The man who gave us MMP now wants a change which would have meant New Zealand First got only one seat in the 1999 election instead of the five it has.
Sir John Wallace, chair of the 1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System then first chair of the Electoral Commission made his comments in a paper prepared for a conference at Victoria University Law School at the weekend to mark the retirement of Sir Ivor Richardson as President of the Appeal Court.
An unspoken long-term dimension of National party leader Bill English’s economic and tax policy to be released next week will be individual accounts as a means of accessing some social services.
Mr English will announce a commitment to income tax cuts in the first term of a National government: from a top marginal personal rate of 39c to 33c and from 33c to 30c for corporate rates.
“He’s doing not a bad job,” said a merchant banker a couple of weeks back about Jim Anderton. Therein lies both his triumph and his troubles.
Mr Anderton, the onetime outcast, has glowed in government. Within months of the formation of the coalition senior Labour ministers were heaping praise on him.
“Very, very, very close friends,” said Colin Powell. You can’t manage, wheedle, spin or buy the PR for the home front Helen Clark won in Washington.
This person, remember, is a principal architect of the anti-nuclear policy which precipitated the breach with the United States. She it was who stiffened then acting Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer against accepting a visit from the inoffensive Buchanan in early 1985.
Sometime this month Pete Hodgson will flesh out his Kyoto protocol strategy with some policy — not least, on who will get emissions credits and how they will be traded. That will stir another round of futile business resistance to him ratifying Kyoto.
Hodgson will argue, once again, that of all developed countries New Zealand, dependent on climate-sensitive exports, has most to lose from unabated climate change. Industry will argue that investment will dry up and some companies scarper if they have to pay for Kyoto and competitors in other non-Kyoto countries do not.
An army marches on its stomach, goes the old saying. Nowadays civilians supply the victuals.
Is this the way it is supposed to be under a government that clings to the notion that only the state can run hospitals and schools? How come a British-based company can make a profit out of peacekeeping?
Serco specialises in outsourcing task management, engineering systems and infrastructure investment. In February 1998, in a joint venture with an Australian engineering firm, William Adams, it took over the army’s logistics — from “factory to foxhole”.
Two remarkable figures will be casualties if the Alliance’s disintegrates: Matt McCarten and Laila Harr�.
McCarten is a man of disarming charm, whose easy candour masks a native shrewdness as an organiser that enemies call cunning or deviousness. A television natural despite his slight stutter, he has the requisite charisma to lead a small party.
During the intense days after September 11 a top Labour minister observed: “The United States is not always right.” Will Helen Clark say that in the Oval Office next Tuesday?
“Not always right” is light years away from the “not often right” presumption by many of top Labour people’s ilk in the shadow of Vietnam in the early 1970s when the United States had a fondness for Latin American and Asian dictators. By contrast with that, Clark swiftly joined George Bush’s Afghanistan jihad.
There is a paradox at the heart of the innovation strategy. How can the government, by nature a risk-averse institution, encourage more risk-taking?
Vital to innovation is research. And vital to ground-breaking research is that researchers feel and are free to take risks, big risks.
This was one of the most salient points to emerge at a day-long forum on Thursday [14 March] on the potential for and of interaction between the arts and science organised by the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology.
On the wings of our electoral system are two parties which claim the future. But they could hardly be more different futures and they could hardly promote them more differently.
The Greens want ecological harmony, humans linked to nature in economic as well as spiritual life. ACT instals the individual at the centre of the universe and insists true harmony comes from individuals following their best instincts.