“Saying sorry won’t get a new wall-to-wall,” the Barry Humphreys character Edna Everage once famously said, complaining about a guest who had spilt wine on the carpet.
And that was the killer for Ella Henry. Saying sorry didn’t remove the stain. The Human Rights Commission could not credibly have carried her after her hot-headed letter to a policeman wrongly alleging racism. Presuming racism in others without direct evidence is itself a form of racism.
There is nothing like the alpine winter air to purify the spirit and clear the mind. On holiday far from the treacherous avalanche terrain of Wellington politics, the Prime Minister can refine priorities.
One is clear: her government gives the environment priority over the economy. Sandra Lee’s Reefton mining ban is on message.
What’s business’s biggest beef with the Government? High on most lists — including the Government’s business compliance cost committee’s — is the Resource Management Act (RMA). The National party aims to capitalise on it to win business votes.
To many in business the RMA has meant uncertainty, delays, court appeals and added costs. Some projects drown in a soup of bureaucracy and objections. Some would-be investors just give up.
Rodney Hide is putting trust to the test. Drip by drip he drops his leakers’ corrosive acid on Jim Anderton’s kiwibank, for which you, as captive shareholders, are stumping up $80 million.
The upshot is the loss of the Prime Minister’s trust in a vital state agency, the Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit, apparently the source of at least some of the leaks.
What do the Greens stand for? Sustainable development is high on the list. But what does it mean?
For some people sustainable development means no more than an economic growth rate which can be sustained, cycle after cycle. Ours now is somewhere between 2.5 per cent and 3 per cent, which the government wants lifted to 4 per cent.
They came, they conquered with words and they went — back home to countries that innovate, that organise, that are upwardly mobile.
Behind they left some energised and better networked people and even a good intention or two and some others a bit more aware of the hard choices ahead if we are to “catch the knowledge wave” to the top league.
It is a perfectly valid choice for the people of this country to make to settle for gentle economic decline relative to other countries. It is the one the people have made for 35 years and it has loads of international precedent, since Greece pioneered it two millennia ago.
But it is not one that appeals to the political, research and business elites. So start paddling for the Knowledge Wave.
Some things don’t change. When last the National party conference met in the Auckland Town Hall in 1980, my low opinion of the morning tea biscuits stirred divisional chair Pat Baker’s wife Susan to bake me a batch of excellent cheese scones.
This Sunday morning just past, in the same unhallowed precincts, Pat delivered me a little box of Susan’s tasty fresh-baked cheese puffs to mark National’s return.
Look through the smoke of the presidential battle at this coming weekend’s National party conference and whom do you see? Simon Power.
Take note of that name. It has a tailor-made feel to it.
Jenny Shipley has plucked Power from the very back benches to make the conference’s closing speech on “A National future”.
So Mark Prebble, head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, had to move out of range of Christine Rankin’s fleshly protuberances. Senior public servants once were made of sterner stuff.
Prebble, a most able bureaucrat, thought he had offered Rankin helpful advice. But it turns out he was being taken down in evidence, as were others, all now national laughing-stocks.