Don’t look now but there are changes in schooling and in the way the two big parties think about it. The twentieth-century education factory system won’t do in this century.
Last century’s school factories mass-processed children into intermediate goods for final processing by employers or for further processing by the tertiary factories.
Don Brash has written a memoir. It should be quite a read, given his trajectory, from Presbyterian left believer who found classical-liberal economic truth doing his doctorate in Australia, to the World Bank, merchant banker, failed National candidate and kiwifruit king, to Reserve Bank governor, National leader and an ACT takeover.
The Greens met in a “campaign conference” over the weekend. Delegates will now vote on a candidate list ranking. The big question for the campaign and the list: are the Greens a party of the future?
In 1972 the Greens’ predecessor party, Values, shook the political and policy tree when it burst into an election Labour thought it had locked up. Labour was in transition from the class-struggle politicians to 40s-50s middle-class modernisers. Values encapsulated next-generation baby-boomers’ rising bother about ecosystems and resources “commons”.
New Zealand wages are around 30 per cent below Australian wages. That makes our goods competitive in Australia — too competitive for some Australians. Their solution: a non-tariff trade barrier.
Horticulture farmers here have for a year or so been muttering sotto voce that Australian supermarkets were switching sourcing for their own-brand food from New Zealand to Australian producers. It is justified on a “buy Australia” campaign — and props up uncompetitive Australian suppliers. Add that to the near-prohibitive biosecurity procedures on New Zealand apples. Underarm bowlers are in action.
Thursday is Waitangi Day, national day, a day, John Key thinks, for a new flag. More to the point, it could mark our role as a leading advanced small country.
Set aside the aromatic irony in our most royalist Prime Minister since 1957 wanting the Queen’s home-country flag off our flag. Symbols reflect how we think about ourselves. And “ourselves” is all of us, so a new design would need to be the product of an exhaustive debate not an elite brainstorm and a quickie referendum.
John Key is an elusive Prime Minister. He goes in and out of focus, never quite in-charge but no amateurs-night drop-in either. This, his sixth year in office and second incumbency election year, is the time to define his prime ministership if he is going to.
A third term is usually too late. Sir Keith Holyoake’s third-term “young Turks” re-energised his cabinet but he flatlined. Sir Robert Muldoon defined himself well before he got to the top. Jim Bolger secured his legacy — entrenching the bicultural path — in his second term.
Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them, the old saying goes. Is it true? Is it true in 2014?
There isn’t yet enough wrong for the government to lose. Though National has support-partner issues, it has strong poll ratings, jobs and wages are rising, consumer and business confidence is high and big majorities tell pollsters the country is on the right track.
In GDP terms, 2014 looks the best in seven years for this country and high among rich-countries. Half of that is Christchurch, which is assured (though temporary). Auckland house-building is set to rise.
Those factors mean that, short of a big shock, what happens offshore is less critical to the GDP number than usual. Nevertheless, a third of the economy is exports of goods and services, so the world is still significant. Out there the outlook is mixed.
This is election year so the policy argument will focus mainly on what will win. But in January there is space and time to think about some deep currents and their big policy challenges.
Start with the big changes in work.
In the 1990s-2000s that meant mainly the changing location of work.
This went two ways. In one direction migrants went to rich countries in huge numbers. Governments which used to see external threats and opportunities mainly through the lenses of war and trade now see a threat to their societies’ stability as they go multicultural.
Tomorrow is 2014, centenary year of the start of a devastating war that divided two eras. The lesson: history-bending events come seemingly out of the blue. The question for us now: do we have the capacity to ride out the next such event?
In July 1914 a Serbian terrorist (as we would call him now) shot dead an Austrian imperial archduke in backwater Sarajevo: a local event that went global through a rapid chain reaction to a pan-European “industrial” war of 51 months that did huge economic damage, killed 10 million soldiers and four empires and badly wounded a fifth, the British.