We have, it seems, an oversupply of corner-cutting developers, architects, engineers and builders and inattentive building inspectors policing inadequate law.
Low-life has invaded the high-rise. Town houses and apartment blocks have leaked stains on our national honour.
My favourite story is actually of a non-leak: an apartment block’s fire sprinklers not connected to water, allegedly ticked off by the Fire Service. Whom can you trust?
New Zealand is too small and has to get more lined up with Australia, three Australian chief executives of New Zealand organisations told a conference on Saturday.
“If we (Australian and New Zealand) don’t get it together, it’s going to be a Texan boot or something like that that kicks us,” said TelstraClear CEO Rosemary Howard at the conference, organised by Victoria University’s Stout Centre and Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and part-sponsored by the Australian High Commission and Qantas.
Peter Dunne hasn’t shifted his generally dry-ish economic stance to accommodate his big centre-left partner in government. So United Future will likely oppose new workplace regulation. But neither will the party relitigate past changes.
And, Dunne said in an interview, so far the arrangement with Labour-Progressive Coalition ministers is working “punctiliously”. “Ministers are going out of their way to build relationships.”
You don’t need to know how electricity works to turn on the lights in your house.
That’s how Social Crediters, now all but defunct, locked up in Jim Anderton’s Progressive Coalition, used decades ago to deflect scepticism about their wondrous A-plus-B theorem to solve the world’s financial ills.
Biosecurity Minister Jim Sutton isn’t panicking despite a gloomy assessment of biosecurity strategy and procedures by his Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in its post-election briefing.
A Biosecurity Council set up in 1997 produced a draft strategy earlier this year but it has been concluded that it was not sufficiently focused, Sutton said in an interview [on Monday].
Politics is a realists’ trade. The most artful practitioners keep principle in the back pocket, if anywhere.
Bill English says he is hewing a principled line on Iraq. This fits in with his declaration in his first speech this session that National will hold the government to account according to National’s principles.
Here’s a challenge: in the haystack of departmental post-election briefings to ministers find the needle, the references to personal responsibility.
I’ve ploughed through 14. The firm message is that a large number of your fellow-citizens are helpless. Things happen to them, disadvantages are imposed on them, barriers are erected to stop them being full members of society.
Science Minister Pete Hodgson will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Crown research institutes (CRIs) this evening (Monday) with stern words from his ministry about the “fragility” of the research system ringing in his ears.
The Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (MoRST) wants “new processes to create a more motivated and focused research community”, which it broadly hints is low in morale. For a government that has made “innovation” central to its economic programme, these words have a special urgency — and they come after three years in office.
What hasn’t changed in your life since September 11 2001? Almost everything hasn’t changed. Helen Clark is still Prime Minister. The economy bowled on with hardly a hiccup. The big change was to be searched at airports by paranoiacs who believed you could destroy tall buildings with nail scissors.
Helen Clark is in her element this week: summiting with “world leaders”, this time in Johannesburg to save the world’s poor and the environment by way of “sustainable development”. This is social democracy on a very grand scale.
Clark is in interesting company: protesters against that paramount evil, “globalisation”, who now bedevil every conference of “world leaders”. Their thesis is that rich countries and their corporations are enslaving the world and wrecking the environment through free trade.