It’s Anzac Day, a day to reflect on the nation-shaping event we shared with Australia at Gallipoli, We might also reflect on the disappearing “NZ” in Anzac.
This is centenary year of Australia’s federation of its six colonies, now states. An illuminating description of that century has been running on the ABC television, written by Paul Kelly, doyen of Australian political commentators.
Christine Rankin was the small beer. The pre-Easter manoeuvre that wrote her out of the government’s script marks two very big policy changes.
One is the reversal of a central principle of the 1988 state sector reforms.
The second is the flagging of a “social equivalent of the Treasury”, testing all policy against social criteria the way the Treasury does against fiscal and economic criteria.
It takes a strong Prime Minister to make a strong coalition government. It takes a constructive Deputy Prime Minister to glue it.
Only with brave imagination could one two years ago foresee Jim Anderton in this role. But in that role he is — in three ways.
First is his visible subordination to Helen Clark. This is Labour’s government and predominantly Labour’s rhetoric.
Helen Clark flies off today into a crisis. She is heading for China which has been warring with words with the United States. But that is not the crisis.
The crisis is in Japan, where she goes first, to drum up trade. Japan is rich but adrift, its banks tottering dangerously under bad loans. If they cannot be rescued, that might trigger a very nasty chain of events, compounding the slide in American share and managed funds prices and turning American consumers’ nervousness into fear, so driving the whole world into recession.
A few years ago the Business Roundtable toured through the country a no-nonsense nun, Connie Driscoll, who rescues Chicago women in strife and turns their lives around.
Sister Driscoll’s enterprise demonstrates a simple truth of which the roundtable has reminded us persistently and valuably: that people with imagination and passion, operating independently, can move mountains that defy all the state’s earthmoving machinery. This applies in the economy, health care, education – and social welfare.
Celebrities, confrontation and crime are the three cyphers of media ratings. Politicians have been supplying plenty of the first two and even a flash of the third. Haven’t they done well!
It is a commonplace among the chattering classes and their “commentariat” that the carryings-on of the past two weeks were not a good thing. Fat lot they know about what real people think and want.
Last Wednesday night in Parliament the National party rowdily belaboured all and sundry for wimpishness in the face of a flood of child pornography. No surprises in that — except that it incidentally included the Society for Promotion of Community Standards.
Whatever else one might say of the SPCS, excoriator of nudity and lax morals, it cannot be accused of limp-wristed liberalism.
A rumour swept through the public service last week: the three parts of the old Social
Welfare Department were to be put back together. It’s the sort of far-out rumour that is treated as a joke.
It’s not a joke.
The public service could be in for its biggest reshaping since the late-1980s reforms — though ministers emphasise no “big bang” is proposed and cabinet thinking is at a very early stage.
Social democrats once prided themselves on being internationalists. Workers across national borders were presumed to share a common oppression by capitalists. Nationalism was a game played by the ruling classes.
Helen Clark is heir to this tradition. It was a principle that sent Peter Fraser to jail for sedition in World War I. Half a century later the tradition spurred a generation of idealists to champion small countries, from Vietnam to El Salvador, against the United States. Ms Clark was one.
The real point about kiwibank is not Richard Prebble’s grandstanding defence of a liberty that was never seriously threatened. National’s Tony Ryall had it right: the real point is the bank’s opportunity cost to taxpayers.
If $80 million is invested in a bank, that $80 million is not available for the government’s capital programme to build roads, schools, hospitals and suchlike.