Ideas & other articles | Colin James

Ten Prime Ministers

Colin James’s chapter for Political Science edition on leadership, December 2004

Prime Ministers make a difference. Much of the success or failure of a prime ministership is determined by factors outside the Prime Minster’s control: movements in the economy, social change, external shocks, the condition of the party or government they inherited, the makeup of Parliament. But the personality, psyche and preferences each brings to the role determines whether he or she makes the best or not of those factors.

Four ways of looking at the Iraq adventure

Thoughts delivered at a Retreat, 6 April 2003

Iraq is a complicated issue. You can view it from many dimensions. I am going to pick four.

The first is strategic. This has three divergent parts.

One is an extension of the Huntington thesis posited a decade ago that the world is headed for a clash of civilisations: between the post-christian west and militant islam. This pits the ideal of liberal-democratic capitalism against fundamentalist islam. It is a false contest, in that few muslims are fundamentalist (just as few christians are) and few islamic fundamentalists are terrorists. Nevertheless some who back the American presence in Iraq do argue that at least part of its mission is to bring liberal democracy to Iraq and perhaps the whole Middle East — to civilise islam. This is a chimera in that it would take generations to achieve such a conversion — if indeed it proved possible. (Our own brush with indigenous rights and the reassertion of the validity of animist spirituality, as Whaimutu Dewes touched on yesterday, is surely enough to cause thinking New Zealanders to pause). Nevertheless, it is an arguable reason for the invasion of Iraq, if the combatants and those who follow and help in the reconstruction are prepared to apply money, patience and effort.

Fixing up globalisation

Colin James’s unpublished article on Singer”s “One World”

Globalisation is here to stay, so it is time we set it in some ethical standards. So says Peter Singer in a new book to get your synapses in working order for your return to the office.

Singer is an Australian philosopher with a high-prestige “bioethics” university post at Princeton in the United States. His easy-to-read new book, One World: the ethics of globalisation*, is a challenging adjunct to Philippe Legrain’s brilliant Open World: The Truth about Globalisation, reviewed here on November 6.

Warrior Queen or Good Queen Helen?

Colin James on Helen Clark for the Independent for 4 December 2002

Helen Clark kicked off the election campaign this year snarling at the Greens on the steps of Parliament. Later she did a sumptuous official opening in the Aotea Centre to an adoring throng. But the earlier unrehearsed version became the campaign’s abiding image and theme. And it cost votes.

The Treasury gets the intervention message

Unpublished NZ Herald article by Colin James

Get used to it: the 1990s have gone. That is Treasury Secretary Alan Bollard’s parting shot as he heads for the Reserve Bank. Now the Treasury backs “proactive” government intervention in the economy.

Being “open for business”, relying on market signals and a level playing field, is no longer enough, the Treasury said in its traditional post-election briefing to the re-elected government.

A new "Wintringham doctrine"?

Extract from comments to seminar by the Centre for Public Law, 6 August

At noon on 11 July an extraordinary event took place in Room G005 in Parliament. There, at the request of the head of the public service, Michael Wintringham, senior officers of the Ministries for the Environment and of Agriculture and Forestry briefed news media on a matter of great importance to the outcome of the election due 16 days later. When later I asked Mr Wintringham if he had established a new doctrine with this initiative, his answer was perfect public service opacity: that was for people like me to debate.

An unequal matter

Dialogue page, The Australian, 20 September 2001

In the book of Paul Kelly’s excellent television survey of the Australian federal century, New Zealand rates just a handful of passing and insubstantial mentions and no index entry.
This is despite CER, the free trade arrangement which has locked the two economies together, and despite New Zealand membership for three and a-half decades of the ANZUS treaty.

How the middle class always wins

Article requested by NZ Herald but not published

When in the early 1990s Margaret Wilson, now Minister of Labour, ran into problems with Wellington politicians opposed to Waikato University setting up the law school she was to run, she mobilised the district’s burghers and farmers. She got her law school.

Which stories shall we tell ourselves?

Article for New Zealand Books, issue 50

“Nothing is more important to a country,” onetime Australian Treasurer and Prime Minister Paul Keating told the Knowledge Wave conference in August, “than the way it thinks about itself.” Right now, this country, barely a nation, thinks it is small, far away and slipping off the pace.

No flicker left to fan

Random thought on the MMP review committee

Random thought on MMP Helen Clark once led the charge against MMP. Now she has doused the fires of public resentment with cautious centrism. The MPs on the review committee had no flicker left to fan into life.

So, unless Parliament as a whole has a fit and decides to overrule its committee, MMP stays intact.