How do you get economic growth down? Have a drought. How do you get it up? Get yourself a cornucopia of metals, gas and oil.
A drought in this country cuts deep into GDP. A drought in Australia does not have much affect because agriculture is a relatively small part of the economy.
Australia has vast mineral and petroleum riches. New Zealand’s supply is not in that league.
Much of politics and government is about managing and minimising risk. Failure invites a media roasting.
Take politics: a big risk for National is that on election day voters will not see a government-in-waiting.
To get Peter Dunne alongside, National needs, he says, more votes than Labour. Right now National is trailing Labour by 10 per cent in the polls.
What the state gives, the state can take away. That is a message we usually learn too late.
Take farmers. In the late 1970s Sir Robert Muldoon, National party Prime Minister, dreamt up a supplementary minimum price scheme (SMPs) to support farmers under pressure.
Inflation was rampant, costs were high and prices were low. The terms of trade had dropped by a third between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s.
What does a third-world nation want most? To be as rich as a first-world nation.
There is an exception. Bhutan’s official measure of performance is gross national happiness. Bhutan is very poor. Four-fifths of its population are subsistence farmers and it ranks 134th out of 177 on the United Nations Development Programme’s index.
Nine years ago at this time ACT met in conference as a 2 per cent party. Richard Prebble was made leader and made ACT a 6 per cent party in the election in October.
That’s Rodney Hide’s task as he goes into his first conference as ACT leader this weekend.
ACT’s poll average in the four major polls published in February was 2.1 per cent. That is microscopically better than the February 1996 four-poll average of 1.7 per cent (the precise election vote was 6.2 per cent).
His Royal Highness Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, is dropping in. Time to reflect.
Prince Charles represents the monarchy — our monarchy, furnished to us for ceremonials by the august House of Windsor and the generous English people.
Women’s magazines will be pleased he is coming amongst us. With Charles on the cover they can sell more copies. He is not female but he is a passable stand-in.
State-owned enterprises float in murky political waters. John Key is about to tiptoe in.
He will tiptoe because this is a pond in which National could easily sink. The prevailing folklore is that Labour and National governments in the 1980s and 1990s flogged off state assets to greedy foreigners who made a bomb out of them for little or no gain to taxpayers.
Steve Maharey has become one of the cabinet’s most influential ministers. That was unthinkable five years ago.
Maharey has always been the most theoretical minister, a student of “third way” theory. That was too airy-fairy for Helen Clark, whose politics is an admixture of farm-girl practicality and 1970s university social democracy.
We make half a million 111 calls a year. That is one for every eight people, babies included. We are, it seems, a very violent or very jumpy society.
Telecom’s white pages say 111 is “for emergencies”. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary describes “emergency” as: “a situation, especially of danger or conflict, that arises unexpectedly and requires urgent action; (a person with) a condition requiring immediate treatment.”
You don’t hear much of Helengrad these days. Instead, the sniggers are likely to be about The Don. The Soviet allusion has given way to the Sicilian: get in line or you’re topped.
Katherine Rich did not just lose her portfolio. She plunged in rank. Don Brash was exacting retribution.
In her early years in government Helen Clark micro-managed. Very few ministers had cabinet experience and she said they needed guidance if the government was to function well.