They came, they conquered with words and they went — back home to countries that innovate, that organise, that are upwardly mobile.
Behind they left some energised and better networked people and even a good intention or two and some others a bit more aware of the hard choices ahead if we are to “catch the knowledge wave” to the top league.
Colin James’s summing up at the Knowledge Wave conference, 3 August 2001
It falls to me to offer a summing-up. I shall do that as an intrigued bystander — and a fairly detached one.
I am a bystander because I am a journalist. A journalist’s duty is to be sceptical. That, as we learnt last night, is not well understood by scientists, though it should be.
Risk and politics are usually oil and water. But some occasions call for some oil on the water. This, for the Labour party, is one of those times.
The Labour party, its leadership having been brought up to admire the welfare state achievements of Scandinavia, has set itself the objective of bringing our society up to that standard.
It is a perfectly valid choice for the people of this country to make to settle for gentle economic decline relative to other countries. It is the one the people have made for 35 years and it has loads of international precedent, since Greece pioneered it two millennia ago.
But it is not one that appeals to the political, research and business elites. So start paddling for the Knowledge Wave.
Some things don’t change. When last the National party conference met in the Auckland Town Hall in 1980, my low opinion of the morning tea biscuits stirred divisional chair Pat Baker’s wife Susan to bake me a batch of excellent cheese scones.
This Sunday morning just past, in the same unhallowed precincts, Pat delivered me a little box of Susan’s tasty fresh-baked cheese puffs to mark National’s return.
Look through the smoke of the presidential battle at this coming weekend’s National party conference and whom do you see? Simon Power.
Take note of that name. It has a tailor-made feel to it.
Jenny Shipley has plucked Power from the very back benches to make the conference’s closing speech on “A National future”.
So Mark Prebble, head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, had to move out of range of Christine Rankin’s fleshly protuberances. Senior public servants once were made of sterner stuff.
Prebble, a most able bureaucrat, thought he had offered Rankin helpful advice. But it turns out he was being taken down in evidence, as were others, all now national laughing-stocks.
Book review for NZ Books Issue 49
Waltzing with Matilda; should New Zealand join Australia? By Bob Catley, Dark Horse Publishing, Auckland, 2001, $29.95, ISBN 0-9582146-1-1
A chilling graph presented to Auckland business leaders on 14 May undermines Bob Catley’s thesis. Auckland, the graph showed, lost 3.4% in GDP per capita in $US terms between 1990 and 2000. A good reason, you might think, as Catley does, to throw in our lot with Australia. Except that the graph shows Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide all also falling, by amounts from 1.3% to 2.0%.
A big part of success in government is to be on the right side of history. It’s not easy.
First, history comes in slices and in grades. You can be on the right side of history for a couple of years, only to find you have been in a little eddy current by the bank going in the other direction from the main current.
Speech to the National Party Epsom electorate’s “newsmakers” breakfast, 29 June 2001
My first point is that I am not a newsmaker, as the title of these breakfasts suggests. I am a news watcher.
My interest is not in what or who is right or wrong but in what will stay the distance or fall by the wayside. Those who have political or economic agendas often think I am for or against them or their position — when actually I am testing them or their policies against the public’s judgment. I am, in the famous words of Sir Walter Nash, “neither for nor against”. I am a news watcher, as dispassionate as I can be, not a newsmaker, passionately arguing a case or pushing an interest. What I think or feel, even what I conclude after analysis is the “right” policy course or person for the job, is irrelevant to readers. What I can relevantly do is clarify for readers what the actors in the deadly political game think or feel.