August 4, 2010
With Geoffrey Palmer's appointment to head a UN inquiry re the Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, New Zealand's even-handed Middle East policy becomes something more than sitting evenly on both hands
July 21, 2010
World leader and villager roles to make diplomacy work – an update
May 30, 2010
Sanctions against Iraq led to terrible strife and wrecking of the country. Everything must be done to prevent this sort of thing happening to another country. Already an arc of disorder and strife stretches from Pakistan across to Somalia.
May 16, 2010
“…the world is in for more turbulent times than it has been accustomed to…”
“…new thinking might be in order not only at national and international levels, but also at local ones…”
April 28, 2010
There was, and remains, an opportunity to forge a new kind of partnership for peace with the Turkey that New Zealand fought against in world war one.
April 16, 2010
President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit where NZ Prime Minister John Key "rides high on nuclear-free NZ". It is of course wonderful indeed that a national leader can now so step on to the world stage to have laid on him a mantle woven by ordinary people acting very locally in his country 3 and 4 decades ago.
December 28, 2009
Prime Minster John Key is coming in on a deep and protracted problem that Sir Paul Reeves has been working on over a long period… Fiji had had three coups in almost 20 years when Commodore Frank Bainimarama led a fourth in 2006.
December 21, 2009
"History tells us that movements begin with people, not governments, and when they become powerful enough, governments respond." Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California
December 10, 2009
I thought that maybe New Zealand Prime Minster John Key might try and connect with United States President Barak Obama through their common links to the Polynesian world.
September 28, 2009
Guest Blogger John Gallagher writes: Where other, larger countries are willing to relate to us, it will be on their terms rather than our own. We are the only ones who can look, primarily, after our own interests and concerns, or, indeed, our very independence.
January 23, 2009
John Gallagher continues his blog on life after the February 2009 New Zealand Jobs Summit. This time he looks at how wider vision in this information age can keep pragmatism working for jobs and for much else besides.
January 22, 2009
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key intends his Summit on Employment to be a “'do-fest,' non 'talk-fest' affair." OK, but clarity is needed as to what such a conference can achieve and what it will leave still to be done. New Zealand’s history since 1973 illustrates how without vision, short-term “pragmatism” can become very “unpragmatic"