United States Admiral Dennis Blair brought a subtler message last week than the one Helen Clark swatted away – one Ms Clark in a different guise might have run with.
Admiral Blair did not just say we should do more. That has become obvious from East Timor: having to scrape up reservists for that venture has uncovered a manpower hole in peacekeeping policy that has been known, but masked, for most of the past decade.
On Friday-Saturday, hard on the heels of hard talk from United States Admiral Dennis Blair, the National party will run a defence seminar featuring the Australian Senate foreign affairs, defence and trade committee chair Sandy McDonald, a critic of the Clark line.
This follows Bob Simcock’s child battering conference last month. Similar ventures in other topics are taking place out of the public gaze. National is moving to redevelop policy and doing it intelligently.
The mood turned in October. You could feel it. Nothing spectacular but a palpable drop in anger and gloom.
It showed last week in one poll in a better rating for the government. Whether it is the start of a long upswing, as happened for Jenny Shipley twice from around this time of the year, we will not know for months. But it comes just in time to rescue this coming weekend’s Labour conference from untoward introspection.
Paul Swain told a hoary joke about speechwriting. Helen Clark was 20 minutes late and spoke woodenly. They seemed symbolic of missing, not catching, the jet to the wonder economy they were extolling at Mr Swain’s e-summit last week.
Actually Mr Swain’s ancient joke – the fired speechwriter’s final speech notes for a bullying minister list on page 1 an ambitious set of points the minister will make in the speech, then on page 2 say only “now you’re on your own, you bastard” – backhandedly underlined the e-economy’s unpredictability.
There is a paradox at the heart of the government’s business policy. Council of Trade Unions economist Peter Conway fingered it on this page on Friday.
“There is a good argument for a quantum leap in economic development expenditure,” Mr Conway wrote, “but such notions have to compete with superannuation pre-funding as well as the spending pressures because of the huge social deficit that has developed over the past two decades.”
Matt Robson’s media profile is a reasoned advocate of enlightened treatment of criminals.
This is not a fashionable cause, even with his Labour allies in the cabinet. Characteristically, however, Mr Robson courts not popularity but rightness as he sees it.
This is the man who in 1989 gave up almost certain Labour candidacy for a safe seat to follow his conscience into minority politics. That marks him as unusual in a place where the main chance is the main course.
Is this an unholy alliance? Commerce Minister Paul Swain is co-hosting an address by former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar next week – with, of all people, the Business Roundtable.
Just two days earlier Mr Swain will pack down at the Prime Minister’s cabinet-meets-business conference, from which some prominent Roundtablers have been explicitly excluded.
Early in my appropriately short stage career, when I was five or six, the focal point of a play I starred in was whether the cheese someone had been sent to buy was milder than strong or stronger than mild. The regulation debate has taken on some of that flavour.
Is the government moving us into a heavy light-handed regulatory regime or a light heavy-handed one? Much hangs on this.
I remember as a fledgling parliamentary journalist marvelling at Pierre Trudeau’s way of answering questions. This was the Holyoake era and intellect was an infrequent visitor to politics.
Mr Trudeau seemed to reach deep into a cultural and intellectual reservoir to begin each answer. He was deeply thoughtful and subtly informative. He was, to boot, suave and handsome, even dashing.
If the dollar, the petrol price and the Olympic washout haven’t yet got you down, go listen to a home-grown captain of industry. Mapped out between you and your economic hopes will be mighty crevasses of unconfidence and gloom.
Perhaps positive thinking is these days reserved to foreign magnates who can invest their energy and money anywhere in the international board game. Certainly, by most accounts, the Herald’s owner, Tony O’Reilly – who distinguished himself in my eyes way back in 1959 by, film-star-like, wearing cut-down boots as a British Lions wing – was upbeat in speeches here last week.