John Key has started delivering on ideas out of the Jobs Summit. This week Cabinet approved the nine-day fortnight concept in return for a pledge employers will not make workers in the scheme redundant. The Govt will pay employers $12.50 an hour per worker for up to five hours a fortnight if they negotiate a voluntary agreement with workers to reduce hours to a 9-day fortnight. Only businesses with more than 100 workers can join the scheme, which could cost the Govt around $200m. It could save the jobs of perhaps 25,000 workers, as the recession deepens. The political upside is significant. The Govt has shown its determination to save jobs. The issue has become urgent as several companies have flagged to unions big job cuts are imminent. The downside will come from the impact on those workers who do lose their jobs. But Key has demonstrated again he is not burdened with ideology.

This is why the Opposition is finding it hard to get traction in attacking him. Key is attracted to new ideas and he applies a simple test: will it work? His enthusiasm for a cycleway the length of NZ (another to emerge from the Jobs Summit) has been dismissed by critics as wacky but the man who dreamt up the Te Araroa walkway which covers 3000km from one end of NZ to the other, Geoff Chapple, reckons the cycle way is a “great idea.” Key’s astute political manoeuvring which brought the Maori Party into coalition with National and ACT is paying off, with Maori Party MPs attacking Labour even more vigorously than National, on such issues as privately-run prisons and the foreshore and seabed.

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