Category: imported_guest

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.

Law and order is the foundation of a properly functioning society. History shows that for any nation, where law and order goes, there too eventually goes their society. Thus, the substantial rise in violent crime seen over the last eight or so years of this Labour government should be cause for serious concern and urgent action to those charged with the responsibility of protecting New Zealand society.

There are few futuristic ideas that have lost their sheen as quickly as the notion that settlements of Maori grievances would improve New Zealand’s race relations. Our ancestors were sceptical. There were inquiries into grievances in 1921 and 1927, and Prime Minister Peter Fraser told Maori in the 1940s that he would settle the eleven sets of identifiable grievance that Maori had against the Crown. Several “full and final settlements” were made between 1943 and 1947. But most of the money paid to Maori trust boards was wasted.

Every time the All Blacks lose to the Wallabies, New Zealand endures a familiar grieving process. First comes grief, then blame, soul-searching, and finally brainstorming over the right tactics to beat them.