Of the alternatives to MMP on the ballot on November 26, John Key will back the supplementary member (SM) voting system. It favours the big parties while still giving small ones a look in.
Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark opposed MMP. But Shipley got a kick out of successfully running a minority government for two years — and getting some significant policy initiatives through. Clark managed three innovative governing arrangements with skill. Key, too, has got the MMP partner-party spirit.
Colin James for the Otago Daily Times on the “other election” 14 November 2011
In behind the campaign slogans and headlines is another election. National and Labour in different ways want to change the way we think about some important issues of our time.
This is not the deep, dark skulduggery the two big parties accuse each other of to scarify voters: a secret National plan to sell all the trading enterprises and leave us skint or a Labour plot to kidnap and dump us, bankrupt, back in the 1970s.
Whose slogan is this: “For a richer New Zealand”? Not ACT’s. ACT’s is “experience that counts”. Not National’s. National’s is “brighter”, not “richer”. It is the Greens’. It shows how far the Greens have come.
A measure of that is that co-leader Metiria Turei, whose brief is social policy, started a radio debate talking of a green economy. Rivers and poverty came later. Co-leader Russel Norman has made it his mission to reposition the party as promising economic development.
Public sector managers can expect faster and more far-reaching change if National gets a second term on November 26. This could be the biggest reshaping since the radical 1980s reforms.
One big driver is fiscal consolidation which requires the state to occupy a smaller share of the economy. Another is political instinct: three of the governing parties want a smaller state sector anyway.
Labour’s first task in the election campaign was to get noticed. It did, with two contentious policies which might lose it votes on the specifics but win some on the getting-noticed front.
Anyone who actually watched Friday’s opening video would have seen an imaginative presentation, combining the young (for example, Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern) and the traditional (for example, Damien O’Connor who blasted the party list as dominated by gays and unions) — and even with Phil Goff in it.
Colin James’s comments in commemoration of Sir Frank Holmes St Paul’s Cathedral, 31 October 2011
Frank was forever a young man, which makes our business here today incongruous. Death is an old man’s calling.
Helen Clark, in that way she had of speaking an observation that caused it to sound like an instruction, once said to me: “Someone should write Frank’s biography.” Not because she said it but because she was right, I suggested it to a couple of people. Then I thought when I cut down the work I am doing I could do it.
That was the cup that is, just. The childlike headlines can be pasted in the kids’ scrapbooks — oops, cached on their iPads. Now we come back down to earth. We may find the earth is moving.
The last seven weeks have had an end-of-empire feel — end of the Roman empire, that is: lavish spending by imperious officials on public spectacles and games to divert and entertain the plebs and narcotise anxiety and discontent.
Conference on foreign policy issues, New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, 20 October 2011
Someone in the cabinet might tell the airline it mostly owns that Christchurch has been hit by an earthquake or two. The seatback video on a flight from Sydney featured the “gothic facade” on an intact cathedral and a “cable car (sic) on Regents (sic) Street”.
Tourists might be a tiny bit surprised when they try to board the tram to admire the cathedral. If, of course, they can find a place to stay.
Organisational Effectiveness in Times of Seismic Risk, Conference organised by Wellington Rotary and Victoria University of Wellington, 18 October 2011