I interviewed John Howard a year or so before the “unlosable” election in 1993 which John Hewson nevertheless did lose for the Australian Liberals. Howard was shadow industrial relations minister.
It was a lifeless exchange, with no hint of the battler who overcame his 1980s failure as leader to outlast Hewson and then Alexander Downer and lead the Liberals to three terms in power in 1996 — and maybe a fourth on October 9.
Labour shortage is the single biggest obstacle to expansion for business right now. And tangled up in this shortage is a bigger question: can we grow a big enough working population for the future?
This is a population question — and not as simple as it looks.
The focus has been on population ageing when the baby boomers retire and in the context of superannuation and health care affordability. Demographer Ian Pool of Waikato University argues this ignores the looming changes in population structure and policy issues wrapped up in that — particularly for Maori.
The quick-fix slogan for education is to say you will ram the three Rs into kids by hook or by crook. Listen for Don Brash to say that in his looming big speech on education.
Such rhetoric will resonate with employers scraping the employables barrel and scouring the surrounds for escapers. But will it re-skill the nation?
Society deemed him an animal. “Who made me that? Me. What was I fighting? Myself. Who created me? Me. I own that.”
So said Mark Stephens, the vicious Parnell Panther rapist, in an ownership-of-past-wrongs message to ACT deputy leader Muriel Newman’s welfare symposium on Saturday.
The right likes hearing stories that tell of taking responsibility for one’s misdeeds. They are the obverse of taking responsibility for looking after oneself, getting a job, getting off welfare, fulfilling obligations.
Australia has something New Zealand doesn’t have, right? A free trade agreement with the United States, yes. But also tougher labour practices.
They may be about to get tougher if the impending election bounces Mark Latham’s way.
From some comments from business lobbies here, you would think doing business in Australia is a doddle. Adopt Australia’s regulatory environment and, hey presto, we will be rich like Australia.
The Olympic Games start this week. Breathlessly we will watch to see which of the drugs giants wins as their machines run, prance, swim and ride.
Sport at Olympic level has become a mixture of the chemical, the mechanical and celebrity. The television sport we watch — as distinct from the character-building sport we play (and fewer of us do, it seems) — is now lions versus Christians: keeping the masses doped up with spectacle.
At next Monday’s cabinet Helen Clark will match the leadership tenure of Labour’s greatest leader, Peter Fraser. Another milestone.
There is one striking difference. Fraser was Prime Minister for all but a year of his 10 years, 252 days as leader. Six years of Clark’s time were in opposition. She is still only third-longest serving Labour Prime Minister behind Fraser and David Lange, having passed Michael Joseph Savage’s four years, five months in April.
The credit card is full. You can’t load any more debt on the house because its value has stopped rising. How now to keep the good times rolling?
That is the crunch economic question for the government. The country doesn’t get richer long-term on household debt or by redividing the cake in the workplace. Those are one-offs.
Ted Lapkin, of the Australian/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, contrived last week to imply from the jailed Israeli spies affair that Helen Clark favours Al Qaeda over Israel. That says more about Lapkin than about Clark the warrior in Afghanistan.
In 2003 academic historian Joel Hayward was broken when the Jewish Council demanded Canterbury University review his 1991 master’s thesis which contained errors about the Holocaust. The university complied, even though an undergraduate paper is unlikely to start a pogrom and Hayward corrected his errors.
Politics is often a game of leads and lags. These take many forms and can decide elections.
Take the economy. There seems to be a lag of around a year to 18 months between a change in the direction of growth and a resultant change in electoral behaviour.
This is because the economic driver of votes is not the big numbers economists pore over but the small numbers: households’ balance sheets and cash flows. And even when the household numbers change there seems to be a lag before a new psychology cuts in and votes shift.