God is a socialist, surely. Just as voters braced for cold showers and blackouts, the rains came and filled the lakes. For good measure, June was warm (well, not too cold).
This is the second year it has rained on cue. In April last year one generator gravely warned me of price spikes in the campaign if Helen Clark pulled an early election.
National goes to its conference this month a troubled party but with glimmers of hope flickering.
Will it be a serious contender in the battle for power in 2005, as it was not in 2002? If so, is it rebuilding in a way that might win the war for dominance through the next 20 to 25 years?
This need was well grasped by Bill English as far back as 1997. As a sub-40-year-old who came into Parliament only in 1990, he was looking for a post-Rogernomics language of slightly right-of-centre conservatism.
No weapons of mass destruction found and time is getting on. Not a good look for George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard who gave WMD as their top reason for invading Iraq.
WMD may yet be found. But the United States has moved the target: the evidence will come from “the scientists not the sand dunes”, academic and former United States presidential adviser Richard Allen, still influential in Washington, told the Otago University foreign policy school on Sunday. The issue is capability to produce, not actual existence.
This is a taxing government. Not a wildly taxing government but one which puts your taxes up nonetheless.
This is both overt and covert.
The overt tax increases have been in excise taxes, on alcohol, tobacco and petrol — and, of course, the extra 6c income tax in 2000 on “the rich”, the over-$60,000s.
Bill English was at it again on Thursday on the Treaty of Waitangi: “one standard of citizenship for a nation of mongrels” might be a loose translation.
“We must,” he told a party fund-raising dinner in deeply conservative Matamata, “break out of the paralysing ideology of the Treaty and the arrogant attitudes that go with it.
The interviewer, a man of obvious erudition, succinctly leads a world-class military historian and a large audience in the Sydney Town Hall through an insightful tour of the historian’s recent work.
A former journalist, he uses the best of the interviewer’s tools: he elicits and does not instruct; he is unobtrusive but not obsequious, empathetic but not sycophantic. He adds context from his own extensive knowledge.
Capitalism, the left used to say, “privatises its profits and socialises its losses”. So Air New Zealand goes bust and workers’ taxes rescue it. TranzRail gets into difficulty and there the workers are again.
The other side of that coin is crass government. In the late 1980s Sir Roger Douglas kept finding hidden losses from Sir Robert Muldoon’s early 1980s “think big” heavy industrialisation programme. The massive addition to government debt — upwards of $8 billion — was a part-driver of the sale of state enterprises that followed.
It is an assertion of nationhood or a quixotic discard of top brains. Or, if you are conspiracy junkie, scare yourself with a socialist plot. The Supreme Court Bill has got all this and more.
At least equally important, it is a defining moment as to where sovereignty lies, in the people or in Parliament.
What is the point of tertiary education? Point one: to develop individuals to their greatest potential. Point two: to fuel the “knowledge society” so we all get richer. So the government says.
To fulfil the first the government would just stump up whatever money it is prepared to commit and leave students to do what they want. To fulfil the second the government, as a funder, needs to take an active interest in what is taught and to whom — and channel its money accordingly.
Every now and then someone calls for a “bipartisan” foreign policy, as there allegedly was in some past golden age. Why do such calls fall on deaf political ears?
First, many of the calls were by academics or other commentators who talk about foreign policy but don’t do it. Those who do foreign policy can safely ignore such people in a country which does not much value expert and academic analysis.