Ability to change one's mind a valuable virtue

The hardest thing in politics is to change your mind: it's embarrassing to switch horses, it's ungainly, and makes a politician vulnerable to attack.

The great economist, Lord Keynes, was once challenged at a media event - they had the "gotcha" press even back then.

How, he was asked, could he justify his statement when just a few years ago he had said the opposite ? "When the evidence proves I'm wrong, I change my mind.

What do you do ?" he replied sweetly.

I wish I had read and used that quote when I was active in politics, Parliamentary question time would have been easier.

I watched an excellent movie on Ché Guevara, Castro's comrade and organiser during Cuba's revolutionary struggle.

At the time I like to think I would have first supported the trade unions in their strike against the Cuban dictator, that bastard Batista.

When strikes and democratic action were brutally suppressed, I would have supported Castro.

But within a few years the authoritarian tendencies of Castro would have repelled most free-thinkers.

I confess that, as a young man, I thought Mugabe was a great freedom fighter.

But it is one thing to support Mugabe or Castro in the 1960s, and quite another in the 1980s.

Now I carry a Zimbabwe $100 billion note in my wallet because, better than any speech I can give or book I can write, this explains how, when politicians go wrong, everything collapses.

I was a protectionist, an economic nationalist, until the late 1970s when, after studying our country's negotiations for closer economic relations with Australia, I changed my mind and thought the NZ National Party was correct but too cautious.

Pragmatism is not the opposite of principles in politics.

What is right for one historic period or set of conditions, may not be right for different situations.

This is not to say there are not core principles: those objectives are how to raise living standards, look after people, and our physical, social and cultural environment.

But how to influence these outcomes, and the tools we can use, will change.

During the Great Depression, governments everywhere cut spending and raised taxes to bring the books into balance.

A Labour government in the UK actually cut the unemployment benefit to help balance the budget.

Keynesian economics arrived and, as Keynes explained in his proposition the Paradox of Saving, normally savings are good; but in a recession they are fatal, you have to encourage spending.

Alas, deficit budgeting continued in good economic times by some governments that thought you could borrow and spend forever.

The public loved it.

Running deficits and borrowing in good times is as dumb as tax hikes and lowering expenditures in tough economic times.