Let’s say you’re 10 and gifted and live in Glen Innes or Wainuiomata. Your gift is not athletic or you would already be getting special encouragement. You are gifted in what your head does.
You do convoluted puzzles fast. You connect ideas that bamboozle adults. You are more than bright. You are superbright, one of a tiny sliver of the population.
The New Year resolutions have gone stale and there’s a risk reality-life will set in before we’re even back at work. So let’s look on the bright side and imagine some good things for 2004.
Let’s first wish American consumers a happy year. On them we depend.
They are running a deficit in their household accounts and piling debt on debt. So are the local, state and federal governments. So is the United States as a whole in its balance of payments current account.
Last June the Appeal Court kicked sand in beach-lovers’ faces. This is the year Helen Clark and Michael Cullen have to make the peace down on the foreshore.
If they fail, expect a lot of splashing around as protagonists for and antagonists against Maori rights make their points. But if Clark and Cullen do solve the foreshore/seabed puzzle, that might prove to be a pivot around which the Treaty of Waitangi will turn.
Tomorrow at midnight we lose an important link with Britain and the colonial past. Any court hearing unfinished then cannot be appealed to the judicial committee of the Privy Council.
It is a landmark event to end the year, historically, constitutionally and symbolically. It is far more important than ministers conceded. They alleged it was just a change in the court structure and denied us, the people, a say by way of referendum.
It’s Christmas: let’s celebrate the good in life. For example, the fall of Saddam Hussein. One tyrant down, a gift to the world.
It’s a pity we can’t add: peace on earth. There is so much more for George Bush and Tony Blair to do, so many more tyrants.
There is even a ready-made doctrine at hand, developed in 2001 by an international commission: that a state’s first duty is to protect its citizens and when a state flouts that duty it devolves upon other states.
Colin James on Hong Kong for the Perspectives pages for 22 and 23 December 2003
A question of democracy
First article
In Hong Kong there are two powerful scents. One is the heady incense of freedom. The other is the scorching smell of a dragon’s breath.
Economic freedom has been Hong Kong’s trademark for many decades, as bargain-hunting New Zealanders of the past know. A few New Zealanders also know its commercial vigour first-hand.
This political year is ending with the same topic uppermost as last year: the Treaty. Then taniwha were spooking the pakeha. This year has been Tangaroa’s turn.
In an eventful year — Iraq, GM, TranzRail, electricity shortages, Ahmed Zaoui, to name a few events — the Appeal Court’s foreshore/seabed decision in June was a sensation. In essence conservative in its narrow frame and venerable foreign precedents, it was also revolutionary for overturning existing law and raising spectres of tribes controlling beach and foreshore access.
The big deal in next year’s Budget — and several Budgets after that — is Steve Maharey’s grand plan. It will be popular with Labour activists.
There are two dimensions to this plan. One is palliative: more money for low-to-middle-income families. The other is structural: tidying up the benefit and tax credit systems.
Hands up if you still think this country should have joined the American invasion of Iraq in March and the reasons the invaders gave are still convincing.
One basis for still arguing New Zealand should have been there is kith and kin: we should always join our tribe in war and the Americans, British and Australians are our tribe. Actually, “we” now include very large numbers from other tribes, which pro-invasion ACT and National overlook.
There is a point in every government’s life when it gets too big for its boots. That is a prelude for a trip-up.
The point is easy to spot in hindsight, though not often obvious at the time. Governments themselves seldom pick it, to their cost.
One early symptom is a certain restlessness when a supporter or a constituent or a lobby group tries to make a point that runs counter to government policy.