Michael Reddell: 2025 and what might have been

Okay, so the weather in Wellington is even less conducive to either being at the beach or in the garden than it was on Friday.

Tomorrow it will be 2025. Once upon a time there was a government that adopted a goal of catching up economically with Australia by 2025. I don’t suppose the Prime Minister of the day – John Key – really cared that much for the goal, although for a while he articulated the rhetoric well enough, and he’d campaigned in 2008 on the continuing exodus of New Zealanders to greener pastures – well, higher incomes anyway, on a dry continent – across the Tasman. The goal, and the associated taskforce set up to advice the government on how it might get there, was more of an ACT win.

Peter Dunne: Closing the Gaps - Deja Vu

There are strong echoes of the Clark Labour government’s “Closing the Gaps” programme in the system now being used by Auckland surgeons to prioritise patients on ethnicity, geographic location and equity grounds.

“Closing the Gaps” sought to assist socio-economically disadvantaged Māori and Pasifika through specially targeted programmes. Labour had campaigned on this at the 1999 election and started to implement the policy in its first Budget in 2000. Labour’s aim was to combat the systemic racism it saw at the time by confronting socio-economic disparities directly and promoting greater opportunities for Māori and Pasifika.