Humanity’s dark side has been on show this year: beheadings, aeroplanes downed, Americans torturing muslims, the Taleban executing children. Where is the good?
John Key’s entry into his party’s campaign launch on August 24 was amidst a phalanx of government and hired security guards.
Today the Treasury will likely publish fiscal figures less rosy than those Bill English managed into a “surplus” at budget time. Last week John Key took us another step from free nation to fearful huddle.
English is no macho-politician. In the election campaign he did not talk up tax cuts. As dairy prices have gone on sliding since election day, defying Key’s breezy forecasts, English has acknowledged the surplus challenge.
When a tumbledown bach with a modest view on a modest section is “valued” at $640,000, up 36 per cent from 2011, that suggests an economy seriously out of kilter.
Land and house “values” are wildly out of whack whether judged by history, incomes or other asset prices. Result: misery, frustration and economic loss.
Colin James to the Victoria University post-election conference, 3 December 2014
The 2014 election came 30 years after the 1984 election which triggered a tectonic shift in policy, ideology and our understanding of ourselves. There was no tectonic wrench in 2014, though the Labour party could be forgiven for thinking the ground was liquefying under its ageing edifice. But pressure had been building up in the political, ideology and social plates and seismic analysis is appropriate in addition to the usual microscopic and telescopic inquiry.
Can Grant Robertson count? Will Jacinda Ardern stick it out? What does an Andrew Little smile look like? Where does a theology degree fit in politics? Does any of this matter?
Plenty think Labour is mere amusement or an historical relic awaiting embalming.
They might have cause to think again.
One cause is Little.
Here’s a foreign policy issue the government wishes would go away: climate change. Most other governments wish it would go away, too.
They will nonetheless send emissaries to Lima in Peru for 12 days of talks from next Monday. Lima is a waystation on the meandering United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change pathway towards a deal in Paris in late 2015 to limit world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions after 2020.
The imperial President of China flies in tomorrow. The Labour party anoints its new leader today. What links the two?
Xi Jinping is China’s most powerful leader since at least Deng Xiaoping and maybe since Mao Zedong. He has centralised power in Beijing and in himself.
Rowan Callick, former Beijing correspondent for The Australian and author of “Party Time”, a book on China’s Communist party, says Xi is reasserting the party’s control over the government and the military and tightening discipline within the party, in part by arrests for corruption. (Don’t ask about Xi’s extended family’s vast wealth.)
Early this year Australia’s Treasurer, Joe Hockey, introduced Bill English to G20 finance ministers as the man they should talk to learn how to do public service reform.
Hockey could have added other English-driven changes, such as fiscal consolidation, pursuit of “outcomes” and not just contracted “outputs”, professional accounting of the Crown’s net financial and physical assets (a part of last week’s social housing furore, about which more here soon), school “standards”, beginnings of a crime system switch to rehabilitation and importation into social security reform of the “investment approach”, now intended for wider application (as indicated here last month).
Topping the list of officials’ post-election briefings to incoming ministers (BIMs), is, for the first time, a BIG — a briefing to the whole incoming government by all chief executives (CEOs). But is it actually to the whole government? The BIG guys might have missed something.
A usually sceptical senior minister is impressed with the BIG’s tenor. A senior public servant warns not to get excited: that it was done is more important than what it says.
John Key is both increasing and decreasing security. Which security matters more?
The security Key is increasing — or aiming to — is about beheadings and bombings and a clash of civilisations and religions. The security Key is decreasing is about work.
In part Key’s pushes reflect ideology. In part they reflect a rapidly changing world from which our tiny society can’t hide.