“Regional development” has come a long way from the 1970s. Then it resembled aid to the third world: money from Wellington to make work in depressed regions. Now it is smart work, anywhere, which the government “coaches”.
What makes that “regional”, as distinct from national? According to advocates of this revived practice, the distinctiveness of the region. So you don’t have a steel mill or wearable art or gumboot-throwing in every town.
Helen Clark goes to this weekend’s Labour party conference a leader in command, as none has been since Peter Fraser. The shy policy wonk of 20 years ago has become this country’s most commanding Prime Minister in half a century.
That long? Wasn’t Sir Robert Muldoon a powerhouse? Not like Clark is. He lost the feel of the electorate. Two years after his 1975 landslide he was within three months of losing a safe rural seat in a by-election and within a year winning fewer votes than Labour in a general election.
Business is about to get more assertive of its policy needs and to campaign for public backing of faster economic growth. A focal point will be a conference on December 6 organised by Business New Zealand.
This comes at a time when the government is still congratulating itself on its much improved relations with business through its regional forums and other projects. Helen Clark’s speeches to business audiences continue to be very well, sometimes nearly rapturously, received. And she gets very high marks for her trade and investment promotion work with business on trips abroad.
It sounds an anomaly in terms, like a herd of cats. But Steve Maharey is undeterred: he is backing a conference of social entrepreneurs.
What will they do, tomorrow and Friday in Wellington, these free spirits? Not earnestly pass resolutions to save souls. Entrepreneurs — business, cultural, environmental or social — are risk-takers for an idea that works, not conformists to majority votes.
The message from John Howard to Helen Clark is that if she wants three terms it will help if she picks and soothes the electorate’s frights.
Howard made up ground steadily all year, with policy backflips and high dives and oodles of money. But suburban fright at real and imagined Asian perils gave him his election-night cushion.
The most important word uttered by Helen Clark last week was “worldview”. It signals her recognition of biculturalism, the country’s biggest challenge.
Turning that challenge into opportunity would inscribe Clark’s prime ministership in history more memorably than a bigger economy or better hospitals.
Been bowled over by the knowledge wave lately? You know, the one that was making big surf in August? Probably not. But there is a quiet swell.
The hype of the conference co-chaired by Auckland University vice-chancellor John Hood and Prime Minister Helen Clark in August has faded and the slogan has also dropped from public view. But there are some initiatives that directly result from conference recommendations and others to which it added impetus. The slogan has provided a low-level unifying theme.
One of my favourite small companies is Learning Media. A CROC (Crown-owned company), it is no crock. Jim Anderton could cite it in his anti-privatisation speeches.
Learning Media was once a departmental supplier of classroom fodder. Rogergnomes turned the bureaucrats into a company and told them to find ways of making money. And they have: revenue doubled (to $24 million) and profits quadrupled (to $2.7 million) in the past five years, with exports now at 40% of sales.
We now have a battle of political generations. That is what Bill English’s leisurely accession to the National party leadership spells.
Helen Clark is, in political terms, a child of the 1960s and early 1970s. English is politically a child of the 1990s. The next four years will be a contest between their different ways of viewing the world.
Australia is dispatching troops, planes and ships for George Bush’s war. This country has offered the SAS, fullstop. Yet again the two nations are diverging, a now familiar fact in a relationship of critical importance to business.
There is another familiar fact: apart from to companies with business or subsidiaries here, New Zealand doesn’t seriously matter to Australia, except when things go wrong.