Category: Guest Posts
Some time back in the 1990s, I wrote an article that began: “The newspaper you are holding in your hands is an endangered species.” The risk to newspapers that worried me then had to do with media freedom. That remains a matter of concern to journalists – probably always will be – but it has been replaced by a far more urgent threat. Dismal financial results reportedly recently by the two big newspaper groups, APN News and Media and Fairfax Media, confirmed what had long been obvious: that the newspaper industry is reeling from the impact of the internet.
Something strange happened on the road to our much-celebrated post-industrial utopia. The real winners of the global economy have turned out to be not the creative types or the data junkies, but the material boys: countries, states and companies that have perfected the art of physical production in agriculture, energy and, remarkably, manufacturing.
Many people believe that electricity prices are too high. They find it difficult to understand why, when most of our electricity is generated by old hydropower stations, the price has escalated at well above the rate of inflation since about 2002 when the market first started to function as it was designed to do. They would be right.
In January 2013 I was asked by the secretariat of the Government Constitutional Advisory Panel to take part in audio and video taped interviews. The invitation was probably issued on the basis that I have written extensively about Treaty issues and that I am a member of the Independent Constitutional Review Panel that has its presence on this NZCPR website. I wish to share these interviews with NZCPR readers and raise troubling issues that emerged for me while doing the interviews.
If history has anything to teach us, it’s that we should never take anything for granted. We need to be vigilant in protecting what’s good about our society. New Zealand has so much to be proud of. We have led the world by ensuring equality of all citizens before the law, introducing universal male and female sufferage, and we’ve largely had great and integrated race relations. So when the Ministry of Education starts demanding that schools give people of one ethnic descent superior rights to all others, the hackles ought to be rising.
The Constitutional Advisory Panel has kicked off its public consultation efforts. One of the issues the panel will look into is the term of Parliament, most likely by assessing whether it should be increased to four years, and whether we should have a fixed election. Of all the matters it is discussing, this seems likely to be the one that is most likely to see some traction.
The Waitangi “season” is here - that time of year when our political leaders embark upon their political pilgrimages of atonement and appeasement, firstly to Ratana pa, then on to Waitangi in Northland. This annual charade will culminate in the “official” Waitangi Day “celebrations”, when the northern clans traditionally indulge in their offensive, often violent and always insulting behaviour, only this time, it happens where the treaty was signed.
The latest round of full and final settlements was supposed to put an end to racial issues and let us get on with the serious business of living together and surviving as one people, planning for the future. At the very least, the settlements should surely have given us a breathing space of a few years, before our local Mafiosi turned up again for the next instalment of the protection money. But no.
A huge amount is said about child poverty, but bugger all about what causes it. By the end of last year 13, 634 of the babies born in the previous 12 months had a parent or caregiver relying on a benefit. 48 percent of these caregivers were Maori.
A "rational optimist" like me thinks the world will go on getting better for most people at a record rate, not because I have a temperamental or ideological bent to good cheer but because of the data. Poverty, hunger, population growth rates, inequality, and mortality from violence, disease and weather - all continue to plummet on a global scale. But a global optimist can still be a regional pessimist. When asked what I am pessimistic about, I usually reply: bureaucracy and superstition.
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