Could any bunch of bumbling bureaucrats have done as badly with Air New Zealand as the private sector geniuses?
They’ve reduced a good little airline to an orphan on the taxpayer’s teat — maybe killed it. They’ve wrecked the livelihoods of thousands of decent Australians. They’ve tarnished the koru’s image and the country’s standing and put exports at risk.
Parliament has in the past week been expending much energy and hot air perpetuating an injustice. But could it have done differently?
Here’s the injustice. Had erstwhile ACC minister Ruth Dyson that fateful night last year crashed while driving over the alcohol limit and suffered a work-impairing head injury she would have received a state benefit (ACC) related to her six-figure income.
Commerce Minister Paul Swain will soon produce new car dealers legislation which will be more light-handed than the National government wrote. Last Wednesday he claimed to be responding positively to 90 per cent of his business compliance costs panel’s recommendations.
And, he said in an interview, the “tweaks” the government has been making to competition law has reached high tide. The re-regulation of the economy and social services to correct what the Labour party saw as market failures or inappropriate application of market principles will be completed next year.
Tom Scott once famously said that King Country was the sort of seat a gumboot could run for National and would win. Well, the gumboot in that seat got to be seven years Prime Minister, an able Ambassador in Washington and now New Zealand Post chair. What next?
Jim Bolger turned out no gumboot. A slow burner, perhaps. But this tortoise has plugged on past a lot of hares. The outsider became the ultimate insider.
Winston Peters is on to a good thing, eh?. Asian refugees will stop the greyhairs getting operations. Worth a few votes, that.
Except that this time he starts from the pits of micro-support, not the trampoline of rising stardom, as with Asian migrants in 1995-96. And he is up against a Prime Minister who, unlike Jim Bolger, is cogent with the media.
“Saying sorry won’t get a new wall-to-wall,” the Barry Humphreys character Edna Everage once famously said, complaining about a guest who had spilt wine on the carpet.
And that was the killer for Ella Henry. Saying sorry didn’t remove the stain. The Human Rights Commission could not credibly have carried her after her hot-headed letter to a policeman wrongly alleging racism. Presuming racism in others without direct evidence is itself a form of racism.
There is nothing like the alpine winter air to purify the spirit and clear the mind. On holiday far from the treacherous avalanche terrain of Wellington politics, the Prime Minister can refine priorities.
One is clear: her government gives the environment priority over the economy. Sandra Lee’s Reefton mining ban is on message.
What’s business’s biggest beef with the Government? High on most lists — including the Government’s business compliance cost committee’s — is the Resource Management Act (RMA). The National party aims to capitalise on it to win business votes.
To many in business the RMA has meant uncertainty, delays, court appeals and added costs. Some projects drown in a soup of bureaucracy and objections. Some would-be investors just give up.
Rodney Hide is putting trust to the test. Drip by drip he drops his leakers’ corrosive acid on Jim Anderton’s kiwibank, for which you, as captive shareholders, are stumping up $80 million.
The upshot is the loss of the Prime Minister’s trust in a vital state agency, the Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit, apparently the source of at least some of the leaks.
What do the Greens stand for? Sustainable development is high on the list. But what does it mean?
For some people sustainable development means no more than an economic growth rate which can be sustained, cycle after cycle. Ours now is somewhere between 2.5 per cent and 3 per cent, which the government wants lifted to 4 per cent.