Politics is a realists’ trade. The most artful practitioners keep principle in the back pocket, if anywhere.
Bill English says he is hewing a principled line on Iraq. This fits in with his declaration in his first speech this session that National will hold the government to account according to National’s principles.
Here’s a challenge: in the haystack of departmental post-election briefings to ministers find the needle, the references to personal responsibility.
I’ve ploughed through 14. The firm message is that a large number of your fellow-citizens are helpless. Things happen to them, disadvantages are imposed on them, barriers are erected to stop them being full members of society.
Science Minister Pete Hodgson will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Crown research institutes (CRIs) this evening (Monday) with stern words from his ministry about the “fragility” of the research system ringing in his ears.
The Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (MoRST) wants “new processes to create a more motivated and focused research community”, which it broadly hints is low in morale. For a government that has made “innovation” central to its economic programme, these words have a special urgency — and they come after three years in office.
What hasn’t changed in your life since September 11 2001? Almost everything hasn’t changed. Helen Clark is still Prime Minister. The economy bowled on with hardly a hiccup. The big change was to be searched at airports by paranoiacs who believed you could destroy tall buildings with nail scissors.
Helen Clark is in her element this week: summiting with “world leaders”, this time in Johannesburg to save the world’s poor and the environment by way of “sustainable development”. This is social democracy on a very grand scale.
Clark is in interesting company: protesters against that paramount evil, “globalisation”, who now bedevil every conference of “world leaders”. Their thesis is that rich countries and their corporations are enslaving the world and wrecking the environment through free trade.
One of the government’s biggest tests this term in its quest to establish a durable majority will be welfare.
In the 1999 Speech from the Throne Helen Clark aimed to “correct” what she felt were the excesses of 15 years of reforms by free-marketeers and reducers of the state.
Today’s Speech from the Throne is a more challenging exercise — or should be.
Bring back Jenny Shipley. Not to bounce Bill English; there is enough juice in that stew. To tell us about “the family”.
The most abiding picture I have from the 1999 campaign was of Shipley resting her head on husband Burton’s shoulder on a bus ride at the end of a day on the West Coast. It was not showy or tokenist or despairing. It was homely.
Here are some numbers United Future and Labour might usefully take on board.
Some 40 per cent of United Future and ACT voters told the post-election NZ Herald DigiPoll they found it difficult to work out whom to vote for. The average for all those questioned was 24 per cent.
That a quarter of all voters found it difficult to decide their vote casts interesting light on MMP. It is also a worry for National, which shed votes in the campaign, many probably to ACT and United Future. Around 36 per cent of voters for those two parties said they made up their mind on election day or the day before.
A small, slight figure scurries through the sunrise at the sprawling Queensland resort hotel, Mamiya 6×7 camera and gear in hand and over shoulder, seeking out images of a foreign country. He is Francis Fukuyama and he is also an accomplished cabinetmaker.
But he is better known for his construction of very big ideas and for his picture of a world at the “end of history” — not the end of events but the endpoint of the contest of ideas with the victory of liberal democracy and market capitalism, Europe’s great invention.
What happens in the National party, now that it is at 21 per cent?
First off, it would probably help to slaughter a sacrificial lamb — or mutton, as the case may be.
Michelle Boag was until the campaign a plus: an attraction for better candidates, a catalyst for renewal of electorate chairs, the party’s engineroom, and a sharpener of the organisation.