Category: Guest Posts
Five years ago Reeds published my novel True Facts. Before you scream, understand that the title was not a grammatical error, rather it was deliberate and highly pertinent to the plot, as I shall explain.
As a youngster in a post war London I was brought up on lamb and anchor butter from New Zealand.
An old adage declares that nothing is as permanent as a temporary expedient. Four Maori seats were established within the New Zealand Parliament in 1867 as a very temporary expedient, originally for a mere five years while Maori communal title to land was converted by the Native Land Court into freehold title. (At that time, only adult males possessing sufficient landed property were entitled to vote, but legal opinion considered communally-owned property an inadequate qualification.) Those four seats remained an established part of the political landscape until the introduction of a proportional representation system (MMP) by the Electoral Act 1993. They were not abolished then, though, as the Royal Commission on the Electoral System had recommended in its 1986 report, but extended, so that the number of Maori seats reflects (by a strange and complicated formula) the Maori population, including the Maori population not even on the Maori electoral roll.
Visiting China is a disconcerting experience these days. The main or central campus of Xiamen University , which is where I’ve just been, has nearly 30,000 students, every single one of them postgraduate. It’s a startling experience to deliver an official lecture and to have so many students ask perceptive and knowledgeable questions -- in very good English!
Following the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, powerful political forces are now being applied to voters in western democracies to do something about global warming.
Imagine basing global or national energy and economic policy on a false theory; pursuing that policy even if clear evidence shows it is wrong; continuing even though the devastating effects of such actions are already manifest; putting your economy in competitive disadvantage when other major economies are not taking the same action.
The current government has been unequivocal about its top priority goal: to get New Zealand back into the top half of the OECD income range. Prime minister Helen Clark reaffirmed that goal in parliament earlier this year. Finance minister Michael Cullen has said that the government needs to achieve 4% plus annual growth in real GDP on a sustained basis to achieve it.
In the past few years there has been increasing concern about global climate change on the part of the media, politicians, and the public. It has been stimulated by the idea that human activities may influence global climate adversely and that action is required on the part of governments to do something about this problem.
Often when people ask my wife where I am she replies, “Oh, he’s off somewhere saving the world.” Well the other day I said to her, “I’ve now worked out how I’m going to do it.” “How?” she asked. I said, “a quarter acre at a time.”
Thirty years ago, Phil Silva (the founding director of the Dunedin Study) wrote that New Zealanders invested more time and care in maintaining their cars than they did their children.
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