Politicians will shortly engage in bloodsport with Television New Zealand’s board, executives and stars. All good fun but what will it tell us?
It will tell us at least one board member is too nosey-parker, stars are paid too much for the Prime Minister’s liking and much shareholder value has been destroyed. But we know all that.
Things in threes have a pleasing alliteration. So, for example, it is convenient to mark the modern media by three Cs: celebrity, confrontation and crime.
That explains why Christine Rankin (a fourth C) was a headline hit a few years back: celebrity status; confrontation in court with ministers; and, if not crime, allegations of impropriety.
Six years ago this coming Sunday Helen Clark won office. She won a third term in September-October. But is her nemesis round the corner?
Few — and I was not one — predicted six years ago that Clark would get three terms.
We reckoned without export and house price booms.
We reckoned without her evolution in office, with touches of populism in, for example, her championing of the rugby world cup bid and her pitch rightwards since 2002 in forming governments.
Productivity growth is the centrepiece of Helen Clark’s third term and she told us last week “science and innovation are critical to driving our prosperity”. But the numbers — and the logic — don’t add up.
The government’s strategy for “driving prosperity” is in its vaunted growth and innovation framework (GIF). Research, science and technology (RS&T) is a core element of the GIF.
John Key tells of an international bank — not his one — which used to expect its employees around the world to live the business culture of its home country.
It was a one-culture company. It didn’t work. Employees preferred to live their own countries’ cultures.
So the bank became a one-company culture, unified under a brand and certain operational commonalities but accommodating national cultural differences. It has flourished.
Once in 2002 I rang Rod Donald somewhat before 6 in the morning, anticipating he would be calling for the latest poll averages and determined for once to get in first. He didn’t answer but rang me back a bit later.
The phone had been on, he said, but he had been in the shower. Upon which I tried some humour: no doubt, he slept with it under his pillow. Well, actually, he did. Nicola was not very pleased, he added.
Back to Muldoonist meddling or some judicious jawboning? Which does the inquiry into direct intervention into house mortgages amount to?
Intervention would be a big step away from the principles governing the financial markets for the past 20 years and would carry attendant risks of a less flexible economy and slower growth.
Through today’s Speech from the Throne and in speeches over the next few weeks Helen Clark will promote her reading of the “New Zealand way”. She wants that to be your reading of the “New Zealand way” too.
And the longer she stays in office the more time and opportunity she gets to do just that, to make her government “normal”.
It’s a perennial story: the central government’s version of the local hole-in-the-road syndrome — where the “w” gets lost from “whole-of-government” action.
You know the local story: serial roadworks to fix the drains, water supply, phone cables, electricity cables and then drains again.
What does National need to do before the next election? Put the small “n” back in National.
That is, it must look, smell, feel, sound and act like a party representative of the nation — as it was in its halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s.
At National party conferences these days you count the Maori there in single digits; so, too, for Pacific islanders and other ethnic minorities.