A good and a bad policy from Labour
Derek Cheng reports:
A Labour-led Government would look into having weekly study-free afternoons in every secondary school for pupils to play sports.
Its sport and recreation policy, to be released today, includes broad initiatives such as fighting obesity, encouraging physical activity and maintaining back-country huts and tracks.
It has a focus on participation in school sport, including investigating “reintroducing midweek early finishing nationwide to facilitate midweek sport”.
Rather than trying to have the food police in school tuck-shops, an emphasis on more exercise and sport is a much better approach.
It’s a pity Labour were not a bit bolder and made it a policy, rather than merely investigate it. But still better than nothing.
The policy document also cites back-country huts and tracks as a significant asset that draws tourists.
“The existing network of back-country huts and tracks is vital as well and should remain. A bivvy in the right place, for example, can save lives,” the document says.
“Labour will promote development of new outdoor recreational opportunities, for example, walking and cycling trails on former railways land.”
I’m a big fan of huts and tracks, so welcome Labour saying they are vital. However I’m not sure what this means in policy terms. Are they going to build more? If so, how many and at what cost?
So overall the policy gets a tick from me. Not so impressed with the overseas development policy though.
National shut down NZAID as an organisation and moved the aid programme back into MFAT, with the explicit aim of aligning the aid programme with foreign policy goals. This has undermined the credibility and legitimacy of the aid programme.
Labour will re-establish NZAID as New Zealand’s international development agency, committed to the elimination of poverty, implementing a high-impact development programme, transparent and accountable, and contributing to New Zealand’s broader foreign policy goals.
First of all it is idiocy to say that our aid programme should not be compatible with our foreign policy goals. Of course it should be.
The issue of whether NZAID should be a semi-autonomous agency or a division within MFAT has arguments on both sides. I wasn’t actually convinced that it should have been merged back into the MFAT. However as it has now been merged back in, the last thing you want to do is pull it back out again. This would be massively costly and disruptive. You can’t have its status changing every few years.
Basically Labour’s policy is to just reverse everything that McCully has done. It’s not future looking in any way at all – it is just trying to turn the clock back, without realising you can’t.