The Olympic Games start this week. Breathlessly we will watch to see which of the drugs giants wins as their machines run, prance, swim and ride.
Sport at Olympic level has become a mixture of the chemical, the mechanical and celebrity. The television sport we watch — as distinct from the character-building sport we play (and fewer of us do, it seems) — is now lions versus Christians: keeping the masses doped up with spectacle.
At next Monday’s cabinet Helen Clark will match the leadership tenure of Labour’s greatest leader, Peter Fraser. Another milestone.
There is one striking difference. Fraser was Prime Minister for all but a year of his 10 years, 252 days as leader. Six years of Clark’s time were in opposition. She is still only third-longest serving Labour Prime Minister behind Fraser and David Lange, having passed Michael Joseph Savage’s four years, five months in April.
The credit card is full. You can’t load any more debt on the house because its value has stopped rising. How now to keep the good times rolling?
That is the crunch economic question for the government. The country doesn’t get richer long-term on household debt or by redividing the cake in the workplace. Those are one-offs.
Ted Lapkin, of the Australian/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, contrived last week to imply from the jailed Israeli spies affair that Helen Clark favours Al Qaeda over Israel. That says more about Lapkin than about Clark the warrior in Afghanistan.
In 2003 academic historian Joel Hayward was broken when the Jewish Council demanded Canterbury University review his 1991 master’s thesis which contained errors about the Holocaust. The university complied, even though an undergraduate paper is unlikely to start a pogrom and Hayward corrected his errors.
Politics is often a game of leads and lags. These take many forms and can decide elections.
Take the economy. There seems to be a lag of around a year to 18 months between a change in the direction of growth and a resultant change in electoral behaviour.
This is because the economic driver of votes is not the big numbers economists pore over but the small numbers: households’ balance sheets and cash flows. And even when the household numbers change there seems to be a lag before a new psychology cuts in and votes shift.
Here are two potential killers of this government (besides the Maori party which is dividing part of Labour’s core vote).
The first of these two other killers is “political correctness” — “PC”.
Of course, what is politically correct or, more accurately, politically incorrect, is in the eye of the beholder. The trick is to get your opponent seen as offside with majority values and too closely aligned to minority values — that is, correct about values the majority doesn’t care for.
Fair trade is free trade, right? Yes and no. Profits can be made out of fair trade that is not free.
This is not to be confused with the profits to be made out of unfair trade that is not free because of government policy or structural failure. United States’ mollycoddled cotton farmers, Japan’s geriatric rice farmers, Europe’s timorous farmers of all sorts live fat on government subsidies and protection. Huge companies control trade in some commodities on which tariffs are low or zero.
A year ago Don Brash laid down a challenge to the National party at its conference: did it really mean to constrain the government’s role and spending? If it did, Brash stated, some tough consequences would follow.
Brash laid out eight goals in a sort of credo. Among them:
* Hold government spending to its present level per person in inflation-adjusted terms. Over 10 years that would cut spending as a proportion of GDP by at least 5 per cent.
It is a week for constitutional moments — in Baghdad yesterday and in Wellington on Thursday.
The Baghdad moment was the official handover by the American occupiers to an Iraqi regime. This is supposed to be a step towards a “democratic” Iraq.
If so, it will be a long journey. Iraq has no tradition of democracy, lacks a sufficient middle class on which to build democratic traditions and is riven deeply by religion and ethnically, three nations rather than one. And next-door Iran is fomenting discord.
At first sight James Buwalda looks and sounds a harmless chap: soft-spoken, slight of build, an easy target, you would think, for Murray McCully hunting a bureaucratic scalp.
Then you notice a set to Buwalda’s jaw that bespeaks determination and an inner toughness. That has been felt full force in the Labour Department, which he took over as chief executive a year ago and is radically restructuring.