The most important word uttered by Helen Clark last week was “worldview”. It signals her recognition of biculturalism, the country’s biggest challenge.
Turning that challenge into opportunity would inscribe Clark’s prime ministership in history more memorably than a bigger economy or better hospitals.
Been bowled over by the knowledge wave lately? You know, the one that was making big surf in August? Probably not. But there is a quiet swell.
The hype of the conference co-chaired by Auckland University vice-chancellor John Hood and Prime Minister Helen Clark in August has faded and the slogan has also dropped from public view. But there are some initiatives that directly result from conference recommendations and others to which it added impetus. The slogan has provided a low-level unifying theme.
One of my favourite small companies is Learning Media. A CROC (Crown-owned company), it is no crock. Jim Anderton could cite it in his anti-privatisation speeches.
Learning Media was once a departmental supplier of classroom fodder. Rogergnomes turned the bureaucrats into a company and told them to find ways of making money. And they have: revenue doubled (to $24 million) and profits quadrupled (to $2.7 million) in the past five years, with exports now at 40% of sales.
We now have a battle of political generations. That is what Bill English’s leisurely accession to the National party leadership spells.
Helen Clark is, in political terms, a child of the 1960s and early 1970s. English is politically a child of the 1990s. The next four years will be a contest between their different ways of viewing the world.
Australia is dispatching troops, planes and ships for George Bush’s war. This country has offered the SAS, fullstop. Yet again the two nations are diverging, a now familiar fact in a relationship of critical importance to business.
There is another familiar fact: apart from to companies with business or subsidiaries here, New Zealand doesn’t seriously matter to Australia, except when things go wrong.
The government is about to make one of the most critical decisions of its first term — maybe its whole life. It will decide policy on genetic modification (GM). Whichever way it jumps, there will be no way back to where we are now for a long time, perhaps eternity.
The cabinet will make this critical decision amidst a frenzy of lobbying and propaganda from GM’s opponents (who call it genetic engineering, which sounds more sinister) and proponents, some of whom have had the Prime Minister’s ear in recent weeks.
Jenny Shipley is gutsy. She showed that in a losing campaign in 1999. She showed it again on Monday night, conceding defeat to Bill English’s promoters. Can English match that gutsiness?
He will need to. He is now head to head with a hardened campaigner in Helen Clark, pragmatic to her back teeth when the public opinion chips are down. See how quickly she read the mood on troops for America. See how she wrapped herself in the flag over Air New Zealand.
This is a green government. That can’t be said too often and Marian Hobbs was at it on Monday evening, celebrating a decade of the Resource Management Act and promising “strong government leadership” to achieve the act’s objectives.
Her report card: “…enables communities to manage their environment . . . ground-breaking framework for achieving sustainability . . . largely successful, achieving a great deal to improve the environment.” And democratic: “If you provide people with a way to have their say, there will inevitably be disagreements.”
It looked an innocuous little measure, with a tightly limited purpose. But the bill enabling the Stock Exchange (NZSE) to demutualise contains within it some meaty issues that go to the heart of the government’s approach to regulation of the markets.
The New Zealand Stock Exchange Restructuring Bill is a “private bill” — that is, a bill (pro forma sponsored by Environment Minister Marian Hobbs as MP for Wellington Central, where the NZSE head office is) to empower it do what it cannot otherwise do lawfully.
Tomorrow Pete Hodgson will announce the government’s energy conservation strategy. It will be ambitious and far-reaching, digging into our wallets to save the planet from greenhouse gases.
More policies will follow. This government is determined to meet the Kyoto targets (though it appears set to eschew the option of genetic modification of fodder to tame this country’s worst offender, animal methane emissions).