Pundit

The howls of outrage are starting to be heard around Auckland as its citizens start sensing that they're being stitched up by some old-fashioned right wing ideology. Rodney Hide and Stephen Joyce, needles in hand, are passing all the decision-making that matters in the city over to private council-owned companies, a decision that could come home to roost just before next year's election, once Aucklanders start to get their first super city rate bills and see their first super-frustrated super city councillors next year

But what has struck me about this bag of free-market ideology in recent weeks is that it's been in contrast to many of its other recent announcements. On one hand the private sector is being handed half of Auckland, prisons are to be re-privatised and the government is talking about extending public-private partnerships into defence.

On the other hand, this is a National government showing of centrist tendencies for the first time since Sir Robert Muldoon held the reins.

And by centre, I mean centralisation; putting an active government at heart of decision-making in this country.

If you doubt me, just looked back at the steam being emitted from of the ACT party conference a few weeks back. Hide kept a lid on it for now, using the vents of regulatory reform and 'some power is better than none'. But the ACTivists are getting fed up, and a significant emerging question is whether ACT can hold its nerve any better than the Alliance did back in the first term of the Clark administration.

Or thumb through a few recent policy prescriptions. The leaks and stories are coming thick and fast that the public sector is about to be shaken up – ministries merged here, education cuts there. As you'd expect from National, the push is for smaller, cheaper government – and if you believe some of the talk at the moment, we won't see the worst of it until the Budget in May.

What's missing from the typical National party prescription of the past decade or two, however, is the mantra that the private sector always knows better and contracts being farmed out to an army of "efficient" private employees. National is actually arguing that competition can be a waste of time and money; better for government departments to unite.

The Key government is, in other words, centralising state services. The Prime Minister said last week, "New Zealand looks out of place with other similar countries in terms of the fragmentation of state agencies and the number of agencies."

Where's the talk of funder-provider splits and the discipline of competition?

Go back a week. The Crown Research Institute taskforce released a report promising to overhaul science in this country and the government welcomed it with open arms. Its main thrust? Re-integrate the CRIs because the competitive model has done its dash and more collaboration is needed. Simon Upton's 'cut the flab, get them fit and competitive' model from the early 1990s has had its day.

What about National Standards? A typical right wing play to slap down the teachers' unions and obsess further about the three Rs, right? Except that, again, the standards are creating a centralised government structure. Schools aren't being freed to compete and there's no talk of more "flexibility", "bulk funding" or other code words for free-market reform. Indeed, in Britain where national standards are being shown the door, the Tories have been critical of the "wave of bureacracy" crashing onto schools thanks to national standards, arguing that much of what matters in education can't be measured by league tables. National standards are seen as bringing too much power to the centre, yet here National's in favour and Labour is against.

Where the government is pushing to the right, it's doing so under the cover of its coalition partners. ACT policies on the super city, three strikes and regulatory reform are classic examples of ideology triumphant. Maori Party MPs are being allowed to experiment with an estimated $1 billion of taxpayers money to see whether private providers can close the gaps better than government departments. (They won't be able to of course; the failure isn't in "service delivery").

Is it political pragmatism? The insatiable desire of politicians to 'do something'? Do we see this government true in its CRI collaboration or in its super city privatisation? Is it some clever hybrid ideology, or simply another sign of more muddled thinking with no core beliefs? Or is it individual ministers charging off in their own directions with no philosophy from the ninth floor to hang onto?

For me, I'm hoping that some of these questions will be answered on May 20. Budgets tend to reveal a government's flesh and bones. Perhaps then this administration will pluck off another veil, and reveal a little more of its body of beliefs.