They came, they conquered with words and they went — back home to countries that innovate, that organise, that are upwardly mobile.
Behind they left some energised and better networked people and even a good intention or two and some others a bit more aware of the hard choices ahead if we are to “catch the knowledge wave” to the top league.
It is a perfectly valid choice for the people of this country to make to settle for gentle economic decline relative to other countries. It is the one the people have made for 35 years and it has loads of international precedent, since Greece pioneered it two millennia ago.
But it is not one that appeals to the political, research and business elites. So start paddling for the Knowledge Wave.
Some things don’t change. When last the National party conference met in the Auckland Town Hall in 1980, my low opinion of the morning tea biscuits stirred divisional chair Pat Baker’s wife Susan to bake me a batch of excellent cheese scones.
This Sunday morning just past, in the same unhallowed precincts, Pat delivered me a little box of Susan’s tasty fresh-baked cheese puffs to mark National’s return.
Look through the smoke of the presidential battle at this coming weekend’s National party conference and whom do you see? Simon Power.
Take note of that name. It has a tailor-made feel to it.
Jenny Shipley has plucked Power from the very back benches to make the conference’s closing speech on “A National future”.
So Mark Prebble, head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, had to move out of range of Christine Rankin’s fleshly protuberances. Senior public servants once were made of sterner stuff.
Prebble, a most able bureaucrat, thought he had offered Rankin helpful advice. But it turns out he was being taken down in evidence, as were others, all now national laughing-stocks.
Who does the cabinet think is the most important visitor this week? Indonesian President Wahid, who is on the skids? Or Sir Tony Atkinson?
Sir Tony Who? What’s he got that warranted a meeting with the full cabinet on Monday afternoon, dinner with selected senior ministers on Monday night, a meeting with the Labour caucus yesterday morning — and star turn at a day-long seminar on Friday, at which Helen Clark will deliver “a vision for social democracy in New Zealand”?
What’s going on? The government should be losing ground in the polls but over the past month it has gained.
The health sector is in uproar and the government’s response is to gag (it is a gag, whatever weasel words Annette King envelopes it in) the hospital chief executives who can’t make ends meet because costs, in-part government-imposed, exceed government-supplied revenue.
A year ago a disastrous series of misapprehensions was in train which eventually scythed the top off Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ), the local bodies’ umbrella organisation.
It was all about how the Prime Minister came to be double-booked for the local government conference in July and for one of her sacred holiday breaks. Innocent and guilty alike sizzled in the conflagration.
A day with the Greens is bracing, lashings of icy air, apocalypse and utopia.
The Greens, like many small parties before them — for example, the Social Crediters, now submerged in the Alliance — have the luxury of certainty of their analysis and prescription.
Unlike the Social Crediters, however, they can draw comfort and reinforcement from recent history’s march, now quickening with global warming, towards their thinking.
Bill English is not a great self-trumpeter. He’s more believable in a low key. Trumpets make noisy politics. His strength is in the subtleties of strategic policy.
Largely unnoticed amid the big brass Budget fanfares, English has been tinkling out a melody of National economic policy renewal.
On Budget night leader Jenny Shipley banged on about the low-paid. That’s defensible — just — as an attempt to wedge the government away from its core vote and English dutifully hums along.