Dairy farming is great for us right now, delivering cash to the economy in the world recession. Plasma TV and car makers aren’t doing well. Food makers are doing OK.
So we might say thank goodness David Lange’s “sunset industry” description of farming turned out wrong, thanks to dairy farmers’ productivity leap and a global upturn for food products. This decade dairy exports have been the mainstay.
Colin James’s paper to the Maori in Parliament conference, 9 May 2009
I signed up to talk about the future, which officially is the next panel, and then found myself assigned to talk about “Maori in general seats”. But when you come to think of it, that invites contemplation of the future, of Maori as full citizens. So that is what I shall talk about.
Who said this and when: “Unless there is planning now for a good environment, economic progress will be hindered”.
Answer: the physical environment committee of the National Development Conference, (NDC) in April 1969.
Some things haven’t changed much in the 40 years this coming week since I first reported on politics — for the Dominion as it then was.
Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, intends to equip its navy with long-range cruise missiles. Associate Defence Minister Heather Roy wants to sell off armoured vehicles. The Tasman is a deep gulf.
The National party fire-eaters who used to meet on the Sunday morning at annual conferences and demand fighters and more frigates have faded. There is no talk from Defence Minister Wayne Mapp of increasing defence spending as a share of GDP (half Australia’s). We are a small Pacific island, distant from tyranny, with no pretensions to power.
Michael Cullen is a very funny man, capable of a belly-laugh one-liner a minute for 20 minutes without notes. He is also a very deep man. As often as not, when the laughter had died and the wound had healed his one-liners were worth pondering.
Cullen is also a very smart man, the smartest politician I have dealt with. He is a man of strong values — what used to be called principles or ideals before managerial politics took over.
The good thing about being a government is that you don’t have to make ends meet. You just borrow. Bill English is borrowing big and will go on borrowing big after his budget on May 28.
The 1960s Prime Minister Sir Keith Holyoake used to talk about the government budget rather like a household budget: spending out had to equal income in, plus maybe a bit over for a rainy day. But governments learnt to borrow in the 1970s. Now the big rich economies are borrowing heavily to maintain their citizens’ lifestyles.
National and the Maori party have portrayed the Auckland supercity Maori seats as a spat. It is a fundamental difference. v Hone Harawira will lead a hikoi. Pita Sharples will grump that it is a matter of mana.
Then, logically, there might be a select committee manoeuvre to make it look as if the National had to give in to other parties. There will not be bad blood between Sharples and John Key.
Here are three ways to mark Anzac Day: remember the dead; celebrate who we are; and know the potential for peril.
The first is less poignant now than half a century ago. Then war and its ruthless scything of young lives was a living memory for most at Anzac Day commemorations, the second world war being not long past. Most of the town turned out in sombre and thankful spirit.
Health is a political illness. Fixing up people’s ill-health bugs, and sometimes kills, governments, even those with buckets of money.
Making health politically healthy is Tony Ryall’s challenge. That makes his job one of the government’s biggest — alongside his 1990s ministerial “brat pack” mates, onetime Health Minister Bill English and Nick Smith.
John Key and Russel Norman have done a deal. It’s no big deal but it gives Key a green tinge. But is a tinge his limit?
The policy preoccupation, through this big downturn and beyond, is with saving, then growing, jobs and material welfare. Rich country leaders are drafting the next generation’s earnings (that is, borrowing) to buy jobs now.