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.
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.
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.
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.
Book review for NZ Books Issue 49
Waltzing with Matilda; should New Zealand join Australia? By Bob Catley, Dark Horse Publishing, Auckland, 2001, $29.95, ISBN 0-9582146-1-1
A chilling graph presented to Auckland business leaders on 14 May undermines Bob Catley’s thesis. Auckland, the graph showed, lost 3.4% in GDP per capita in $US terms between 1990 and 2000. A good reason, you might think, as Catley does, to throw in our lot with Australia. Except that the graph shows Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide all also falling, by amounts from 1.3% to 2.0%.
Random thought, 18 May 2001
It is part of the political folklore in the Alliance and other places that Labour and the Alliance scrap over some of the same votes. Thus when one goes up, some of that is won at the other’s expense.
And intuitively, this folklore seems to hold merit.
Moreover, in the mid-1990s it did seem from the polls that Labour’s recovery leading up to the 1996 election was at least partly at the Alliance’s expense.
Random Thought 22 February 2001
The real point about the Kiwibank is its opportunity cost to taxpayers. If $80 million is invested in yet another bank to an overbanked country that $80 million is not available to fix bad roads or build hospitals or schools.
This point escaped Richard Prebble who argued the $80 million should go instead on education or police services. But that is current spending, not capital spending, and turns up in a different place on the government’s books.
The Health Strategy released at 3.30pm 11 December is a slender document, unburdened by hard-edged thinking but burdened with some politically soggy tendencies that may well lead to some telling attacks from ACT and National.
Nowhere is there any suggestion people might take some individual responsibility for seeing to their own good health and for the consequences of good and bad decision-making. The burden for seeing individuals’ health is squarely on the state’s shoulders. Prevention is very much the junior arm of this government’s health policy though it does make interpersonal, family, school and community violence one of its 13 “priority population health objectives”.
Published in the Independent on 22 November 2000
Michael Cullen once said to me early in Helen Clark’s leadership of the Labour party that she would much rather be in a backroom debating policy than putting on makeup and classy dresses. Last week a Brunei newspaper gushed over Clark as a “fashion model”.
For the Far Eastern Economic Review
“It’s a boy!” cooed the Dominion’s headline reporting the appointment of Terence Arnold as Solicitor-General on September 8. That this was thought remarkable tells the story of women’s monopolisation of the four top administrative and legal posts in New Zealand.