Jobs. That, in a word, is what the government is about this year. Against that Labour will pose “active government”.
Before the 2011 election senior ministers decided 2012 had to generate “results” to take to the 2014 election.
After a first term, in which a government usually sets up its agenda, atmospherics substitute in the election for demonstrable results. John Key provided the atmospherics in 2011.
Parliament kicks off today for a year that is pivotal for all parties there except (maybe) one-MP parties and New Zealand First.
The Maori party has to pivot from its high-profile founding leadership to, or towards, one which will struggle to build profile. Tariana Turia said last month she is going at the 2014 election and Pita Sharples should, too, but he wants to stay.
Manufacturing is in “crisis”. Long live manufacturing.
The “crisis” is in job destruction. But manufacturing is evolving fast, not just in location around the globe but in how it is done and what it includes. Some call this a new industrial revolution.
The policy issue for the government — and for the Labour party which trumpets the “crisis” — is what manufacturing can most effectively be done here and how to sell into rapidly changing global markets.
Humans operate on the “more” principle: enough is not enough. Happily, we have been able to make and deliver more of nearly everything for more and more people. How we can go on doing that is a core policy issue for the next decade or two.
We have delivered more by radically re-engineering our physical environment and ecosystems over the past two centuries or so: land, landscape and buildings, plants and animals, waterways, supply of raw materials, capacity to travel and connect quickly. This blink of geological time in which science and ingenuity have vanquished the constraints of subsistence and distance has become known as the anthropocene.
We are more than five years on from the global financial crash. Economists and politicians talk still of “recovery”, implying a return to a former state. Actually the global economy has been reshaping, along with global society and politics. We are not going back.
The short focus politicians, bank economists and central bankers favour is on the United States fiscal tangle and Eurozone debt. “Expert” forecasts for 2013 swing from expecting things to come right to apocalypse.
Here’s a New Year resolution for 2013: look on the bright side every now and then (though as a realist, not Pollyanna). There is a bit to see there.
The New Zealand habit is to look on the gloomy side and to see something small, smug and stifling. Half a million ex-New Zealanders have shaken that habit for life in Australia.
Embedded in some of the worst human actions is fine human action. Ten days ago a teacher hid her pupils from a deranged American gunman at the cost of her own life. A bereaved parent felt for the family of that killer of his child.
Some set out to imprison. Others want to open doors. In October the Taleban shot a 14-year-old Pakistani in the head for advocating education for girls, calling her an “obscenity” against Islam. Pakistan’s army chief said Islam guarantees everyone, male and female, “equal inalienable rights to life, property and human dignity”.
This was the year our most forgettable resident, Kim Dotcom, a small, insignificant, undemonstrative, law-abiding, eighth-acre suburbanite, skipped out of the Prime Minister’s and ACT leader’s consciousness.
Their brain fades about spooks’ briefings and trifling $50,000 cheques locked Key and Banks into a tight embrace that made last year’s tea party look chaste.
Summary: Making big decisions for the future
Affording Our Future Conference
Colin James*, assisted by Jess Booker
This year has been one of transitions, in the world economy and energy options, in the orthodoxies by which the rules are made and, here at home, in politics, policies and preferences.
A new decade has been dawning. To talk of a “twenty-first-century” this or that is behind the play. The 2010s are not the 2000s.