Category: Pre-ODT Columns

No weapons of mass destruction found and time is getting on. Not a good look for George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard who gave WMD as their top reason for invading Iraq.

WMD may yet be found. But the United States has moved the target: the evidence will come from “the scientists not the sand dunes”, academic and former United States presidential adviser Richard Allen, still influential in Washington, told the Otago University foreign policy school on Sunday. The issue is capability to produce, not actual existence. read more

This is a taxing government. Not a wildly taxing government but one which puts your taxes up nonetheless.

This is both overt and covert.

The overt tax increases have been in excise taxes, on alcohol, tobacco and petrol — and, of course, the extra 6c income tax in 2000 on “the rich”, the over-$60,000s. read more

Bill English was at it again on Thursday on the Treaty of Waitangi: “one standard of citizenship for a nation of mongrels” might be a loose translation.

“We must,” he told a party fund-raising dinner in deeply conservative Matamata, “break out of the paralysing ideology of the Treaty and the arrogant attitudes that go with it. read more

The interviewer, a man of obvious erudition, succinctly leads a world-class military historian and a large audience in the Sydney Town Hall through an insightful tour of the historian’s recent work.

A former journalist, he uses the best of the interviewer’s tools: he elicits and does not instruct; he is unobtrusive but not obsequious, empathetic but not sycophantic. He adds context from his own extensive knowledge. read more

Capitalism, the left used to say, “privatises its profits and socialises its losses”. So Air New Zealand goes bust and workers’ taxes rescue it. TranzRail gets into difficulty and there the workers are again.

The other side of that coin is crass government. In the late 1980s Sir Roger Douglas kept finding hidden losses from Sir Robert Muldoon’s early 1980s “think big” heavy industrialisation programme. The massive addition to government debt — upwards of $8 billion — was a part-driver of the sale of state enterprises that followed. read more

It is an assertion of nationhood or a quixotic discard of top brains. Or, if you are conspiracy junkie, scare yourself with a socialist plot. The Supreme Court Bill has got all this and more.

At least equally important, it is a defining moment as to where sovereignty lies, in the people or in Parliament. read more

What is the point of tertiary education? Point one: to develop individuals to their greatest potential. Point two: to fuel the “knowledge society” so we all get richer. So the government says.

To fulfil the first the government would just stump up whatever money it is prepared to commit and leave students to do what they want. To fulfil the second the government, as a funder, needs to take an active interest in what is taught and to whom — and channel its money accordingly. read more

This time last year a rift opened between Labour and the Greens. It dogged them through the election campaign and docked votes from both.

For the Greens, it also wiped hopes of cabinet seats. It meant less influence, since Labour can get a majority without them.

The rift was over genetic modification (GM) and was triggered by the Greens’ well-foreshadowed (but nevertheless surprising to Labour) walkout on the bill which legislated an end this coming October to the moratorium an applications for release of GM organisms. read more

“Practical men…are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” So said John Maynard Keynes, the hugely influential twentieth century economic theorist. Well, meet slave Michael Cullen.

A few weeks back Cullen declared: “The fundamental philosophy underlying my approach to fiscal management has been a simple but strict form of keynesianism.” read more

Times change. In 1953 the state could readily afford to finance 1940s Labour Prime Minister Peter Fraser’s noble aim that each person should have “free” education to the “fullest extent of his [sic] powers”.

Then only a very few wanted or needed to go to university. Most occupational training was on the job, not at polytechnics. Now tens of thousands go to universities and likewise to polytechnics. The state could afford to make this “free” only by raising taxes or cutting other activities. So there are fees. National is toying with rationing university places with higher academic entry hurdles. read more