The west shudders — and learns a little bit how it is to be Israel.
Religious and ethnic hatred drive godless, gutless men to beguile the young into killing themselves and strangers going about their business.
In liberal societies such as ours this hate and killing are hard to understand. But they are human.
Here’s a way to get up an Aussie nose: junk the proposed joint therapeutics agency. Which would probably get up our own nose by setting back progress towards the single economic market (SEM).
Health Ministers — on this side Annette King — agreed in 2003 to set up the therapeutics agency as a supranational regulator of medicines in both countries, modelled in part on the joint Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) which looks after food safety.
In the heady days of the fourth Labour government Richard Prebble’s method of “saving rail” included closing the railway workshops in fellow minister Russell Marshall’s Wanganui constituency which Marshall had promised to keep open.
Marshall could have resigned his seat, asked the electors for forgiveness and re-endorsement in a by-election and thereby cleared the slate and his conscience. He stayed put, though he would surely have won.
Phillip Field might yet get his come-uppance — from Parliament, the institution which stands to lose most by what he did with migrant hopefuls, if National can produce an inventive resolution to skirt Standing Orders.
Should we cheer? Of course, if justice is done — and the Ingram report suggests there is justice to be done. But can we be sure Parliament will do justice?
When you have untangled the tax package, turn your mind to a small bill in Parliament. It points to profitability.
The bill is Sue Kedgley’s version of two-year-old British legislation that establishes an employee’s right to ask for flexible work hours and conditions and requires an employer to give reasons if denying the request.
Long-run governments embed policies. And the policies that in turn embed long-run governments are those that have wide political-party and public consensus.
Such consensus should not be confused with the default political-party consensus which develops when the lead opposition party thinks better of promising to adjust policies, as with the anti-nuclear stance, the Cullen fund and students’ interest-free loans.
A major party cannot be a simple party. It must pull together different strands in a constructive tension. That is National’s challenge over the next two years.
Delegates to this weekend’s conference who look back over the party’s 70-year history will recall that its heyday was the third quarter of last century.
Climate change is coming, arguably for real, certainly in policy. Businesses that ignore it or fight the government on it might take a lesson from Telecom.
Telecom tried the government’s patience too long and got whacked. Had its internal debate last year gone the other way and voluntary unbundling and wholesale/retail split been started then, Telecom would have won marks with the public and the government.
There are two sorts of beneficiary: the can’t-works and the won’t-works. The point of modern welfare policy is to turn won’t-works into will-works and give can’t-works the chance of some work.
Instead, most of the argument we have heard over the past couple of weeks has been therapeutic hand-wringing, punitive vengeance and superior paternalism.
Friday is the Labour party’s ninetieth birthday. Today is the United States’ 230th. What would the founders think?
Labour was born in a time of darkest war, imperial grandeur gone bad. It was born in part of failure to improve working conditions through direct action and recognition that if improvement was to be won through political action, the movement’s disparate strands had to work as one.