Last month an email came inviting me to jot down a few words for a newspaper feature called “100 Reasons to Be A Kiwi”. I assumed the email was intended for a celebrity and had been misaddressed.
Then came a phone call, close to deadline — and a deadline of my own, which precluded response.
God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform, the hymnist William Cowper wrote. So it has been with the Powelliphanta Augustus snails in Happy Valley.
The Happy Valley snails are unique. They are large. They have evolved their own special way of life in their own special habitat.
When Solid Energy, the company greens love to hate, more even than McDonalds and sugar-drink killer-fiends, came to Happy Valley hungry for coal, conservationists fretted for the snails — as we all do now, in retrospect, for the huia, whose food and shelter colonists ravaged.
On May 4 the Herald reported a road incident which led the police, the Herald said, to lay a charge of “wreckless” driving. Don Brash might have wished for such a transit through 2006.
Instead, his political career, which had been on a high only 14 months earlier, ended in a train wreck of a publicised affair, shadowy dealings with a vindictive religious sect and persistent lapses of political skill.
It has been an international month. But don’t mistake that for distant.
South Korea’s President dropped in and pumped up a free trade agreement — tellingly using some arguments put by Phil Goff in Seoul in October on agriculture and trade diversion.
George Bush’s fanciful mission to democratise the Middle East collapsed. Iraq is “grave” and deteriorating, his father’s friend James Baker told him. Sensible minds are bending to fix the damage he has done to us all. Which should teach Bush that humility, not hubris, is Christianity’s essence.
Here is a fair bet: you want to be able to go from any A to any B any time; you want your house warm in winter and cool in summer; you want your workplace to work; and you want all of that 24/7.
Here is what the gloom industry tells you: “You can’t have all of that any more — not forever anyway; what you do get will cost you more in several ways; and there will be interruptions.”
Four years ago Bill English was crushed on the anvil of defeat and humiliation. Today he is a darling of his party again — and the most convincing definer of the modern conservatism that will position his party in the John Key era.
English rose effortlessly to the top of the National party, pre-ordained from youth and armed with a good degree and a stint in the Treasury to add to farm life as a child. He also was armed with a strong Catholic faith.
A great strength of Helen Clark’s cabinet has been its friendships. Ministers argue a lot, particularly recently and particularly over energy and climate change. But they are, most of them, not only political friends but also personal friends.
You can’t say that of the present National shadow cabinet. John Key, Bill English and Co have work to do.
Of course, John Key is business-friendly. But he brings to National’s leadership an agenda that already goes far beyond business and will widen as he heads to the top Beehive job. He is pro-business but not a business lapdog.
Key comes from business. But he also left business. Business made him rich. But he wants more than money. It is that “more” that business will have to come to grips with. He is no Roundtable clone, even though the business was in is one of the most open-market of all business sectors.
Phase one of the reconstruction and recovery is over. Now for phase two. The John Key National party will have more of the characteristics that made it the dominant party in decades past.
Don Brash will go down in the party’s folklore as having brought it back from the brink — members, money and, for a time, momentum. He re-aggregated the right’s vote and laid the platform for the 2008 drive for power.
Helen Clark and Don Brash have been abroad, Clark plying her foreign affairs trade, Brash the apprentice. Is he learning quickly and deeply enough?
Last year Brash personally inserted into National’s policy a line that the anti-nuclear law would not be changed without consulting the public. Labour was easily able to twist that into code for his wanting a change and subservience to the United States — and thereby got back in the election race.