How to start and how to stop: two problems with trying out new things in the government. Both are important for taxpayers.
By the time an idea materialises into a “pilot”, so much may have been invested in research, planning and persuading stakeholders, other officials and ministers that it is almost predestined to evolve into a full-blown operation.
In December Pita Sharples characterised negotiations between John Key and the iwi leadership group as the marrying of two worldviews and two political systems, the Maori political system and the general political system. Ponder that this coming Waitangi Day.
Sharples was combining the Treaty of Waitangi’s two modern messages: one of unity and the other of separateness. As the Treaty’s truth and reconciliation phase begins to wind down with the settling of historical grievances, those two messages will need rebalancing if the Treaty is henceforth to be a nation-defining force.
Phil Goff cooks sausages to a turn on the barbecue. But can he cook up a strategic future for Labour?
Here’s Labour’s record for the five decades years since the end of 1959: in government 19 years, out of government 31 years. Its best five decades were 1929-79, when it had 20 years in government, its worst just 12 in 1949-99. Of the 60 years since 1949 it has held office for 21 — one in three.
Two days before Christmas Treasury Secretary John Whitehead announced a cleanout of his top ranks. This day of the long knives was a step in the Treasury’s bid to regain premier status under a government which wants a “step-change” in economic performance.
Whitehead replaced all four deputy secretaries with two new deputy chief executives, one from the Prime Minister’s Department and one from Britain, and two new deputy secretaries. He appointed a chief economist, also British. Crown business and “state sector performance” monitoring got a new boss. There is a new chief accountant.
John Key said all last year he wanted a “world class tax system”. Now Bill English’s working group has granted him his wish, with a stern injunction to get on with it. This is his big first-term test.
When English told the Treasury and Victoria University’s Centre for Accounting Governance and Taxation Research to form a group to research tax reform, officials thought they would be doing some repairs. By August Bob Buckle’s group had convinced officials the system was “broken”.
We spent the double-noughts decade on a spending binge. The tens are payback time. It might take a while.
By we, I mean Europeans, North Americans and Australasians. The result has been to push along a redistribution of economic power.
Floyd Norris of the New York Times calculates that an investment spread across all “developed” markets, with all dividends reinvested (and investors “somehow avoided all taxes”), would have had an annual return through the 2000s of 0.2 per cent, “not enough to offset the transaction costs and far below inflation”. The United States return was “negative 2.3 per cent”.
In 1999 the United States ran the world. By 2009 pretenders had grown more assertive and power more dispersed. To navigate these shifting tides this small country will need to keep its wits about it.
Four events shook the United States in the decade after 1999: the dotcom crash in 2000, ending investors’ digital euphoria; the islamist terror of September 11 2001; the banking crash of 2007-08; and Chinese and Indian intransigence at Copenhagen.
OK, you’ve now begun to break those resolutions you made last Thursday midnight. Some you’ve forgotten. Some you wish you’d never made. Some you will make again 361 days hence.
That’s the good thing about New Year’s Eve: it comes round once a year. You get another go.
Here are 13 other resolutions that might have been made on Thursday — or might not.
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.
It’s been a year of flags and forelock-tugs. John Key so reveres the Union Jack he gave us back knights and dames. Then he runs the tino rangatiratanga flag up the pole alongside his quaint vestige of empire.
Meet the bifurcated Prime Minister, part-ancient, part-modern. He said the iwi flag is a symbol of the Treaty of Waitangi as the nation’s founding document — a historical relic. He also said the meaning he takes from it is “potential and hope” — a signpost to the future.