The Maori party will get the Foreshore and Seabed Act repealed. The National party must uphold English legal tradition. Each must look the other way a bit to do the deal.
The Maori party was formed in anger at the act, so repeal is critically symbolic to the party. The act’s confiscation was of a right to go to court, with limited prospects, not actual confiscation of land. But Maori felt it as a confiscation of land.
Paula Bennett says “most people” will see last week’s welfare changes as “fair and reasonable”. She is almost certainly right. But is that the limit of her ambition?
A majority doesn’t make something right. Attorney-General Chris Finlayson, a lawyer’s lawyer, ruled that under the Bill of Rights Bennett’s changes are not fair: they discriminate on sex, marital status and family status grounds in applying the work requirement to those on a domestic purposes benefit whose youngest child is six but not to those on a widow’s benefit or a woman-alone on the DPB. Her new law does not qualify for exemption on the ground that it “serves an important and significant objective” and is “proportionate to that objective.”
Kate Wilkinson unintentionally put her finger exactly on the issue over mining on conservation land. “Let’s stop all the grandstanding,” she said. The Economist magazine agreed.
Wilkinson, bottom-of-the-cabinet Conservation Minister, was bollocking green and political attacks on cabinet No 3 Gerry Brownlee’s mining ambitions. The Economist, reporting those ambitions, was bollocking the tourism industry’s “100 per cent pure” slogan, which Tourism Minister John Key extols.
Environment Minister Nick Smith aims to set up a private-public taskforce to work out explore “green growth”. His 1990s predecessor in the portfolio, Simon Upton, is doing the same in Paris at the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD). Can they mesh?
Green growth (or green-tech or clean-tech) is the theory and practice of growing the economy in environment-friendly ways, a notion the government has been slow to come to — its notion of “balance” implies that more environment means less growth.
Back in 2002 the Clark government made local councils responsible for the “social, economic, environmental, and cultural wellbeing” in their areas and characterised that as a “power of general competence”. One mayor enthused that the “horse can now gallop round the paddock”.
Tim Groser is fond of this statistic: that the increase in exports to China in 2009 was the same as that year’s total exports to Korea. That analogy says much about east Asia’s growing indispensability to our Polynesian and British outlier nation.
First, it underlines China’s rise in the global economy and critical importance to this economy. Second, Groser’s choice of Korea instead of Britain or Canada as a comparison attests to the Asianisation of our future.
The Reserve Bank again flagged on Thursday that it will start raising its official cash rate mid-2010 or thereabouts. We are getting back to “normal”. Or are we?
The Clark government thought “normal” was the post-2000 boom when the Treasury’s revenue estimates were falsified monthly by waves of unexpected cash (actually at base funded by excessive consumer and house-buyer borrowing). So, claiming Treasury authority for its view, it spent up, in part to outbid John Key’s 2005 promise of cornucopian tax cuts.
It is a month for plans, strategies and discussion papers: infrastructure, road safety, mining in beautiful places, Crown research institutes, personal grievance, child abuse, with more to come, not least the “New Zealand Inc” consolidation of offshore diplomatic, trade and migration work — geared to “catching up with Australia”.
The government went big on investment this week — on infrastructure. It wants to go big on minerals investment. Will it go big on investment in children?
The best infrastructure, the biggest mineral bonanza, the lowest taxes and the best balanced regulation won’t catch Australia if too many children get a bad start in life. They are the Australia-catching future workforce.
This is John Key’s crunch year. It is also Rodney Hide’s. New love has limits. Hard politics is an arranged marriage.
Hide is a mixture of bounce and bluster. The bounce gets things done. The bluster pumps him up big which might keep the small band of faithful hopeful, but at the risk, if punctured, of leaving him and ACT smaller (as do love trysts at taxpayers’ expense and loose talk about National at dinner).