“Very, very, very close friends,” said Colin Powell. You can’t manage, wheedle, spin or buy the PR for the home front Helen Clark won in Washington.
This person, remember, is a principal architect of the anti-nuclear policy which precipitated the breach with the United States. She it was who stiffened then acting Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer against accepting a visit from the inoffensive Buchanan in early 1985.
An army marches on its stomach, goes the old saying. Nowadays civilians supply the victuals.
Is this the way it is supposed to be under a government that clings to the notion that only the state can run hospitals and schools? How come a British-based company can make a profit out of peacekeeping?
Serco specialises in outsourcing task management, engineering systems and infrastructure investment. In February 1998, in a joint venture with an Australian engineering firm, William Adams, it took over the army’s logistics — from “factory to foxhole”.
Two remarkable figures will be casualties if the Alliance’s disintegrates: Matt McCarten and Laila Harr�.
McCarten is a man of disarming charm, whose easy candour masks a native shrewdness as an organiser that enemies call cunning or deviousness. A television natural despite his slight stutter, he has the requisite charisma to lead a small party.
During the intense days after September 11 a top Labour minister observed: “The United States is not always right.” Will Helen Clark say that in the Oval Office next Tuesday?
“Not always right” is light years away from the “not often right” presumption by many of top Labour people’s ilk in the shadow of Vietnam in the early 1970s when the United States had a fondness for Latin American and Asian dictators. By contrast with that, Clark swiftly joined George Bush’s Afghanistan jihad.
There is a paradox at the heart of the innovation strategy. How can the government, by nature a risk-averse institution, encourage more risk-taking?
Vital to innovation is research. And vital to ground-breaking research is that researchers feel and are free to take risks, big risks.
This was one of the most salient points to emerge at a day-long forum on Thursday [14 March] on the potential for and of interaction between the arts and science organised by the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology.
On the wings of our electoral system are two parties which claim the future. But they could hardly be more different futures and they could hardly promote them more differently.
The Greens want ecological harmony, humans linked to nature in economic as well as spiritual life. ACT instals the individual at the centre of the universe and insists true harmony comes from individuals following their best instincts.
Bill English, a Southlander, is fomenting aggro between the provinces and Auckland. This is an interesting tactic.
Of course, more people live outside Auckland than in it. And the JAFA syndrome is alive and well. But an aspiring Prime Minister usually seeks to unite, not divide.
And an aspiring Prime Minister seeks especially not to make Auckland a target. When tax-scourge John Banks is on the side of higher taxes, one ought to register that something is up.
Pity the proletariat, the teeming masses with nothing to lose but their chains. They are losing their champions.
However the drama plays out in the Alliance now, the party’s hard-left council ideologues holding aloft the revolutionary standard are in real danger of oblivion.
It is now close to irrevocable that Jim Anderton will head a different group, perhaps constituted around the disgruntled Democrats, into the election and into the next Parliament. This move may come by end-April and may end “staunch” Laila Harr�’s cabinet career.
The Queen will come amongst us on Friday. This is a signal event.
OK, she’s not making a special visit to cheer up her loyal subjects. She’s en route to Australia to preside at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting.
But she is our head of state and commands all due respect. It’s not often she trips out this far from her British fastness.
A spectre stalks Bill English: the National sympathiser who votes Labour to block out the Greens.
This sort of talk has been around for the best part of a year. It quietened after Jenny Shipley was dumped in October. But it revived when English and his party disappeared during the summer.
The line goes like this. Labour looks odds-on for a second term. The Green peril is on the rise. So vote Labour to give the Labour-Alliance coalition a majority and leave no levers in Green hands.