The issue at the heart of John Key’s all-and-nothing sign-up to the United Nations declaration on indigenous rights is who belongs here and how deeply they belong.
That is important because if too many people in a country feel they don’t belong, the economy and society — not to mention the politics — will be suboptimal or worse.
Anzac Day has just passed, a reminder of a shared military disaster etched in two national memories. How much more will we share 40 years hence?
We will share many relatives. We will likely share more of each other’s economies as politicians work towards a single economic market (SEM). And then we might need a share of Australia’s fiscal loot.
Australia is just too attractive. Refugees aim for the big island. Other migrants pour in — 7 million in all since 1945. Half a million Australians were born in New Zealand. That’s stitching a new meaning on to Anzac.
An Australian Treasury report last year projected the population to climb by three-fifths to 35.9 million in 2050 from 22.3 million now. Just to keep up — to stay one-fifth the size — we would have to grow to around 7.1 million from 4.4 million now. Statistics New Zealand’s median 2050 projection is 5.6 million (a rise of a bit over a quarter).
Making policy is seldom pure. It is mostly the intersection of ideas, interests and votes, with ministers as players and umpires. It is a game for the strong and articulate.
Take “drivers of crime”. A year ago Simon Power, essentially a liberal, having spent the 2008-09 summer whipping up bills to whip criminals, summoned a high-profile conference on the “drivers”. But in December he was still whipping, conceding ACT a three-strikes bill and passing it on to prisons boss Judith Collins.
It was an inauspicious week to launch whanau ora: a week when it was revealed public funds going to a Maori health provider had gone missing.
When Tariana Turia was Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector in Helen Clark’s government she ran into flak over where some money went. Labour chief whip Tim Barnett was put in to monitor the processes.
Just as policy wonks and scientists were settling in last Wednesday to plot how to ramp up research into agriculture greenhouse gas emissions and as business was yet again pushing John Key to delay the emissions trading scheme, Tokyo announced one.
New Zealand’s ETS is due to come into effect on July 1 for all sectors but agriculture, delayed to 2015, and forestry, in since January 2008. Delay now would need rushed legislation.
Climate change challenges come in many forms, quite apart from that of making sense or nonsense of the numbers. Here is another: genetic modification.
New Zealand has adopted as official policy a quasi-religious ban on genetic modification (GM). There is a similar quasi-religious ban on nuclear power. This post-Easter week a big international meeting in Wellington will — at least by inference — raise the GM one.
The Maori party will get the Foreshore and Seabed Act repealed. The National party must uphold English legal tradition. Each must look the other way a bit to do the deal.
The Maori party was formed in anger at the act, so repeal is critically symbolic to the party. The act’s confiscation was of a right to go to court, with limited prospects, not actual confiscation of land. But Maori felt it as a confiscation of land.
Colin James’s article in Public Sector April 2010
Governments in the rich world got big and bold in the twentieth century. They got even bigger in the first decade of the twenty-first, when banks collapsed. Where was the public in all this?
The public was of two minds.
When the public saw need or want, as individuals, as part of an interest group or in a fit of altruism, it demanded more government, to start or stop something or to expand a service or make it free of charge. That way we got “free” health care in the 1940s, universal superannuation at 65 in the 1990s and regulation heaped on builders, real estate agents and electricity companies in the 2000s.
How do you tie bureaucrats’ and politicians’ hands so they won’t make mucky law? Rodney Hide thinks he has the answer.
New Zealand ranks high in some lists of “free” economies and ease of doing business. But that is not because it goes easy on making law. Parliament passes scores of acts a year, the cabinet raises a small mountain of regulations and ministers and officials issue rivers of edicts which amount to law.