When a blokey icon company like DB Breweries takes an interest, maybe “sustainable development” and “triple bottom line” are edging into the business mainstream.
DB had human resources general manager Mark Campbell at the Business Council for Sustainable Development’s conference last week. Campbell is in charge of developing a triple bottom line report over the next year.
The President of You Know Where flies round in Air Force 1. Our equivalent is a sort of Air Force 0.15: a crate held together with chewing gum and rubber bands. A great advertisement.
The Prime Minister sensibly flies commercial.
The National party feigns shock/horror. That is the party that cut defence spending 30 per cent in GDP terms during the 1990s. Had it not, the army might have had some radios and ground transport that worked and clapped out planes replaced.
We have, it seems, an oversupply of corner-cutting developers, architects, engineers and builders and inattentive building inspectors policing inadequate law.
Low-life has invaded the high-rise. Town houses and apartment blocks have leaked stains on our national honour.
My favourite story is actually of a non-leak: an apartment block’s fire sprinklers not connected to water, allegedly ticked off by the Fire Service. Whom can you trust?
New Zealand is too small and has to get more lined up with Australia, three Australian chief executives of New Zealand organisations told a conference on Saturday.
“If we (Australian and New Zealand) don’t get it together, it’s going to be a Texan boot or something like that that kicks us,” said TelstraClear CEO Rosemary Howard at the conference, organised by Victoria University’s Stout Centre and Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and part-sponsored by the Australian High Commission and Qantas.
Peter Dunne hasn’t shifted his generally dry-ish economic stance to accommodate his big centre-left partner in government. So United Future will likely oppose new workplace regulation. But neither will the party relitigate past changes.
And, Dunne said in an interview, so far the arrangement with Labour-Progressive Coalition ministers is working “punctiliously”. “Ministers are going out of their way to build relationships.”
Tariana Turia is a person to watch as Helen Clark gets down to managing her second term. Turia is the living embodiment of whanaungatanga, which comes fraught with complications for a society mostly still British in its ways and for a Labour party still hung up on solidarity.
Clark was raised in the old Labour party. The unions’ card votes decided crucial matters at the conference. In the caucus the leader’s majority ruled.
You don’t need to know how electricity works to turn on the lights in your house.
That’s how Social Crediters, now all but defunct, locked up in Jim Anderton’s Progressive Coalition, used decades ago to deflect scepticism about their wondrous A-plus-B theorem to solve the world’s financial ills.
Biosecurity Minister Jim Sutton isn’t panicking despite a gloomy assessment of biosecurity strategy and procedures by his Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in its post-election briefing.
A Biosecurity Council set up in 1997 produced a draft strategy earlier this year but it has been concluded that it was not sufficiently focused, Sutton said in an interview [on Monday].
Politics is a realists’ trade. The most artful practitioners keep principle in the back pocket, if anywhere.
Bill English says he is hewing a principled line on Iraq. This fits in with his declaration in his first speech this session that National will hold the government to account according to National’s principles.
Here’s a challenge: in the haystack of departmental post-election briefings to ministers find the needle, the references to personal responsibility.
I’ve ploughed through 14. The firm message is that a large number of your fellow-citizens are helpless. Things happen to them, disadvantages are imposed on them, barriers are erected to stop them being full members of society.