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.
Judith Collins will officiate at another police “event” today — but not one with the flashing lights, sirens and fast cars that have become synonymous with police. She is to launch a new policing venture — to be done by the public.
This is not cost-cutting. The aim is to catch, charge and incarcerate more criminals and make the country more peaceable. The public is, or was, the point of having a police force. Which is the point Commissioner Howard Broad wants to re-emphasise.
Back in February Bill English is said to have told public service chief executives the ministers they were dealing with were a “loose coalition of the self-employed”. Pita Sharples has been showing us how loose.
Sharples is a man with a mission: to elevate the status of Maori. Maori Television winning the rugby world cup rights fitted that. Maori phrases on the airwaves underline to foreigners this nation’s cultural point of distinction.
British Tory MP Gregory Barker brought two lessons for John Key on Saturday: a conservative party can promote world “leadership” in climate change; and it is the sort of long-term policy that demands big-party bipartisan backing.
Key has explicitly rejected the first and last month stepped away from the second.
Judith Collins trumpeted a terrible defeat last week: a record number of people locked up in cells.
This week she detailed another terrible defeat: recorded violence rose 7 per cent in the year to June, driven by a 13.5 per cent rise in family violence.
Her response to family violence? “It is time we got serious about stamping out this problem by offering more protection to victims and ensuring offenders were punished for their crimes.”
There is a rule in politics: last long enough in government and initiatives that were originally controversial become orthodox.
So the National government’s deregulation of the labour market in 1991, radical at the time and fiercely opposed by Labour and the unions, was not wholly rolled back in 2000 when the unions’ party, Labour, won office with the Alliance in tow.
Sue Bradford is leaving the Greens’ caucus next month. She lost a majority vote. That is not very Green.
Bradford is a battler. She has added a dimension of tough social activism to the Greens which they will not readily replicate. Not many MPs could have done her section 59 bill.
But Metiria Turei beat her in a majority vote to be co-leader. The Greens went for a change of generation. Bradford is baby-boomer 57. Turei is generation-x 39. Post-Bradford, the Greens will be less social-activist and more small-g green.
Here’s the back-office rationale for sending the SAS back to Afghanistan: it provides an exit option.
It goes like this: pull the reconstruction team out of Banyam where it is doing great work, but in a possibly unreconstructible country; set a fixed term for the SAS; pull out the SAS and leave Nato and the Taleban to it.
Bill English is about to get another reminder from the Treasury of the challenges ahead if the country is to stay fiscally prudent. And with it will come a prod to start thinking long-term about big decisions some government will have to make sometime.
The reminder will come in the Treasury’s second 40-year fiscal projection. This first was in 2006.
Circling in parts of the Labour party in the past couple of months has been a new book, The Spirit Level. Delegates cited it at the conference last weekend. It might become a sort of guidebook for the next Labour ministry.
The reason is in the subtitle: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. More accurately, the “more equal” might have been written “less unequal”.