Six years ago this coming Sunday Helen Clark won office. She won a third term in September-October. But is her nemesis round the corner?
Few — and I was not one — predicted six years ago that Clark would get three terms.
We reckoned without export and house price booms.
We reckoned without her evolution in office, with touches of populism in, for example, her championing of the rugby world cup bid and her pitch rightwards since 2002 in forming governments.
Productivity growth is the centrepiece of Helen Clark’s third term and she told us last week “science and innovation are critical to driving our prosperity”. But the numbers — and the logic — don’t add up.
The government’s strategy for “driving prosperity” is in its vaunted growth and innovation framework (GIF). Research, science and technology (RS&T) is a core element of the GIF.
John Key tells of an international bank — not his one — which used to expect its employees around the world to live the business culture of its home country.
It was a one-culture company. It didn’t work. Employees preferred to live their own countries’ cultures.
So the bank became a one-company culture, unified under a brand and certain operational commonalities but accommodating national cultural differences. It has flourished.
Colin James: Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture, Maidment Theatre, Auckland University, 14 November 2005
This is an honour and an astonishment: an astonishment because this occasion is grandly titled a “lecture” and I am a journalist — journalists write stories; and an honour because I think Bruce Jesson was worthy of having a lecture named for him.
Once in 2002 I rang Rod Donald somewhat before 6 in the morning, anticipating he would be calling for the latest poll averages and determined for once to get in first. He didn’t answer but rang me back a bit later.
The phone had been on, he said, but he had been in the shower. Upon which I tried some humour: no doubt, he slept with it under his pillow. Well, actually, he did. Nicola was not very pleased, he added.
Back to Muldoonist meddling or some judicious jawboning? Which does the inquiry into direct intervention into house mortgages amount to?
Intervention would be a big step away from the principles governing the financial markets for the past 20 years and would carry attendant risks of a less flexible economy and slower growth.
Through today’s Speech from the Throne and in speeches over the next few weeks Helen Clark will promote her reading of the “New Zealand way”. She wants that to be your reading of the “New Zealand way” too.
And the longer she stays in office the more time and opportunity she gets to do just that, to make her government “normal”.
It’s a perennial story: the central government’s version of the local hole-in-the-road syndrome — where the “w” gets lost from “whole-of-government” action.
You know the local story: serial roadworks to fix the drains, water supply, phone cables, electricity cables and then drains again.
Sir Keith Holyoake won his third term in 1966 just as the terms of trade turned sour and the economy turned down. He called a nine-month-long national development conference of all economic interest groups to do some “indicative planning” and set 10-year targets. He scraped a fourth term in 1969.
What does National need to do before the next election? Put the small “n” back in National.
That is, it must look, smell, feel, sound and act like a party representative of the nation — as it was in its halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s.
At National party conferences these days you count the Maori there in single digits; so, too, for Pacific islanders and other ethnic minorities.