Parliament reconvenes today. Top of the list is more tax law, to ease businesses’ cash flows in the hope they will lay off fewer staff. John Key needs more chalk-marks before his 100 days end.
His first 83 days have gone swimmingly. The golden weather runs on and on.
He has smiled and joked a lot and been friendly with a disparate range of people, many of them not normally enthusiasts for National leaders, some not for any major party leader. He is likeable, which is a change.
Here’s a bright idea: when you get into trouble by overspending, spend your way out.
Doesn’t compute? Well, it does in Washington, London, Canberra or in a capital city nearly everywhere in the rich world. Governments are throwing money at consumers, directly in grants and tax breaks and indirectly in saving firms and so jobs.
As John Key, Bill English and a swag of ministers head to two days of Treaty of Waitangi commemorations on Thursday they take with them heavy baggage: the constitution.
In the heady post-election days of mid-November they agreed with the Maori party to establish “no later than early 2010” “a group to consider constitutional issues, including Maori representation”. The Maori party is to be consulted on the group’s membership and the choice of chair and is to be represented on the group.
Where is the government? Scattered through dozens of ministries and departments and myriad other agencies, each with a separate brief. Small wonder it can’t get its act together. Well, self-help is on the way in the form of chief executive groupings.
Since the balkanising and efficiency-focused state sector reforms 20 years ago, there has been much agonising over the “silos” the reforms produced and a variety of attempts to improve coordination.
For three decades the Waitangi Day focus has been on rights for Maori. John Key goes to his first Waitangi Day celebrations as Prime Minister next Friday. Will he shift the focus?
Key’s deal with the Maori party has raised National hopes of detaching Maori voters from Labour.
Plenty of Maori do vote National. They are a fair proportion of the one-third of Maori voters who stick with the general roll. John Carter, MP for Northland which has a high Maori population, attributes much of his majority to Maori on his electorate’s roll.
Australians trudge back to work today after their 221st anniversary holiday. Or not. Even the lucky country is retrenching. Whole mining towns are shutting up.
As the rich world reverses down its debt mountain, taking the developing world with it, Australia is being driven off its lofty coal and mineral prices uplands. Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are between them shedding 20,000 jobs.
Barack Obama takes office today — actually, tomorrow, our time. Two years ago close to this time Ben Bernanke took office. The two are joined at the hip.
Obama comes to office with reverence befitting a saint or a saviour. He is neither. But if superhuman acts are expected of him, that is because his agenda is superhuman.
Here are two ways to spend New Year: clamp your ears shut to the dire predictions, the better to keep summer alive a week or two; or look through the predictions to our abundant riches.
It is now fashionable to talk of the “great crash of 2008” as some replica of the “great crash of 1929”, after which came the “great depression”. A scary prospect.
Airports are not pretty. But one October afternoon Hamilton airport was for me for a moment a place of beauty.
A young man with the moonish face of intellectual disability waited impassively alongside an elderly woman for a traveller to arrive. He was a reminder of human sadness, the unfairness of chance.
It has been the year of the H word. It was the year of a big exit. It is the year a new boy topped the class.
Hypocrisy is so tempting to politicians that the word is banned in Parliament. There an MP’s word must be accepted until demonstrably proved false. But outside is a different story. Slowly, painfully, grindingly, Winston Peters conceded he had had big bucks from big business — the opposite of the underdog, victim image with which he had wooed and wowed the blue rinses.