Winston Peters is on to a good thing, eh?. Asian refugees will stop the greyhairs getting operations. Worth a few votes, that.
Except that this time he starts from the pits of micro-support, not the trampoline of rising stardom, as with Asian migrants in 1995-96. And he is up against a Prime Minister who, unlike Jim Bolger, is cogent with the media.
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.
Why are we so uptight about elites? In the runup to last month’s Knowledge Wave conference both main parties worried that it might be an elite affair. It was.
For the Labour party this was standard fare. “Elitism” and “elite capture” are dirty words because they somehow disparage the modern PC version of the “working man” — though Labour’s own upper reaches are stuffed with members of the elite.
“Saying sorry won’t get a new wall-to-wall,” the Barry Humphreys character Edna Everage once famously said, complaining about a guest who had spilt wine on the carpet.
And that was the killer for Ella Henry. Saying sorry didn’t remove the stain. The Human Rights Commission could not credibly have carried her after her hot-headed letter to a policeman wrongly alleging racism. Presuming racism in others without direct evidence is itself a form of racism.
There is nothing like the alpine winter air to purify the spirit and clear the mind. On holiday far from the treacherous avalanche terrain of Wellington politics, the Prime Minister can refine priorities.
One is clear: her government gives the environment priority over the economy. Sandra Lee’s Reefton mining ban is on message.
Speech to the Wellington Rotary Club, 20 August 2001
I have for some years been fascinated by the fact that the National party dominated governments for the second half of the twentieth century. Political scientists by and large ignore this and expend great energy on Labour — which was a failure in that half-century.
What’s business’s biggest beef with the Government? High on most lists — including the Government’s business compliance cost committee’s — is the Resource Management Act (RMA). The National party aims to capitalise on it to win business votes.
To many in business the RMA has meant uncertainty, delays, court appeals and added costs. Some projects drown in a soup of bureaucracy and objections. Some would-be investors just give up.
Rodney Hide is putting trust to the test. Drip by drip he drops his leakers’ corrosive acid on Jim Anderton’s kiwibank, for which you, as captive shareholders, are stumping up $80 million.
The upshot is the loss of the Prime Minister’s trust in a vital state agency, the Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit, apparently the source of at least some of the leaks.
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.
What do the Greens stand for? Sustainable development is high on the list. But what does it mean?
For some people sustainable development means no more than an economic growth rate which can be sustained, cycle after cycle. Ours now is somewhere between 2.5 per cent and 3 per cent, which the government wants lifted to 4 per cent.