Now the H-word is coming back to haunt Labour backbenchers in a very personal way. The polls are giving them their first foretaste of defeat in 2002. What is their government to do?
This year has been spent honouring the “credit card’s” seven promises and ministers are congratulating themselves that they are now well through that. Money is being spent, programmes are in train, laws have been passed or are being drafted.
In Melbourne rich countries’ kids “non-violently” stop people gathering to talk about free trade. In Wellington Jenny Shipley leads her party into opposition to a free trade agreement. What is going on?
Mrs Shipley argues that she is not opposing the Singapore-New Zealand “closer economic partnership” (CEP) agreement, just its special treatment for Maori. But if her party, however sorely provoked by Helen Clark, persists in this political posturing, that opposition will amount to opposition to the CEP.
Tariana Turia is right. Colonisation of Maori devastated a culture, an economy and a power system.
To understand why she is right, imagine that 7 or 8 million Chinese arrive and impose the Mandarin language, a different set of laws and way of doing business and a political system that marginalises us and follow that up, if we resist, by military confiscation of swathes of farmland, factories and offices – plus a bonus of deadly new diseases.
Want to hear another, true, horror story about our low dollar? Last week a man had his credit card at first refused in China because it had the words “New Zealand” on it.
Once upon a time we thought of China as coolies in poverty. Now the Chinese think of us as unbankable.
How did we get to this “kiwifruit republic” state?
National is trying to eliminate some differences with Labour so it can better compete. It is also trying to sharpen some differences with Labour so it can better compete.
Divergence, it seems, is the better part of valour.
Nowhere is divergence more evident than in National’s muddle over Maori. Jenny Shipley, political child of placid mid-century provincialism, intoned slogans to her party’s conference on Saturday of the sort likely to whip white unease into a froth of ethnic resentment. Bill English, not long out of short pants when the Treaty of Waitangi renaissance began and seeking centrist reconciliation, says National must have Maori support to win long term and is heading out to marae and Maori “nation-building” hui.
Three years ago, when the National party last gathered in conference at the Grand Chancellor Hotel in Christchurch as it will this weekend, leadership change was in the air. Jenny Shipley was stalking Jim Bolger.
He fell to her knife two months later, judged by his MPs as not enough a “nineties” man, which was an irony since it had been his wont to proclaim the nineties as the “golden decade”.
This government is big on “partnership”. It wants one with local government, with business, with Maori – with nearly everyone who will play.
Steve Maharey even has a very PC committee beavering away to develop a “framework” to govern its partnerships with non-government organisations and the voluntary sector.
Is free trade dead? Not yet. A new World Trade Organisation trade liberalisation round may be (temporarily?) stalled. But bilateral and regional initiatives abound – and that’s a bother for us.
New Zealand is small and distant. It scarcely registers on foreign capitals’ radars. Why should Korea, still less the United States, bother with us if they can talk turkey with Japan?
If it has escaped your notice so far, this Prime Minister is determined to get what she wants.
That includes the Minister of Maori Affairs she has set her mind on. Labour would be looking for a new leader if it bucked her choice, she said on Monday.
She made it sound matter-of-fact, so much so that I almost had to pinch myself to register she had issued an ultimatum – normally a sign of crisis politics.
Jim Soorley is a Marist priest turned businessman turned Labor Lord Mayor of Brisbane. He says in a globalised world nations are the past and cities are the future.
Mr Soorley was a star turn at the local government conference in Christchurch on Monday.
Now in his fourth term, Mr Soorley insists that it is the clean-green and socially cohesive cities (or localities) that will attract business in future. His administration has invested heavily in making Brisbane such a place.