Category: Guest Posts
Singapore is admired for its spectacular economic success. You touch down at the island’s ultra-modern airport—routinely voted the world’s most efficient. Soon you navigate through lanes of gleaming new cars in a tropical garden setting. A glimpse of the sea reveals hundreds of ships in front of the world’s busiest container port.
A constitution is an agreement which a people has about some fundamental things ~ about how they are to be governed, and the principles on which they base their government and society.There has to be agreement ~ and the very fact that we are holding this debate is proof that the Treaty and its so-called principles should not be in our constitution, because on that matter there is no agreement.
For fans of government largesse, the temptation of relative poverty rates must be irresistible. These rates reliably rise during periods of market-oriented reforms, and fall during periods of government expansions.
A lifetime of observation and work in the social sciences has convinced me of one thing. George Orwell was partly wrong in his classic novel 1984. The threats to the open society do not come from above. They come from all around us: from our peers. The oppression is rooted in economic interest and professional capture.
I am a long time believer that an unwritten constitution of the sort you find in New Zealand today, or the United Kingdom before it was enmeshed in the European Union, is a very good sort of constitution indeed. Among its strengths are its flexibility and incredibly democratic nature.
Many of you will no doubt remember the Sanitarium advertisement from the 1960s, “Kiwi kids are Weet-bix kids.” During the long summer evenings you may have enjoyed a glass or two of Cabernet Sauvignon from New Zealand’s oldest winery, Mission Estate. Down in the South Island, during the day tourists will have had the thrill of a jet-boat ride on the Shotover River, courtesy of Shotover Jet. What you probably did not realise is that these apparently commercial organisations, operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Marist Holdings (Greenmeadows) Limited, and the Ngai Tahu Charitable Group, have charitable therefore income tax exempt status.
There has been an astonishing amount of alarmist comment – certainly in the “New Zealand Herald” and even on Radio New Zealand – about the possibility that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand could impose a “Cypriot-type” tax on bank deposits in the event of a bank failure. People have expressed outrage at the idea, and Russel Norman has suggested that a deposit insurance scheme would be a “much simpler, well-tested alternative” to what the RB is proposing, formally called Open Bank Resolution.
New Zealand’s constitution is working perfectly adequately. Nothing is broken; nothing requires fixing. But the government, at the Maori Party’s behest, established a ‘Constitutional Advisory Panel’ to consider (as well as a number of obvious political non-starters) ‘the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in our constitution, and how our legal and political systems can reflect tikanga Maori’
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.
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