The search is on for a new generation of Maori economic leaders to drive the second hui taumata, or Maori economic development summit, to be held next year.
The intention to hold a summit has been confirmed by Prime Minister Helen Clark and Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia in the wake of Clark’s comment to the Labour party conference on November 8 that it was time to “take stock” 20 years after the first summit in November 1984.
Secure behind the glass wall of the Christchurch convention centre today’s Labour leaders couldn’t wholly repress a sniff at the motley few behind police lines opposite. In their day, with the Vietnam war and nuclear ships, apartheid and free love on the go, they could get up a real protest.
Within minutes of Nick Smith’s election as National’s deputy leader a parliamentary staffer sent me an email consisting solely of a questionmark. Bang on.
Smith swiftly delivered. Pathos followed apotheosis. Unifying management, the job of a real deputy, was swapped for impulse and division. Don Brash’s unorthodox — because novice — political style fell in its first hole.
Be warned: a boss who runs a company off the rails and then takes a big payout might get a tongue-lashing from the National party’s new leader. Don Brash wants the public to back business and rich rewards for failure don’t help.
Brash backs high salaries for those who create jobs. But “it is quite outrageous that people who destroy large quantities of shareholder wealth and thousands of jobs seem to end up with very, very large payments,” he said in an interview [Thursday]. He will say that “occasionally in speeches”.
Between his master’s economic thesis and his PhD Don Brash had a conversion from opposing foreign investment to extolling it. The “Christian socialist” turned believer in markets. He hasn’t looked back.
That sounds much like the born-again experience that took some Labour people to ACT. And, indeed, Brash comes from a religious family. His father was a Presbyterian minister of very high international status.
Don Brash could do with a short course in politics — national politics.
Who was first item on TV1 news on Saturday evening and on yesterday’s front pages? Not Hu, who should have been. Instead, Dr Who.
Whether Brash or Bill English is National party leader today is trivial in the grand scheme. Getting on well with an immense and fast-enriching country is vital to the nation.
Tomorrow the apocalypse. The moratorium comes off applications to release genetically modified organisms.
If the Greens are to be believed, once the first GMO is approved, even conditionally, Pandora’s box is open and there is no putting the lid back on. We are doomed, economically, corporeally and spiritually.
Who said this last week? “The Jews rule the world by proxy. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong.”
A bigot. A loudmouth. And, to boot, a senior Asian leader: Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, the world’s 17th biggest trading nation.
A little-noticed item in the Land Transport Management Bill is the insertion of “demand management”. The aim is to constrain road traffic.
This additional Green victory was put in by Parliament’s transport and industrial relations committee, which reported the bill back to the House on Monday.
Australian students used to picket the One Nation party. Its anti-immigrant, anti-aborigine rhetoric was anathema to left-liberal idealism. But last week the students’ leader effusively praised One Nation’s sole surviving senator, Len Harris.
Harris had pledged the deciding vote against the government’s differential university fees, adding yet another defeated bill to a lengthening list which John Howard will be able to advance only by a joint sitting of both houses of Parliament after the next election.