Australia has something New Zealand doesn’t have, right? A free trade agreement with the United States, yes. But also tougher labour practices.
They may be about to get tougher if the impending election bounces Mark Latham’s way.
From some comments from business lobbies here, you would think doing business in Australia is a doddle. Adopt Australia’s regulatory environment and, hey presto, we will be rich like Australia.
The Olympic Games start this week. Breathlessly we will watch to see which of the drugs giants wins as their machines run, prance, swim and ride.
Sport at Olympic level has become a mixture of the chemical, the mechanical and celebrity. The television sport we watch — as distinct from the character-building sport we play (and fewer of us do, it seems) — is now lions versus Christians: keeping the masses doped up with spectacle.
At next Monday’s cabinet Helen Clark will match the leadership tenure of Labour’s greatest leader, Peter Fraser. Another milestone.
There is one striking difference. Fraser was Prime Minister for all but a year of his 10 years, 252 days as leader. Six years of Clark’s time were in opposition. She is still only third-longest serving Labour Prime Minister behind Fraser and David Lange, having passed Michael Joseph Savage’s four years, five months in April.
Next month Don Brash is due to launch the third of his king hits, on welfare. Two more are to follow, on education and the economy. By the end he will have a sort of “credit card” of five slogans National will take to the 2005 election.
This is in the tradition of modern election campaigning: embed in the minds of winnable voters a few simple big ideas which trigger an emotional or sentimental response. Labour did it in 1999.
The credit card is full. You can’t load any more debt on the house because its value has stopped rising. How now to keep the good times rolling?
That is the crunch economic question for the government. The country doesn’t get richer long-term on household debt or by redividing the cake in the workplace. Those are one-offs.
Dinner speech at Treasury productivity symposium, 28 July 2004
You have heard all day from economists and now you get a journalist. My economics stopped at the Philips curve, or shortly thereafter, so you should rhyme journalist with generalist. My beat is politics, which is a generalist’s haven. I suppose I am supposed to be some sort of connection between the arcane and the banal. And be brief about it.
Ted Lapkin, of the Australian/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, contrived last week to imply from the jailed Israeli spies affair that Helen Clark favours Al Qaeda over Israel. That says more about Lapkin than about Clark the warrior in Afghanistan.
In 2003 academic historian Joel Hayward was broken when the Jewish Council demanded Canterbury University review his 1991 master’s thesis which contained errors about the Holocaust. The university complied, even though an undergraduate paper is unlikely to start a pogrom and Hayward corrected his errors.
Speech by Colin James at Human Rights Commission symposium, Wanganui, 20 July 2004
“People say he’s got rights. But I don’t think he should have rights.” That quote from Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report today about paedophile Lloyd McIntosh provides a neat starting point for what I want to say in this symposium on human rights.
Politics is often a game of leads and lags. These take many forms and can decide elections.
Take the economy. There seems to be a lag of around a year to 18 months between a change in the direction of growth and a resultant change in electoral behaviour.
This is because the economic driver of votes is not the big numbers economists pore over but the small numbers: households’ balance sheets and cash flows. And even when the household numbers change there seems to be a lag before a new psychology cuts in and votes shift.
Here are two potential killers of this government (besides the Maori party which is dividing part of Labour’s core vote).
The first of these two other killers is “political correctness” — “PC”.
Of course, what is politically correct or, more accurately, politically incorrect, is in the eye of the beholder. The trick is to get your opponent seen as offside with majority values and too closely aligned to minority values — that is, correct about values the majority doesn’t care for.