Category: imported_guest
Home affordability has been in the news in recent weeks. The “problem” is a perennial political football, but things got a little more serious recently when the National Party released broad-brush details of their plan to deal with the issue. The Minister of Finance, Bill English, has correctly recognised that housing is becoming less affordable to low income earners and has proposed a range of initiatives to deal with it:
Any way you add up the sums, the message is that present and future commitments under just the one Vote, Treaty Negotiations, will comes to something like 5-6 billion dollars in total present value, probably even more. It’s hard to find Votes with a similarly spectacular explosion.
A ‘conversation’. The very word fills me with foreboding. ‘Conversations’ are creatures of the caring classes; the schoolteachers and academics, the higher-paid end of the public service and all the professional carers in charities, lobby groups, trusts and the social sciences; all comfortably off, and all dedicated to their own deadly vision of a truly caring and happy world where they and people just like them intend to be in charge.
In 1999, the Labour Party, by then in Opposition, promised a comprehensive review of the Act if they won the election that year. After they formed a government late that year, they commissioned that comprehensive review by Lars Svensson, a highly respected monetary policy academic (and now Deputy Governor of the Swedish central bank). And the result? Following careful assessment of the Act and the way the Reserve Bank was implementing it, Professor Svensson concluded that it was world’s best practice.
I think it would be a disaster for New Zealand to move to a written constitution of the sort almost certain to be offered. And I would run a mile from incorporating or entrenching the Treaty into any such instrument, not least because overwhelmingly no one knows what it means when applied to any specific issue. So all you will be buying is the views of the top judges, instead of your own, the voters. That’s not a trade I would ever make.
Obligations are well known to people with jobs. They have obligations to their employers to be there on time, to observe the conditions of their contract and generally toe the line during their hours of employment. Working parents are obliged to put their children in some sort of care, be it formal or family-based. In return they receive a pay packet that furnishes their needs and wants, not dissimilar to a benefit, though usually more generous.
The Maori water claim is not just an argument over an increasingly valuable resource. It is also another nail in the coffin of racial harmony and national survival.
School has always been, and is still, a means to an end. That end is the entry of emerging adults into the world of work – or rather, as is largely the case today, the transition to higher or further education leading on to a career track. Societies spend megabucks on schooling and have a right to expect a return, namely the production of young people with the cognitive skills and attitudes towards study and work that will turn them into productive citizens who will benefit society in return.
In any mature society, the issue of having, abiding by or amending, a country’s constitution is of national significance and importance. This facet of national life determines not only how political power will be exercised but also how it will be kept in check - matters of profound significance and therefore to be exercised with great diligence and care. A constitution is the source of ultimate or supreme law of a country, to which all other legislation is subservient.
Our crisis is one of character. We are in the situation we are in because of the sort of people we are. Any solution must spring out of our own energy and faith in ourselves, out of a shared understanding of the world and of our hopes for the future, and out of a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood which impels us to care for each other but which also impels those who are cared for to desire that they pull their weight in striving for the common good. ‘Without vision the people perish.’ Most of all, we must have faith in ourselves.
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