{"id":1583,"date":"2008-11-07T11:07:22","date_gmt":"2008-11-06T22:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/?p=1583"},"modified":"2008-11-07T11:07:22","modified_gmt":"2008-11-06T22:07:22","slug":"time-for-a-shuddup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/archives\/1583","title":{"rendered":"Time for a shuddup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Said <a href=\"http:\/\/www.publicaddress.net\/default,5486.sm#post5486\">Russell Brown<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&hellip; I doubt that history will assess the Clark-Cullen Labour governments as dismissively as their critics do now. Labour&#8217;s real achievements &ndash; net government debt reduced from 20 billion to two billion before the current crisis; unemployment down to levels many people didn&#8217;t think possible; a huge drop in the number of welfare beneficiaries, especially per capita; real wage growth; GDP growth that outstripped the OECD for years; a historic turnaround of trends in poverty; the repair of a public sector that was in dire straits by the end of the 90s; a serious attempt to address our savings problem via KiwiSaver and the Superannuation Fund; and a degree of stability that we now all take for granted &ndash; outweigh any counterfactual.<\/p>\n<p>In 20 years&#8217; time, those achievements will be regarded as prodigious and defining of an era. The fact that Helen Clark signed a painting for charity, or that her car once went really fast with a police escort on an open road; or the absurd mythology constructed around the departure of an under-performing police commissioner; none of these will be thought of as anything important.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Said Russell Brown: &hellip; I doubt that history will assess the Clark-Cullen Labour governments as dismissively as their critics do now. Labour&#8217;s real achievements &ndash; net government debt reduced from 20 billion to two billion before the current crisis; unemployment down to levels many people didn&#8217;t think possible; a huge drop in the number of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}