One of the busiest ministers is Nick Smith. This is not just because he is reorienting ACC and large chunks of environment policy but because he goes at it with great energy and, officials attest, in command of stupefying detail.
Last week Smith fined up the last of the 2009 ACC reform legislation’s major changes: discounts for safe employers and penalties for unsafe ones — up to 50 per cent each way for big employers and up to 10 per cent for small ones.
How long will John Key stick around? Even before Kevin Rudd was suddenly rolled last month, this question was doing the rounds in the Wellington political hothouse.
The speculation goes like this: Key has not come to the top job with a burning ambition to change the world in a particular way, as distinct from a desire to do some good; he is not a career politician despite a teenage desire to be Prime Minister; he is not a loser and won’t want to go out on a loss; he has the sort of personality that could enjoy time at the top and then move on.
John Key will be lionised this weekend at the National party conference, with reason. Will he be lionised this time three years hence?
Key was the third phase of National’s recovery of self-respect, delivering it back to power after Jenny Shipley’s 1998 divorce from a costly coalition with Winston Peters and Don Brash’s rescue from the 2002 nadir with the race card, personal attack advertising and large tax-cut promises.
Dunedin is important to John Key and his chief science adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman. Half of Sir Peter’s 10-strong working group aiming to inject scientific evidence into a crucial aspect of social policy are Otago University professors, three based in Dunedin.
This group, if taken seriously by ministers, could turn out to be much more valuable to social cohesion and economic health than the benefit-trimming Welfare Working Group.
John Key is off the South Korea, China and Vietnam. A couple of days in each place, with business and research interests in tow, including a day at the Shanghai expo where half a million people go each day. It highlights east Asia’s importance. But has he grasped the breadth of that importance?
Colin James for the Royal Society’s Kotuitui publication but not published when I refused to indemnify it against all conceivable legal and other challenges
Jon Johansson is a passionate man. He says so in the first sentence of The Politics of Possibility: “I love my country.” It’s an uncommon way for an academic to begin. His reason: “The first principle of any nation is its geography”. And this country is a village where, he says, politics is intimate and politicians accessible.
So Johansson sets out to describe our particular political topography and political flora and fauna. He mixes journalism into his academic inquiry: a Victoria University academic, Johansson relishes being a commentator in the old electronic media and in the evolving online version — and is a campaigning commentator, with some strong views (notably on the future republic) which he airs as an “instinctual centrist” with Aristotelian principles.
Colin James to the Association of Pacific Rim Universities Auckland University, 1 July 2010
The territory that is now New Zealand was in 1840 a Pacific place, peopled by autonomous, self-governing tribes (iwi) and subtribes (hapu) who came from the Polynesian Pacific around 800 years ago. In 1840 it was incorporated into the British Empire by the Treaty of Waitangi signed by most iwi and for the next century and a quarter New Zealand was Europe’s most distant outpost — an outpost in the Pacific. Since the mid-1970s, and particularly since the mid-1980s, a distinct European-descended culture and custom has evolved with deepening roots, which increasingly reflects and incorporates elements of Maori tradition, language, motifs and culture and custom. Te reo — the Maori language — has equal official status with English. New Zealand calls itself bicultural, a nation of two principal cultures: Aotearoa-New Zealand. This is in part a factor of the demographic resurgence of Maori (now 15 per cent of the population), in part a response to a new assertiveness from Maori leaders and in part a factor of the fashionable doctrine of indigenous rights, given weight through legislation and court decisions and anchored in the Treaty of Waitangi. In addition, there has been a new migration over the past 40 years from the Polynesian Pacific (now 7 per cent).
Last year John Key, ex-banker, went to his first National party conference as Prime Minister as the adulated winner who had restored the party to power. This year he is the Prime Minister who has taken the party into uncomfortable territory in his dealings with iwi leaders. Next year will he be the economic game-changing Prime Minister?
Kevin Rudd speaks mandarin. But while he was (briefly) Prime Minister he could not secure a free trade agreement with China. New Zealand is still not just the first but the only “advanced” economy in free trade with the celestial empire.
There was much talk of New Zealand’s numerous “firsts” with China at Otago University’s annual foreign policy “school” at the weekend as explaining much of our “special relationship”.
History has a way of veering off track. Kevin Rudd’s “historic” first speech to Parliament by a foreign leader billed for tomorrow will not be history after all. Julia Gillard has rescheduled history. Will she also reschedule the Rudd trans-Tasman agenda?
Lying in behind this question is another, particularly on Australia’s side: might Gillard and John Key want in time to take that agenda to a new level?