-yours poker”.

Jim Bolger landed in the National Party’s dogbox for bestriding the last Labour Government’s NZ Post and Kiwibank empires. National later “saw” its blue ex-Prime Minister and raised it a red peer, giving Sir Michael Cullen, Labour’s old Finance Minister, Bolger’s gigs in 2010.

But Labour has just swept the table: Sir Michael is now chairman of its Tax Working Group, and as of this week, Bolger is now presiding over potentially massive labour-market reforms.

Other countries tend to call these grand policy co-optees tsars. To the Nats, Bolger is now more of a Rasputin. Nothing strikes at the heart of core National-voter fears like a resurgence of worker power over business. That one of its own most illustrious grandees is the chief viper in that bosom is pretty hard to take.

Normally, it’s good manners for MPs to grin and bear these inter-party swapsies, knowing that the public greatly approve when party politics at least seem to be put aside for the sake of enduring policy fixes for serious problems. This time, National’s response has been openly spiteful, warning of a return to the 1970s tripartite merry-go-round, in which, as Minister of Labour, Bolger and his then splendid sideburns figured memorably.