There has been much talk since Parekura Horomia died about the foreshore and seabed turmoil and his decision to stick with Labour then. But what if Labour had not passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act to override the Appeal Court decision?
Would Maori have been pleased or angry now?
There was abundant Maori anger at the time: a hikoi and a new anti-Labour Maori party. From that perspective Labour would have been much better to have gone along with Dame Sian Elias and her problematic colleagues.
In a couple of weeks Australia and New Zealand will publish their government budgets. Each has some learning for the other.
It is now ingrained in the New Zealand psyche that Australia is far richer and so a far better place to make a living. In the 12 months to March 51,273 emigrated there.
Wages and salaries are far higher for the same work. Australia has vast quantities of stuff it can dig up and ship to China and other voracious “emerging” economies. The stuff we export mostly comes off grass, not from holes in the ground — vanilla to Australia’s absinthe.
Labour triggered four of the biggest items of last week’s politics and in different ways they touch on security — appropriately as Anzac Day looms.
Enabling same-sex couples to marry adds a bit more legal security for those couples. Some argue the state should stick to legally safeguarding civil unions and leave it to couples to consecrate their union as they prefer. But the state will not get out of marriage so those wanting equality needed the next step.
Last Thursday Paula Bennett was pleased with herself for getting her you-must-work welfare bill through Parliament and Bill English was pleased to confirm that you-the-taxpayer are still on course to get him a budget surplus.
The two are linked. And both are linked to a two-dimensional housing tangle.
John Key cruised into his job. He didn’t do the apprenticeship a Helen Clark or a Jim Bolger did before becoming leader of his party, then Prime Minister. That is one reason he misses some points of proper process.
The apprenticeship he did do was doing deals. Doing deals is how politics and government are done in Washington where money talks and talks big and Key has a soft spot for the United States (viz his Korea mistake on Sunday). A deal-making mentality is another reason he misses some points of proper process.
Mighty River Power pre-registrations 440,000, anti-selldown petitioners 390,000. The selldown wins. Or does it?
Two years ago the political calculus was: do the selldowns well, make a lot people feel they have won something and show most of the rest the sky hasn’t fallen in and selldowns will cease to be a third-rail issue.
It is 10 years from the United States’ revenge invasion of Iraq. Iraq and its surrounds are in turmoil. The region that gave us two big lasting religions is a cauldron of hate and hope.
The United States cast its Iraq invasion not just to search and destroy (non-existent) nuclear weapons but also as a mission to bring democracy to an oppressed people and light the way to democracy for neighbouring states: shades of the medieval crusades to recover Jerusalem from the barbarians; Shades of the nineteenth-century British imperial mission to lead people out of savagery into the promised land of Christian civilisation.
We have an extractive economy which depends on commodity exports. That makes the drought a big deal. It makes Solid Energy a big deal — made bigger by a public-private muddle.
The drought is big for farmers. It is big for the rest of us because most exports are of what is extracted from grass grown with rain, from forests, from the sea, from underground and from the landscape, exported as pleasure for tourists.
Reserve Bank governor Graeme Wheeler is likely to leave the official cash rate unchanged at 2.5 per cent on Thursday. That is, he will leave it at the emergency level to which it was cut after the February 22 Christchurch earthquake to insure against a plunge in confidence.
Wheeler is in top company. Nearly six years after the United States derivatives market began to tank, bestowing on us the global financial crisis (GFC), big-rich-country central banks are still at battle stations, shovelling out money through “quantitative easing”, holding their official interest rates near zero and jawboning to calm nerves and/or lift spirits.
GDP growth is this government’s dominant priority. If polls of consumer confidence, notably Colmar Brunton’s for TV1, are a guide, rank and file voters have cottoned on.
Credit growth is the strongest for nearly four years: 3.8 per cent in the 12 months to January, 0.4 per cent in January alone. That’s the “spend” part of GDP growth.