Colin James book review for NZ Herald Perspectives page for 12 October 2007
Brian Easton, Globalisation and the Wealth of Nations, Auckland University Press, 234pp, $49.99
We are all global now, aren’t we? Well, actually, no. We’re still, the great majority of us, solidly local. For most, “globalisation” is what other people do.
Wrench the dazed gaze off black Cardiff Arms and flick to the town hall. It’s local elections time.
If you take local politics seriously or have a particular gripe or just a sense of civic opportunity or duty, you have probably already voted. If not, you probably won’t and you will be in the majority nationwide.
Do you think humanity will do anything serious about climate change? Does humanity think it much matters whether it does or doesn’t?
Note: “humanity”, not “New Zealanders”. We here can have only the tiniest effect. Anything we do can be relevant only in solidarity with what those in far more populous countries do.
Tomorrow is Dominion Day. What’s that? The centenary of the day New Zealand was declared a dominion. Ummm.
Dominion Day is one of the dates lighted on by people hunting for a national day which doesn’t remind as much of division as of unity, as does Waitangi Day, and doesn’t commemorate military defeat, as does Anzac Day.
This week, two months late and nearly eight years after a self-proclaimed climate-friendly government came to power, comes the greenhouse gas trading scheme announcement: some firm decisions, some preferred options and some choices yet to be made.
The government’s explanation for taking eight years is that there was not a parliamentary majority. But that mistakes the true nature of majorities.
Mike Moore was Prime Minister for eight and a-half weeks. Helen Clark next June will have been Prime Minister for eight and a-half years.
Moore, of course, went on to an international job far bigger than Prime Minister of a mini-country, so a comparison of his and Clark’s time in office is odious. The same goes for the fact that in Moore’s two elections as leader Labour’s share of the vote dropped both times, the first time by 13 per cent, while in Clark’s four elections there have been two rises and two falls for a net gain of 6 per cent.
Who owns New Zealand and does it matter? Purists say it doesn’t matter. But it seems enough people think it does matter to stop Arabs buying Auckland airport. Who’s right?
For nearly half a century from the late 1930s governments responded to our distance from markets and vulnerability to international economic shocks by trying to ringfence the economy.
The rise of John Key and Kevin Rudd are eerily alike — even, now, to owning up to an out-of-character jaunt to a strip joint. Shock, horror. The traders in the Alex cartoon, chronicle of life in Key’s London financial markets, seem to do half their business (so to speak) in lap dancing bars.
Another week, another upset for a twitchy government — this time an actually trivial but politically scratchy Iraq kerfuffle. But what of deeper matters?
This is a government which has claimed to be for the future, not the past, for a surer-footed, more creative people, richer in our (carbon-neutral) environment, our society and our inner selves.
You know things aren’t good when central banks start sloshing money into the financial system. Next, of course, come politicians’ reassurances of “sound fundamentals”.
French, German and Australian financial institutions, including funds run by the august Deutsche Bank, Australia’s star Macquariebank and France’s BNP Paribas, have got caught in the fallout from the United States lend-anything-to-anybody party.