While most big-name magazines have been contracting and even going out of print under the internet’s assault, The Economist has been expanding.
The Economist is a distinctively English — Oxbridge — institution, a weekly established in 1843 to spread the word about free markets. From the 1970s it has pushed into the United States, Asia — everywhere.
Did you notice the recession? Did it savage your household or neighbourhood? Have you noticed that things are looking up now and it’s (nearly) fine, sort of?
Or did you only know there was a recession because economists and politicians kept banging out numbers of gloom? Is it the same with the sort-of lift?
If you can’t get through the door, you are not likely to be much help to families in trouble and need — nor, more important, to their children. The Maori Women’s Welfare League, which can open doors, can tell you that.
So can Shine, an Auckland NGO (non-government organisation) which has begun a three-month pilot of a Paula Bennett initiative to get more effective “low-key” intervention to head off domestic violence and protect under-2s.
What will Don Brash’s 2025 taskforce say next year and the year after and the year after and the year after?
Most likely it will say that, short-term fluctuations aside, the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia is not getting smaller and that the government is dragging its feet on the taskforce’s recommended reforms.
It’s useful to know who your friends are. Rodney Hide is a devoted friend of this “very, very good government”. He called Nick Smith’s emissions trading bill “atrocious policy” resulting from “atrocious process”.
Then a luminary John Key counted as a friend on education policy joined three others to question his (actually Bill English’s) cornerstone education policy — standards.
Once upon a time farmers had great leverage within and over the National party. This past week or two the iwi leadership group has had more. Its lever is the Maori party’s votes Nick Smith needs for his revised emissions trading scheme (ETS).
Farmers got intensity-based status in the ETS with no cap. But they have not got out of the ETS, as farmers in Australia have from that country’s, through the Liberal-National opposition.
It’s been a month for H’s in hot water. First Rodney Hide for perk-bingeing actions not fitting perk-busting principles. Then the man with two H’s, Hone Harawira.
Harawira got into hot water, initially, for making cultural use of a trip to Europe: a day in Paris connecting with his heritage.
Rodney Hide has stumbled into the H world: say one thing, do another, about perks. Then in Christchurch on Wednesday there was H for hubris as he disparaged “do-nothing” John Key. In Hide’s actual work as a minister, however, the H stands for high-aiming.
His aim: to revolutionise the way law is made. His mechanism: a new law, plus new procedures, to parallel the transparency Ruth Richardson’s Fiscal Responsibility Act injected into government budgeting.
A year ago Helen Clark’s government was in its death throes, a week away from election defeat. John Key was on a roll. He still is.
Key is set to roll over the top of Phil Goff in 2011. Indeed, the spectre for Labour is National’s fall in 2002 after losing power in 1999.
It is not beyond imagining that Labour could come in below its 2008 vote and the Greens not get 5 per cent, in which case National then cruises with an easy majority through a second term. A complicating factor in that event could be a despairing vote by some to lift New Zealand First back over 5 per cent to provide the sort of antidote United Future provided to Labour in 2002 when National was down and out.
Either the Nobel peace prize judges have taken leave of this world or they have preternatural premonitions of promise fulfilled. President Barack Obama got the prize for doing … well, some great speeches.
The judges’ adulation of a work in gestation is a measure of modern western society’s need for heroes. That includes us.