Federated Farmers is adamant: food, a necessary of life, must not be in the greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme (ETS). John Key and his Minister of Agriculture, David Carter, are adamant it must be in.
When the National party and Federated Farmers are openly at odds on a major issue, that is serious politics.
The foreshore and seabed is much more a political than a legal issue. That’s why the government will take its time.
Of course, there is much law involved. The issue became political because the Appeal Court in effect laid down new law in 2003 by overturning a longstanding High Court decision.
There is also the common law, Maori customary law, Te Ture Whenua Act, which deals with Maori land, and complex coastal and marine law. And there is the Foreshore and Seabed Act, which the ministerial review committee, itself reinterpreting the law, wants repealed and replaced.
What gets National party people out of bed in the morning? Power. Other parties have a purpose for power. For National the purpose is power.
That focus is a reason why National is in power more often than Labour. Since the two first went head to head in 1936, National will have been in office 40 years by 2011 and Labour 35 years. If National wins a second term in 2011 it will in the half-century to 2014 have beaten Labour 32-18.
Here are two views about the electricity industry: it charges consumers too much; and the large government-owned parts don’t deliver big enough dividends to the government. The government holds both views.
Here are two more views about the electricity industry: for the good of the clean-green brand the proportion generated from renewable sources must rise; and generators must be free to build non-renewables plants. The government holds both views.
On Monday Rodney Hide will take a paper to the cabinet to set up a 2025 commission. This is an ambitious undertaking.
The 2025 commission is part of the National-ACT support agreement.
The two parties agreed to set a “concrete goal of closing the income gap with Australia by 2025”. They also agreed that would “require a sustained lift in the productivity growth rate to 3 per cent a year or more”.
Colin James’s address to the Institute of Public Administration, 25 June 2009
The public sector has long been big in New Zealand. An assumption that the government is by and large a friend in need and in deed is part of our political culture. This trust and the fact that the public sector is big means the public has a strong interest in its government operating by clear, well-understood and strict rules of conduct. Observance of those rules is not a technicality, to be adjusted for convenience. Observance of the rules — of propriety in government — is in the public interest.
Of course, the government isn’t always a friend. Maori know that from their post-Treaty of Waitangi history. Everyone has a story or two about stuff-ups or gaps in services or unfair or incompetent treatment at the hands of a public agency or one of its staff. And there is a small minority which thinks the public sector is inherently a drag on economic progress and largely inimical to individual liberty.
Sir Fred Goodwin last week reduced his pension to $875,000 to escape a court case. That is a bad bank story. When banks go bad, voters get angry and politicians are cats on hot bricks.
Sir Fred was chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, a big and venerable bank which he made enormously bigger with reckless acquisitions and then crashed with a reckless attitude to risk.
Grant Robertson, MP for public servants, is keeping a tally of sackings — 1200 at his latest count. If he sticks to this task, he is assured of a long-term job.
National last year promised a “cap” on core public service staff numbers but also a shuffle: fewer “bureaucrats” and more on the “front line”, especially in hospitals, police and prisons.
The issue in the Supreme Court’s suppression of evidence in the David Bain trial is not whether there were words on the tape or not. It is that the court found that the law does not trust a jury to make a wise decision.
The logic of that distrust is to abolish juries. After all, they are a medieval hangover. Judgment by one’s peers is not just a legal fiction but an actual fiction. Juries are unrepresentative.
The jury has spoken. But does it speak for anywhere other than Mt Albert? And does it speak on anything but Mt Albert’s particularities?
At least the Supreme Court doesn’t get a look in, to tell the jurors there is evidence they must not hear because they are not wise enough to judge its relevance or accuracy. In elections, as distinct from in the law, voters are treated, by the presiding authorities at least, as adults.