Don Brash could do with a short course in politics — national politics.
Who was first item on TV1 news on Saturday evening and on yesterday’s front pages? Not Hu, who should have been. Instead, Dr Who.
Whether Brash or Bill English is National party leader today is trivial in the grand scheme. Getting on well with an immense and fast-enriching country is vital to the nation.
Tomorrow the apocalypse. The moratorium comes off applications to release genetically modified organisms.
If the Greens are to be believed, once the first GMO is approved, even conditionally, Pandora’s box is open and there is no putting the lid back on. We are doomed, economically, corporeally and spiritually.
Who said this last week? “The Jews rule the world by proxy. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong.”
A bigot. A loudmouth. And, to boot, a senior Asian leader: Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, the world’s 17th biggest trading nation.
A little-noticed item in the Land Transport Management Bill is the insertion of “demand management”. The aim is to constrain road traffic.
This additional Green victory was put in by Parliament’s transport and industrial relations committee, which reported the bill back to the House on Monday.
Australian students used to picket the One Nation party. Its anti-immigrant, anti-aborigine rhetoric was anathema to left-liberal idealism. But last week the students’ leader effusively praised One Nation’s sole surviving senator, Len Harris.
Harris had pledged the deciding vote against the government’s differential university fees, adding yet another defeated bill to a lengthening list which John Howard will be able to advance only by a joint sitting of both houses of Parliament after the next election.
Article 1: Can Japan forge a tripolar Asia?
Colin James for the New Zealand Herald for 1 October 2003
First of three on Japan, with a fourth for the Business Herald
Down here at the end of the world we know what it is like to be an outlier nation. We see Japan as part of Asia. But Japan acts like an outlier too.
A problem with genetic modification (GM) is that it invites us to take risks and the twentieth century gnawed away our tolerance for risk gone bad.
It doesn’t help that insurance companies insure only fully calculable risk fully covered by premiums. So they have refused GM cover.
One big GM risk involves this complex calculation: will losing “GM-free” status lose food export markets? A deeper risk is the one science constantly courts as it opens up the unknown: what might it unleash?
Guess who is the most admired businesswoman of this country. Telecom’s golden woman, Theresa Gattung? Telstra Clear’s feisty Rosemary Howard? No. It’s Helen Clark.
That is the finding of a poll by BRC Marketing and Social Research. It comes in the wake of other polls demonstrating widespread public ignorance of the crucial role of business in raising and maintaining living standards.
How come farmers are so powerful? They turn rich countries’ presidents and prime ministers to jelly. Poor countries’ leaders made jelly of the WTO trade talks on behalf of farmers.
In rich Japan, where I am just now, full-time farmers are fewer than 1 per cent of the workforce. But, working through an arcane political system, they have frozen negotiators for decades.
The government’s share of the economy may have less effect on growth than previously thought — but the expenditure and taxing mix may be holding us back.
These are among findings in a study by Dr Arthur Grimes, a former head of economics at the Reserve bank and director of the Institute of Policy Studies at Victoria University, now with Motu Research, a think tank, and adjunct economics professor at Waikato University.