Helen Clark, beset by John Key, is watching John Howard to see how (and if) he sees off Kevin Rudd this year. But some places Howard goes she can’t.
Howard’s latest cocktail of morality and politics is gobsmacking: send in police and the army to take the booze off Northern Territory Aborigine adults to cut down sexual and violent abuse of kids, which he calls a “national emergency”. Rudd has backed him.
Early this month some bigwigs in the climate change world were here for World Environment Day functions and they oozed praise for this country’s leadership. If they were to come back next year would they still be so airily congratulatory?
New Zealand is indeed a leader judged by prime ministerial rhetoric. But rhetoric is not action. And Parliament is deeply divided over action.
Worried about the exodus? Well, Australia is, too. And get ready to worry some more. That was a strand of discussion at the annual Australia New Zealand Leadership Forum on Friday and Saturday.
The forum aims to underpin the government-to-government relationship by bringing together politicians, businesspeople, academics and commentators. Now in its fifth year, it nearly collapsed after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd landed his summit to plot Australia’s future on the pre-set April date and then Australian co-chair James Strong was too distracted to organise his side.
Alan Bollard’s job is to tame inflation. Sounds simple. But he has to do that for an economy which is a pingpong ball on the waves of the world economic ocean.
Michael Cullen has much the same problem, as Bill English will have if he succeeds him. At most a government in a mini-economy can adjust policy settings to optimise our capacity to make the best of human and other resources, whatever the world throws at us, good and bad.
What do Facebook and yesterday’s official Queen’s Birthday have in common? They are windows into our constitution.
Start with the Queen, dignified cornerstone of the constitution, anchor for tradition and symbol of the limits of politicians’ proper exercise of power.
Australia will likely remove that cornerstone if the Rudd government lasts a while. That will trigger debate here. Mike Moore, who sat in on Australia’s 1998 constitutional convention (as I did), wants that debate under way now.
It’s 40 years on from the grandiose student “revolutions” of 1968, most boisterously in Paris and at the United States Democratic presidential nominating convention. The real revolution was quieter. The Greens, who meet in conference this weekend, are heirs to part of that quieter revolution.
Domestic inflation isn’t the problem any more. So Michael Cullen feels free to dollop out tax cuts and to run a Budget that stimulates the economy to the tune of a bit over 2 per cent.
He is banking on the Reserve Bank agreeing with him on domestic inflation and looking through imported oil, food, transport and consumer goods inflation, magnified by the now-falling New Zealand dollar.
For most of their time Helen Clark’s Labour-led governments have had good luck in the economy. Now the luck has turned. Tough on Michael Cullen in his ninth (and last?) Budget.
Clark and Cullen benefited from the higher productivity growth delivered by the pre-1999 economic reforms and from a buoyant international economy.
One of the hazards of MMP is Swiss cheese policy: big holes where cheese should be. Is this what is happening to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trading legislation?
The carbon tax ended up with more holes than cheese as the government accommodated big industries’ and farmers’ objections. The tax had been the core of the government’s climate change policy. It vanished in 2005.
Treaty of Waitangi settlements are now at a gallop. Will they be cheap at the price?
In the mid-1990s Ruth Richardson put a $1 billion cap on settlements (the Air New Zealand bailout cost nearly that). Under Michael Cullen settlements may be heading to twice that or more.
Afer the Ngai Tahu, Tainui and fisheries settlements in the 1990s settlements came slowly and sporadically in the 2000s.