You think Australia is big? Think again. Australia is small.
Smallness was a refrain at the Australia-New Zealand leadership forum on Friday-Saturday — not just about this country but also from the Australian side about Australia.
Hence part of the impetus for the new Australian interest in the past two years in pushing CER, the trans-Tasman free trade agreement, to higher levels of regulatory integration and on to a “single market”.
It is better to let big sister think she thought of something first. That way little sister get her way.
Qantas chair Margaret Jackson arrived for the Australia-New Zealand leadership forum bent on a mission to soup up CER into a common market with a common currency. She was going to stir the laggards on this side of the Tasman into action.
Business New Zealand is about to campaign to “harness Kiwi values so growth is portrayed as an outcome of Kiwi values, not a threat to them”. So chief executive Simon Carlaw told a National party regional conference on Saturday.
This comes off the back of a Growth and Innovation Advisory Board’s survey of values and attitudes to business and growth which, Carlaw said, found that linking New Zealanders’ strong, distinctive values to “business” and “growth” causes their attitudes to business success and opportunities to “become very positive”.
After last week’s tumults, is MMP an unstable system? This week Parliament should be calmer. But last week’s high drama about the government’s majority has raised a question: Is MMP an unstable system? If it is, it will be changed.
Consider the record:
* In 1998 the National-New Zealand First coalition fell apart. National survived in office only on mavericks’ votes.
Colin James on a Treasury report on growth for the Business Herald
The “failed policies of the 1990s” didn’t fail. The economy speeded up and the country is richer as a result. But there were some gaps, most notably in skills development and capital accumulation. And some of the government’s changes since 1999 are working against future improvements.
Muddy shoes in the Koru lounge at Wellington airport. Tired and happy, thickly accented Maori. That was the end of the hikoi for some.
Those “marchers” didn’t sound or look like “haters and wreckers”, as the Prime Minister characterised the leaders. But they thought they had done a good thing, alongside the Harawiras and Sykes. They were buzzing.
Without Richard Prebble there would be no ACT. In March 1996 ACT was polling the same as now, around 2 per cent on average. Prebble got it to 6 per cent.
But this year it began to look as if with Prebble there would be no ACT. His curious attack on Don Brash at ACT’s conference in March indicated a man losing his grip.
Former Prime Minister David Lange did not tell the United States Secretary of State George Schultz he would bring about a change in the Labour party’s anti-nuclear policy, Merwyn Norrish, foreign affairs chief at the time said at the weekend.
This has been a bone of contention between New Zealand and the United States since the fateful meeting between the pair two days after the 1984 election which brought Lange to power. Some think the rift that then developed is a reason why New Zealand has lagged Australian in getting a free trade agreement with the United States.
The ghost of Michelle Boag, the ill-fated former National party president, will stalk the party’s regional conferences which begin this weekend. Boag asked Don Brash to stand in 2002. And Brash has resuscitated the party.
Sure, polls are now showing National off its peak and logic suggests it will come off more over the next few months. But there has been a step-shift upwards of 10 per cent or more. Boag, who left under a cloud shortly after the 2002 election disaster, has been thereby in part vindicated.
A fantasy of farm leaders for 30 years or more has been that the Chinese will all buy one wool sock, eat one rack of lamb and drink a pint of milk: instant export bonanza.
Of course, it doesn’t work like that. But China is an enormous market, enriching fast, with 100 million middle class consumers who want high-end protein which is this country’s specialty.