Political & Economic week that was: John Key not attending Waitangi celebrations

Prime Minister John Key spent the week performing the Waitangi hokey cokey – is he going or isn't he?

He's in. He is out. He's shaking at all about.

In the end, he was out. The ostensible reason was a change in the conditions under which he was invited: That is no doubt part of the mix, but factors such as security concerns and political calculation also played a part.

Combining the TPP signing so close to Waitangi Day – and having signed it at the deliberately provocative venue of the SkyCity Convention Centre – it is time for New Zealand's head of government to move to cool some of the political temperature.

Attending Waitangi would have only raised temperatures further. And New Zealand doesn't need that.

The TPP protests probably haven't in themselves hurt the government: both Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand had magnificent live streams of the protests when they were on and the intriguing thing was how incoherent protesters were about what they were objecting to.

Mostly, they are unhappy with living in a 21st-century economy with John Key as prime minister.

To put it another way, the protests were a focal point for people who already don't like the government, and an opportunity for radical Marxists such as the Professor Jane Kelseys of this world to grab the wheel of that momentum and give it a sharp twist leftward.

Which will properly help rather than hinder the current government.

On the economic side, the week saw some astonishingly good job figures – a drop in the employment rate from 6.0% to 5.3%, when every economist expected unemployment to increase.

It could be a rogue result: the household labour force survey has been volatile since the global financial crisis, not necessarily because it is wrong but because the economy tends to be a bit more volatile and unpredictable.

But the other factor could be a reversing out of what might be called the finance company effect.

When the number of jobs dropped in 2009, one notable outlier was the number of older New Zealanders remaining in the workforce.

What it seemed to be was people who had planned to retire on savings they might've stashed in, say, Hanover or Bridgecorp or South Canterbury finance companies, and who were now having to carry on working.

It is too early to say for sure but it could be this is now reversing out as Statistics New Zealand noted the drop in the labour force participation rate appeared to be skewed by older New Zealanders dropping out.

The final economic news this week was Reserve Bank governor Graeme Wheeler telling his critics they were taking too "mechanistic" a view of monetary policy, and that – as per the policy targets agreement – he is taking matters such as asset prices and financial stability into account as well as price inflation.

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