WHY CAN’T WE get public transport right in New Zealand’s largest city? Visit any other world city and you will find buses, trams, light-rail networks and extraordinarily fast and efficient heavy rail services. Literally millions of people avail themselves of these services every day.
In the Middle Ages, rebellious nobles faced not only execution, but also the complete forfeiture of their estates to the Crown. Were such draconian powers still available to the leaders of today, then it is easy to predict the outcome of what most of the country’s leading economists have characterised as a completely unwarranted “Crisis of Business Confidence”.
HOW CAN YOU TELL when a system is falling apart? That the load-bearing walls of everyday reality are beginning to weaken? The simple answer is absurdity. Words spoken and positions taken that simply make no sense. Behaviour that raises suspicion of complete madness. Sums that stubbornly refuse to add up.
St John is scathing in her condemnation of the purveyors of what she regards as the “subsidy myth”. Matthew Hooton, Eric Crampton on the Right; Bryce Edwards on the Left; and “others”.
If nothing else, the experience will have shown Little what he is up against. The anger and hurt of Maori. The radical programmes with which the latter propose to empty the prisons of their disproportionate ethnic muster. The anxious attempts of the various state institutions tasked with managing crime and punishment to generate outcomes that meet the often contradictory expectations of their political masters. And last – but by no means least – the inescapable reality of “Middle New Zealand’s” veto: it’s indisputable power and its implacable determination to have the final say.
Evening On The Land
GREEN POLITICS has never been about business-as-usual. Green politics has always been about the salvation of the planet and the reclamation of the human soul from the talons of the Capitalist death-machine. To reduce Green politics to mere environmentalism is to betray a complete misunderstanding of its raison d’être.
Sadly and predictably, however, that is exactly what the majority of New Zealand’s political commentators are doing. They are heaping their praise upon the Green caucus for taking the party back-to-basics with wonderful new policies about re-cycling car tyres and paying ten bucks to whoever before dumping your rubbish.
Evil looks nothing like the artist’s impression: there are no horns, no tail, no cloven hooves, no whiff of sulphur. Life would be so much easier if there were! No, if you really want to know what evil looks like, then examine the faces of the people who live next door; the people on the bus; the people in the lunchroom at work.
EVERY TIME the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance address the “Business Community” I wince. It’s painful to watch these two abase themselves in the way they do. As if their endless protestations of good will and their oft-repeated promise to “listen” will make the slightest difference. The Business Community is acutely aware that there is nothing with more potential to cause them harm than a left-wing government. If it cannot be tamed, then it must be broken.
The 1980s were such unenlightened times. The appalling events of that era could never happen in the Aotearoa-New Zealand of 2018. Our health and safety laws simply wouldn’t permit it!