Shock, horror, houses are unaffordable. Not as unaffordable as Australia but enough to de-gloss the supposed “Kiwi dream”.
This amounts to a newly sharpened division in our society: the have-house category is shrinking and the have-not-house category is growing.
This is no surprise. The income and wealth range (technically measured by the Gini coefficient) has lengthened significantly since the 1980s reforms. The best off have got relatively much better off.
If you have a parole system there will be mistakes. Psychology is an inexact art and humans are inexact practitioners even of exact arts.
So when someone on parole does wrong, the real questions are the design of the parameters and processes for granting parole and the care (or not) with which authorities have conformed to them.
How come Michael Cullen, who looks like the sainted Michael Joseph Savage, 1930s benefactor of the disadvantaged, is called Grinch and Scrooge? What got into his political DNA?
Cullen has spent massively on the very things Savage and his first Labour government cabinet made everybody’s birthright: education, healthcare, affordable rental housing and sustenance in adversity and old age.
If 2006 was Helen Clark’s annus horribilis, why did she end it so chipper? What does she know that we don’t?
What we know is that Phillip Field’s waywardness and her use of parliamentary funds for her 2005 election pledge card damaged her and her government.
What we know is that John Key freshens and moderates the face of the National party just when her government is ageing.
Numbers. Lots of numbers. That is one of business’s central needs from Helen Clark and Michael Cullen when they get back to the Beehive. Too much uncertainty is bad for business.
Why numbers? Because what ministers decide can change the operating environment. Government strategies, frameworks, plans and legislation have to be quantified into threats, taxes, costs, windfalls and opportunities if a business plan is to be complete.
Last month an email came inviting me to jot down a few words for a newspaper feature called “100 Reasons to Be A Kiwi”. I assumed the email was intended for a celebrity and had been misaddressed.
Then came a phone call, close to deadline — and a deadline of my own, which precluded response.
God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform, the hymnist William Cowper wrote. So it has been with the Powelliphanta Augustus snails in Happy Valley.
The Happy Valley snails are unique. They are large. They have evolved their own special way of life in their own special habitat.
When Solid Energy, the company greens love to hate, more even than McDonalds and sugar-drink killer-fiends, came to Happy Valley hungry for coal, conservationists fretted for the snails — as we all do now, in retrospect, for the huia, whose food and shelter colonists ravaged.
On May 4 the Herald reported a road incident which led the police, the Herald said, to lay a charge of “wreckless” driving. Don Brash might have wished for such a transit through 2006.
Instead, his political career, which had been on a high only 14 months earlier, ended in a train wreck of a publicised affair, shadowy dealings with a vindictive religious sect and persistent lapses of political skill.
It has been an international month. But don’t mistake that for distant.
South Korea’s President dropped in and pumped up a free trade agreement — tellingly using some arguments put by Phil Goff in Seoul in October on agriculture and trade diversion.
George Bush’s fanciful mission to democratise the Middle East collapsed. Iraq is “grave” and deteriorating, his father’s friend James Baker told him. Sensible minds are bending to fix the damage he has done to us all. Which should teach Bush that humility, not hubris, is Christianity’s essence.
Here is a fair bet: you want to be able to go from any A to any B any time; you want your house warm in winter and cool in summer; you want your workplace to work; and you want all of that 24/7.
Here is what the gloom industry tells you: “You can’t have all of that any more — not forever anyway; what you do get will cost you more in several ways; and there will be interruptions.”