Matt Robson’s media profile is a reasoned advocate of enlightened treatment of criminals.
This is not a fashionable cause, even with his Labour allies in the cabinet. Characteristically, however, Mr Robson courts not popularity but rightness as he sees it.
This is the man who in 1989 gave up almost certain Labour candidacy for a safe seat to follow his conscience into minority politics. That marks him as unusual in a place where the main chance is the main course.
Is this an unholy alliance? Commerce Minister Paul Swain is co-hosting an address by former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar next week – with, of all people, the Business Roundtable.
Just two days earlier Mr Swain will pack down at the Prime Minister’s cabinet-meets-business conference, from which some prominent Roundtablers have been explicitly excluded.
Early in my appropriately short stage career, when I was five or six, the focal point of a play I starred in was whether the cheese someone had been sent to buy was milder than strong or stronger than mild. The regulation debate has taken on some of that flavour.
Is the government moving us into a heavy light-handed regulatory regime or a light heavy-handed one? Much hangs on this.
I remember as a fledgling parliamentary journalist marvelling at Pierre Trudeau’s way of answering questions. This was the Holyoake era and intellect was an infrequent visitor to politics.
Mr Trudeau seemed to reach deep into a cultural and intellectual reservoir to begin each answer. He was deeply thoughtful and subtly informative. He was, to boot, suave and handsome, even dashing.
If the dollar, the petrol price and the Olympic washout haven’t yet got you down, go listen to a home-grown captain of industry. Mapped out between you and your economic hopes will be mighty crevasses of unconfidence and gloom.
Perhaps positive thinking is these days reserved to foreign magnates who can invest their energy and money anywhere in the international board game. Certainly, by most accounts, the Herald’s owner, Tony O’Reilly – who distinguished himself in my eyes way back in 1959 by, film-star-like, wearing cut-down boots as a British Lions wing – was upbeat in speeches here last week.
Now the H-word is coming back to haunt Labour backbenchers in a very personal way. The polls are giving them their first foretaste of defeat in 2002. What is their government to do?
This year has been spent honouring the “credit card’s” seven promises and ministers are congratulating themselves that they are now well through that. Money is being spent, programmes are in train, laws have been passed or are being drafted.
In Melbourne rich countries’ kids “non-violently” stop people gathering to talk about free trade. In Wellington Jenny Shipley leads her party into opposition to a free trade agreement. What is going on?
Mrs Shipley argues that she is not opposing the Singapore-New Zealand “closer economic partnership” (CEP) agreement, just its special treatment for Maori. But if her party, however sorely provoked by Helen Clark, persists in this political posturing, that opposition will amount to opposition to the CEP.
Tariana Turia is right. Colonisation of Maori devastated a culture, an economy and a power system.
To understand why she is right, imagine that 7 or 8 million Chinese arrive and impose the Mandarin language, a different set of laws and way of doing business and a political system that marginalises us and follow that up, if we resist, by military confiscation of swathes of farmland, factories and offices – plus a bonus of deadly new diseases.
Want to hear another, true, horror story about our low dollar? Last week a man had his credit card at first refused in China because it had the words “New Zealand” on it.
Once upon a time we thought of China as coolies in poverty. Now the Chinese think of us as unbankable.
How did we get to this “kiwifruit republic” state?
National is trying to eliminate some differences with Labour so it can better compete. It is also trying to sharpen some differences with Labour so it can better compete.
Divergence, it seems, is the better part of valour.
Nowhere is divergence more evident than in National’s muddle over Maori. Jenny Shipley, political child of placid mid-century provincialism, intoned slogans to her party’s conference on Saturday of the sort likely to whip white unease into a froth of ethnic resentment. Bill English, not long out of short pants when the Treaty of Waitangi renaissance began and seeking centrist reconciliation, says National must have Maori support to win long term and is heading out to marae and Maori “nation-building” hui.