Now we have the government’s manifesto for a second term. That manifesto is: “Eat your cake and grow it, too.”
The innovation strategy announced to Parliament yesterday rejects any suggestion that hard choices are needed between social and environmental spending and economic policy if growth targets are to be met. All three will proceed in parallel.
Embedded in Prime Minister Helen Clark’s annual statement to Parliament on February 12 fleshing out her ambition to “transform” the economy will be lashings of private sector thinking.
This itself represents a transformation — of government-business relations. Two years ago ministers scandalised business with policies friendly to their core supporters but hostile to business. After the smoke cleared from that battlefield the government and some in business began gingerly to explore paths across no-man’s-land.
The Treaty of Waitangi was supposed, its British signatory famously said, to make one people of two. Today it signifies two cultures, not one.
And the unified power system imposed by the British assumption of government which the treaty legitimised no longer goes unchallenged.
That is biculturalism. Get it right and the future looks promising. Get it wrong and we risk a mini-Palestine.
This non-nation will struggle through — or simply ignore, except as a holiday — its notional national day next Wednesday.
Twenty-nine years ago a nationalist Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, who made February 6 the national day, said the Treaty of Waitangi gave two peoples “the gift of opportunity”.
A marvellous thing happened on our way into the twenty-first century. Our economic prospects started to feel better — but that is partly because we got poorer.
Provided no international economic calamity takes us all down, this decade is shaping up not too badly.
Exports have gone well these past couple of years and the proceeds have been flowing into the cities. Migration has turned from an outflow to an inflow. The stockmarket, while hardly rocketing into the ether, did well above the world average last year.
Nandor Tanczos of the Greens refused to condemn the vandalisation of genetically modified (GM) potatoes in a Crop and Food Research Institute laboratory. This is a matter of profound importance.
First, note that Green co-leader Rod Donald approved “civil disobedience” in some cases in respect of GM crops when the government announced its position on the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification — though on Monday co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons explicitly condemned this particular act.
There are some really bad sides to MMP. We saw one just before Christmas: some very bad lawmaking and some very bad law.
Unsurprisingly, it involved Winston Peters. Not a man for detail, his drinking ban bill contained a stupid error and so turned out to be unfit for the hoon-crunching it was designed for.
Seeking heroes for an uneasy culture It’s a new year and it’s time we climbed out of the slough we’ve been in these past 20 years. Having some heroes would help.
We’ve just lost one. That was a surprise to me because, though I fully understood the America’s Cup’s status in popular culture, I had not grasped that Sir Peter Blake had become a national hero.
The public service is headed for sweeping changes in the wake of a high-powered “review of the centre” commissioned by State Services Minister Trevor Mallard — though they will not be introduced as a big bang.
Mr Mallard will today confirm the cabinet’s agreement to the changes. A change implementation advisory board is to be appointed to ensure the changes are driven through.
Did the world change on September 11? I didn’t think so on September 12 and I don’t think so now.
It was a spectacular event, brilliant in conception and execution and awe-striking in destruction of a cityscape.
It greatly annoyed the Americans who have responded with great force to exterminate an evil.