Pre-ODT Columns – Page 13

Making economic (non)sense of climate change

Here’s a joke about economists in a letter last week to the Economist magazine:

“When I considered taking a degree in economics almost 50 years ago, I was told that the exam questions would be the same from year to year but that the correct answers would differ each year.”

Here’s a not-so-jokey letter from the same issue: “The current head of the Congressional Budget Office co-wrote a paper a few years back titled: ‘Can Financial Innovation Help to Explain the Reduced Volatility of Economic Activity?’ ” read more

Making big policy in defence

Defence is high policy. Or is it? That question is at the core of Wayne Mapp’s defence review.

Most often “defence” is parked in talk of weapons, platforms and personnel. That keeps it safely out of polite society. So polite society keeps the defence force hungry: a guard dog it has to have but keeps in a kennel in the yard. read more

Stronger together in an uncertain world

Fresh from free-trading the Pacific in Cairns, John Key will be back in Australia in a fortnight, this time to advance the trans-Tasman single economic market.

Three ministers, Simon Power, Tim Groser and David Carter will meet Australian counterparts Nick Sherry, Simon Crean and Tony Burke tomorrow to tick some boxes for “tangible outcomes” when Key meets Kevin Rudd on August 20. read more

Local and global — the emissions target tango

Here are two angles on the 2020 target for greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). One is the greens’ slogan to “think globally, act locally”. The other is to think locally and act globally.

Greenpeace and others who back a 40 per cent cut take the first route.

The world is headed for trouble, they say. Sure, if New Zealand stopped emitting GHGs completely that would not avert the trouble. But if everyone takes on board the global predicament and takes local action, that would limit the global trouble. And we would be good citizens of the world. read more

One way to make Key's National the future

Bill English first came as an MP to a National party conference in Christchurch in the floodwaters of the 1991 “mother of all budgets”. Delegates were stunned or in uproar. The only uproar at this weekend’s conference in Christchurch will be rapture over its leader.

John Key and English will be lionised for victory last year and for running an agenda delegates can applaud. read more

The modern National party on show

Does Bill English have a radical rightwing economic agenda and did we see flashes of that this past week in Treasury Secretary John Whitehead’s speech on the public sector and English’s foreign investment rule changes?

Is this the vulpine National party slinking out from its lair to ravage an unsuspecting populace? Is that what we will see on show at the party’s conference this weekend? read more

Managing Rodney: a local test for Key

Will John Key and Rodney Hide be on roughly the same page in their speeches to the local government conference on Monday and Tuesday? For National’s sake, they have to be.

Hide has picked up where Maurice Williamson left off in the last National-led government. One get-together of predominantly conservative local government grandees was — until wiser counsel prevailed — itching to pass a vote of no-confidence in Hide. read more

Flagging the atmospherics of mana

Colin James’s Dominion Post and Otago Daily Times column for 20 July 2009 Note how respectfully China’s government has been treating one of its indigenous minorities recently. And note China’s vote for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Note also that China has arrested a Chinese-Australian Rio Tinto iron ore negotiator for stealing unspecified state secrets. And note that Chinese state steel companies are not happy with their negotiations with Australia on iron ore prices. read more

The economics of whacking kids

An enrolment deadline for the yes-means-no/no-means-yes referendum passed on Friday. Have you worked out how to vote? Will you vote?

Why vote? It is only indicative. MPs ignored the 82-92 per cent majority votes in the three previous citizens-initiated referendums, in 1995 on the number of firemen and in 1999 on reducing the number of seats in Parliament and on the needs of victims and minimum and hard labour sentences. read more

Can Key do Lange-Douglas-style ambition?

Twenty-five years ago next Tuesday David Lange’s government was elected in a landslide and in turn set off a landslide. John Key, claiming “ambition”, is reticent by comparison.

Lange came to office as a mascot of a rising generation, the freedom generation. His contemporaries demanded personal, moral and economic freedom. Their prolific writing, painting and music reflected their independence from Britain, the first generation to be unselfconsciously so. read more