Stuart Smith: Affordable Energy, Food vs Climate Change Policies

World leaders are meeting at the latest UN climate conference COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

These meetings are a gathering of the great and the good in the climate change world. Some will fly to Egypt in their private jets to lecture us all on using public transport, oblivious to their own hypocrisy at using the highest emitting form of transport possible.

Point of Order: Clark enlightens us about open banking

While Sio throws light (through a Maori world lens) on what once was blind justice

It’s the announcement we saw coming when Newshub revealed the Government was poised to announce a major change to banking, “which experts say will slash their profits”.

This news was broadcast as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was adding her voice to the populist chorus of disapproval about those profits.

It so happened the government was working on a concept called “open banking”, whereby customers can move their bank accounts, direct debits and what-have-you between banks.

Garrick Tremain: Waste

 Here is Garrick Tremain's cartoon commentary on James Shaw's attendance at the COP27 conference in Egypt! 

Mike Hosking: Why isn't Ardern at COP27?

It does, on the surface, seem odd that Jacinda "nuclear moment” Ardern is not front and centre in Egypt saving the world at COP27.

And yet if you think about it, it isn't.

What Ardern is, and more and more have realised it, is all talk. As we discovered last week, with the court victim programmes that were announced by her with great fanfare, but when they turned out to be duds, she was taking no accountability for them whatsoever.

Geoffrey Miller: Is it time for Jacinda Ardern to head to the Middle East?

In her victorious election campaign in 2017, Jacinda Ardern famously called climate change ‘my generation’s nuclear-free moment’.

But perhaps surprisingly, Ardern has not attended a UN climate change conference since she became New Zealand’s Prime Minister in 2017.

Had New Zealand’s Covid-19 situation allowed for it, Ardern would have almost certainly joined the many other world leaders who went to COP26 in Glasgow last year.

Ron Smith: All Quiet on the Egyptian Front

With Syria dominating the news from the Middle East, there has been relatively little news in the main-stream media about what might be happening in other places of earlier great interest, such as Tunisia, Libya, and, particularly, Egypt.  Of course, there have been some incidents that have commanded attention, such as the occasional arrests of the remaining Muslim Brotherhood leadership, following the violent suppression of the anti-coup protests, and the recent events in the northern Sinai in which Brotherhood activists, supported by Hamas from Gaza, captured a busload of Egyptian police officers and executed them one by one.  This was swiftly followed by an Egyptian military operation which resulted in the death of most of those responsible.  Other than these events (and the very recent assassination attempt on the Egyptian Interior Minister) Egypt has been relatively quiet since the protests following the overthrow of President Morsi, nearly two months ago.

Ron Smith: Experiments in Democracy

Do recent events in Egypt constitute a failure of democracy, or a triumph of civil society, or a bit of both? It is hard not to be ambivalent as the latest iteration of the ‘Arab Spring’ plays out in Cairo and around the country.  On the one hand, it is scarcely a year since Mr Morsi became president, after what seemed to have been free and fair elections, and now the Army has intervened and he is in military custody (with other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood). 

Ron Smith: On Constitutions

The proposed constitution for Egypt contains a good deal of contentious material and it will be interesting to see how it fares in the referendum, scheduled for this weekend.  As readers of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research know, there are also constitutional projects afoot here in New Zealand.  There are interesting parallels between the two.

In the Egyptian case, and in the context of a ‘virtuous revolution which has unified all Egyptians’, there is an early affirmation of the object of the exercise.  This is to ‘build a modern democratic state’, in which, ‘Equality and equal opportunities are established for all citizens, men and women’.  But all is not as it seems.  As in Orwell’s celebrated story, some (animals) are more equal than others.  In this case the ‘more equal’ are specifically Islamic and masculine.  On the face of it, there is to be ‘no discrimination’ between men and women (this is in the Preamble); but what are we to make of Article 10, ‘The State shall ….enable the reconciliation between the duties of a women toward her family and her work’?  This seems clearly to envisage a restricted status for women, of a kind that, lamentably, is to be found around much of the Islamic world.  More generally, there is limited constitutional protection (and much threat) for minorities such as the Coptic Christians, and any who desire to live in a modern, secular state.

Ron Smith: Of Springs and False Dawns

The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ has been in progress for about a year and it may be appropriate now to take stock of what was anticipated, or hoped for, and what we seem to have got. Of course, as Zhou Enlai famously once said of the effect of the French Revolution on western civilisation, it may be ‘too soon to tell’, but as far as the ‘Arab Spring’ is concerned, some things may already be evident.

Most obvious amongst these is that the analogy with the ‘Prague Spring’ is not appropriate and that western media interpretation of unfolding events in the Arab world, as similar to those that took place in Eastern Europe in 1989, may have been nothing more than wistful thinking. The Prague Spring, itself, was a 1968 attempt to throw-off the worst excesses of communism in Czechoslovakia, but it did presage a wider struggle for liberty that was dramatically and surprisingly successful, twenty-one years later.

Ron Smith: Egypt and Bahrain

In attempting to understand what is happening and what might happen next, there are a number of important distinctions to appreciate in the social and political situation in these two countries and in the apparent demands of the protestors in each case.

Most obviously, it needs to be noted that the ruling elite in Bahrain is Sunni and comprises less than a third of the population. Thus, the replacement of the present autocracy by a democratically-elected, representative system of government will, inevitably, result in a Shiite majority government. The Sunnis, who have always been in power (and profited mightily from it), will never be in power again. So they have a very powerful reason for not conceding to the protestors in the street. In the absence of very strong countervailing considerations, we might therefore expect a continuation of the present pattern of very strong repression.

Ron Smith: Egyptian Revolution: where to from here

There has been some very optimistic, and, I think, rather naïve speculation about the likely consequences of recent events in the Middle East, and, notably, Egypt. Analogy with the ‘velvet revolution’ of 1989, is particularly misleading. Prospects for the emergence of secular, democratic (‘western-like’) states in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, etc., are vanishingly small, with a range of other possibilities being much more likely.