A fantasy of farm leaders for 30 years or more has been that the Chinese will all buy one wool sock, eat one rack of lamb and drink a pint of milk: instant export bonanza.
Of course, it doesn’t work like that. But China is an enormous market, enriching fast, with 100 million middle class consumers who want high-end protein which is this country’s specialty.
This is how MMP works: the government seeks out supporters for legislation and, if necessary, adjusts the legislation to secure support. The Foreshore and Seabed Bill is a prime example.
If the Labour party had a majority, as in the old days, it could ram through whatever it decided, subject to its desire to keep the Maori seats and its need to hold the non-Maori middle ground.
There is a skill governments attract: pitching a case just the right way to download some taxpayer money.
Governments don’t set out to foster the skill but it happens under all of them. Fill a bucket with money and schemers suss the criteria and build a case to fit — all by the book.
We’ve seen examples of that in the past couple of weeks: a hip-hip study, a personal degree, Maori and Pacific island lesbians’ and gays’ access to sport and culture — all in the name of social entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial, all right, but not very social.
Paper by Colin James to conference on The First Term of the Fourth Labour Government 30 April-1 May, Parliament Buildings
This conference was originally about leadership — David Lange’s. Sometime after I agreed to contribute, Lange disappeared from the programme and the topic was changed to the first term of the fourth Labour government. That is an arbitrary boundary, though, on reflection, I do think it is the first term, from 1984 to 1987, that really counts and so, in a sense, this period is a relevant one for a conference.
Just as there are leads and lags in the economy, so there are in politics. They can decide elections.
Economic forecasters pore over leading indicators that might harbour prophecies of turning points. One is business confidence. There is a useful correlation between rises and falls in confidence and subsequent rises and falls in output.
A couple of weeks ago Bruce Hawker dropped in for a chat with the Prime Minister’s advisers.
Hawker is an Australian political and public affairs consultant. He devised a strategy for the Bob Carr government in New South Wales to counter the inroads One Nation was making on race grounds into the Labour vote in the suburbs: tell those voters Labour was aware they had concerns, wanted to hear them and would address them. Carr got the suburban “wedge” back.
This last weekend was an anniversary of an event of high drama. Another looms, of a minor, but still important, event. Both have overtones not expected at the time.
The first was of the invasion of Iraq by United States President George Bush�s and British Prime Minister Tony Blair�s “coalition of the willing”. The coalition had overwhelming firepower so of course it won.
Let’s dispose of a red herring. A Maori party would not have won the foreshore/seabed battle for iwi and hapu.
Why not? It would have much more loudly represented tribal Maori views than Labour’s Maori MPs. Wouldn’t that have been a good thing?
Yes, as a vent. But a Labour-led government freed of the need to balance Maori interests against majority interests and deprived of the Maori vote would probably have bulldozed through much less friendly legislation.
They seek it here. They seek it there. They seek it everywhere. The constitution, that is. And just when they think they have got it in their sights, they find they are tripping over the Treaty of Waitangi.
The constitution has the hallmarks of a mythical spirit. It lurks in corners of libraries and the recesses of lawyers’ minds, for the most part out of sight as a silent behavioural guide but, when it emerges, a signal of crisis.
At the heart of the wrangle between Labour and National over the Treaty of Waitangi are “group rights”.
National is uncomfortable with group rights. It is the party of individualism. Labour embraces group rights. It was born of a belief that for workers to force concessions from bosses they had to act as a unitary body, with no scope for individuals to act differently — as the song says, “solidarity forever”.