Commerce Minister Lianne Dalziel is miffed. New Zealand is only the fourth easiest country to set up a business in. She vows it will soon be the easiest, by way of a sort of one-click shop that does all the registrations. It will be a small gain for the country but a big gain in a new small business’s scheme of things.
Category: NZ Herald
How about this time a social "investment" Budget?
The fridge breaks down. Taps leak. The lawnmower is stolen. The roof leaks because the repaint is five years overdue. You can’t get on top of the to-do list.
Welcome to the fifth Labour government midway through its third term. Can this month’s Budget rescue it from its downslide?
Labour shows no sign of getting off the four-and-a-half-year downward trend in its poll averages since late 2002. And that’s also the tone of public discussion.
Anzac Day: it's all about being independent, isn't it?
Is Anzac Day about war or about independent nationhood? We don’t seem these days to be able to make up our minds.
Every year a minister goes to Gallipoli to commemorate our defeat there at the hands of British political and military genius. This year it is Winston Peters’ turn. Helen Clark went and she set up a prize for kids writing about our military history.
A roadmap for dealing with the Australians
Top of the John Howard’s agenda for his meeting with his state premiers on Friday was climate change. Worms turn when the weather turns bad.
And the weather has turned bad.
First, a drought so dire that parched Australians are attributing it at least partly to climate change. Howard has a grand water plan.
A modern Easter message of justice
Jesus Christ was a criminal — at least, he was branded as such and excruciatingly executed for it in accordance with the law. That is Easter. That was justice then.
Well, they were rough times. Christ was a rebel and a nuisance to the authorities in a region that was troublesome to the world’s greatest empire (as it is now). So he was strung up.
This is the month for hard decisions on climate change
The left demonises the 1984-90 Labour government for trashing Labour tradition by abolishing the guaranteed job. But it did spend much more on social services. And it socialised the motorcar.
Families who had not been able to own a car or kept a rustbucket on the road only with frontier ingenuity could buy a decent secondhand import, thanks to the abolition of quotas and cuts in tariffs.
What we might do in trade if we have the initiative
A country deals better with the world if its people and its political parties agree what counts. That goes even for big countries, as the United States found in the 1960s. It especially goes for minnows.
So what was John Key up to sniping at Helen Clark while she was in Washington? It read like petty domestic politics when the imperative was strategic foreign policy.
Should you or Parliament decide the big social issues?
Do you like the idea of Labour MPs being “whipped” in to vote against whacking kids? This is not a joke question.
Beneath that superficial irony lies another: immediately after the election Helen Clark, ruing the loss of provincial seats, was swearing to abjure social engineering this term. She would not be exposed to jibes of political correctness next election.
Iraq? Who said Iraq? It's time to be mates with US again
With exquisite timing, Helen Clark will be in Washington next week exactly on the fourth anniversary of President George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. There could hardly be a more emphatic signal that the United States relationship has been renormalised.
That is not because Clark endorses Bush’s adventure any more now than she did four years ago when she refused to join it and when as a result relations cooled from the “very, very, very good friends” status her sending of troops to Afghanistan had earned her in 2001.
From welfare to opportunity — the key to social support
How big is John Key’s underclass? About one in 20 of the population, one social policy expert reckons.
About half the population manages fine all the time. The rest, who include many who are economically deprived, are mostly OK but “at risk” if something goes badly wrong.
On this reckoning, Key was never underclass. He was economically deprived but with a capable mother who got the family out. That is not uncommon but it is also not easy, especially for those not equipped with good education, strong aspirations and self-belief.