Category: NZ Herald

This is becoming a heavy-duty session for bills that test MPs’ personal beliefs and political footwork: last month, prostitution; next, euthanasia; coming later this year, cannabis’ legal status and same-sex marriage.

Such bills rouse high passions. They brutally divide society, political parties and friendships. Lobbies with fierce, irreconcilable views put MPs under heavy pressure. And, usually promoted by an individual MP, they are typically decided on “conscience”: MPs personally decide how to vote, free of the party whip. read more

Today the National party caucus disposes of Maurice Williamson, its leader has said. The party board is to do its bit on membership on Thursday.

The first question this messy affair raises is: What damage suspending or expelling Williamson will do? The party’s answer: less than leaving him in.

Leaving him in risks more such episodes as his rock-throwing on conference eve. Counselling by present and past grandees did not work before the conference so cannot be counted on to work now. read more

If the Treaty of Waitangi hadn’t been around, would we be bothering about the foreshore and seabed? Yes.

This is not a matter driven by the Treaty. It is a matter of indigenous rights. Indeed, the very fact that the Treaty has become a hot topic over the past 20 years is at least partly due to a rise to prominence of indigenous rights in ex-colonial countries, Australia, Canada and the United States among them. read more

Holding government spending growth to no more than the rise in population and prices is one of eight goals proposed by National party finance spokesman Don Brash.

Brash stated his goals at the National party conference in Christchurch yesterday [Sunday]. They are not yet party policy. Though Leader Bill English told the Herald he was “relaxed” about them, he described them as “proposed goals”. Detailed policy is still some distance away. read more

God is a socialist, surely. Just as voters braced for cold showers and blackouts, the rains came and filled the lakes. For good measure, June was warm (well, not too cold).

This is the second year it has rained on cue. In April last year one generator gravely warned me of price spikes in the campaign if Helen Clark pulled an early election. read more

No weapons of mass destruction found and time is getting on. Not a good look for George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard who gave WMD as their top reason for invading Iraq.

WMD may yet be found. But the United States has moved the target: the evidence will come from “the scientists not the sand dunes”, academic and former United States presidential adviser Richard Allen, still influential in Washington, told the Otago University foreign policy school on Sunday. The issue is capability to produce, not actual existence. read more

This is a taxing government. Not a wildly taxing government but one which puts your taxes up nonetheless.

This is both overt and covert.

The overt tax increases have been in excise taxes, on alcohol, tobacco and petrol — and, of course, the extra 6c income tax in 2000 on “the rich”, the over-$60,000s. read more

Bill English was at it again on Thursday on the Treaty of Waitangi: “one standard of citizenship for a nation of mongrels” might be a loose translation.

“We must,” he told a party fund-raising dinner in deeply conservative Matamata, “break out of the paralysing ideology of the Treaty and the arrogant attitudes that go with it. read more

The interviewer, a man of obvious erudition, succinctly leads a world-class military historian and a large audience in the Sydney Town Hall through an insightful tour of the historian’s recent work.

A former journalist, he uses the best of the interviewer’s tools: he elicits and does not instruct; he is unobtrusive but not obsequious, empathetic but not sycophantic. He adds context from his own extensive knowledge. read more

Capitalism, the left used to say, “privatises its profits and socialises its losses”. So Air New Zealand goes bust and workers’ taxes rescue it. TranzRail gets into difficulty and there the workers are again.

The other side of that coin is crass government. In the late 1980s Sir Roger Douglas kept finding hidden losses from Sir Robert Muldoon’s early 1980s “think big” heavy industrialisation programme. The massive addition to government debt — upwards of $8 billion — was a part-driver of the sale of state enterprises that followed. read more