This was the year our most forgettable resident, Kim Dotcom, a small, insignificant, undemonstrative, law-abiding, eighth-acre suburbanite, skipped out of the Prime Minister’s and ACT leader’s consciousness.
Their brain fades about spooks’ briefings and trifling $50,000 cheques locked Key and Banks into a tight embrace that made last year’s tea party look chaste.
This year has been one of transitions, in the world economy and energy options, in the orthodoxies by which the rules are made and, here at home, in politics, policies and preferences.
A new decade has been dawning. To talk of a “twenty-first-century” this or that is behind the play. The 2010s are not the 2000s.
National MP Nikki Kaye’s parliamentary education and science committee, which she chairs, will report soon on “e-learning”. Sounds technofreakish rather than educational. Actually, the context is deep historical change.
One dimension of e-learning is using computer and internet technology as learning mechanisms — conveying information, stimulating interest and engagement and taking learning beyond the classroom.
Climate negotiators are in Doha for two weeks. The symbolism is grim: Doha gave its name to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) global freer trade talks which have frozen, giving way to regional bargaining: a United States-based deal will be talked over in Auckland next week and an Asia-based deal was kicked along last week in Cambodia.
The big thing that happened in the past week was the launch of the Land and Water Forum’s final report on how to manage water. The small thing that happened was another assault on David Shearer.
The assault on Shearer infused the Labour party conference, restating the old adage that the worst enemy of a Labour MP is another Labour MP. It was a factor in the 264-237 vote on Saturday to give 14 MPs the power to force a leadership vote in February (or today). A new rule means any such vote will henceforth be split 40-40-20 between MPs’ votes, general membership votes and union votes.
The unemployment rate lifted again in September, on one measure, to 7.3 per cent — just in time to lift Labour hopes at the party’s conference this coming weekend. Actually, it is not so simple.
First, the participation rate — those at work or looking for work — stayed high. People are not (yet) giving up in despair. (Emigrants to Australia are another story).
Graeme Wheeler is comfortably orthodox. Comforting to the cabinet, that is, but not to exporters — nor to the red-green-black trio of opposition parties.
The new Reserve Bank governor was clear in his first speech on Friday that his core role is to contain inflation, aiming at 2 per cent a year, perhaps a bit high in a deflationary global environment but lower than his predecessors’ record of mostly 2-3 per cent.
Yesterday was Labour Day — a day symbolic of a deep divide in our politics.
Folklore traces it back to Samuel Parnell’s demand in 1840 for an eight-hour working day. The first Labour Day was in 1890, actually a year of defeat for the union movement. It was Mondayised in 1899.
The Labour party owes its name to the wage labourers, skilled and unskilled, it was formed to represent. Unions channelled that support into the party organisation and Parliament.
Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan is contorting himself and fiscal numbers to get his promised budget surplus this fiscal year as his economy slows. Here John Key and Bill English are less adamant about making good their muscular election and May budget promises of a 2014-15 surplus.
Key and English have an advantage over Swan.
The United States says Kim Dotcom purloins intellectual property (IP). Well, he does seem to filch the memories of some who come into his orbit. Perhaps they are stashed in a dungeon at his mansion.
John Banks had a massive memory loss. John Key has owned up to a memory fade about a briefing from the Government Communications Security Bureau, which had a collective memory fade. Detective Inspector Grant Wormald’s memory seemed to skip a beat in court.