Alan Bollard is a pingpong ball on an ocean of money. No matter how hard he tries to sink, forces beyond his control keep popping him back up top again. Inflation is now stuck over his 3 per cent limit.
Michael Cullen has a similar problem. Budget surpluses have ballooned up year after year. Even now, when he is trying to spend and spend, not least by shovelling money through Working for Families tax credits, he has another big number to live down.
The constitution matters. That is the big lesson in behind the parliamentary funds disgrace. If politicians bend the constitution, we are all at risk.
The constitution says who is to have power and how it is to be used and not used. For the constitution to work well, politicians must play by its rules and be seen to.
David Parker’s assignment is to persuade a nation that lives much of the time in a fridge that it is living in an oven.
Certainly in Wellington, where Parker delivered his latest high-level climate change musings on Friday, imagining global warming is an out-of-body experience. People arrived bundled in coats and fleece-lined gear — in October.
Conversions happen in politics as they do in religion. So we will see on Friday that Don Brash has converted — not to the Exclusive Brethren but to climate change.
Last year Brash declared the science in doubt. Now he accepts that the preponderance of scientific evidence is that there is global warming and that something must be done.
From last week you can carry 3-ounce (85-gram) flasks of liquids and gels on to planes in the United States. Isn’t that great? Isn’t it sad?
The mightiest nation on earth cowers. Jihadists score a victory with every shoe taken off at security points, every bag offloaded, every flight delayed. That is tens of thousands of victories a day.
Winston Churchill said of the Nazis: “They’re afraid of words.” And they were. So are all bigots and tyrants and their followers.
Words are the elixir of democracy. Think freely, talk freely, meet freely in groups, contest ideas, argue cases in court: that is how peace is made and kept.
John Key National leader is becoming a fait accompli in the media and in many people’s minds. But is he in fact an accomplished leader in waiting?
No one quite knows yet.
And no one would need to know yet if Don Brash had been tracking onward and upward to Prime Minister.
But he hasn’t been and isn’t. So the question National MPs didn’t want to have to ask themselves is on the table: who shall replace Brash (in due course), when, how and with whom as deputy?
Here are two news stories from the past few days, one from this country and one from Australia, which deal with plugging labour force gaps.
The local story was the extension of the seasonal work permit pilot scheme for foreigners to work in horticulture. The Australian story credited John Howard’s baby bonus with lifting the birth rate.
Between March 1 and last Friday Judith Collins became a kinder, gentler person.
On March 1 in Parliament she called David Benson-Pope a “pervert”, a savage accusation for which there was no evidence — damaging to Benson-Pope and damaging to his family, which includes teenagers.
On Friday on Radio New Zealand Collins waxed emotional about the damage to Don Brash’s family from the outing of his run-of-the-mill affair. “I am not going personally to attack people’s families, no matter what the error,” she said.
In the week when great minds pondered anew whether the Al Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers five years ago changed the world, what did Clayton Cosgrove do? He called for Statistics New Zealand’s operation manual.
Swift action from the Minister of Statistics was apparently needed to save the nation from staff tea-making rules which made media mirth.