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With great temerity I would like to discuss the national standards introduced into primary and intermediate schools this week. There has been criticism from a number of quarters that the introduction of the standards will lead to a narrowing of the curriculum and the labelling of children as failures. On the other side there are arguments that greater information is required for parents who wish to know more about the performance of their children.

The festive season is a time for family and reflection. After a few drinks on Christmas Day, this combination got some of my family musing about future generations. First we started talking about New Zealand’s flaccid emissions trading scheme, the lack of progress at Copenhagen, and finally about living in a world of more than 2 degree temperature rises. The impacts on New Zealand may be manageable, but how might we deal with the global fallout, possibly including refugees from a drought stricken Australia?

There has been a renewed focus on public asset sales in some western countries as governments reassess the value they get from owning commercial assets when faced with spiraling public debt. The British Government, for example, has announced it will sell £16bn ($35.8bn) in public assets over the next two years. Several other European countries such as France and Germany are also undergoing or seriously pondering public asset sales.

Like the 30,000 members of the facebook group “bring back Georgie Pie”, I have fond memories of the franchise. Some would swear by the taste, but the biggest attraction for many was that the pies were cheap. Georgie Pie’s $1, $2, $3, $4 menu became legendary in fact, but therein lies the problem. The economic and regulatory environment has evolved since the 1990s, and the costs of doing business for an outfit like Georgie Pie have increased substantially.

In a recent speech to Federated Farmers, Phil Goff briefly mentioned that the monetary policy consensus between the two main parties was over. Such a statement is at best a mistaken way of mentioning policy differences and at worst a commitment by the Labour Party to damage the New Zealand economy.

A number of refinements would be required before an accurate measure of a school’s value-added can be established. This presents a challenge to education researchers and to the media who report exam results. Trying to stop publication of school test scores or making access to them difficult is not a solution. Secrecy only instigates rumour and misinformation. Far better to make the information readily accessible and encourage researchers to compete with each other to see who can estimate the most robust measures of value-added and identify which schools really are performing best.

Over the past two years the New Zealand dollar has trampolined spectacularly, plummeting almost 25% over the 12 months ended March 2009 and then rebounding 23% since then. Many exporters and importers are exasperated, while currency traders and economists have been made to look like chumps. But that won’t stop them making currency forecasts; after all, some mug has to.

Those of us that live in Wellington like to think of it as the creative and innovative hub of New Zealand with the highest qualified workforce and highest incomes. But it appears that Auckland can increasingly lay claim to that mantle.

It was only a matter of time before the mounting losses at the Accident Compensation Corporation lead to ideologically-charged plans for opening up the work account to competition. Opposition parties equate competition with privatisation, or the equally dirty “P” word, profits. Private insurance companies will be, heaven forbid, making money out of providing insurance.

This week’s signing of a free-trade agreement with Malaysia has pushed our economy a little further down the path of being an “Asian nation”, to borrow the description that Jim Bolger infamously applied to New Zealand back in 1993. And the path to “Asiafication” has a lot of miles left in it yet.