Here are two potential killers of this government (besides the Maori party which is dividing part of Labour’s core vote).
The first of these two other killers is “political correctness” — “PC”.
Of course, what is politically correct or, more accurately, politically incorrect, is in the eye of the beholder. The trick is to get your opponent seen as offside with majority values and too closely aligned to minority values — that is, correct about values the majority doesn’t care for.
Fair trade is free trade, right? Yes and no. Profits can be made out of fair trade that is not free.
This is not to be confused with the profits to be made out of unfair trade that is not free because of government policy or structural failure. United States’ mollycoddled cotton farmers, Japan’s geriatric rice farmers, Europe’s timorous farmers of all sorts live fat on government subsidies and protection. Huge companies control trade in some commodities on which tariffs are low or zero.
A year ago Don Brash laid down a challenge to the National party at its conference: did it really mean to constrain the government’s role and spending? If it did, Brash stated, some tough consequences would follow.
Brash laid out eight goals in a sort of credo. Among them:
* Hold government spending to its present level per person in inflation-adjusted terms. Over 10 years that would cut spending as a proportion of GDP by at least 5 per cent.
It is a week for constitutional moments — in Baghdad yesterday and in Wellington on Thursday.
The Baghdad moment was the official handover by the American occupiers to an Iraqi regime. This is supposed to be a step towards a “democratic” Iraq.
If so, it will be a long journey. Iraq has no tradition of democracy, lacks a sufficient middle class on which to build democratic traditions and is riven deeply by religion and ethnically, three nations rather than one. And next-door Iran is fomenting discord.
At first sight James Buwalda looks and sounds a harmless chap: soft-spoken, slight of build, an easy target, you would think, for Murray McCully hunting a bureaucratic scalp.
Then you notice a set to Buwalda’s jaw that bespeaks determination and an inner toughness. That has been felt full force in the Labour Department, which he took over as chief executive a year ago and is radically restructuring.
Bill English is back. No, not the leader. The thoughtful, modern-conservative policy wonk.
Having mused on a career outside politics but not being of the age when cushy diplomatic posts or board appointments are bestowed, he has found redemption in education.
No, not his own. Others’. Though he has been educating himself in the process.
At one early ACT conference Rodney Hide and Richard Prebble were the after-dinner act. It was a laugh a minute, smart, intelligent and sharp, a great evening’s entertainment.
Hide, you will gather from that, has a great sense of humour, irrepressible like the rest of his personality, plus a skill at sound bites. He has huge energy. He has bravery, bravado and braggadocio.
Stand by for the Labour-Green government. It is just one of many possible combinations but it is distinctly possible. It is one with important implications for business.
The Greens’ impact is already visible in the outcome of the agreement after the 2002 election to cooperate on transport legislation. The Land Transport Management Act bears the marks in its extensive consultation requirements, accent on sustainability and demand management and exhortation to walk and cycle.
Next Monday will be the 20th anniversary of the night Sir Robert Muldoon called the snap election which changed this country. His slurring words that night spelt the end of his government and an era.
To view Muldoon now is to peer across one of the great divides in this country’s history, a gulf between the last British generation and the first truly local one.
Unions are about confrontation, carving holes in profits, right? Well, maybe not.
Some unionists have grasped that re-cutting the cake does not in the end lead to sustainable higher real wages. What does that is baking a bigger cake.
And that means forming common cause with enterprises to lift productivity and get more value-added from each employee.