Free trade is the easy bit for John Key, new ambassador. There has been a strong political majority at home for free trade for two decades. The hard bit in international relations is the environment.
All foreign policy starts at home. Diplomacy in essence is promotion of the national interest, getting your way with other countries to enhance wellbeing at home.
Since 2002 the proportion of MPs who are Maori has clearly exceeded the Maori proportion of the voting-age population. Now there is a Maori party in the governing machine.
In part this has come from the increase in Maori electorates from four to seven, each with fewer electors than in the general electorates.
The election campaign guns having fallen silent, it is fitting to remember this is Armistice Day: 90 years ago, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the tribes of Europe stopped killing each other in the “war to end all wars”.
An idealistic American president tried to make that true but 20 years later the killing resumed, on a wider scale. Only with the making of the European Union did peace break out. Now another American president, elected to global acclaim amidst division at home and dismay abroad at his predecessor, has a resounding mandate to bring peace and unity.
John Key is a phenomenon — six years an MP and now Prime Minister. Helen Clark is phenomenon — 15 years Labour party leader, deputy Prime Minister at 39, nine years Prime Minister. It was quite a contest.
In the event it was a clear contest: National and friends as an alternative government to Labour and friends. And it was a clear result: a majority for that alternative government.
You knew Helen Clark would fight all year all the way to tonight’s election eve sweep down Ponsonby Road when she turned up to her first press conference of the year in open-toed shoes — with her toenails painted. This was a gal who once didn’t wear lipstick.
All year Clark has battled adverse polls reflecting a sagging public mood and a sagging economy, her lapses of political management last year and third-term-it-is. To come from behind, she pushed “trust”: on the one hand a “secret agenda” behind John Key’s bland change-with-no-change; on the other insisting her decades of experience were needed to navigate the wild waters whipped up by the international credit turmoil.
Leaders count. They add personality to parties, a prism through which voters see, and in part assess, the parties.
Leaders have always counted. In 1928, long before television brought leaders up close in the living room, the resurrection of old-stager Sir Joseph Ward, portrayed as a financial wizard in hard times, won the ramshackle United party enough seats to govern. By 1984 television-smart Sir Robert Muldoon had driven droves of National voters to despair with his bullying and statist economic policies. Defeat was assured.
Political parties — the big ones at least — these days aim not just to “campaign” but to “market”, to push “products” to “consumers”. There’s a small industry geared to it. You’re in its sights right now.
Politicians and parties have long used advertisements, pamphlets and other sales aids to pitch for votes. In the 1920s A E Davy’s catchy slogans and ingenious organising helped usher first Gordon Coates and then Sir Joseph Ward — of opposing parties — into office in successive elections.
Michael Cullen is a paradox. So is his economy.
In debate in Parliament Cullen is the master of snide. Off-camera and relaxed, he can punch out a side-splitting one-liner a minute.
In public he is a grim Scrooge. But on television last week he let show, for just an instant, an emotional upset about the poor. His emotion about historical wrongs is a driver in his Treaty of Waitangi deals.
Would you like to vote to ban same-sex marriage, declare a fertilised human egg is a person or decriminalise personal use of marijuana? Welcome to the United States elections on November 4. That’s democracy — or is it?
In representative parliamentary democracies like ours voters elect people to Parliament to make decisions and laws and keep a check on the government on their behalf.
The Greens’ billboards make two pitches: “Vote for me, the planet” and “Vote for me/us, the future of humanity”. Which message is relevant to the election?
The planet’s future is assured: life will go on, even if humans make their habitat uninhabitable. The planet needs no votes.