Author: Colin James

Shane Jones’s going was in character: hubris, self-belief and oratory. All politicians need those HSO characteristics but real top-notchers have a leavening of counterbalancing HSOs: humility, self-deprecation (John Key is good at that) and output.

Jones could never have been leader. His machismo didn’t fit in a party still quaintly majority-fixated on identity politics. He had too much of the first HSOs and too little of the second HSOs. read more

There will be much talk on Friday of “national identity”. Just one year short of the original baptism of the Anzacs, jingoism will be in fashion. Some will say, and many will think, it is our real national day.

The basis for this sentiment is some history and some myth: “heroism” and a degree of distancing from Britain — or at least from the British military leaders and politicians under whose edicts localities, big and small, throughout the empire’s “last, loneliest, loveliest” outpost lost men in sacrifice to the gods of war. read more

Australia signed a trade deal with Japan last week. Does that help or hinder New Zealand’s trade ambitions and prospects?

There are four parts to New Zealand’s trade strategy, broadly followed since Trade Minister Tim Groser enunciated them when an official.

The base is domestic policies that promote international competitiveness abroad and at home and prod businesses to follow through. read more

No lolly scramble in May’s Budget. That was John Key’s message last week and will be Bill English’s next week. Only some wholesome nuts to nourish GDP growth and some pacifiers for the voracious sickness industry. Key’s nut last week was more trade support.

Contrast Helen Clark’s interest-free student loans in 2005, which turned enough middle class students and parents to give her a third term. read more

An aspiring Dotcom party member gushed in an email on Thursday: “A party that’s ALL about the future, not the past.” But is it?

Compare the Values party formed a few months before the 1972 election.

Values focused on the physical environment two years after a widely supported petition frightened a National government into retreating from building a high dam at Manapouri. Values appealed particularly to a rising generation which bothered more about biodiversity and conservation than its parents did. read more

David Cunliffe has just under six months to build the sort of credibility for a Labour-Greens coalition that pulls some voters across from National’s side and some non-voters in from the cold.

In his six months as leader Cunliffe, first, got only a short-lived bump in opinion polls and then in February-early March took Labour back to its David Shearer low. His biggest publicity recently has been for leadership stumbles. read more

Judith Collins wasn’t at the National party’s Bluegreens conference on Saturday. So she was saved from being upstaged by stalwart Bluegreen MP Nicky Wagner’s line: “Everything that kills stuff is good.”

Wagner hurriedly added: “…humanely”. And she was talking about killing possums, stoats and rats, which, the conference was told, kill 15 million birds a year, putting New Zealand in the top class for endangering indigenous bird species close to, or to, extinction. read more

An old English music hall singalong trips cheerily: “I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air. They fly so high, nearly reach the sky.” Next, reality: “Then like my dreams, they fade and die.” Central bankers know about that now.

In January eight years ago Ben Bernanke took the chair of the Federal Reserve, the United States’ central bank, to succeed Alan Greenspan, who had (in)famously kept the “punch bowl” full during the riotous 2000s asset-bubble party. read more