Category: Otago Daily Times

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. read more

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. read more

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. read more

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. read more

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. read more

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. read more

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. read more

Christmas is a message from the past, in the present and for the future. The future message is the big one.

The safe Christmas message is the one from the past: the life and retold words of a man of deep and long influence. That message is straightforward.

The easy Christmas message is the one in the present: the transitory comfort of presents and food and, mostly, the deeper comfort of company. read more

Peter Dunne got the boot for chatting too profusely with a woman journalist. John Banks got the boot for being judged into a trial the police had avoided. The National party’s rogue-right savaged Len Brown for too intimate a connection with an adviser.

Is that the year that was: trivia and side-issues? read more

Since 1991 the proportion of ethnic-Asians in our population has quadrupled to 11.8 per cent, the census found. That is not far behind the 14.9 per cent of Maori and the trajectory is much steeper.

Asia is coming to us. Those Asian New Zealanders make us culturally much more a part of Asia (though we remain distinctly Pacific in culture and geography). The more Asians here, the more Asian we will be. read more