Posts Tagged ‘Colin James’

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Was Helen Clark a ‘third way’ Prime Minister?

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

This post follows on from an earlier one entitled Looking back on the Third Way, which examined the ‘third way’ strand of progressive thinking through the writings of its leading theorist Anthony Giddens.

The Fifth Labour Government in New Zealand led by Helen Clark came to power a few years after Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ in the United Kingdom. Can it also be seen as a ‘third way’ administration?

And if so, what did this mean in the New Zealand context, particularly with regard to the role of the state and ideas about the desirability and efficacy of state action?

The two leading figures of the Fifth Labour Government were Helen Clark and her deputy Michael Cullen. But only limited guidance can be gleaned from their public statements and writings.

This reflects the rather pragmatic and practical style that their government adopted. Veteran political commentator Colin James has written extensively over the years about the intellectual influences of successive governments including this one. His columns over the 2000s repeatedly trace its leaders reaching tentatively towards an overarching project or distinctive philosophy, only to pull back again.

“They are not a theoretical lot, even the boss herself with her political scientist’s training.” (May 2001)

“Clark and Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen have shied away from visions and proclamations of philosophy. Attempts to engage them in that sort of conversation don’t often get far.” (February 2003)

Perhaps most strikingly of all, he quotes “one Labour grandee” as saying on the topic of ‘vision’, “Hitler had one of those and look where it got the world”. (May 2005)

Even so, Helen Clark did from time to time describe her government in ‘third way’ terms, at least at first. (Michael Cullen never did, so far as I could find.)

In 2000 she said to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce that hers was “a classic Third Way government – committed to a market economy, but not to a market society”, and told that year’s Labour Party conference that their’s was “a third way approach” to dealing with the issues of how to adapt to globalisation and new technologies. In a 2002 address at the London School of Economics, she explicitly linked her government to the  writings of Anthony Giddens.

Two of her most specific explanations however came in speeches to the Local Government Conference in 2000 and the annual conference of the Meat Industry Association in 2001, respectively:

our third way government is seeking a new role, built around that concept of partnership, acknowledging the limitations of government, but also accepting the responsibility of leading, facilitating, enabling, brokering, and funding where appropriate to get results. (July 2000)

Labour takes the view that neither the excesses of hands-on nor of hands-off have served New Zealand well. That’s why we have articulated a third way for the state in the economy. That third way sees government as a leader, a facilitator, a co-ordinator, a broker, and a partner. It is a strategic role which also sees us apply funding where there is a public interest and/or market failure. (September 2001)

These statements are certainly consistent with Giddens’ conception of the ‘third way’. But to get further elaboration, including a sense of any specific New Zealand dimension to the ‘third way’, we will need to look elsewhere.

In part two of this discussion I will turn to the articulation of New Zealand’s ‘third way’ put forward by Steve Maharey, who Colin James at the time described as “Cabinet’s thinker” and Labour’s “most theoretical minister” (February 2005). Then, in part three I’ll look at the 1999 publication The New Politics: a Third Way for New Zealand.

Links:

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Commentary round-up

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

A regular feature spotlighting new writing (and audio) from top commentators Rod Oram, Colin James and Brian Easton.

In Labour fails to convince on economic policy (Star-Times), Rod Oram is rather harsher than his earlier Nine to Noon radio spot (covered last week). He is particularly critical of Labour’s new policy on foreign investment:

. . . if foreign investors help the New Zealand dairy industry shift to far more sophisticated, higher-value products, there is a good case for having them here. Labour says those are the land investors it will approve, while it bans the rest.

It will be very difficult, though, for the government to pick the right projects. Other countries such as Ireland have learnt how to make difficult decisions about which foreign investments to support. Labour must convince us it can learn and apply them. If it doesn’t, its agricultural land policy will be a big liability in the business community.

I find this a little ironic, in light of Oram’s own suggestions on foreign investment on Nine to Noon a few weeks ago, as covered in my round-up at the time:

It would be far more interesting if approval was contingent, for example, on a large-scale investment that would improve the industrial capability of New Zealand and increases exports beyond a business-as-usual case. Or there would be safeguards, so for example if a foreign investor bought a New Zealand company any money that that company had received in the way of government R & D grants over, say, the previous five years were refunded. You could be an awful lot more strategic about that — as other countries have been.

If anything, that sounds rather more difficult to operationalise than what Labour is proposing. Though perhaps he has backed away what may have just been an off-the-cuff musing at the time. In any case, he concludes:

“John Key has no game plan for our cities and our farms so that we can compete and win in the global economy,” Goff told the conference. “I do.”

No he doesn’t. But at least he and his Labour colleagues are working on it.

(Oram’s Nine to Noon spot didn’t appear this week, due to the short week.) (Thanks, Samuel Parnell!)

Colin James looks at the Maori Party in The foreshore party’s long growth into realist politics (Fairfax papers):

What does this say to the Maori party as it gathers on Saturday? That it has reached or is close to the limits of what it can extract from National. National will not agree to a “Treaty-based constitution”, except in the formal sense that the Treaty is the founding document legitimising the imposition of constitutional colonial government.

. . . So on Saturday there will be congratulations for the leadership on the totemic wins. But the farsighted will ask what can be extracted from National for a second term after next year’s election which has not already been dealt with or set in train.

And in Science, John Key and the Singapore syndrome (Otago Daily Times) he continues last week’s discussion on science policy:

So what’s stopping Key deciding to lift the game? He could, for example, add $200 million new spending each year for five years, which would get us to around 1 per cent of GDP.

. . . Of course, it also means either taking money off somewhere else or delaying a return to a budget surplus. And many RS&T ideas produce no return and those that do can take up to 10 years for a return, whereas hip operations, national superannuation at age 65 and the like are here-and-now politics.

Nothing new from Brian Easton this week.

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Commentary round-up

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

A regular feature spotlighting new writing (and audio) from top commentators Rod Oram, Colin James and Brian Easton.

Turning science from problem to opportunity, Colin James’s column for the Fairfax papers this week, is about a soon-to-be-released report from Research, Science and Technology minister Wayne Mapp and former AgResearch chief executive Andrew West:

Mapp, who started slowly in RS&T because his main interest was defence (his “review” is about to reach his desk), has got enthusiastic. On Thursday he will scan the role of science over the next 20 years. He got West to find “demonstrable evidence in the New Zealand situation that expenditure on science leads to economic growth”.

West has done that and a lot more. His still very-much-under-wraps report goes far beyond a simple cost-benefit exercise. In his idiosyncratic manner he has crafted a bold, maybe even daring, strategy.

Yep, that sounds like Andrew West! I worked with him when he was NZQA chief executive and then Tertiary Education Commission chair in the early 2000’s, and had a little to do with him at AgResearch too. I’ll be interested to see his report.

Off that back of that Mapp will pitch for more funds. He is talking of a “modest but not insignificant” lift in the 2011 budget. Others in the swim think it might not be so modest if Key gets enthused and pulls rank on English. One option is an annual commitment of a significant additional sum, accumulating over time to a large lift in GDP terms.

Colin concludes:

Sir Peter [Gluckman, Key's Science Advisor], West and Mapp are putting to Key an opportunity.

It might be the wrong opportunity for Key or just too risky or too hard. But small hints suggest he might (just conceivably) go for it. If he does, the 2011 budget might (just conceivably) be his prime ministership’s defining day.

Writing in Otago Daily Times, Colin also looks at Squaring (or not) Labour’s economic nationalism circle. His take on the policy shift that I discussed an aspect of in my column yesterday is:

The new line reflects a conceptual shift.

Much of Labour has longed to escape the neoliberalism its 1980s government embraced. Its 2000s government knocked off some rough edges but could not disavow it. Now, in the aftermath of the great financial crisis (GFC), Labour can quote from a rising tide of hefty international writing.

. . . Labour’s hope is that the post-GFC new way-truth-and-light — when it can be seen and then codified after the global blindness subsides — is congenial to its instincts and values and frees it from the 1980s legacy.

. . . Certainly, Labour has been emboldened to act on the plausible premise that neoliberal economics is no longer convincing politics. The enemies of capitalism who lurk multitudinously within capitalism and who, in precipitating the GFC, did such wide and deep and still persisting damage have brought that about. Labour sees its economic nationalism as fitting this “changed world”.

Rod Oram also looks at Labour’s economic policy development in his weekly interview with Nine to Noon (audio). It’s difficult to summarise succinctly and I’d encourage you to have a listen for yourself, but in general he is cautiously optimistic but with some reservations and awaiting more analytics.

Rod also writes Rail revival will finally make a difference for the Star-Times:

The Key government was no fan of its predecessor’s decision to buy back rail, but it took a rational approach to the asset . . . The government vigorously tested the business case KiwiRail put to it before agreeing in May to invest $250m in this financial year. It agreed to invest a further $500m the next two years, subject to business-case approval.

. . . Such improvements will cut the Auckland to Wellington freight time to around 11 hours over the next two years, from 13 hours now. When this goal is achieved, KiwiRail, working closely with its export and freight forwarding customers, will be demonstrating the viability of rail. Hopefully, it will then be able to convince the government to make further investment.

My fellow blogger (and sometimes Policy Progress commenter) Big Cake is critical of the column, however, for ignoring what he sees as “the fundamental issue that parts of the rail network are commercial duds and, if not closed, will continue to weaken the rail network as a whole”

And, finally, Brian Easton writes for the Listener on Riceonomics, another in his series of articles about China. This one uses the massive public construction works of ancient China like the Forbidden City to illustrate “the central role of the economic surplus, including how it comes about, who shares it and what they do with it”.

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Commentary round-up

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

A regular feature spotlighting new writing (and audio) from top commentators Rod Oram, Colin James and Brian Easton.

Colin James’s column for the Fairfax papers, Labour: perhaps the end of the beginning, is about the Labour Party conference this weekend:

MPs have been developing six “frameworks” and a number of other policy documents, drawing on outsiders as well as party supporters. The “frameworks” and a range of other policy items will be test-driven this weekend at open workshops and “new thinking” debates, then firmed into election policy. Some other topics will be canvassed at “fringe” meetings.

We will see at the weekend whether the “frameworks” amount to imaginative and fresh enough rethinking on which to base policy that can still be relevant in 2020 (the sort that Phil Goff’s gimmicky GST off fresh fruit and vegetables, opposed by some MPs, is not).

One which may qualify is Annette King’s use of an outside “commission” to rebase social policy on intervening in early childhood to avert expensive remediation or incarceration later. Instead of a child segment in the health, education, housing and welfare policies, those policies will grow out of this child-based policy. From among her advisers, academics Richie Poulton, David and Liz Craig and former Children’s Commissioner Cindy Kiro will figure at the conference. (Poulton is also on Sir Peter Gluckman’s group tackling this issue and on Anne Tolley’s early childhood education inquiry.)

David Craig is also a guest-poster at Policy Progress. You can read his State subsidisation of low wages and his trilogy on Reconceiving the welfare state (parts one, two and three).

Ruth Dyson took a cue from King and ran two day-long forums to canvass academic, professional and lobby group outsiders and unions. Her 2020 challenge is affordability, which she says can be met only by shifting the focus more heavily on to prevention and disease prevention. She has yet to produce a “framework”.

Economic debates will feature economist Ganesh Nana and journalist Bernard Hickey. The economic rethink draws on post-GFC writing searching for the “new normal”. One insider says: “The world economic order is changing, so policy platforms are changing, particularly in the developed world. Things that were out of bounds are now back in play. That gives an opportunity to flash ideas around old and new.”

The policy frameworks are also mentioned in Are we heading towards a greener government? (Otago Daily Times):

Environment is one of the six policy “frameworks” to be workshopped and debated at the Labour party’s conference this weekend.

The framework will talk of transition to a low-pollution economy. It will argue that, if necessary, short-term economic gain should be traded off for long-term environmental benefit.

It will talk of intergenerational fairness and needing to live within the earth’s capacity to support humans. So, make it easier for people to live more environmentally friendly lives. The government should promote strong, enforceable standards and, because it occupies about a third of the economy, lead by example.

It will propose re-tightening aspects of environmental regulation the government has loosened and toughening the emissions trading scheme, with strategies on energy, transport and land use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But the main focus is on Department of Conservation director-general Al Morrison (a former journalist who some readers may recall as the political editor for Radio New Zealand, 1996-2002) and the speech he gave last week that attracted some media attention:

He analogised this rundown to the country’s economic performance in running nearly four decades of balance of payments current account deficits: “Our economy is dangerously exposed, seriously out of balance and facing huge adjustments. The prospect of getting back into balance is a distant one.”

. . . But Morrison is not a lefty sandal-wearer. He links the environment — and the conservation estate — with economic wellbeing. This is in two senses: that nice nature is one of the things we sell, to tourists and with our land-based products; and that there is money to be made out of this “natural capital”.

. . . for strategic planners in business and elsewhere the message is that greener policy settings are likely in due course.

Morrison has signposted a path for those strategists: to look for ways of working with environmentalists, including DoC, to make money and in the course of doing that, make New Zealanders more prosperous in a wider sense than simple GDP.

Rod Oram talks to Nine to Noon about the looming Currency Wars that I discussed on Friday. With regard to New Zealand he differs from Bernard Hickey’s analysis (which I reported in that post), saying:

In the short-term there’s not a lot we can do. We have a highly-traded currency and it bobs around on these international markets.

. . . there’s not a lot that people can do in the short-term. The Reserve Bank, thanks to the previous government, has some more minor powers to try to nudge the exchange rate at a turning point in the cycle (and we’re nowhere near one of those yet). But basically we, and even countries much larger than us, can’t intervene; the forces are too big.

But there’s a very important longer-term issue, which is that one of the reasons always for the strength of our currency is our relatively high interest rates here, which takes us right back to how monetary policy is conducted. And the view on our government about monetary policy is incredibly orthodox, it hasn’t changed much over the last fifteen years. Whereas there are very interesting new views coming out of the likes of the IMF that monetary policy perhaps needs to be run in a slightly different way, particularly in countries like ours which are very open economies.

Ryan: I’m always bemused as to what that different way is, beyond the flexibility that the former Finance Minister gave to ‘look through’ the cap or the maximum interest rate that the Reserve Bank governor’s supposed to work to, and to factor in other economic priorities. What else can you do?

Oram: Well those ideas that came up a few years ago were seriously bad ones. Like trying to put an extra levy on top of mortgages, for example, to try and curb those. What’s coming through is much more practical and rather more insightful. So, for example, the Reserve Bank has a new capital reserve requirement on the banks — we’re the first jurisdiction in the world to do it — which allows it to lean against lending if you like, so when lending is very strong it can increase the capital reserves the banks needs to have in place to try to slow that lending down. So that’s some of the new thinking that’s going on.

And it’s very interesting that Labour has picked up on that, and has already made it very clear that it’s going to campaign next year on this issue. So it’ll be very interesting to see, particularly if the currency pressures get a lot more extreme over the coming months, to what extent this will become an election issue. We can’t control our currency, but maybe there are ways to moderate its movements more than we’re doing.

Oram’s Star-Times column is NZ film stuck in muddle earth (“The film The Hobbit is a sideshow. The real drama is the survival of the New Zealand screen industry.”)

Nothing new from Brian Easton this week.

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Commentary round-up

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

A regular feature spotlighting new writing (and audio) from top commentators Rod Oram, Colin James and Brian Easton.

Brian Easton’s latest Listener column is Reserve Bank to the Rescue, which looks at Alan Bollard and his book Crisis: One Central Bank Governor and the Global Financial Collapse. He considers that “readers will be delighted with the book’s honesty and transparency. It is a damned good read.” But he also notes:

Whereas the book ends, the crisis has not – or rather the international monetary crisis is morphing into a long recession, in which there will be employment and production crises. New Zealand will be unable to avoid the consequences, and the Reserve Bank will remain under pressure managing the economy.

Brian also publishes an index of his recent writings on the Global Financial Crisis.

Colin James has four new pieces this week. The long and the short of “what works” (Fairfax papers) focuses on the “Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act’s quasi-regal powers to override laws through Orders-in-Council, in order to get Canterbury fixed fast”:

The immediate effect of the Canterbury law is necessary quick action. The medium-term effect is assurance of a return to economic and social normality. The long-term risk is damage to freedoms and trust, without which liberal democracy and capitalism don’t work well.

Interestingly, he also also notes in passing a parallel concern about the recent tax cuts:

Take English’s inequality-increasing tax changes. This week they affect your wellbeing (and the budget, at a half-billion-dollar cost through to March). The medium-term effect, English insists, is 1 per cent added to wealth production. The potential long-term effect is that higher inequality, if not offset, may limit potential growth, as in many underperforming economies.

His column for the Otago Daily Times asks Is a new big local government reshuffle in the offing? (“it is logical that the mayors of Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton and Tauranga have been conferring over joint actions and that some local politicians have begun pushing for their own super-regions.”)

In Not cleaning up on clean-tech (Management magazine), Colin reports on differing attitudes within the government towards the environment:

John Key has habitually talked of “balance”, which implies a zero-sum calculation that more environment equals less economic growth and vice-versa.

It’s not quite as simple as that.

. . . [Agriculture Minister David] Carter knows, and Key understands — he did, after all, back Smith in resisting heavy pressure from Business New Zealand and Federated Farmers to delay the emissions trading scheme — that, as some put it, “the new regulators are the big retail chains”.

. . . Dairy farmers who don’t get the message will at some point fall behind the game. Forestry companies are getting to know they have to meet tough international standards to make premium sales. There is now a world water alliance of big companies and NGOs.

[Environment Minister Nick] Smith understands this. In the 1990s National cabinet he and Simon Upton were lone environmentalist voices. In 2002 the Blue Greens National ginger group Smith championed was a minor strand, with three MP members. Now it has 18 MPs and attracts a sizable annual conference.

But it has yet to seriously influence core government policy . . .  Bill English is sceptical and has a tight grip on state finances that could fund research and joint projects.

. . . The message so far: if clean-tech is to take off in New Zealand the private sector will have to get there pretty much on its own — or in cahoots with foreigners who see an opportunity to piggy-back on the 100 per cent pure brand.

And, unusually, he has published a ‘random thought’ on the latest Paul Henry débâcle, entitled Real New Zealanders.

Rod Oram’s Star-Times column Failing to keep up with the neighbours looks at funding for universities. His arguments have already attracted criticism from my Education Direction colleague Dave Guerin at ED Blog:

Rod has a tendency to come up with elegant plans for industry and the government to implement to create wealth, which usually involve medium to heavy government intervention and high industry cooperation. I usually don’t agree with them, but at least he makes a strong and cogent argument in their favour. In this case, his argument is very, very weak and he ends with a cheap shot at government that he simply does not establish in his column.

“It’s clear that this government, like its predecessors, understands only the cost not the value of universities. As a result, it is relegating us to a much poorer future.”

Rod might get more traction for his arguments if he treated those with which he disagreed with a little more respect. Suggesting that others only focus on cost, rather than your focus on value, is rather odd after you have spent a whole column arguing for higher inputs, especially salaries, for your own industry.

Rod’s talk with Radio NZ’s Nine to Noon this week looks at the film and television industrial relations debate centred on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.

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Commentary round-up

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

A regular feature spotlighting new writing (and audio) from top commentators Rod Oram, Colin James and Brian Easton.

In the Fairfax paper this week, Colin James asks, Will unequal tax cuts be good for the economy? After covering the usual contestation between government and opposition about who gains what from the October 1 changes, he concludes by saying:

Much has been made of the rise in income and wealth inequality since the 1980s in our sorts of “Anglo” economies.

That may be an element in recent political volatility and might partially explain conservative parties’ failure in Britain and Australia to win majorities in otherwise propitious circumstances: the 1950s-60s upward socioeconomic mobility stalled in the 1980s. In turn it may be a factor in faltering economic growth, now the house-bubble-borrow-and-spend taps have been turned off.

Intriguingly, the Economist magazine, not noted for soggy leftism, several times directly linked inequality to growth rates in a recent survey of Latin America: the more unequal a country, the slower its economic growth.

Of course, Latin America is different. Isn’t it?

Colin’s Otago Daily Times column is The long haul back out of the 2000s economic haze, another look at our economic situation and economic prospects:

New Zealanders were the most indebted in the developed world after now-bust Iceland. That debt was lent by foreigners: New Zealand’s country debt to the rest of the world, at 86 per cent of GDP, poses a risk that in another global shock credit lines might be pulled in.

But:

Despite our 2000s profligacy, we have a real possibility of a reasonable decade ahead. We may even, with luck, avoid a house price plunge: prices might just go sideways and let inflation engineer the fall of 30 per cent or so in real terms needed to align with fundamentals.

That however depends on exports to Australia and China, and they both have their own problems. Australia is heavily reliant on mining (as Rod Oram has noted previously) while  China needs to contend with “water; widening social and economic divisions; corruption”.

Rod Oram’s Star-Times column, Water forum offers sign of hope, covers the Land and water Forum, as Colin James did last week. Rod is a bit more cautious than Colin about whether Nick Smith has achieved a break-through in collaborative processes:

. . . it remains to be seen how far the government will buy into the forum’s recommendations. If it treats them as a framework for an enduring consensus on water, then it could run a robust, publicly supported national water strategy.

Then it, business, environmental and other lobby groups and the wider public would want to use the collaborative process to find common ground on other very difficult issues such as energy strategy, adaptation to climate change, urban land use and design, or even the likes of savings and superannuation.

But if the government treated the forum’s recommendations as a menu from which it selected politically acceptable items, or worse rejected others under pressure from lobby groups, it would make a mockery of the collaborative process. It would leave us mired in the same old adversarial politics.

Rod also talks to Nine to Noon about Transpower versus the business lobby and the government’s changes to the rules for foreign investment. He sets out some interesting ideas of his own for the latter:

Oram: It would be far more interesting if approval was contingent, for example, on a large-scale investment that would improve the industrial capability of New Zealand and increases exports beyond a business-as-usual case. Or there would be safeguards, so for example if a foreign investor bought a New Zealand company any money that that company had received in the way of government R & D grants over, say, the previous five years were refunded. You could be an awful lot more strategic about that — as other countries have been.

Ryan: Unless you lose your investment to other countries.

Oram: No but other countries are strategic. They know what they want, and they know what to ask for and expect from foreign investors. And we don’t.

Brian Easton publishes an index of his articles on gambling economics.

If you have thoughts about the issues raised by our commentators this week, or other interesting pieces of commentary you’d like to highlight, then leave a comment below!

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Commentary round-up

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

A regular feature spotlighting new writing (and audio) from top commentators Rod Oram, Colin James and Brian Easton.

There are five new items on Brian Easton’s website this week. One of them is Costs and Benefits and Alcohol Policy, a note for a symposium in Barcelona next month. It follows on from his previous work in this area, as discussed by Ayesha Verrall in her Policy Progress guest-post last week. He also publishes an index of alcohol and related studies.

Easton has also produced two pieces that touch on the Canterbury earthquake: The Canterbury Earthquake and the South Canterbury Meltdown and Christchurch as a Global City. From the latter:

At the moment the focus is on reconstruction of the city; that effort gives you a little time to think about how you might pursue your vision for Christchurch. Sure the earthquake was a shock but the reconstruction provides an opportunity to continue Canterbury’s tradition of respect for its past with an excitement about its future. Turn the shakes into an opportunity.

And his Listener column is The Bottom Line (“Selling products around the world is much more complicated than it once seemed.”)

Colin James writes on How ACT could help Labour to win in 2011 and how not (Otago Daily Times), which has a look at the electoral arithmetic, and New ways of thinking about water and the environment (Fairfax papers), which looks at the Land and Water Forum:

The forum is composed of 57 groups with an interest in water ranging from iwi and conservation lobbies to dairy farmers and Fonterra. Its brief: through a “small group” of 20, to talk its way to consensus on new foundations for water policy.

This is a new way of doing policy, potentially useful for knotty issues because it promises a more durable foundation for policy than the ideology and instincts of one major party plus small parties — which was Labour’s approach, with the Greens and New Zealand First, in legislating the ETS and then National’s, with the Maori party, in softening it. Seesaw policy is bad for business and democratic stability.

Labour couldn’t make the leap to the outside-consensus route. Smith cottoned on and got the cabinet to go along on water. Ministers had to agree to tell interest groups not to come to them while the forum was meeting. Iwi still had their Treaty of Waitangi pipeline to Key but they played ball inside the forum.

Water policy is a recurring theme of James’s:

Living in a wet country, New Zealanders have thought of water as “free”, with plenty for heritage, spiritual, recreational, tourism, personal sustenance, land based industries, manufacturing, commercial and electricity uses.

But not any more. In places it is over-allocated. And spreading more water to grow more cows mucks up waterways and risks damaging high-end tourism, coastal aquaculture and drinking-water — and the fresh-natural-safe country brand.

Rod Oram’s Star-Times column says the New Zealand accountancy profession is out of step internationally in its neglect of sustainability. To some extent it’s taken its cue from the current Key-English-Hide government:

. . . the government doesn’t understand the practical, immediate benefits of sustainability or the way this field is becoming the bedrock of good businesses and the driver of new ones such as clean technology.

It hates the word sustainability, even though the term is used worldwide. As soon as it took office in 2008, it banned the word from government and axed or drastically cut supporting programmes.

Sadly, many businesses took their cue from government and backed off on sustainability. The local accounting profession followed suit, walking away from the leadership role its colleagues are playing overseas.

And on Nine to Noon, he once again looks at the Auckland local body election from a business and economic perspective.

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Commentary round-up

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

A regular feature spotlighting new writing (and audio) from top commentators Rod Oram, Colin James and Brian Easton.

Colin James’s Fairfax column this week is Shifting the ground on Maori claims and rights. It focuses on Waitangi Tribunal claim 262, which seeks hapu and whanau control over native flora and fauna, uses to which they are put and traditional practices and knowledge around them. A report from Judge Joe Williams is due on the claim.

Williams . . .  hopes to publish it this year. It would help John Key if he did because this is a bigger quake than the foreshore and seabed and Key won’t want aftershocks running through next year’s election.

There are two main dimensions.

One is intellectual property — stopping companies copyrighting or patenting plants and other “life-forms” and using Maori images and artworks in trademarks and the like. This has widespread implications for the food, beauty and medicine industries, here and abroad. It has implications for free trade agreements which typically now include intellectual property.

The other dimension, as James Matenga, a master of business student, put it at a seminar last Thursday, is “to re-establish our own values and law that works for us”, not to “be successful according to pakeha values and laws”. The “us” are not New Zealanders, nor even Maori. The “us”, according to fellow student Patrick Hape are whanau and hapu, each with unique knowledge and practices (matauranga maori) which are their property alone.

. . . This is beyond the Treaty of Waitangi, to pick up the theme of Williams’ speech at the constitutional conference on September 2. WAI262 is a matter of indigenous rights, of which the Treaty is just one expression.

James’s Otago Daily Times column, Testing the liberal principle of unity in difference, follows up by drawing a (distant) connection between the clash of religions typified by Pastor Terry Jones’s Koran-burning threat and Treaty relations in New Zealand.

Rod Oram’s Radio New Zealand commentary this week was on the latest developments on high-speed broadband and Trans-Tasman aviation.

His Star-Times column, meanwhile, returns to his theme about the governance of Auckland with a piece entitled Still time to hold their feet to the fire. After restating his view of the challenges the city faces, he writes:

Take the two mayoral front-runners, John Banks and Len Brown. They have peppered us with pronouncements and platitudes on all sorts of issues. But it’s impossible to detect in either candidate any over-arching principles, underlying logic, detailed workplan or specific, measurable commitments.

It’s no surprise that each musters less than 30% support in the polls. On a more positive note, though, that means they have yet to convince more than half the region’s population. They have everything to play for in the four weeks until the polls close on October 9.

So, hold their feet to the fire. Think about a couple of important things you think the mayor has to achieve, discuss them with your family, friends and colleagues, go to candidate meetings, write, email or in other ways try to work out where they stand on your issues. Consider also who seems best at dealing with the huge complexity of issues and relationships the new structure will demand. Then vote.

There are no new articles from Brian Easton this week.

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Commentary round-up

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Colun James’s columns this week have a distinct focus upon the Labour opposition. His Fairfax paper column is Making a start on remaking Labour, which sets out to describe some of their emerging new thinking:

In David Cunliffe’s words, it means shifting from “politics for” to “politics with”. The problem with “politics for”, 38-year-old first-term MP Grant Robertson says, is that “for most people, politics is something that is done to them. So they disengage.”

James also sketches a new ‘economic revisionism’, “influenced by post-crash international commentary by the likes of Robert Reich, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Robert Skidelsky, Dani Rodrik and Tony Judt plus Olivier Blanchard of the International Monetary Fund and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times”:

The emerging policy frame is said to be “internationalist and outward-looking”, concerned with economic sovereignty but not protectionist. It will aim for an economy which is “clean, green and clever”, not just an appendage of Australia, with an emphasis on saving (“a crucial issue” canvassed by Cunliffe in a recent speech) and innovation, where Labour stalled in the 2000s. The state will be “highly active but not necessarily bigger”. Goff and David Cunliffe have been musing on changes in tax and monetary policy.

Then, in his Otago Daily Times column Children-centred policy, James looks at developments in the party’s social policy:

Labour has also changed tack on how to address the fundamentals of opportunity. Deputy leader and social policy spokesperson Annette King consulted a “commission” of outsiders, some not people normally in the Labour, or any, party camp.

The result, to be presented to Labour’s conference next month, is a focus on children. The aim is to move from developing policy by way of separate adjustments to the various branches of social policy to devising policies to ensure a good start to life and a real prospect of getting well educated and thus a full place in the workforce.

The idea is that from that children-centred base policies will be reshaped for the education, health, housing, justice and welfare portfolios.

. . . King will not just speechify at the conference plenary. There will be a workshop — open to the media, unlike workshops at National’s fear-driven secretive conference — on the commission’s recommendations and the children-centred approach

On the other hand, in his monthly Management column, The brand-leaders of modern politics, James argues that “brand Key has it over brand Goff”.

Brian Easton’s most-recently-available Listener column is Unhealthy Start. I’m standing for election to the Capital & Coast District Health Board and one of the issues I’m most concerned about is health inequalities, so I was struck by his opening paragraph:

We used to think New Zealand was the best place in the world to bring up children. Alas, this is no longer true, as the statistics in the box below show. They come from a report by the Public Health Advisory Committee, “The Best Start in Life: Achieving Effective Action on Child Health and Wellbeing”. The committee says the main reason we do so badly is that we have no properly resourced public agency committed to improving health and well-being outcomes for children.

Out of 30 OECD countries, New Zealand is ranked:

  • 21st for infant mortality (5.1/1,000 live births)
  • 29th for measles immunisation rates (82% vaccinated by age two)
  • 20th for the percentage of children living in poor households (15% of all children)
  • 17th for children in overcrowded houses (31% of all children).

New Zealand fares poorly in other international comparisons. It

  • is fourth to bottom of all OECD countries for injury deaths among one-to-four-year-olds
  • has 14 times the average OECD rate of rheumatic fever
  • has rates of whooping cough and pneumonia 5–10 times greater than the United Kingdom and United States
  • has a four to six times higher rate of child maltreatment death than OECD countries with the lowest incidence.

Easton has also posted a speech to the New Zealand Home Health National Conference, but it was actually primarily about the global financial crisis and its fiscal ramifications. This is a topic I covered in my column last week, and Easton’s take on the economic outlook is similar. He starts by critiquing the mainstream analysis:

There is a general misunderstanding about the Global Financial Crisis. When the public became aware of it in late 2008, many thought that the Great Depression of the 1930s was repeating itself . . . The relief that a second Great Depression had been avoided swung opinion to the other extreme, so many thought there would be only a short cyclical downturn . . . within a couple of years there would be a strong economic recovery and the economy would be soon on its pre-crisis track.

Easton then raises “the gloomy prospect that we are going to have a long recession, a period of some years when the economy will broadly stagnate”, and considers what this means for public spending: “over a period we are going to have to restrain the expenditure path below what we thought it would be tracking in 2008.” As I did, he warns that this is something progressives also need to take seriously:

Note that even were there a government at the other side of the ideological spectrum, it too would have to severely restrain public spending. Of course it is in the interests of all political advocates to fudge the need for cutting public and private spending, but unless we do that we don’t get back on a growth track and prolong the recession.

Rod Oram’s Star-Times column is entitled The Harsh Truth on Hubbard and makes the case that, despite his virtues as individual, the fault for the collapse of South Canterbury Finance lies primarily with its founder.

In his business commentator slot on Nine to Noon, Oram weighs the various economic impacts of the Canterbury earthquake and argues for the Christchurch City Council to make bold urban design choices during the rebuilding.

Have you got a view on Labour’s policy renewal, children’s health, economic prospects, or the implications of SCF or the earthquake? Leave a comment below.

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Commentary round-up

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

A regular feature spotlighting new writing (and audio) from top commentators Rod Oram, Colin James and Brian Easton.

I didn’t get a chance to read Colin James’s Fairfax papers column A need for new thinking beyond the “recovery” until after I posted my own Outlook: a lost decade? yesterday, but  it covers similar issues, though from a different perspective. Following on from his column last week, James defines the “three great forces” that will shape “the new business-as-usual”:

One is the rearrangement of economic power, with the rise of east Asia and especially relative late-comer China and India coming along . . .

The second great force is digital technology and its globalising power which is jarring the global economy’s tectonics. It both flattens the world and pushes up powerful new peaks which increasingly will be in the arc from Tokyo to Mumbai. New Zealand is an outlier.

The third great force is under-45s’ expectation that goods and services, including “public” services, are customised to individual needs and wants.

None of these forces is new. But the great crash has pulled back the curtains. (Read more)

He also provides this interesting sneak-preview:

As a Treasury discussion paper for the savings working group next week will show, a net savings gain of around $5 billion is needed just to hold our towering net debt to the world to 90 per cent of GDP. Ideally, if we are to ride tidal waves generated by the economic tectonics, that 90 per cent must fall.

And in his Otago Daily Times column this week, Changing democracy: doing it to the politicians, James looks at the OpenLabourNZ event this week and the shifts it is aiming to address.

Rod Oram’s business commentator slot on National Radio this week was on South Canterbury Finance, although unfortunately he was speaking just ahead of the big announcement.

Probably of more enduring interest, therefore, is his Star-Times column Time to think, work smarter, where he has another look at Auckland’s challenges:

We know lots about what needs to be done but less about how to do it. As a result, the region is famous among urban planners worldwide for the quality of its myriad strategies – and infamous for its lack of execution because of the fragmentation of local government and combative relations with central government.

The Royal Commission on Auckland governance delivered excellent analysis of these failures and proposed many carefully integrated remedies. One of the most crucial was a spatial plan. This would enable the Auckland Council to bring together the economic, infrastructure, environmental, landscape and social factors that shape the region, with long-term strategies for making the most of them. In essence, the spatial plan would help the region work out the very complex issues of how, where and when to grow and how to plan and invest for that.

The government quickly endorsed the proposal for “one plan for Auckland”. But it dropped many other Royal Commission recommendations that were essential to making the spatial plan work well. (Read more)

There are no new articles from Brian Easton this week.

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