Don Brash could do with a short course in politics — national politics.
Who was first item on TV1 news on Saturday evening and on yesterday’s front pages? Not Hu, who should have been. Instead, Dr Who.
Whether Brash or Bill English is National party leader today is trivial in the grand scheme. Getting on well with an immense and fast-enriching country is vital to the nation.
Tomorrow the apocalypse. The moratorium comes off applications to release genetically modified organisms.
If the Greens are to be believed, once the first GMO is approved, even conditionally, Pandora’s box is open and there is no putting the lid back on. We are doomed, economically, corporeally and spiritually.
Who said this last week? “The Jews rule the world by proxy. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong.”
A bigot. A loudmouth. And, to boot, a senior Asian leader: Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, the world’s 17th biggest trading nation.
A little-noticed item in the Land Transport Management Bill is the insertion of “demand management”. The aim is to constrain road traffic.
This additional Green victory was put in by Parliament’s transport and industrial relations committee, which reported the bill back to the House on Monday.
Colin James to the Wairarapa Institute of International Affairs, 15 October 2003
I am here because Ian Grant, who has done me too many kindnesses over the years to refuse him outright, felt it was time you had some light relief.
I do brush up against the world in my columns from time to time because occasionally the world intrudes on politics just as does crime, monetary policy, biotechnology, the Treaty of Waitangi and cooking. But be clear about my credentials: a journalist is a baggage carrier and to carry baggages one needs know only their dimensions and weight, not the contents. The journalist is expert at not being an expert; a journalist’s expertise is in inexpertise. The journalist is a hack: hence the real title of the assemblage of anecdotes and random observations I am about to offer is “A hack at foreign affairs”.
Australian students used to picket the One Nation party. Its anti-immigrant, anti-aborigine rhetoric was anathema to left-liberal idealism. But last week the students’ leader effusively praised One Nation’s sole surviving senator, Len Harris.
Harris had pledged the deciding vote against the government’s differential university fees, adding yet another defeated bill to a lengthening list which John Howard will be able to advance only by a joint sitting of both houses of Parliament after the next election.
As political management issues stack up, they don’t come much more challenging than genetic modification (GM). This is the crunch month because the moratorium on applications for release ends on October 27.
The government says it has to keep the GM door open because if this country has any comparative advantage in research it is in the biosciences and GM is an integral part.
Colin James on CER for Management for October 2003
No 2 has to try harder. That sums up CER on its 20th birthday. No 1 has better things to do — though now maybe, just maybe, it might cast a glance or two No 2’s way.
The first 10 years was vintage stuff. New Zealand went from dipping a quivering toe in the water of competition with Big Brother manufacturers to jumping in the deep end — and found it could swim. Trade boomed both ways. CER became the world’s star free trade agreement.
Article 1: Can Japan forge a tripolar Asia?
Colin James for the New Zealand Herald for 1 October 2003
First of three on Japan, with a fourth for the Business Herald
Down here at the end of the world we know what it is like to be an outlier nation. We see Japan as part of Asia. But Japan acts like an outlier too.
A problem with genetic modification (GM) is that it invites us to take risks and the twentieth century gnawed away our tolerance for risk gone bad.
It doesn’t help that insurance companies insure only fully calculable risk fully covered by premiums. So they have refused GM cover.
One big GM risk involves this complex calculation: will losing “GM-free” status lose food export markets? A deeper risk is the one science constantly courts as it opens up the unknown: what might it unleash?