Just out of his “100 days”, John Key is off to Australia tomorrow for the annual prime ministerial bilateral. There is much to do.
There is much to do at home, too — not least to develop policy options against the developing possibility of a depression. A “jobs summit” and bankrolling “icon” companies are short-term recession fixes. A depression is long-term and life-changing.
Judith Collins has sharp teeth. This week they went deep into Corrections Department chief executive Barry Matthews because of the report on (mis)management of parolees (with not enough staff).
Tony Ryall has chomped on Otago District Health Board chair Richard Thomson and spat him out because he was the chair when a massive fraud was discovered (though he fixed it).
Tim Barnett, former Labour chief whip, has landed a big international job, combating AIDS, based in Cape Town. Helen Clark is pitching for chief of the United Nations Development Programme. That makes two points.
One is that many of our bright people do big jobs elsewhere. The other is that ours, for all its frequent small-village myopia, is a very internationalised society, inextricably wired into a world in which nations and peoples are increasingly interdependent.
Here’s a bright idea: when you get into trouble by overspending, spend your way out.
Doesn’t compute? Well, it does in Washington, London, Canberra or in a capital city nearly everywhere in the rich world. Governments are throwing money at consumers, directly in grants and tax breaks and indirectly in saving firms and so jobs.
For three decades the Waitangi Day focus has been on rights for Maori. John Key goes to his first Waitangi Day celebrations as Prime Minister next Friday. Will he shift the focus?
Key’s deal with the Maori party has raised National hopes of detaching Maori voters from Labour.
Plenty of Maori do vote National. They are a fair proportion of the one-third of Maori voters who stick with the general roll. John Carter, MP for Northland which has a high Maori population, attributes much of his majority to Maori on his electorate’s roll.
Here are two ways to spend New Year: clamp your ears shut to the dire predictions, the better to keep summer alive a week or two; or look through the predictions to our abundant riches.
It is now fashionable to talk of the “great crash of 2008” as some replica of the “great crash of 1929”, after which came the “great depression”. A scary prospect.
Airports are not pretty. But one October afternoon Hamilton airport was for me for a moment a place of beauty.
A young man with the moonish face of intellectual disability waited impassively alongside an elderly woman for a traveller to arrive. He was a reminder of human sadness, the unfairness of chance.
It has been the year of the H word. It was the year of a big exit. It is the year a new boy topped the class.
Hypocrisy is so tempting to politicians that the word is banned in Parliament. There an MP’s word must be accepted until demonstrably proved false. But outside is a different story. Slowly, painfully, grindingly, Winston Peters conceded he had had big bucks from big business — the opposite of the underdog, victim image with which he had wooed and wowed the blue rinses.
There has so far been a rule under MMP: support parties’ vote shares fall at the next election.
* New Zealand First in coalition with National, 13.3 per cent of the party vote in 1996, 4.3 per cent in 1999; supporting Labour, 5.7 per cent in 2005, 4.1 per cent in 2008;
* Alliance in coalition with Labour, 7.7 per cent in 1999, 1.3 per cent in 2002;
What makes an economy rich? Resources, luck, the population’s mindset and energy, infrastructure (including human capital) and institutional settings. Governments can do little or nothing about the first three. So if John Key is to make good his vaunted “ambition” and enrich us, he must improve infrastructure and hone institutional settings.