Category: Otago Daily Times

Paula Bennett says “most people” will see last week’s welfare changes as “fair and reasonable”. She is almost certainly right. But is that the limit of her ambition?

A majority doesn’t make something right. Attorney-General Chris Finlayson, a lawyer’s lawyer, ruled that under the Bill of Rights Bennett’s changes are not fair: they discriminate on sex, marital status and family status grounds in applying the work requirement to those on a domestic purposes benefit whose youngest child is six but not to those on a widow’s benefit or a woman-alone on the DPB. Her new law does not qualify for exemption on the ground that it “serves an important and significant objective” and is “proportionate to that objective.” read more

Environment Minister Nick Smith aims to set up a private-public taskforce to work out explore “green growth”. His 1990s predecessor in the portfolio, Simon Upton, is doing the same in Paris at the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD). Can they mesh?

Green growth (or green-tech or clean-tech) is the theory and practice of growing the economy in environment-friendly ways, a notion the government has been slow to come to — its notion of “balance” implies that more environment means less growth. read more

Tim Groser is fond of this statistic: that the increase in exports to China in 2009 was the same as that year’s total exports to Korea. That analogy says much about east Asia’s growing indispensability to our Polynesian and British outlier nation.

First, it underlines China’s rise in the global economy and critical importance to this economy. Second, Groser’s choice of Korea instead of Britain or Canada as a comparison attests to the Asianisation of our future. read more

It is a month for plans, strategies and discussion papers: infrastructure, road safety, mining in beautiful places, Crown research institutes, personal grievance, child abuse, with more to come, not least the “New Zealand Inc” consolidation of offshore diplomatic, trade and migration work — geared to “catching up with Australia”. read more

This is John Key’s crunch year. It is also Rodney Hide’s. New love has limits. Hard politics is an arranged marriage.

Hide is a mixture of bounce and bluster. The bounce gets things done. The bluster pumps him up big which might keep the small band of faithful hopeful, but at the risk, if punctured, of leaving him and ACT smaller (as do love trysts at taxpayers’ expense and loose talk about National at dinner). read more

John Key’s government is experimenting with changes to the way some policy is made. They might just point to a different sort of politics.

Top of the economic policy news last week was Simon Power’s response to the Capital Markets Development Taskforce’s 60 recommendations and high on his list was rejection for now of minority selldowns of state-owned enterprises to citizens to broaden and deepen the too-thin stock exchange — though Key is set to seek endorsement in the 2011 election. read more

Mostly the law gets done to people — by politicians, judges, lawyers and police. Is there room for citizens?

Citizens can take the law into their hands in three main ways (aside from vigilantism and shooting intruders, which are outside the law). They can be part of a movement or a party. They can be part of a pressure group. They can get angry and protest. read more

Grow the revenue. That will be a core message in John Key’s speech tomorrow opening Parliament for 2010.

That is not a tax story, growing government revenue. It is an economy story, growing the country’s revenue. Workers don’t get rich by being fired to make a company lean and mean. They get rich by being hired by companies which make more for each employee than they were getting before. read more

In December Pita Sharples characterised negotiations between John Key and the iwi leadership group as the marrying of two worldviews and two political systems, the Maori political system and the general political system. Ponder that this coming Waitangi Day.

Sharples was combining the Treaty of Waitangi’s two modern messages: one of unity and the other of separateness. As the Treaty’s truth and reconciliation phase begins to wind down with the settling of historical grievances, those two messages will need rebalancing if the Treaty is henceforth to be a nation-defining force. read more

Two days before Christmas Treasury Secretary John Whitehead announced a cleanout of his top ranks. This day of the long knives was a step in the Treasury’s bid to regain premier status under a government which wants a “step-change” in economic performance.

Whitehead replaced all four deputy secretaries with two new deputy chief executives, one from the Prime Minister’s Department and one from Britain, and two new deputy secretaries. He appointed a chief economist, also British. Crown business and “state sector performance” monitoring got a new boss. There is a new chief accountant. read more