-
Related
Act leader Rodney Hide is talking up the skills of Sir Roger Douglas, despite National leader John Key's insistence there would be no cabinet place for him in a possible National-Act coalition government.
Hide and Key formally announced their support for one another on Saturday.
Key says he would be happy to give Hide a ministerial role, but there is no way Roger Douglas will get a role in cabinet.
Hide says he accepts the condition, but hopes Key will change his mind after the election.
He claims he will not "throw his toys out of the sandpit" over the matter, however.
Nevertheless, he says he is confident Douglas will make a huge contribution to parliament.
Douglas's reforms as Finance Minister in the Fourth Labour Government (1984 to 1990) have governed the direction of much of New Zealand's economic policy and discourse since, but he remains such a controversial and polarising figure that Key renounced any possibility of working with him earlier this year.
Speaking to TVNZ's Agenda last week, Key noted Douglas's hard-line stance against the Working For Families scheme as totally unpalatable. However, Key also agitiated for scrapping Working For Families in 2006, a position he has since moderated.
Douglas has not been pulling his punches either. At Act's economic policy launch in October, he decried National as 'socialists' to whom Act's policies were 'diametrically opposed'. He did not dismiss the idea of working in government with National, though, and said Key's stance was simply 'playing politics'.
