Enjoy the Interregnum

If you haven't signed up for the Initiative's weekly newsletter, you should. I need to be better at blogging the bits I write there. Here's this week's column, written on Wednesday.

If no person’s life, liberty or property are safe while Parliament is in session, what’s the rush to have a new government?

As I write this column, no coalition has been struck. Journalists stake out Parliament’s parking garage trying to divine the will of Winston from cryptic hints he might there provide. And if you took the newspaper headlines too seriously, you might think that New Zealand would sink under the ocean if coalitions weren’t formed by whatever date Winston teased about.

But everyone else simply got on with life.

The morning after the election was beautiful. Smiling people strolled along Wellington’s sunny waterfront, almost as though having a Prime Minister were not that important for anything that matters.

And while nobody has yet figured out the causal mechanism behind it, even the weather has been better since we stopped having a Prime Minister. I count about four good days for every terrible one since the election. We know you can’t beat Wellington on a good day, but it’s rare to have those good days in September and October. Since we stopped having a Prime Minister, they’ve been the norm.

Even political tragics could have been happier with the lack of result: the sorrow of losing outweighs the joy of political victory, and neither of the main parties had to reckon with defeat.

And those sceptical about government full-stop have been able to pretend we have none. Sure, the administrative state continues churning away in the background. But it is on auto-pilot. And auto-pilot can be a nice option when the broad policy settings are already basically right.

Outside of that locked and empty cockpit, people argue about daft things like whether it might be a good idea to break the aileron controls by requiring the Reserve Bank to target exchange rates rather than just inflation. The longer that door stays shut, the safer we all are.

The interregnum cannot last forever; the auto-pilot cannot land the plane. Broken policies around housing must be fixed, and Ministries and Councils cannot do that on their own.

But we should enjoy the reprieve from government while it lasts – and hope for more sunny days ahead.

And if Edgeler wants to insist that we do have a Prime Minister, just a caretaker one, my fingers are in my ears. Let me pretend.

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