Is dairy John Key’s “Think Big”? Is it “too big to fail”? Is it a security risk?
Take the last first. The New Zealand Herald’s Claire Trevett quoted Sir Michael Cullen saying (at the media briefing on his spying report) that he had told Canberra spies Australians were New Zealand’s biggest security risk.
Is Bill English drifting out of date? Is Graeme Wheeler? Do the 1980s just not work in the 2010s? Ask around.
Wheeler will pronounce again on Thursday on the official (interest) cash rate (OCR). His problem: prices are rising too slowly.
Inflation targeting was brought into monetary policy to stop prices rising too fast. Now the global worry in the monkish chambers of central bankers and economic oracles is that prices are not rising fast enough.
This week John Key’s flag write-in referendum starts. Polls are two-to-one against. But Super-Richie is in favour, which might count for something. He is officially a national treasure, an ONZ, one of 28, including quintessential New Zealander Prince Philip.
The flag is a national emblem. That Key wears his minority alternative on his lapel says he is not a stickler for protocol — which is a plus in his lengthening marriage (the honeymoon is long over) with a majority of Kiwis.
Bill English waxed eloquent last Thursday on “social investment”, saying speeches on the topic “are universally the most popular ideas I have presented in 25 years in politics”. But he reminded his large public servant audience: “The government’s top priority remains the economy.”
It has long been customary to talk of “public” and “private” as separate and distinct. But are they really?
The argument often centres on “public sector” versus “private sector”.
So it went at a Fabian Society seminar on Friday. The Public Service Association and frontline workers questioned the wisdom and effectiveness of contracting out delivery of public services to non-state entities.
Arrogance bred intransigence last Thursday. The contest spilled into Waitangi weekend. What’s going on? Where is Labour in this?
The government’s secretive conduct of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, coupled with John Key’s dismissal of opponents as hater-and-wrecker ideologues or know-nothings who don’t know what is good for them, elicited exactly the response you would expect in a modern participatory democracy.
Waitangi Day looms. National day or holiday? A day to validate our national story or a day at the beach or the mall? A day of substance or a day of symbol?
Some think Anzac Day is our real national day, marking, they say, our coming of age in World War I.
That war did make white New Zealanders aware Mother-Britain could get things wrong (Gallipoli and much else) and feel a bit different from home-grown Poms.
What’s in a legacy? For John Key it might turn out to be someone else’s.
Take some recent Prime Ministers.
Jim Bolger’s legacy is to have confronted the instincts of most in his party and to have continued Treaty of Waitangi settlements and the transition to a bicultural New Zealand.
This year the world became more disordered. That disorder will stretch into 2016. The good news is we have some strengths.
The loudest noise in the disorder comes from the disciples of death in the Middle East.
The arbitrary dismemberment of the Ottoman empire by imperious European victors in the war we are commemorating (1916 was a bad year) have proved to be illusory lines in the sand, blown away by the winds of sectional hate.
It’s Christmastime and two journalists have something to say to us. Journalists? Aren’t they cynical, despised more even than politicians?
One I know well: Brent Edwards, director of news gathering at Radio New Zealand (RNZ).
On RNZ’s website in June Edwards, then political editor, quoted from a funeral tribute in May to Peter Conway, former Council of Trade Unions secretary, that Conway, was “soft on people, hard on issues”.