Category: Otago Daily Times

We celebrated Guy Fawkes yesterday. We condemn Al Qaeda and other terrorists for their murderous bombing. And we deplore a mine company which didn’t keep its miners and contractors safe. How come the difference?

Perhaps it is that Fawkes was caught before he lit the fuse to blow up the English Parliament. In that vein we might welcome muslim terrorists’ diminished capacity to kill innocents as a result of United States President Barack Obama’s drones killing leading Muslim assassins and wreckers and his sanctioned assassination of Osama Bin Laden. read more

One sad outcome of the Dotcom affair is that a rogue who should not have got residency has been transformed into a national celebrity.

A second sad outcome is that factual reporting of the affair in serious news media abroad pictures us as what Americans used to call hillbillies. The Crown Law Office, police, Government Communications Security Bureau (a systemic failure, by the way, not human error) and too-little-engaged ministers have dirtied the country brand. read more

Last Wednesday John Key invited Winston Peters to read the books that say nothing can be done about the high exchange rate. If Key were keener on reading than he has shown in the case of John Banks’ damning police report, he might find there are now also books challenging the orthodoxy he is wedded to. read more

Relax. We are not going to fold into Australia. The two countries’ Productivity Commissions have let their Prime Ministers off the hook of deciding on a step-change or not. Our independent foreign policy is not at risk on that score.
Julia Gillard and John Key requested the commissions to jointly explore policy initiatives to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the 1983 signing of CER, the closer economic relationship agreement. Essentially in their draft report issued today the commissions say: stay on the same track. read more

Water, water, everywhere — not a time to blink. A flood over politics, policy, farmers, generators, multinationals, iwi. Sometimes John Key looks as if he is pushing water uphill.
Last week’s spillway: the cabinet’s manoeuvre on the Waitangi Tribunal’s report; the Maori King’s summoning of a hui; the Maori Council’s musing on a court challenge; Ngati Kahungungu’s tabling of a claim for rivers and aquifers in its rohe; the Environment Court’s clearance of Manawatu region’s tough “one plan” to clean its river; reappointment of commissioners to run Canterbury’s water; another round on Rio Tinto’s Manapouri play. read more

Yet another academic is prophesying gloom for the United States. A new paper by Robert Gordon picks up a theme that GDP-enhancing new science and technology has thinned over the past half-century and future consumption growth will therefore be slower.

Instead of the material standard of living doubling every 30 years or so as it did from 1930 to 1990, doubling will slow to 100 years, the nineteenth century pace, Gordon says. read more

The big news last week was the Waitangi Tribunal’s demand asset sales be delayed till a framework for dealing with iwi water claims is sorted. The deeper news was in two reports on inequalities, with two followups due this week.

The asset sales poser is soluble. It is part of the adjustment of law, administration and politics to the revival of the Treaty of Waitangi and our bicultural experiment which assigns equality to two deeply different cultures. read more

There is nothing like an idea for which the time has come — or come again. Take voodoo economics.
Steven Joyce on The Nation at the weekend used the term to scoff at Labour party ideas to constrain the exchange rate. The irony was that the originator of the phrase, George Bush senior, applied it to some of the very policies Joyce defends as orthodox. read more

National’s problem next election is support. That qualifies its recent lift in the polls, which in any case coincides with its protracted standoff with the Maori Council and the Waitangi Tribunal over water (very faint echoes of Don Brash).

ACT is all but dismantled. Peter Dunne is down to one uncertain seat. The Maori party is over-dependent on its two co-leaders who have said they want to retire and say the party voted against National more often than did Labour in 2008-11. Colin Craig is presentable and definable but National has yet to work out if it wants him and, if so, how he is to get seats (a 4 per cent threshold might help — but it would also help Winston Peters). read more

So there is to be a “small number” of “partnership schools”. More than the original four, that suggests. And of quite a variety. Is that good, bad or irrelevant?

The motivation for these adaptations of American “charter” schools is ideological. ACT says the market will do better for kids because parents will choose the best schools for their kids. read more