A speech last Wednesday by Michael Woodhouse had a poignant relevance to a landmark conference at Otago University this weekend and New Zealand’s leading United Nations role in July.
Woodhouse, who is Minister of Immigration, was marking world refugee day. He waxed lyrical that New Zealand, as a “good international citizen”, “takes our responsibilities to provide protection to refugees extremely seriously”. His evidence: we are taking “up to” 100 Syrian refugees.
The Reserve Bank last week joined the global pack. If the world’s big central banks are lax, what choice does Graeme Wheeler have in this tiny backwater? And Bill English has shown no interest in lightening his load.
Back in 1990 Ruth Richardson used to complain Labour ministers’ fiscal laxity was making it harder for the Reserve Bank to hold down prices.
Comments to the Wairarapa branch of the Institute of International Affairs, 9 June 2015
The world is in a disorderly phase. This is driven in part by geopolitical and geo-economic events, including the mass movement of people, and in part by disruptive technological change which is fragmenting and dispersing power, eroding the sovereignty of individual nation-states and beginning to turn us from citizens of nations into global citizens. This multi-generational transition is likely over time to require a range of informal and semi-formal supranational governance arrangements. A role for New Zealand, as a disinterested global country-citizen, could be to suggest prototypes of such arrangements, starting in the South Pacific.
Sport is business. Business is money. Big sport is big money. World soccer bosses have been playing the game — just as “athletes” take drugs and cricketers help bettors.
The payoff for the public is big circuses.
And not many die putting on those shows, which wasn’t so 800 years ago when tournaments were how young men laid claim to be celebrated. One recent learned description: “hundreds of heavily armed and armoured men lunged at each other on horseback”, “excited horses ridden by excited people” and “naked aggression”.
Kevin Hague typecast himself out of a future-maker role for the Greens when he called James Shaw a “metrosexual”, a word from a past era. Shaw said he was “not even sure what that means”.
Shaw is 42. He is younger-X, the next power generation. He and Labour No 3 Grant Robertson (43), his Wellington Central opponent, are comfortably friendly.
Bill English has a degree in English, which should have inculcated respect for correct word use — if he hadn’t become a politician, a breed which bends language for good and ill.
So in claiming not to break an election promise not to raise taxes, he asserted his new airport levy is not a tax. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines a levy as “a tax, esp. one raised for a particular purpose”. It is a hypothecated tax, as the petrol tax is.
There are three political dimensions to the budget’s star “children in hardship” item.
One is John Key’s ownership. That fits his protestations of concern about disadvantaged children — though action has been slow coming. He made his pile in finance. This shows a human side.
Who said: “The public service is a bit too responsive to politicians”? A lofty academic? A public servant bemoaning servile bosses?
It was Bill English last week.
Set aside that usually ministers complain public servants are not responsive — servile — enough and that English acknowledges some ministerial colleagues are of that ilk.
[These comments are set in a 2013-43 timeframe but necessarily with a stronger focus on the 2013-23 period. The comments were to accompany Professor Natalie Jackson’s analysis and projection of demographic change* and the focus on that change, not other change, except incidentally.]
The demographic age and ethnic imbalances projected for the next 30 years are likely to influence local and national politics by adding region-to-region socioeconomic disparities to the national socioeconomic disparities which have developed over the past 30 years. Disparities reduce social cohesion which is the bedrock of political stability.
Where do the flag, water policy and climate change action meet? Where do they not meet? And what have they got to do with the budget?
Start with the flag. It is a symbol. It says we are South Britain, not Aotearoa/New Zealand.
The Union Jack symbolises popular enthusiasm for British-based royals William, Kate, George and Charlotte. Leading royal enthusiast John Key wants to junk the jack.