The constitutional advisory panel launches its public “conversation” today. The timing is apposite: the Audit Office last week reminded John Key of the merit of proper process; and the Supreme Court’s delayed ruling on the iwi water claim is imminent.
It comes also against a backdrop of legislation to significantly change the rol of regional and local government.
Bill English has set the budget date nice and early — as John Key did the election date in 2011 and is likely to do in 2014. Now are English and Key — and Steven Joyce, who is to make a science speech on Thursday — up to the fiscal science challenge?
That science challenge — not to be confused with the Prime Minister’s science challenge for scientists themselves — is to match richer small-countries’ commitment. Governments here for two decades, including Key’s, have not committed to science the public resources better-performing small countries do. Contrast the European Union’s increase in its science budget this month while cutting its overall budget.
Houses are big in 2013 — big in size and way too big in price for too many people. That is the stuff of big politics.
It encapsulates a distinction between politics’ two sides. The government relies on resetting regulation so the market-economy meets the demand, wants builders to lift productivity, says it will “work with” local councils, particularly Auckland, to get more land freed up so it is cheaper and new houses on it are cheaper and wants councils’ regulatory costs to developers and builders cut.
Auckland wants to be the world’s “most liveable city” and illustrates that prominently in its plan with a big picture of people ambling on a beach. Wellington airport has been announcing to visitors that they
have arrived at the “Middle of Middle-earth”.
Great images in our two main cities! Are beach lounging and hobbits the essence of our national identity now?
Parliament kicks off today for a year that is pivotal for all parties there except (maybe) one-MP parties and New Zealand First.
The Maori party has to pivot from its high-profile founding leadership to, or towards, one which will struggle to build profile. Tariana Turia said last month she is going at the 2014 election and Pita Sharples should, too, but he wants to stay.
Manufacturing is in “crisis”. Long live manufacturing.
The “crisis” is in job destruction. But manufacturing is evolving fast, not just in location around the globe but in how it is done and what it includes. Some call this a new industrial revolution.
The policy issue for the government — and for the Labour party which trumpets the “crisis” — is what manufacturing can most effectively be done here and how to sell into rapidly changing global markets.
Humans operate on the “more” principle: enough is not enough. Happily, we have been able to make and deliver more of nearly everything for more and more people. How we can go on doing that is a core policy issue for the next decade or two.
We have delivered more by radically re-engineering our physical environment and ecosystems over the past two centuries or so: land, landscape and buildings, plants and animals, waterways, supply of raw materials, capacity to travel and connect quickly. This blink of geological time in which science and ingenuity have vanquished the constraints of subsistence and distance has become known as the anthropocene.
We are more than five years on from the global financial crash. Economists and politicians talk still of “recovery”, implying a return to a former state. Actually the global economy has been reshaping, along with global society and politics. We are not going back.
The short focus politicians, bank economists and central bankers favour is on the United States fiscal tangle and Eurozone debt. “Expert” forecasts for 2013 swing from expecting things to come right to apocalypse.
Here’s a New Year resolution for 2013: look on the bright side every now and then (though as a realist, not Pollyanna). There is a bit to see there.
The New Zealand habit is to look on the gloomy side and to see something small, smug and stifling. Half a million ex-New Zealanders have shaken that habit for life in Australia.
Embedded in some of the worst human actions is fine human action. Ten days ago a teacher hid her pupils from a deranged American gunman at the cost of her own life. A bereaved parent felt for the family of that killer of his child.
Some set out to imprison. Others want to open doors. In October the Taleban shot a 14-year-old Pakistani in the head for advocating education for girls, calling her an “obscenity” against Islam. Pakistan’s army chief said Islam guarantees everyone, male and female, “equal inalienable rights to life, property and human dignity”.