His Royal Highness Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, is dropping in. Time to reflect.
Prince Charles represents the monarchy — our monarchy, furnished to us for ceremonials by the august House of Windsor and the generous English people.
Women’s magazines will be pleased he is coming amongst us. With Charles on the cover they can sell more copies. He is not female but he is a passable stand-in.
State-owned enterprises float in murky political waters. John Key is about to tiptoe in.
He will tiptoe because this is a pond in which National could easily sink. The prevailing folklore is that Labour and National governments in the 1980s and 1990s flogged off state assets to greedy foreigners who made a bomb out of them for little or no gain to taxpayers.
Steve Maharey has become one of the cabinet’s most influential ministers. That was unthinkable five years ago.
Maharey has always been the most theoretical minister, a student of “third way” theory. That was too airy-fairy for Helen Clark, whose politics is an admixture of farm-girl practicality and 1970s university social democracy.
We make half a million 111 calls a year. That is one for every eight people, babies included. We are, it seems, a very violent or very jumpy society.
Telecom’s white pages say 111 is “for emergencies”. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary describes “emergency” as: “a situation, especially of danger or conflict, that arises unexpectedly and requires urgent action; (a person with) a condition requiring immediate treatment.”
You don’t hear much of Helengrad these days. Instead, the sniggers are likely to be about The Don. The Soviet allusion has given way to the Sicilian: get in line or you’re topped.
Katherine Rich did not just lose her portfolio. She plunged in rank. Don Brash was exacting retribution.
In her early years in government Helen Clark micro-managed. Very few ministers had cabinet experience and she said they needed guidance if the government was to function well.
Election buffs are eagerly watching the Maori party. Why? Because it might just give us overhang seats in Parliament.
Let’s say the Maori party gets 2 per cent of the party vote and wins all seven Maori electorate seats. The 2 per cent entitles it to three seats but under MMP rules it keeps all seven and the size of the Parliament goes up by four to 124.
Right, holidays are over, or nearly. Time to sober up. There are some things to be sober about.
I mean the economy. Specifically, I mean our spendthriftness and our belief that our personal finances are as safe as houses.
This belief has fuelled an impressive consumer boom. But who is really paying for the boom and what does that mean for the future?
Who won most in Helen Clark’s Christmas reshuffle? Bill English. Both education ministers were moved.
Not bad for the has-been, two scalps. Tony Ryall, for all his high-octane attacks on Phil Goff and George Hawkins, got neither’s. That may explain Don Brash’s failure to get a rise out of law and order last July.
Should we have had a referendum on the Civil Union Bill? There are three relevant answers: yes, that’s democracy; no, it’s not the way to protect civil rights; it depends�
That question and those answers illustrate something bigger: we are starting to question and discuss our constitution. A small but significant step will be taken this year.
Don’t be surprised if this year American warriors kill more Iraqis than Al Qaeda killed Americans in its attacks on September 11, 2001 (9/11).
Add to that the larger numbers of Iraqis who will be killed by other Iraqis in this man-made tsunami. In the past two years between 15,000 and 100,000 innocent Iraqi citizens, depending who is doing the counting, have been sacrificed to the ideal of freedom or the ideal of (im)pure religion.