Spiders discomfort some people. Unions discomfort John Key. Unions are the antithesis of individualism and they get in the way. One got in the way of some film moguls so he changed workplace law to suit the moguls.
Unions are fomenting discontent by joining Greypower and other groups to get up a citizens-initiated referendum on state asset sales which could be a bit embarrassing.
Category: Otago Daily Times
Think national, act local — change is coming
Australia grows bananas (and is a republic in all but form). That might help explain its Monty-Pythonesque federal government and very high dissatisfaction ratings for the alternative Prime Minister. Contrast banana-less New Zealand’s in-gear government: green growth, asset selldowns, welfare, public service, local government.
Environmental and other brands — and John Allen
Last week Climate Change Ambassador Jo Tyndall briefed “stakeholders” on the global negotiations, in which New Zealand has an outsize role. Her briefing was clear, on both knowns and unknowns. That says two things about John Allen’s reconstruction of his ministry.
The first is the value of specialist topic expertise, long a marker of New Zealand’s international affairs brand in a number of fields. Allen wants to match that with deeper expertise in countries and regions; generic diplomatic skills are to be an underpinning, not the quintessence of the foreign service.
Labour's task: out of the margins, into the middle
Bill English has been sounding as if he is sorry for Labour: he angers iwi by lobbing section 9 of the State-owned Enterprises Act on to the asset selldown embers; he says the size of the selldowns loot is a “guess”.
The section 9 hoo-ha was so unnecessary that it seems almost like a manoeuvre to give the Maori party’s patchy profile a lift with a pretend win and/or a pretext to go round iwi rohe pitching the investment opportunity.
Innovating innovation — but still on a shoestring
Here’s an idea: invite the super-rich who are buying hideaways and other bits of this country to put a bit of their pocket money (meaning, the odd $10 million or so) into high-tech startups here.
They get a deeper connection with their part-adoptive country. We get more of our science turned into business ventures — and just possibly more of the intellectual property and its earning power (and taxes) stays here.
A better public service? That's the hype
Two “superministers” are the core of the John Key government’s second term and with one of them comes an ambitious remake of public services.
Key’s most important appointment in December was of Steven Joyce as economic development superminister.
Joyce directly runs the economic development, science and innovation and tertiary education portfolios. Tertiary education links to science, skills and labour. Phil Heatley’s energy and resources and Amy Adams’ ICT officials are inside the Ministry of Economic Development. David Carter’s primary industries are the cash cows of development and Gerry Brownlee’s transport duties are mainly infrastructure, critical to economic development.
It's the constitution, stupid. Not so ho hum
n the news recently: a National party apparatchik from John Key’s electorate got excited about a TV programme on poverty during the election campaign and used his sinecure on New Zealand on Air to push a ban on such naughtiness; and reaffirmation of a ministerial trading-floor deal to legislate more pokies for Sky City in return for it building a convention centre.
Ministers off to Oz: time for strategic thinking
The big topic for Julia Gillard and John Key and their cohorts of senior ministers meeting in Melbourne this weekend is not the bilateral projects and tactics. It is where two small countries on Asia’s edge fit in a rapidly and deeply changing world.
The easy topic will be the single economic market (SEM) process and related policies. But within even that comfortable project is a lesson and behind it a strategic question.
Why inequalities have come back into politics
Inequalities are the big political issue for 2012 and beyond. That’s not because the left is about to surge — the left has yet to connect principle to modern conditions. It is because the economic efficiency justifications are crumbling.
For three decades or so the ruling theory has been “all boats rise”. Looser regulation and lower taxes freed entrepreneurs to innovate more, take more risks, make more money and thereby make us all richer.
When the good don't speak out against the bad
The rest of the world would respect Islam more if it more often heard decent Muslims condemning Allah-invoked murders of innocents. There is a lesson in that for those who value capitalism.
The human purpose of religion is to bind humans in harmony, to make value in an otherwise valueless existence. Terror and murder is the antithesis of that. Those acts invite retaliation and regulation, which diminish all our lives, as we find at airports where we are treated like criminals, made to prove our goodwill in X-rays.