One important gold medal in these lofty Olympian weeks will not be celebrated on a dais. It will be the virtual (not virtuous) award to the most inventive therapeutics firm for “performance enhancements” which can’t yet be detected.
Human physical endeavour and excellence were the Olympic ideal. And there are still many individual and team exemplars. But the therapeutics firms’ endeavour and excellence make it hard to figure who’s real and who’s not.
Development. That is what this government is about. Economic development, to be precise. It trumps competing policy claims.
From John Key through Bill English and Steven Joyce and on to David Carter and Phil Heatley, ministers pounded that message to National party delegates at the weekend. It was, Joyce said, about “progress”.
The country’s leading fearful party meets in conference this weekend. Delegates will be cajoled, cosseted and secreted from controversy. Perversely, this will hide some good news.
National is now not alone in secretiveness. Labour has been more open than National at recent annual conferences but this year at its regional conferences closed all but some set pieces because it was discussing how to elect its leader and an organisational revamp. The Greens used to be very open but this year were right up with National.
Tim Groser comes from a family of actors. So when he talks climate change, he talks in theatrical allusions, of “getting everyone on the bus” and “not backing the truck up the drive”.
Groser’s “bus” was at Durban in December, the most recent United Nations global climate change summit. An old bus had creaked into Durban. But up-and-coming big “developing country” emitters like China, India and Brazil were not on and some “developed” countries which were on, notably Japan, were getting off. The United States had never got on.
The most interesting number in the budget was 6.7. It told us that for now the economy is heading in the opposite direction from the one Bill English says is the government’s objective.
The 6.7 was the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) the Treasury projected the balance of payments current account deficit would be in 2015-16. That is up from 1.9 per cent in the year to March 2010 and 4.8 per cent in the year to last March.
The “mixed-ownership model” is set to become law this week. It will pass by one vote, 61-60, against around a 70 per cent objection in opinion polls. This is “representative democracy” in action.
John Key claims a “mandate”. But does he have one?
He can say, correctly, that from January last year he openly stated his intention to sell down four energy companies and Air New Zealand to 51 per cent government ownership. Actually, there was little room for doubt from before the 2008 election.
A nervy cabinet needs a “culture change” at ACC: three board members and the chief executive gone in a flash. The minister is in charge — well, for the good bits.
Beware working for a jumpy government: a minister’s ego can bruise easily. Then it’s ego 1, you nil.
Actually, Ralph Stewart’s much more communicative leadership of staff had been changing the culture. He was collateral damage.
It was a clear win to David Shearer, his first against John Key. Shearer instantly sensed parents’ likely reaction to notes from teachers about Hekia Parata’s brilliant scheme to raise class sizes to pay for more teacher training and a pay-for-performance system. He ran it top of his budget speech.
We called her Betty Windsor in the 1960s, thinking to be smartly sniffy and disavow 1950s childhood awe at the imperial pageantry of the film “A Queen is Crowned”. But Elizabeth II finessed us: the “bourgeois monarchy” is still in business, respected more now than for decades.
She is a relic of hereditary royalty in a democratic age. But she is less a misfit now than when we basked in empire. Her grandson and his wife are knockout hits with the media and much of the population.
Next Monday is the Queen’s official birthday here: a time to mark her 60 years on the job. On Friday a gathering near Upper Hutt will mark the 40th anniversary of the birth of the world’s first national green party — one measure of the many deep changes in the Queen’s Commonwealth.