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.
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.”
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.
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”.
Nine long years. That is how an opposition party sees a three-term government. Nine years of impotence.
Labour endured it from 1990 to 1999, National from 1999 to 2008 and Labour right now might be staring at another turn. That gives its conference in Rotorua next weekend poignancy: how to quickly make a credible government-in-waiting.
National and Labour agree on foreign policy enough for it to be called bipartisan, after decades of difference. A big exception is climate change.
At Environmental Defence Society boss Gary Taylor’s climate change conference in Melbourne on Tuesday Labour’s Charles Chauvel intervened from the floor to state “in public what I have told you in private” that Labour was ready to agree a bipartisan stance on the emissions trading scheme (ETS) with some provisos, notably that changes do not “gut” the scheme.
The crunch paragraph in the ministerial health review group’s report is on page 8: it recommends another review in three years.
The group says that “working within the current legislative framework allows much earlier action” to meet the challenges. But it “runs the risk of not going far enough fast enough”. So, review the review.
Here’s a joke about economists in a letter last week to the Economist magazine:
“When I considered taking a degree in economics almost 50 years ago, I was told that the exam questions would be the same from year to year but that the correct answers would differ each year.”
Here’s a not-so-jokey letter from the same issue: “The current head of the Congressional Budget Office co-wrote a paper a few years back titled: ‘Can Financial Innovation Help to Explain the Reduced Volatility of Economic Activity?’ ”
Fresh from free-trading the Pacific in Cairns, John Key will be back in Australia in a fortnight, this time to advance the trans-Tasman single economic market.
Three ministers, Simon Power, Tim Groser and David Carter will meet Australian counterparts Nick Sherry, Simon Crean and Tony Burke tomorrow to tick some boxes for “tangible outcomes” when Key meets Kevin Rudd on August 20.
Bill English first came as an MP to a National party conference in Christchurch in the floodwaters of the 1991 “mother of all budgets”. Delegates were stunned or in uproar. The only uproar at this weekend’s conference in Christchurch will be rapture over its leader.
John Key and English will be lionised for victory last year and for running an agenda delegates can applaud.