Timidity [updated]

Prime Ministers like to use their keynote addresses at party conferences to announce major measures to move a country forward. Yesterday Prime Minister John Key used his keynote address to announce the extension of the existing ninety-day probation employment period from smaller businesses to larger one.

Not exactly a major announcement, even though both those who despise Key and those who’d like to have his babies conspired to talk nonsense pretending it was.  But it wasn’t a major announcement at all, because if getting 70,000 young unemployed into work was your ambition then you’d get rid of Sue Bradford’s penalising ban on youth rates, under which youth unemployment has soared to record levels.  You’d get rid of the ridiculous minimum wage law, which in both the Great Depression and this one kept workers out of jobs. You’d pull the teeth of the milk-the-boss welfare conveyor belt that is the Employment Court (which would have the added benefit of making unemployed the ambulance-chasing lawyers making a living a living out of this personal grievance industry.) And you’d dump Nick Smith’s Emissions Tax Scam, which is going to cost every producer (for which, read employer) dear.

Instead, Key offers just another sign that even on the rare occasion it does move in the right direction, his government doesn’t have the balls to move very far:  Ninety days probationary unemployment.  Now with fries.

No wonder other minor issues sometimes threaten to take over.

UPDATE 1: Said Fran O’Sullivan in Saturday’s Herald:

National is rapidly mor­ph­ing into a party that has lost its appetite for full-blooded pol­icy debate. Instead it defers to the incli­na­tion by its Polit­buro … for mere stage-management.”

Fran, you’re using the wrong tense. It morphed into that party long ago—about the time John Key assumed the top chair, and began swallowing dead rats instead of grasping nettles.