Labour and the Greens, added together, have edged past National in opinion polls. And they have edged a little nearer each other.
First: Greens co-leader James Shaw scrubs up presentably to the sorts of people who usually think Greens are sandal-wearing ether-dwellers.
Second: Labour has pushed its trade positioning Greenwards. Labour still backs free trade in goods and services, which the Greens don’t. But it has turned much warier of the regulatory dimensions of modern “trade” agreements.
Minister of Local Government Paula Bennett often sounds like the minister against local government. Too much of this might play into Winston Peters’ hands.
Bennett’s favourite phrase for councils has been “loopy rules”. A group under MP Jacqui Dean hunting them out has received 2000 submissions.
John Key will be celebrated this coming weekend. The National party owes him. In the corners and corridors of its conference, though, there will be some pondering. Things are not humming so well now.
This is not a curtain call. The party still rides high in polls and Key’s personal rating, though down a bit, is multiples that of his rivals in other parties.
Colin James’s Otago Daily Times column for 14 July 2015
It’s flag-waving time: Tim Groser off to Europe to wave our climate change flag; Greece waving the socialist flag; and the last chance to wave your own flag at John Key.
Flag design submissions close on Thursday. Only 679 people have gone to public meetings. But online visits have topped 700,000 and around 6000 designs have been submitted. The distinctive koru is second after the Southern Cross and ahead of Key’s unimaginative fern.
Bill English told Australians last month his style was “incremental radicalism”. Is this an oxymoron?
First, some history. English was a new young MP in 1991 when Ruth Richardson plunged National into turmoil with her radical “mother of all budgets”.
He watched in dismay from the back benches as National’s vote plunged 13 percentage points in 1993 and as people seized the chance to vote against nine years of Labour and National radicalism by choosing MMP.
It’s the big end of politics that matters to people. It is the small end of politics that is usually engaging. So with the past fortnight.
At the small end have been Colin Craig and David Smol. At the big end have been Greece and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — not to mention the serial Saudi sheep shenanigans.
A speech last Wednesday by Michael Woodhouse had a poignant relevance to a landmark conference at Otago University this weekend and New Zealand’s leading United Nations role in July.
Woodhouse, who is Minister of Immigration, was marking world refugee day. He waxed lyrical that New Zealand, as a “good international citizen”, “takes our responsibilities to provide protection to refugees extremely seriously”. His evidence: we are taking “up to” 100 Syrian refugees.
The Reserve Bank last week joined the global pack. If the world’s big central banks are lax, what choice does Graeme Wheeler have in this tiny backwater? And Bill English has shown no interest in lightening his load.
Back in 1990 Ruth Richardson used to complain Labour ministers’ fiscal laxity was making it harder for the Reserve Bank to hold down prices.
Sport is business. Business is money. Big sport is big money. World soccer bosses have been playing the game — just as “athletes” take drugs and cricketers help bettors.
The payoff for the public is big circuses.
And not many die putting on those shows, which wasn’t so 800 years ago when tournaments were how young men laid claim to be celebrated. One recent learned description: “hundreds of heavily armed and armoured men lunged at each other on horseback”, “excited horses ridden by excited people” and “naked aggression”.
Kevin Hague typecast himself out of a future-maker role for the Greens when he called James Shaw a “metrosexual”, a word from a past era. Shaw said he was “not even sure what that means”.
Shaw is 42. He is younger-X, the next power generation. He and Labour No 3 Grant Robertson (43), his Wellington Central opponent, are comfortably friendly.