“I’m only a little bit pregnant,” Michael Cullen protested (in effect) last Thursday. It’s an age-old cry and we can all titter about it. But it is not a laughing matter.
I refer to his breach of his self-imposed limit on new spending in the three fiscal years to 2002-03 from $5.9 billion to $6.17 billion.
Speech to National party northern region conference, 5 May 2001
My role, as I understand it, is to talk about the big social and political picture, where we are and where we as a country and society might go. What I am about to say, therefore, could be said to a Labour conference without a word changed.
What do Sir John Marshall, Sir Robert Muldoon and David Lange have in common as Prime Ministers? Answer: their administrations neglected their core vote.
Sir John was Prime Minister for 10 months at the end of the 1960-72 National government. A quintessential believer in the maxim, “politics is the art of the possible” (which then meant “what the centre will buy”), Sir John used to tell Nationalists agitating for policies more closely attuned to the party’s stated right-of-centre principles that voters wanting such policies had nowhere else to go but National.
The government has spelt out two big aims. One is to get back into the top half of the OECD income league. The other is to be a “first-world” nation in other respects. The second aim threatens to trip up the first — which in turn would stymie the second.
It’s all to do with triple-bottom-line accounting. This fashionable notion — not just among leftish liberals and greens but also among some conservatives and even some in business — assesses success not just by the financial balance sheet but by social harmony and the health of the physical environment.
It’s Anzac Day, a day to reflect on the nation-shaping event we shared with Australia at Gallipoli, We might also reflect on the disappearing “NZ” in Anzac.
This is centenary year of Australia’s federation of its six colonies, now states. An illuminating description of that century has been running on the ABC television, written by Paul Kelly, doyen of Australian political commentators.
Christine Rankin was the small beer. The pre-Easter manoeuvre that wrote her out of the government’s script marks two very big policy changes.
One is the reversal of a central principle of the 1988 state sector reforms.
The second is the flagging of a “social equivalent of the Treasury”, testing all policy against social criteria the way the Treasury does against fiscal and economic criteria.
It takes a strong Prime Minister to make a strong coalition government. It takes a constructive Deputy Prime Minister to glue it.
Only with brave imagination could one two years ago foresee Jim Anderton in this role. But in that role he is — in three ways.
First is his visible subordination to Helen Clark. This is Labour’s government and predominantly Labour’s rhetoric.
Helen Clark flies off today into a crisis. She is heading for China which has been warring with words with the United States. But that is not the crisis.
The crisis is in Japan, where she goes first, to drum up trade. Japan is rich but adrift, its banks tottering dangerously under bad loans. If they cannot be rescued, that might trigger a very nasty chain of events, compounding the slide in American share and managed funds prices and turning American consumers’ nervousness into fear, so driving the whole world into recession.
Launch of the Auckland Regional Council’s strategic plan, 4 April 2001
I am an inmate of Wellington who thinks Auckland is better. Auckland is warmer. Its skies are more open. It has Waiheke Island just offshore and I have a shack there and the wine is outstanding. Its harbour is surely one of the finest water playgrounds in the world.
A few years ago the Business Roundtable toured through the country a no-nonsense nun, Connie Driscoll, who rescues Chicago women in strife and turns their lives around.
Sister Driscoll’s enterprise demonstrates a simple truth of which the roundtable has reminded us persistently and valuably: that people with imagination and passion, operating independently, can move mountains that defy all the state’s earthmoving machinery. This applies in the economy, health care, education – and social welfare.