Whose slogan is this: “For a richer New Zealand”? Not ACT’s. ACT’s is “experience that counts”. Not National’s. National’s is “brighter”, not “richer”. It is the Greens’. It shows how far the Greens have come.
A measure of that is that co-leader Metiria Turei, whose brief is social policy, started a radio debate talking of a green economy. Rivers and poverty came later. Co-leader Russel Norman has made it his mission to reposition the party as promising economic development.
Labour’s first task in the election campaign was to get noticed. It did, with two contentious policies which might lose it votes on the specifics but win some on the getting-noticed front.
Anyone who actually watched Friday’s opening video would have seen an imaginative presentation, combining the young (for example, Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern) and the traditional (for example, Damien O’Connor who blasted the party list as dominated by gays and unions) — and even with Phil Goff in it.
That was the cup that is, just. The childlike headlines can be pasted in the kids’ scrapbooks — oops, cached on their iPads. Now we come back down to earth. We may find the earth is moving.
The last seven weeks have had an end-of-empire feel — end of the Roman empire, that is: lavish spending by imperious officials on public spectacles and games to divert and entertain the plebs and narcotise anxiety and discontent.
Someone in the cabinet might tell the airline it mostly owns that Christchurch has been hit by an earthquake or two. The seatback video on a flight from Sydney featured the “gothic facade” on an intact cathedral and a “cable car (sic) on Regents (sic) Street”.
Tourists might be a tiny bit surprised when they try to board the tram to admire the cathedral. If, of course, they can find a place to stay.
It’s the idea that counts. Three valedictorians voiced that outrageous message in Parliament last week.
Simon Power’s going-away address was not just to a packed public gallery but also to well-stocked Labour benches, from which there was warm applause.
Power talked of the need for politicians to have plans: “We run for Parliament to lead agendas, improve the lot of our countrymen (sic), to push change and to execute ideas … to do something,” he said.
MPs shove off this week. They could have stuck around for another two weeks and got some important legislation done but the rugby is bigger politics right now.
Some important people have to be seen partying in the right places. The party is bucking up national morale and politicians must do their bit. Policy can wait.
Relax. If it is going to hit, it won’t hit till after the election. Or, at least, it won’t hit hard before then.
The “it” is damage to our economy from the north Atlantic turmoil. There will be some damage. What no one knows is how much damage and in what form.
What isn’t happening in the so-called rich countries is a “normal” “recovery”. That is because what used to be normal is not normal now and the world hasn’t yet settled into a new normal. We have been in transition for a decade or more and we are not through.
A sense of humour has a place in politics.
So savour the government’s sense of humour: it said a provincial coastal town up north could run a nation-promoting event beamed round the world.
And savour Auckland mayor Len Brown’s sense of humour: he said Murray McCully might have been collegial, collaborative and thoughtful of others in his takeover of that event after some opening night miscues.
United States 50, China 8. No, not rugby. Officials at the Pacific Islands Forum last week.
The Pacific is stocked with fish, has lots of minerals in places and not many people — and the majority of those are Melanesian, with societies, economies and governments that are struggling out of tribalism and bare subsistence. Just the place for superpowers.
September 9 looms: the official launch of a Helen Clark socialist legacy John Key and Murray McCully have ramped into a national spectacle. Three days later (New Zealand time) is the tenth anniversary of Al Qaeda’s spectacular raid on the United States and the 30th of the end of a pivotally divisive rugby tour.
The world didn’t change in 2001 and won’t change on Friday. Contrast 1981.