Category: Otago Daily Times

From September the global oil price has halved. The milk solids price halved from February to December.

Those are two indicators that the international economy is unsettled. Our supposedly “rock star” economy faces an “interesting” 2015.

One marker: Bill English’s evaporating fiscal surplus. The Treasury in its half-yearly economic and fiscal update (HYEFU), which converted the upbeat May number to a downbeat December one, circumscribed its forecasts with a welter of “risks”, economists’ terminology for uncertainties. read more

Just 100 years and six months ago, Europe was an ordered place. By this time 100 years ago it was in brutal disorder.

Early in her time as Prime Minister, Helen Clark talked of an “incredibly benign (security) environment”. The September 11 2001 raids quickly falsified that, driving changes to security laws. read more

Here on Middle Earth what does 2015 hold? That we will still be hobbits at its end? Or that we will stand upright?

No wonder Australians sneer: Sir Peter Jackson, Air New Zealand (in its “safety” videos), Wellington airport (scrawled across its front), Wellington’s mayor, the Tourism Minister and many others sanctify the quaint Tolkien imagery of the stunted. read more

Humanity’s dark side has been on show this year: beheadings, aeroplanes downed, Americans torturing muslims, the Taleban executing children. Where is the good?

John Key’s entry into his party’s campaign launch on August 24 was amidst a phalanx of government and hired security guards. read more

Today the Treasury will likely publish fiscal figures less rosy than those Bill English managed into a “surplus” at budget time. Last week John Key took us another step from free nation to fearful huddle.

English is no macho-politician. In the election campaign he did not talk up tax cuts. As dairy prices have gone on sliding since election day, defying Key’s breezy forecasts, English has acknowledged the surplus challenge. read more

When a tumbledown bach with a modest view on a modest section is “valued” at $640,000, up 36 per cent from 2011, that suggests an economy seriously out of kilter.

Land and house “values” are wildly out of whack whether judged by history, incomes or other asset prices. Result: misery, frustration and economic loss. read more

Can Grant Robertson count? Will Jacinda Ardern stick it out? What does an Andrew Little smile look like? Where does a theology degree fit in politics? Does any of this matter?

Plenty think Labour is mere amusement or an historical relic awaiting embalming.

They might have cause to think again.

One cause is Little. read more

Here’s a foreign policy issue the government wishes would go away: climate change. Most other governments wish it would go away, too.

They will nonetheless send emissaries to Lima in Peru for 12 days of talks from next Monday. Lima is a waystation on the meandering United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change pathway towards a deal in Paris in late 2015 to limit world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions after 2020. read more

The imperial President of China flies in tomorrow. The Labour party anoints its new leader today. What links the two?

Xi Jinping is China’s most powerful leader since at least Deng Xiaoping and maybe since Mao Zedong. He has centralised power in Beijing and in himself.

Rowan Callick, former Beijing correspondent for The Australian and author of “Party Time”, a book on China’s Communist party, says Xi is reasserting the party’s control over the government and the military and tightening discipline within the party, in part by arrests for corruption. (Don’t ask about Xi’s extended family’s vast wealth.) read more

Early this year Australia’s Treasurer, Joe Hockey, introduced Bill English to G20 finance ministers as the man they should talk to learn how to do public service reform.

Hockey could have added other English-driven changes, such as fiscal consolidation, pursuit of “outcomes” and not just contracted “outputs”, professional accounting of the Crown’s net financial and physical assets (a part of last week’s social housing furore, about which more here soon), school “standards”, beginnings of a crime system switch to rehabilitation and importation into social security reform of the “investment approach”, now intended for wider application (as indicated here last month). read more