David Cunliffe - the first health minister to favour private health insurance

Rising Labour Party Cabinet Minister, David Cunliffe, is New Zealand's 'first health minister to favour private health insurance', according to the profile on him in the latest Listener by David Fisher. This fact is indicative of how neoliberal the modern Labour Party is. What's more, key players like Cunliffe are pushing the party even further to the right - according to the Listener, 'Behind the scenes, he is a prime driver in Labour's economic policy.' Unsurprisingly, Cunliffe 'has long advocated private-public partnerships for infrastructure works', and he appears to be getting his way, with the Labour Government making more and more noises about contracting the private sector to carry out public work. Cunliffe says,'only in partnership with the business and community sectors can Government truly be effective'. As well as talking about his 'centrist tendencies', the article deals thoroughly with the issue of whether Cunliffe is actually arrogant - as both his colleagues and opponents allege - or merely highly-confident. The profile provides a fairly full picture of the politician. Cunliffe graduating with an honours degree in Politics from Otago, after which he worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Wellington, Canberra and Washington DC, then studied at Harvard University, before becoming a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in New Zealand. His partner, Karen Price (also ex-MFAT) is a environmental lawyer and partner in the law firm Minter Ellison. They now live in a $2 million house in Ponsonby, despite the fact that Cunliffe is a Labour MP for a West Auckland electorate. The Listener profile sums him up very nicely with this one sentence: 'Cunliffe is the new wave of "Third Way" Labour politicians: well-educated, wealthy and perhaps more comfortable among big business than in a working men's club'.