Take your pick of frights: climate change, water wrangles, the scramble for fuel and metals, high food prices starving the poor. Here’s another: bad food.
Climate change has inspired apocalyptic predictions of sudden tipping points, sea level rises, famines, extinction of species, including us, and worse. Industries have grown up to study, warn about, respond to and challenge it.
It’s all about who is the future. John Key reckons he is and that fast broadband to every living room is a powerful symbol — and, moreover, that he knows about these things better than Helen Clark because he is younger.
The electoral strategy behind the broadband big bang is to draw a picture of Key in window-shopping voters’ minds as an action Prime Minister of the future and contrast that with older Helen Clark, a 1980s minister and boss for nine years.
Friday is Anzac day: time to think about past war and the Australian connection, which for growing numbers of New Zealanders these days is very much about mates, sons, daughters and other relatives who have gone there to live and bring their kids up as Aussies.
The Australian vacuum’s impact on families and workforces here is a central talking point in the gathering election campaign. Don Brash made much of it in 2005 when the flow was a stream. Now it is a flood.
Reserve Bank governor Alan Bollard wants businesses to invest and banks to fund that investment as the squeeze goes on households and the economy turns down.
Bollard’s plea suggests he is getting edgy at the prospect of a sharp downturn even as he has to keep interest rates up to bring inflation back under 3 per cent. If businesses invest, that would both work against that downturn in the economic cycle in a relatively non-inflationary way and build economic capacity for the future.
Spare a thought for John McCain, trying to hold the United States presidency for the Republicans: 81 per cent of Americans think their country is on the wrong track. Here fewer than half do.
But Helen Clark, preparing for her pre-election party “congress” this coming weekend, can take little comfort. Business and consumer sentiment has plummeted. While sentiment has been bad before in her time at the top and in 2005 spiked up to give her a narrow win, the mood is heavier right now.
In apartheid days support for rugby tours used to be called “building bridges”. Opponents, among them today’s Prime Minister, thought sports boycotts more likely to effect change. The argument spilled into the streets in 1981.
But trade with South Africa was small. Trade with China is very big and about to get bigger with a free trade agreement (FTA).
Easter is a holiday. Or Easter is a sacred time. Take your pick. Most picked holiday these past few days. So is anything sacred?
“Sacred” usually connotes religion. And for some people religion connotes anti-science and/or violence and intolerance. Hence recent scathing books by biologist Richard Dawkins and social and political commentator Christopher Hitchens.
This week is the fifth anniversary of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He claimed victory six weeks later. The war grinds on. Iraq subdivides.
None of the reasons/pretexts for the invasion has been validated.
Was it one battle in the “long war on terror”, following on from the swift ousting of the Taleban in Afghanistan after the September 11 atrocity? Not if by that were meant land battles: the “war on terror” is now prosecuted in intelligence databases, customs offices and at ever more paranoid airport security checkpoints.
Who gets hurt when the economy slips? How can that hurt be eased? This is where the economic debate is turning. And there is more to it than tax.
A slowdown hurts the poor first. No one much notices, except food banks, which for some time have been reporting rising demand, and budget advice services, helping people trapped in loan-shark debt and/or skewered by rising prices for essentials.
We are used to globalisation now. We surrender assets to foreigners. China makes more and more “New Zealand” goods. We bought our houses on Japanese housewives’ money. We get music off the internet. On balance we are richer for it.
There is another globalisation: of people — fleeing poverty and catastrophe, hunting riches. Are we, will we be, the richer for that?