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Photo (c) Next Magazine The more astute among you may have been able to read between the lines of my moderate and well balanced Facebook posts and detect a few subtle signs that, when it comes to politics, on occasion I may lean slightly to the left. So you won't be surprised that I was pleased with the way things turned out yesterday. We have a new prime minister, one from the same generation as my children. I'm hopeful about how things might work out for her and her new government, but I'm not kidding myself it will be easy. She inherits a national debt whose servicing alone is costing us around $4.5 billion a year (that's about a thousand down the tubes for each man, woman and child of us a year), and people who know about these things are saying it's about to take a turn for the worse. The ecological and social problems which were intractable for the outgoing government are still there, and she has a number of promises, made on the campaign trail, which...

Copyright 2008 New Zealand National Party Our new prime minister will be sworn in next week, so I am told, and despite myself I find I am beginning to respect the guy. He's moved a lot faster than politicians normally do in setting up his government. He's shrewdly got the Maori Party on board, hitting three birds with one stone: extending his somewhat slim majority; alleviating some of the public apprehension about the ACT party having their rabid fangs in the treasury's leg; and setting himself up nicely for a broad electoral appeal in 2011. Very neatly done. I respect that. But do I trust him? I don't know yet. I am dreading a return of the new right policies of the 1980s and 1990s which did such damage to so many layers of our social fabric and suspect that under his neatly brushed pate he has only three basic ideas: privatisation, privatisation and privatisation. We had the lowest voter turnout for years. Perhaps the election was such a foregone conclusion that peop...