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Helen Clark, John Key - frying pan to fire?
Apr. 13th, 2009 | 07:41 pm
Helen Clark, now John Key - frying pan to fire?
It was one of our greatest writers, GK Chesterton, who pointed out that a tired democracy becomes a dictatorship. And the danger is that a disappointed country, fed up with the broken promises, evasive excuses and self-serving compromises of the politicians it no longer trusts - or simply despises - sinks into a kind of angry apathy. National seems to have forgotten that far from it being enthusiastically voted in by New Zealanders, it sailed into power because of how enthusiastically the Clark-Cullen Labour government was resoundingly rejected by the electorate.
So, too, was the kind of autocratic leadership which Clark represented - but into whose shoes Prime Minister John Key has obligingly stepped, showing himself just as capable of unilaterally imposing his will on the National Party and on the country. Any puzzlement as to why this charming and immensely wealthy self-made individual should apparently have been known in Australia as the smiling assassin should by now be dissipating a little.
One of the present Prime Minister’s first acts was to dump Gerry Brownlee as a prospective deputy; Brownlee, who had leant his considerable weight against his then leader Don Brash, having himself formerly persuaded Brash to dump his own elected deputy leader, Nick Smith, in his absence - in favour of Brownlee himself. Did anyone call politics a dirty business?
And now National have apparently been cowed into operating like a collective of yes-men obliged to shelve their individual consciences when the Prime Minister snaps his fingers. National Party members almost to a man and woman were against the unholy coalition of Sue Bradford’s and Helen Clark's foisting of the anti-family, anti-smacking legislation on the public - but were ordered do as they were told. Grown men and women were essentialy treated like children with no conscience votes allowed, whipped into line by a new leader suddenly running with an agenda of his own. Many of National's members must now be totally dismayed by Key’s extraordinary cuddling up to their mortal enemy in philosophic terms, the autocratic and dominating Helen Clark. Moreover, they are having to front up to even more humble pie on the menu, with the explicable promoting of the wasp-tongued former finance minister Michael Cullen to the board of New Zealand Post - with the expectation Dr Cullen will become the board's deputy when incumbent Ken Douglas' appointment expires in October. Dr Cullen’s mishandling the economy is high on the list of the reasons so many New Zealanders are facing economic hardship - including the scores who have left New Zealand for better opportunities in Australia.
The public's disillusion with the political scene has not been helped by yet another Prime Minister apparently feeling called upon to run the country like his private fiefdom. The mainstream media, as out of touch as it usually is, waffles on about the electorate's honeymoon with National not yet being over. However, the public's understanding is that National’s campaign pledges were underpinned by its philosophical commitment to treat all New Zealanders as one people - with no special rights, privileges or funding directed toward one sector only.
We can forget that for a start. A quite different John Key is emerging from the folksy Mr Nice Guy campaigning against an increasingly fascist Labour Government. Let's put aside for the moment the puzzlement - the sheer shock - the public at large is feeling at what many see as an extraordinary cronyism shown by the Prime Minister in bestowing unwarranted and richly undeserved acclamations and support upon both Helen Clark and Michael Cullen whom the country booted out - but not before Labour had wreaked enormous damage on almost every area over which they had control.
The signs of yet another autocratic controller at the helm of what was represented as a mainstream political party were already emerging from underground shenanigans in the National Party control headquarters well before the election. More of that later. In the light of day, no sooner was our present Prime Minister home and dry than he took it upon himself to welsh on a long promised National Party undertaking - the well overdue abolition of the now strikingly racist Maori seats - one of the prime reasons why support swung so strongly to National under its former leader, Don Brash.
Not to put too fine a point on it, although the present Prime Minister is well aware that, under MMP, Maori already have as much proportional representation as any other sector of the community, he has now deprived mainstream New Zealand of its hopes that all New Zealanders will be treated even-handedly, and equally, as one people. He can arguably be accused of opportunistically buying votes with an eye to prolonging his political future. What Key has contrived with additional extra funding directed towards Pita Sharples’ and Tariana Turia’s sectional interests is an unjustified preference for the kind of throw-more-money-at-them solutions which not only rip off the taxpayer - but do nothing at all to improve the shocking statistics for which a Maori underclass has long been largely responsible. There is no sign from the Prime Minister that he is expecting the extremely wealthy Maori tribes who now hold 15 billion dollars of, largely, formerly taxpayers’ money, to begin to take real responsibility for what they are quick to invoke as “our people” - when in their typically manipulative, what-we-are-owed, hands-out mode. Nothing changes.
The estimate of the actual number of Maori in the population (disregarding the Anglican Church’s absurd and dishonest you-are-Maori-if-you-feel-Maori classification), has been variously estimated, for political advantage at between 12 to 15%. However, we are well overdue an actual definition of what it is to be Maori, especially when there is a question of rigorous accountability to New Zealanders for the never-ending raiding of the public purse. Currently and culpably there is a considerable deception being practised by those who, are by far, predominantly European in their genetic inheritance - but who are claiming to be Maori for self-advantage.
The fact that this wilfully contrived political cheating was ever foisted off on the country is scandalous enough in itself. Up until 1975, only those who were full-blooded, or what was referred to as half-caste Maori, were able to enroll as Maori for political purposes: those less than half-caste were directed to enrol on the general role - as they were indisputably predominately in debt, genetically, to other forebears. This international acceptance of genetic inheritance for the purposes of setting the claims is illustrated in the well-regarded and generous ANCSA Settlement (the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act), whereby a claimant who is less than one quarter predominately native i.e. Innuit, or Indian, is disqualified from claiming disadvantage. The departure into an emotional and manipulative, rather than an objective, definition of Maori was foisted off on Parliament by Maori - for Maori-only advantage. That it was ever agreed to was a political disgrace.
What, in essence, has been a deceit against the population at large these decades, fostered by the major political parties for their own advantage, is a shameful indictment on them. Under Don Brash’s principled stand, epitomised in his Orewa speech, calling for one New Zealand for all its citizens (and for which he was demonized by a hysterical media singularly failing to quote even one objectionable claim made in it) the tide began to turn for National. The public reaction was overwhelming. The likelihood of National under his leadership again being chosen by the electorate was such that under Helen Clark (an account of whose dubious activities are chronicled in “Absolute Power”, Ian Wishart’s highly revealing book about her (almost completely ignored by our left-wing media - and, obviously, by John Key), Labour embarked in gross over-spending of the legal limit on election spending in the 2005 election campaign.
Had Labour not done that, National would very probably have won the 2005 election. It was well ahead in the polls going into the final week, but it was accepted that what tipped the vote back in favour of Labour was a very aggressive campaign of full-page ads in major dailies on the Wednesday of that week, with the caption “Don’t Put It All at Risk”. Moreover, Clark utterly failed to deliver on her promise to raise NZ’s living standards into the top half of the OECD over 10 years, and indeed reportedly tried to pretend she had never made any such commitment.
To the informed public's consternation, however, John Key has rhapsodized about her qualifications for a top UN job -(an issue also to be revisited below). More pertinently, on the issue of selling out the country by continual Maori preferment, the Prime Minister has ignored the fact that the Maori Party itself gained not even a 3% of the electoral vote. Inevitably, this translates into a large rat for the Prime Minister to swallow. At less than 3% of the electoral vote the Maori Party has no right whatever to claim that it represents that estimated 12 to 15% Maori sector of the population. And if it does not represent the Maori population at large, why is its special interest pleading being treated by John key as if it does? The so-called Maori Party represents nothing more than the combined interests of the wily Pita Sharples, Tariana Turia and their supporters only.
National seems to have forgotten that the public had begun to trust it again because of the “new” vision offered of the way forward by Don Brash - an aim once but no longer taken for granted as axiomatic for our democracy - equal treatment and equal opportunity for all New Zealanders - in spite of the more than questionable settlements bestowed on Ngai Tahu and Tainui representatives. With Jim Bolger and Doug Graham following Geoffrey Palmer’s lead to become hopelessly adrift on the historically utterly inaccurate concept of a “treaty partnership”, fiercely contested compensation from the public purse was paid to these powerfully manipulative tribes - compensation arguably neither due nor deserved. The public was in no doubt that vote-buying by the National Party was the prime driver on these issues - as with Graham’s shocking instructions to the Maori affairs Select Committee to in essence ignore the nearly 400 well-informed submissions arguing against the Ngai Tahu settlement - on the grounds that the deed had already been signed by him and the Prime Minister.
History will revisit this issue, with questions well overdue to be answered. With National’s present Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson, arguing at the time for the powerful Ngai Tahu against ill-equipped and hamstrung Crown lawyers, this highly controversial settlement was paid for from the public purse. What also needs revisiting in relation to this formerly sparsely-settled, but aggressively manipulative tribe is why it was ever given a monopoly over the ownership of Greenstone - and total rights to the South Island whale watching - neither of these provisions unchallengeable - and both overdue to be re-examined.
Meantime Prime Minister Key has unilaterally disregarded National’s long overdue undertaking to get rid of the Maori seats, letting the public down. Moreover, after years of this party’s undertaking to free the Resource Management Act of references to the Treaty of Waitangi and iwi cultural values, it is reneging on this undertaking, too. While in opposition, it was scathing of the ridiculous claims of mumbo-jumbo in the form of annoyed taniwha objecting to road developments; of strange noises, flickering lights and unexplained running water as claimed breaches of tapu.
Key, however, has been cavalier about overriding National’s election environment policy. This promised to restrict the definition of environment to natural and physical considerations - and to remove the requirement for regard to the “principles” of the Treaty - so-called principles which have been thoroughly discredited in recent years. However, apparently what John Key wants, John Key gets, and National’s campaign pledges can hang themselves out to dry. So, too, can the New Zealand flag. If Maori can agree - (and undoubtedly there will be a National Party coterie congratulating themselves on their cunning with regard to this stipulation) - there will be two flags flying on our next national day) - a distinctly divisive, let alone seriously questionable pledge with constitutional implications. It was a foolish personal promise this Prime Minister had no right to make on behalf of New Zealanders - nor should he have underestimated those Maori activist groups which have consistently already outwitted and out-manipulated both National and Labour to gain their own way in recent years.
However, as we can predictably expect from a lightweight political media, a Nelson Mail leader writer’s interpretation was that Key, in apparently not being hampered by principles, is refusing “to be siloed by old political thinking” and “is not weighed down by political baggage.” These obviously include undertakings to the electorate - including New Zealanders’ expectation that the country should be unified, not divided. This will not be advanced by National's wooing the Maori Party at the expense of the electorate at large. Nor can it be trusted in areas such as the constantly reinvented Treaty settlements claims; the foreshore and seabed issue; and its very probable underground move towards important constitutional change which the electorate has not called for, but which is the constant aim of radical activists and “Liberal” ideologists. Somewhere, there will be a self-selected, self-regarding committee of “eminent” New Zealanders beavering away to present the country at large with their wish list for a new constitution.
Watch this spot, as this present National Government has given no sign to date that it any longer genuinely represents majority New Zealanders - regardless of the fact that well-meaning, if naive commentators invoke him as “a prime minister of style we have not seen before: relaxed open and congenial - as with many sunny optimists people find him hard to dislike - Key’s willingness to break the mould is refreshing” (Karl du Fresne, Nelson Mail 4/2/09). No doubt the gay lobby at the Big Gay Out found our Prime Minister’s dancing on stage with two drag queens equally “refreshing”. However, judging a politician on the basis of his personal charisma is one of the most disastrous common mistakes of history.
Du Fresne, however, was astute enough to query Key’s premature commitment that the taxpayer will dip into his or her pockets to bail out Fisher & Paykel which, in its many good years, as he pointed out, profited considerably by keeping overseas competitors at bay with the help of tariffs and other protectionist measures.
Moreover, it can be argued that one of the reasons for Fisher & Paykel’s present plight was the heavy costs involved in its relocating to China - at considerable cost to its New Zealand workforce sharing the plight of those laid off as a result of companies seeking greater profits overseas. And now these sacked workers are expected, as taxpayers (if they’ve been lucky enough to find new jobs) to help subsidize the company that did their jobs in. Where is the justice in this? The case for special treatment for Fisher & Paykel has not been established. Nor has John Key been required to justify obliging taxpayers to make financial sacrifices for this purpose.
***************
It was one of our greatest writers, GK Chesterton, who pointed out that a tired democracy becomes a dictatorship. And the danger is that a disappointed country, fed up with the broken promises, evasive excuses and self-serving compromises of the politicians it no longer trusts - or simply despises - sinks into a kind of angry apathy. National seems to have forgotten that far from it being enthusiastically voted in by New Zealanders, it sailed into power because of how enthusiastically the Clark-Cullen Labour government was resoundingly rejected by the electorate.
So, too, was the kind of autocratic leadership which Clark represented - but into whose shoes Prime Minister John Key has obligingly stepped, showing himself just as capable of unilaterally imposing his will on the National Party and on the country. Any puzzlement as to why this charming and immensely wealthy self-made individual should apparently have been known in Australia as the smiling assassin should by now be dissipating a little.
One of the present Prime Minister’s first acts was to dump Gerry Brownlee as a prospective deputy; Brownlee, who had leant his considerable weight against his then leader Don Brash, having himself formerly persuaded Brash to dump his own elected deputy leader, Nick Smith, in his absence - in favour of Brownlee himself. Did anyone call politics a dirty business?
And now National have apparently been cowed into operating like a collective of yes-men obliged to shelve their individual consciences when the Prime Minister snaps his fingers. National Party members almost to a man and woman were against the unholy coalition of Sue Bradford’s and Helen Clark's foisting of the anti-family, anti-smacking legislation on the public - but were ordered do as they were told. Grown men and women were essentialy treated like children with no conscience votes allowed, whipped into line by a new leader suddenly running with an agenda of his own. Many of National's members must now be totally dismayed by Key’s extraordinary cuddling up to their mortal enemy in philosophic terms, the autocratic and dominating Helen Clark. Moreover, they are having to front up to even more humble pie on the menu, with the explicable promoting of the wasp-tongued former finance minister Michael Cullen to the board of New Zealand Post - with the expectation Dr Cullen will become the board's deputy when incumbent Ken Douglas' appointment expires in October. Dr Cullen’s mishandling the economy is high on the list of the reasons so many New Zealanders are facing economic hardship - including the scores who have left New Zealand for better opportunities in Australia.
The public's disillusion with the political scene has not been helped by yet another Prime Minister apparently feeling called upon to run the country like his private fiefdom. The mainstream media, as out of touch as it usually is, waffles on about the electorate's honeymoon with National not yet being over. However, the public's understanding is that National’s campaign pledges were underpinned by its philosophical commitment to treat all New Zealanders as one people - with no special rights, privileges or funding directed toward one sector only.
We can forget that for a start. A quite different John Key is emerging from the folksy Mr Nice Guy campaigning against an increasingly fascist Labour Government. Let's put aside for the moment the puzzlement - the sheer shock - the public at large is feeling at what many see as an extraordinary cronyism shown by the Prime Minister in bestowing unwarranted and richly undeserved acclamations and support upon both Helen Clark and Michael Cullen whom the country booted out - but not before Labour had wreaked enormous damage on almost every area over which they had control.
The signs of yet another autocratic controller at the helm of what was represented as a mainstream political party were already emerging from underground shenanigans in the National Party control headquarters well before the election. More of that later. In the light of day, no sooner was our present Prime Minister home and dry than he took it upon himself to welsh on a long promised National Party undertaking - the well overdue abolition of the now strikingly racist Maori seats - one of the prime reasons why support swung so strongly to National under its former leader, Don Brash.
Not to put too fine a point on it, although the present Prime Minister is well aware that, under MMP, Maori already have as much proportional representation as any other sector of the community, he has now deprived mainstream New Zealand of its hopes that all New Zealanders will be treated even-handedly, and equally, as one people. He can arguably be accused of opportunistically buying votes with an eye to prolonging his political future. What Key has contrived with additional extra funding directed towards Pita Sharples’ and Tariana Turia’s sectional interests is an unjustified preference for the kind of throw-more-money-at-them solutions which not only rip off the taxpayer - but do nothing at all to improve the shocking statistics for which a Maori underclass has long been largely responsible. There is no sign from the Prime Minister that he is expecting the extremely wealthy Maori tribes who now hold 15 billion dollars of, largely, formerly taxpayers’ money, to begin to take real responsibility for what they are quick to invoke as “our people” - when in their typically manipulative, what-we-are-owed, hands-out mode. Nothing changes.
The estimate of the actual number of Maori in the population (disregarding the Anglican Church’s absurd and dishonest you-are-Maori-if-you-feel-Maori classification), has been variously estimated, for political advantage at between 12 to 15%. However, we are well overdue an actual definition of what it is to be Maori, especially when there is a question of rigorous accountability to New Zealanders for the never-ending raiding of the public purse. Currently and culpably there is a considerable deception being practised by those who, are by far, predominantly European in their genetic inheritance - but who are claiming to be Maori for self-advantage.
The fact that this wilfully contrived political cheating was ever foisted off on the country is scandalous enough in itself. Up until 1975, only those who were full-blooded, or what was referred to as half-caste Maori, were able to enroll as Maori for political purposes: those less than half-caste were directed to enrol on the general role - as they were indisputably predominately in debt, genetically, to other forebears. This international acceptance of genetic inheritance for the purposes of setting the claims is illustrated in the well-regarded and generous ANCSA Settlement (the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act), whereby a claimant who is less than one quarter predominately native i.e. Innuit, or Indian, is disqualified from claiming disadvantage. The departure into an emotional and manipulative, rather than an objective, definition of Maori was foisted off on Parliament by Maori - for Maori-only advantage. That it was ever agreed to was a political disgrace.
What, in essence, has been a deceit against the population at large these decades, fostered by the major political parties for their own advantage, is a shameful indictment on them. Under Don Brash’s principled stand, epitomised in his Orewa speech, calling for one New Zealand for all its citizens (and for which he was demonized by a hysterical media singularly failing to quote even one objectionable claim made in it) the tide began to turn for National. The public reaction was overwhelming. The likelihood of National under his leadership again being chosen by the electorate was such that under Helen Clark (an account of whose dubious activities are chronicled in “Absolute Power”, Ian Wishart’s highly revealing book about her (almost completely ignored by our left-wing media - and, obviously, by John Key), Labour embarked in gross over-spending of the legal limit on election spending in the 2005 election campaign.
Had Labour not done that, National would very probably have won the 2005 election. It was well ahead in the polls going into the final week, but it was accepted that what tipped the vote back in favour of Labour was a very aggressive campaign of full-page ads in major dailies on the Wednesday of that week, with the caption “Don’t Put It All at Risk”. Moreover, Clark utterly failed to deliver on her promise to raise NZ’s living standards into the top half of the OECD over 10 years, and indeed reportedly tried to pretend she had never made any such commitment.
To the informed public's consternation, however, John Key has rhapsodized about her qualifications for a top UN job -(an issue also to be revisited below). More pertinently, on the issue of selling out the country by continual Maori preferment, the Prime Minister has ignored the fact that the Maori Party itself gained not even a 3% of the electoral vote. Inevitably, this translates into a large rat for the Prime Minister to swallow. At less than 3% of the electoral vote the Maori Party has no right whatever to claim that it represents that estimated 12 to 15% Maori sector of the population. And if it does not represent the Maori population at large, why is its special interest pleading being treated by John key as if it does? The so-called Maori Party represents nothing more than the combined interests of the wily Pita Sharples, Tariana Turia and their supporters only.
National seems to have forgotten that the public had begun to trust it again because of the “new” vision offered of the way forward by Don Brash - an aim once but no longer taken for granted as axiomatic for our democracy - equal treatment and equal opportunity for all New Zealanders - in spite of the more than questionable settlements bestowed on Ngai Tahu and Tainui representatives. With Jim Bolger and Doug Graham following Geoffrey Palmer’s lead to become hopelessly adrift on the historically utterly inaccurate concept of a “treaty partnership”, fiercely contested compensation from the public purse was paid to these powerfully manipulative tribes - compensation arguably neither due nor deserved. The public was in no doubt that vote-buying by the National Party was the prime driver on these issues - as with Graham’s shocking instructions to the Maori affairs Select Committee to in essence ignore the nearly 400 well-informed submissions arguing against the Ngai Tahu settlement - on the grounds that the deed had already been signed by him and the Prime Minister.
History will revisit this issue, with questions well overdue to be answered. With National’s present Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson, arguing at the time for the powerful Ngai Tahu against ill-equipped and hamstrung Crown lawyers, this highly controversial settlement was paid for from the public purse. What also needs revisiting in relation to this formerly sparsely-settled, but aggressively manipulative tribe is why it was ever given a monopoly over the ownership of Greenstone - and total rights to the South Island whale watching - neither of these provisions unchallengeable - and both overdue to be re-examined.
Meantime Prime Minister Key has unilaterally disregarded National’s long overdue undertaking to get rid of the Maori seats, letting the public down. Moreover, after years of this party’s undertaking to free the Resource Management Act of references to the Treaty of Waitangi and iwi cultural values, it is reneging on this undertaking, too. While in opposition, it was scathing of the ridiculous claims of mumbo-jumbo in the form of annoyed taniwha objecting to road developments; of strange noises, flickering lights and unexplained running water as claimed breaches of tapu.
Key, however, has been cavalier about overriding National’s election environment policy. This promised to restrict the definition of environment to natural and physical considerations - and to remove the requirement for regard to the “principles” of the Treaty - so-called principles which have been thoroughly discredited in recent years. However, apparently what John Key wants, John Key gets, and National’s campaign pledges can hang themselves out to dry. So, too, can the New Zealand flag. If Maori can agree - (and undoubtedly there will be a National Party coterie congratulating themselves on their cunning with regard to this stipulation) - there will be two flags flying on our next national day) - a distinctly divisive, let alone seriously questionable pledge with constitutional implications. It was a foolish personal promise this Prime Minister had no right to make on behalf of New Zealanders - nor should he have underestimated those Maori activist groups which have consistently already outwitted and out-manipulated both National and Labour to gain their own way in recent years.
However, as we can predictably expect from a lightweight political media, a Nelson Mail leader writer’s interpretation was that Key, in apparently not being hampered by principles, is refusing “to be siloed by old political thinking” and “is not weighed down by political baggage.” These obviously include undertakings to the electorate - including New Zealanders’ expectation that the country should be unified, not divided. This will not be advanced by National's wooing the Maori Party at the expense of the electorate at large. Nor can it be trusted in areas such as the constantly reinvented Treaty settlements claims; the foreshore and seabed issue; and its very probable underground move towards important constitutional change which the electorate has not called for, but which is the constant aim of radical activists and “Liberal” ideologists. Somewhere, there will be a self-selected, self-regarding committee of “eminent” New Zealanders beavering away to present the country at large with their wish list for a new constitution.
Watch this spot, as this present National Government has given no sign to date that it any longer genuinely represents majority New Zealanders - regardless of the fact that well-meaning, if naive commentators invoke him as “a prime minister of style we have not seen before: relaxed open and congenial - as with many sunny optimists people find him hard to dislike - Key’s willingness to break the mould is refreshing” (Karl du Fresne, Nelson Mail 4/2/09). No doubt the gay lobby at the Big Gay Out found our Prime Minister’s dancing on stage with two drag queens equally “refreshing”. However, judging a politician on the basis of his personal charisma is one of the most disastrous common mistakes of history.
Du Fresne, however, was astute enough to query Key’s premature commitment that the taxpayer will dip into his or her pockets to bail out Fisher & Paykel which, in its many good years, as he pointed out, profited considerably by keeping overseas competitors at bay with the help of tariffs and other protectionist measures.
Moreover, it can be argued that one of the reasons for Fisher & Paykel’s present plight was the heavy costs involved in its relocating to China - at considerable cost to its New Zealand workforce sharing the plight of those laid off as a result of companies seeking greater profits overseas. And now these sacked workers are expected, as taxpayers (if they’ve been lucky enough to find new jobs) to help subsidize the company that did their jobs in. Where is the justice in this? The case for special treatment for Fisher & Paykel has not been established. Nor has John Key been required to justify obliging taxpayers to make financial sacrifices for this purpose.
***************
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National disgraces itself: what constitution?
Apr. 13th, 2009 | 07:40 pm
National disgraces itself. What about its own constitution?
Surely a new leader would not tamper with the National Party’s provisions and principles, rooted in grassroots’ expectations that the parliamentary wing of the party expresses the wish of its own members who put them there - and is not there to override them? This scenario has apparently been re-written by its new leader, discarding what doesn't suit him. Although, according to the National Party's own organisation rules, it is the specially-elected list ranking committees whose job it is to rank the list candidates, what actually happened pre-election was in direct contradiction of the party rules.
When the list-ranking process began, the sitting MPs were all exempted from being judged by the party members. That meant that all sitting MPs, by virtue of being MPs, were spared from being evaluated, compared to new candidates, no matter how lacklustre their performance in the House and in their electorates. While all the non-MP candidates were obliged to travel around at considerable personal expense, and in turn, focus on a damaging competition against one another, rather than against Labour, they did so believing that the rules would be adhered to.
However, when it came to ranking the candidates in each region, not only were the sitting MPs excused from justifying themselves - they were pre-emptively promised inclusion into the top 50 list placings. In fact, before regional voting took place, an instruction was read out advising that the regional MPs should be ranked in the order already provided by the National Party leader - a requirement completely against the rules of the party which stipulate that all candidates, inclusive of sitting MPs, are to be treated equally. It is understood that only one regional chair had the gumption to refuse to read out this directive to abandon the rules.
Apparently it got worse. The practice is for each region, depending upon the number of electorates, to choose the appropriate number of members who become part of the national list-ranking committee. Those numbers are agreed to by the members of the board, the leader and deputy leader. According to the rules, they then debate the merits of each candidate and then place them accordingly. However, a deal had apparently been done with the Auckland and Central North Island delegates with regard to the placing of the top 50 candidates to achieve not a democratic outcome but the “right” ethnic, gender and background mixture - which included placing the now Minister Stephen Joyce, doubling as campaign chair, into place number 16 - in what some might regard as a conflict of interest.
The beneficiaries of this list strategy were the Auckland contingent which was well-placed over all, followed by Central North Island. Both Wellington and Christchurch were the big losers. The result was a list largely owing its loyalty not to the National Party and the membership but, rather, surrounding John Key with those who owe him instead. None of this was seemingly achieved within party rules, which don't seem to have been even an inconvenience. One assessment is that the worst aspect of all is how the party president, the board and the list ranking committee just let it happen. Nobody seems to have stood up to defend the party's own rules, and by corollary, the party membership, for whom the rules are meant to be in place to protect their interests.
In effect, the list ranking process was utterly hijacked - with candidates told that leader John Key, reportedly strongly supported by deputy leader Bill English, was insisting on control over the first 50 rankings. The list ranking committee, in caving in, in essence then showed an equal disregard for the National Party constitution. What became obvious was that individuals were not being sought on the basis of their capabilities. Rather, the choice was to be along the politically correct lines of more women, and more from particular ethnic backgrounds - including one candidate who made a generous personal donation to the party; more youth: no-one, one suspects, who might challenge the particular philosophy or worldview of the present leadership. Even a very short time of involvement as a party member was no barrier to being selected against an equally, if not more capable candidate who’d worked a long time for the party.
Noteworthy was the fact that those electorates who were unable to select their own candidate (due to lack of membership) mostly did well in the list rankings. In other words, people who had the least involvement were the most highly rewarded. It was almost as if the leadership did not trust their own people, their own membership. And, most notably, leader John Key protected his MPs by exempting them from list scrutiny in direct contradiction to his own nomination and candidacy where he pitted himself against a sitting MP. There is a rich irony in Key himself having used these rules to his advantage to challenge and displace sitting member Brian Neeson, MP, to get into parliament - but then choosing to flout this party principle in order to shield his “loyal” parliamentary colleagues from the scrutiny of the wider party membership - once he became leader.
The result was highly intelligent. capable, hard-working candidates placed well below any hope of being elected - perhaps with their individual strengths seen as a handicap to a party whose leader is increasingly showing autocratic tendencies. Those who were regarded as more obedient and controllable, rather than those who represent a set of values no longer in vogue among the party hierarchy (and who might challenge its abandonment of its pledges to the country at large) seem to have won the day. Party president Judy Kirk also openly stated the party “was putting its money where its mouth was, by ensuring these candidates get into parliament.” However National is supposed to be a party of individual achievement and initiative. It talks of merit - yet panders to the ideology of so-called diversity and ethnic divisiveness. Its talk of change was never really questioned as it should have been - change to what? It is pertinent to ask how a corruption of values can lead to change worth having.
Having learned that the present Prime Minister apparently overrode the rules - as he wanted control over the top 50 selections - must have been extremely dispiriting for good candidates beginning to discover what was going on behind the scenes. Equally concerning is that they were told by party headquarters what they might or might not say in relation to the issues of the day; that their speeches were vetted; that they were expected to parrot poorly written handouts; and to pass everything they wished to say back to party headquarters to get it vetted. Candidates were also told that in terms of campaigning their hands were tied as to what collateral they were “allowed” and what type of hoardings they were permitted to use - i.e. once again, it was a question of the party versus the electorate. Furthermore, enormous constraints on personal publicity were imposed by head office stifling the opportunity for capable candidates to take advantage of issues.
In an August Morning Report item about the National Party list rankings, someone in the hierarchy said that the party was hopeful of getting as many as 60 into Parliament. How it expected those candidates who had been listed below 60 to be motivated was not explained. In effect, National Party headquarters was making it clear that they didn't want them. Moreover, the help and membership material that should have been provided for all candidates was apparently deliberately withheld from at least one candidate democratically chosen by the electorate membership - in an electorate which National would prefer one of their least performing, but oh-so-loyal MPs to hold in future.
How many New Zealanders at large know that party candidates were treated not as independent, intelligent adults able to argue for themselves on the issues of the day according to the party philosophy, but as simple or simpleminded yes-men and women expected to do as they were told? So much for democracy. It can be summed up that, unbeknownst to the public, their choice of government was between the corrupt and corrosive socialism of Labour - and the arguably also corrupt manipulations of a National Party hierarchy intent on getting its own way, not with the help, but disregarding the role, of its own membership.
It is not unreasonable to invoke this concept when not only were established constitutional party procedures simply overwritten, but when this in turn forced the next rung down of power to buckle under the pressure to look the other way - justified, presumably, for the sake of power at all costs. It may be little wonder that Prime Minister Key describes himself as a pragmatist, which he has well and truly recently demonstrated in what many of the public regard as his astonishing enthusiasm for the former leaders of the Labour Party. But it raises the question, too, of whether the National Party hierarchy shows as little respect for the electorate as did Labour itself.
Catch-22 as far the country is concerned, is that we may well have exchanged one self-willed autocratic Prime Minister for another. A democratic government is one which operates with the consent of the people. Prime Minister Key is rapidly establishing himself as prepared to operate against the will of the people - as, for example - with his high-handed refusal to take on board the fact that over 80% of the country rejected the Bradford-Clark arrogance of regarding their personal views on child raising - in their anti-smacking diktats - as superior to those of good conservative parents. Key’s stated intention to ignore majority opinion on this issue does not augur well for the politics of consensus.
National Party leaders have not traditionally been inclined to comment constantly on decisions individuals make, which are basically none of their business - as with the Prime Minister's intrusive comments in relation to the car hire firm owner who wanted to reclaim the towing costs for retrieving his firm’s car from the Tasman Glacier, after the tragedy which cost two young men in their lives. It was a very sad business, but the owner’s comment was fair - that by doing what they were asked not to do, and ignoring warnings - to some extent this tragedy was at least part of the individuals’ own making - they cost everybody involved. While the media worked themselves up to a near-hysterical self-righteous indictment of his position - and acknowledging it an appalling and tragic loss for the parents concerned - there was still no reason for the car hire owner to be expected to carry the costs for an accident he wasn't involved in. If John Key felt so strongly about this, then he could himself have paid the costs incurred - he was probably personally much better able to afford it than the business owner - times are very tough for small businesses. But why did he feel called upon to make an inappropriate pronouncement at all?
The government-announced review of the Foreshore and Seabed Act also produced a collective groan from the country and has raised questions about the prices National is paying for its too-generous involvement with the electorally-unpopular Maori Party, particularly insofar as this noose could have been avoided, with National and ACT having the numbers to govern on their own. Key’s relationship with Fiji coup leader Voreque Bainimarama seems also to have been guided by previous Prime Minister Helen Clark’s particular animosity to Bainimarama, which entailed aggressive, rather than constructive policy decisions - a singularly unproductive approach, particularly given China's attempts to gain influence and a strategic position among our Pacific neighbours - and given her lack of any real commitment to target far more grievous human rights issues among other countries with whom New Zealand maintains trading relationships.
The question of consensus politics too, has been absent in the Prime Minister's decision to reinstate knighthoods, although the country has long been uncomfortable with the awarding of these to the richly undeserving. The concept of special recognition for individuals exhibiting extraordinary courage, or demonstrating particular worth, has long been exchanged for political cronyism, backscratching, and favours bestowed. Few would begrudge recognition for the former. But when wealthy businessmen, retired judges and politicians expect these as of right - heaven forbid that we should surmise for a moment that a Sir John Key is envisaged down the line - then the public has had enough of the whole dubious system. They are an anachronism in a democracy - as has long been recognised in America. Feedback that the one well-supported piece of legislation that Labour passed was to get rid of the corrupted practice of bestowing knighthoods does not augur well for National. The solution for those who believe in equal status in a democracy is simple - to simply ignore the title and to interact with every individual on an equal footing. Consent withheld is consent not given.
In his inaugural speech Prime Minister John Key invoked the need for a renewal of individual freedom and responsibility. “My government” (not our government) “will be guided by the principle of individual freedom and belief (sic) in the capacity and right of individuals to shape and improve their own lives. It will not seek to involve itself in decisions that are best made by New Zealanders within their own homes in their own communities. The new government's vision is not to dictate the way in which New Zealanders should live their lives” However, his government is not off to a good start when actions of the Prime Minister can already be seen to demonstrably contradict these principles.
As Spectator commentator Bryan Forbes reminds us - "as much as the threat of terrorism, we should all fear the collapse of morality in public life.” This includes the collapse of political morality and policies of principle in favour of the politics of pragmatism - of vote-buying, of autocratic leadership in a style of which we have already had far too much in this country.
Forbes reminds us of the erosion of what we could once justly boast was our determination to preserve individual freedom - threatened now not only by the creeping intrusion of political correctness and Green bullying, but by a kind of collective inertia. Our inability now to elect leaders who have knowledge of and respect for the politics of principle over those of pragmatism - and who are pledged to govern with the consent, rather then in spite of the lack of consent of the electorate, does not augur well for the for the future of the country. Any Prime Minister who begins to run the country like his or her private fiefdom, making decisions no one has asked for, arguably belongs in some other political system - one foreign to a democracy.
******************
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Helengrad - St Helen?- a convenient fable
Apr. 13th, 2009 | 07:38 pm
From Helengrad to St Helen - a highly convenient fable
Fact: Helen Clark and Michael Cullen headed a government that, in economic terms, did a rotten job of running the country. Regardless of the worldwide economic crisis, this past Labour government, headed by an autocratic prime minister and finance minister feared for his waspish tongue, managed to turn an accumulated $6 billion dollar asset into a huge deficit. Michael Cullen is regarded as largely responsible for the ridiculous price Labour paid to buy back our train network. Toll Holdings, its owners, Australia's largest freight company, reportedly couldn't believe their luck. But then Labour’s leaders didn't pay from their own pockets - the country’s taxpayers did. It’s always easier with others’ money.
This was a government whose efforts went not into increasing productivity in this country, nor in taking on board lessons learned from east European countries formerly regarded as basket cases - until they drastically lowered their taxation rates - and their economies started to surge ahead. Clark and Cullen, old Lefties to the core, apparently didn't want to learn the even basic lessons of how to free up businesses, professions and trades from unnecessary, time-wasting, expensive and resource-consuming strictures, rules and regulations. They loaded them on.
Labour forced city councils to operate as an arm of central government, taking into account expanding peripheral issues and areas of development in the social environment, the art and culture spheres far more appropriate to private enterprise and to individuals themselves. Rather than simply tending to their core businesses, local bodies and councils, attempting to respond to expanding, top-heavy government requirements, have increasingly ground down ratepayers by that secondary form of taxation (if one excludes GST as well) called rates. Their burdensome demands now run well above the rate of inflation, and have become an intolerable burden for our low wage, under-producing economy, for retirees, superannuitants and those on benefits .
It is hard to think of any area of our national life into which the Clark-headed Labour government did not intrude(let alone the scandal of Paintergate). The Prime Minister's donations to arts funding, although grandiosely-named, did not in fact come out of the Prime Minister's own pocket. Nor does the funding of the captured left-wing literary in-groups, recycling their highly lucrative grants among the chosen few approved writers of the day in a system bearing unpleasant comparisons to that in the former USSR. Arts funding is simply not the core business of government - and has inevitably become highly politicised.
Meanwhile, the education sector continues to grind out ill-educated young New Zealanders cheated of anything remotely approaching a basic, good all-round education in our state schools, put to shame by their visiting peers from European countries - unable even to speak and use their own language as well as those taught it in Germany, France, Sweden, or Denmark as a second or third language. Instead, the schools have been long misused by the Left as a major opportunity to capture and politicise the thinking of our young - and to indoctrinate them with the socialist thinking of a third-rate, basically antidemocratic government. Socially and personally damaging, anti-family, anti-parental edicts have been issued and practices introduced - such as premature, valueless sex-education inappropriately forced on children by parliament’s bovver boy, Trevor Mallard. Occasionally referred to in passing as the former Prime Minister's rottweiler, while inexplicably (some would argue inexcusably) appointed as Clark’s Minister of Education, Mallard decided that children should be forced to endure classes in sex education - whether their parents liked it or not.
So much for individual freedom, for parental choice and wisdom. And yes, by all means - why not allow a 12-year-old girl to have an abortion without her parents’ consent? After al, those who are taught about a new subject are often interested enough to try it on - as with having preteen and teen sex. Never mind that that child is one day going to have to face the fact that she destroyed another growing child - her very own son or daughter - and moreover, that she now has a far greater chance of breast cancer later in life - or of becoming sterile. I don't recall Helen Clark's Minister of Education emphasising these things.
Families? Miss Clark understands very well how to bring up children - having never had any of her own. So what more appropriate than that she should give her backing to another expert in child-rearing from a non-conservative family background ?- Sue Bradford - so far to the left on that sector of the deep-Green, neo-Marxist political sphere that it is commonly referred to as red. Parents in future are to bring up their children according to Miss Clark and Ms Bradford's theories on child rearing - with respect to the kind of punishment that these highly experienced gurus have decided are appropriate.
The increasing lawlessness and anti-authoritarianism of an increasing number of children has, of course, nothing whatever to do with the growing lack of respect shown towards parents, whose hands they know are tied - and who can be reported to the police for administering a well-deserved spanking. Children are very quick to sense who holds the power. When their demoralised parents don't, then an inch very quickly becomes a mile.
It is hard not to surmise that this past Labour government deliberately set out to destroy the social fabric of our society with its doctrinaire intrusions, summed up in the words of one observer as a government which removed the right restrictions - and imposed the wrong ones.
In economic terms its mistakes have been huge. The ridiculously naive (if not deliberately destructive) endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol - far from gaining $500 million for the country, has cost us all, at a recent conservative estimate, well over $900 million. The almost frantic spending by the government, pre-election, on vote-buying, when government coffers were already worryingly low, was fiscally irresponsible. Little regard was being given to the sound internal economic system of this country.
Carbon trading, too, is essentially a nonsense - doing nothing at all to reduce carbon dioxide levels - but a very lucrative scam for both governments and big business. Trading emission schemes belong in the same basket, the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere having little if anything to do with the industrial revolution and its man-made aftermath - not when core ice samples from some millions of years ago show that in previous warmer periods the levels of CO2 were many times higher than today.
The major legacy of the Clark-Cullen government has been the overburdening of the productive sector of society, and the encouraging of every apparent kind of welfare dependency available, even though its effects on the productivity of the country have long been well and truly substantiated. Moreover, the moves, pre-election, by Finance Minister Cullen to expedite tribal Maori claims such as the Te Arawa settlement, which, on the strong historical evidence from the times should never have been paid at all (see INVESTIGATE March 2009 - Waitangi Rort - with regard to this astonishing “Tree Lords” handout), have apparently cost the country a whopping 500 million dollars.
And this is on top of the equally questionable Ngai Tahu and Tainui settlements from which the country at large was disenfranchised - with regard to providing input challenging inaccurate and highly distorted representation of actual facts. In essence, our hard-earned money has been thrown with minimal accountability at manipulative Maori activists (by no means representative of Maori at large) inventing continual new claims to bludge on the taxpayer. As Mrs Harawira has reminded them - the squeaky wheel gets the most grease. They’re squeaking.
Not without good reason the taxpayer has a now highly-jaundiced view about the actions of both National and Labour governments' greed for votes these recent decades - and about being taken for a ride by greedy tribes and their lawyers, doing very nicely out of their advocacy, thank you.
It is possible to write a great deal about Helen Clark's tenure as Prime Minister heading a left-wing party which has left New Zealand in far worse shape than when she took over. Traditionally the three main requirements for a government embrace the defence of the realm, upholding the currency in terms of fiscal responsibility, and defending the law of contracts. In the first sphere Labour stands indicted because of the Clark-led attack on our defence capabilities - first and most shockingly, by unilaterally dismantling the combat wing of our air force - followed by reducing our protection by sea, and sending New Zealand soldiers ill-equipped to combat zones.
In the second sphere, this Labour government's tenure, with its failed, anachronistic socialist policies, have cost the country a great deal in economic terms. Clark and Cullen have been bad managers fiscally, in addition to encouraging businesses to leave the country to set up overseas, with an inevitable loss in employment - and in the ideological embracing of free trade agreements which arguably have left increasing numbers of New Zealanders far worse off. It makes no sense to be so purist in doctrine that harm is done to one's own country. The unprecedented numbers of disillusioned, disheartened New Zealanders fleeing the country for Australia and elsewhere are grim testimony to the Clark-Cullen legacy. The largest must be the fact that the electorate tossed them both out in the recent election.
Why then, John Key’s glowing endorsement of individuals whom many regard as having done so much damage to the country in economic and social areas that it may take decades to reverse it? If cronyism began to run rampant under the Clark-led Labour government it is, however, seemingly reaching new heights, or rather depths, with the now Prime Minister's extraordinary patronage of the two who led such a government - resoundingly rejected by the electorate - but now extraordinarily well-rewarded by the chameleon-like Key. What is his excuse for inflicting on the United Nations an autocratic, dictatorial, extraordinarily manipulative former Prime Minister whose government was characterized by accusations of sleaze, dishonesty and cronyism? What is this new love affair, as with John Key’s reported constantly calling of Clark, then promoting her in what the majority of the country must regard as utterly inappropriate, glowing terms to a top UN job?
As one disillusioned commentator wrote “the United Nations is arguably so corrupt that her promotion will probably make very little difference.” But the inexplicable raving of the media - parroting John Key - about her suitability for the job simply because she is a New Zealander is mindless and sycophantic. A country with a genuine concern for the effectiveness of the United Nations would barrack for the best man or woman to be chosen. It is parochial and insular to argue that the leader of a failed government which has damaged the country in so many respects should be supported - simply because he or she is New Zealander! This argument has nothing whatever to do with national pride: we would not be supporting a mass murderer, for example, simply on the grounds of being a New Zealander. What it does apparently have a great deal to do with is the kind of dismaying back-scratching which in recent years has seen outgoing members of the parliamentary hierarchy knowing they can rely on their political opponents to look after their interests - on the understanding that there will be a quid pro quo for them in return along the line.
New Zealanders at large are well aware of this and are not impressed. Nor are the Australians, as in a typical observation from an experienced political and former diplomatic service commentator. “ It's really sad to hear what’s happening over there with Key. What a bitter disappointment, and one that hoards of us over here sympathise with you over. The UN appointment is a shocker, especially coming so soon after the Dragon Lady’s rejection by the electorate.”
However, there was no echo of any such sober, even astonished reaction by our own mainstream media. Yet their role should have been an evaluative one subjecting the Prime Minister's sudden extraordinary enthusiasm for Miss Clark - and possibly one of the worst finance ministers the country has ever had - to the kind of hard-boiled scrutiny which is essential for a free press to be respected. Much of Key’s hyperbolic praise of Clark is simply political wind-baggery.
Other typical reactions? “I can't believe that I'm the only one who squirms uncomfortably at the gushiness of the media and political leaders regarding the imminent appointment of Helen Clark as the head of the U.N. Development Programm. How is it a win for New Zealand when we export onto a bigger stage the single worst political leader in living memory? Yes,she was great for the interests of the Labour party apparatchiks, the burgeoning class of bureaucrats, and the excessive intrusions of the nanny state minders, but that is hardly good news for New Zealand, is it? More people left this country than at any previous time in our history, taking with them the skills and talents needed to grow the wealth of the country and, in turn, taking with them the goods, services, and jobs we want.
“Under her watch, through the subterfuge of Working for Families, we now have more people who owe more of their livelihood to the state. We've had the ephemeral and unarticulated Treaty of Waitangi principles shoved down our throats to the point where institutionalized reverse racism is now the norm - under the ironic guise of 'equality'. Even the post-apartheid regime of South Africa has curtailed our rugby exploits by turning away a team because its constituent players were racially selected! What an utter nonsense. And... parenting has been undermined by the ever-present watchful eye of the state. I ask you, how is that progress?
“It's obvious why the Labour party want to inflict Clark on the world - the position not only allows her to continue her modus operandi within their own ideological framework but, more pragmatically, for new leader Phil Goff, it gets her out of his way. What is perhaps less immediately understandable is why National seem so keen to promote her. After all, having her sit in parliament casting her considerable shadow over Phil Goff is tactically the smart thing to do unless... her presence serves to remind John Key that he's not much different and that continued comparisons might place him in the poorer light? Let's face it, what's really changed? Few of the things Helen Clark has imposed on us look likely for the dustbin. Most are simply being repackaged, renamed, and reasserted. They might be more efficient, less bureaucratic but... substantively the same.
“But putting aside such squabbles, as head of the UNDP, Helen Clark will be in charge of a budget of around $10 billion. Her appointment is predicated on achieving three things: solving third world debt; promoting democracy; and reducing poverty.
“Well, she knows a lot about all three. During her tenure as prime minister she reduced New Zealand further towards being a third world country. She will disperse money like a good bureaucrat without having the faintest idea of how to raise it other than by the efforts of others. As for promoting democracy? This is a woman who single-handedly pushed back the interests of equality by promoting (and whipping the support of) the pimping of women through the Prostitution Reform Act, egregiously giving in to the demands of the Green’s Sue Bradford to allow the state to have co-parenting rights with the anti-smacking Act; and who made the simple act of being Maori a prima facie case for 'special assistance.' Oh... and does anyone remember the Electoral Finance Act? But of course her crowning glory is her deep understanding of poverty. Her experience in very possibly causing so much of it will undoubtedly stand her in good stead.
"It has been said that politics is often a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable; in choosing Helen Clark for this role we have done both simultaneously. We can only hope that what may ultimately save us is the legendary inefficiency of the U.N. bureaucracy itself.”
Perhaps the most damning indictment of John Key’s highly enthusiastic promotion of a prime minister whom the country wanted to see the back of has come from an admission by an individual in the hierarchy surrounding the National Party government - summing up what many thinking New Zealanders rather suspected - in response to some outraged feedback about the new Prime Minister's actions. Her view was, “Oh well, it gets her out of the way.”
Enough said.
***************
Fact: Helen Clark and Michael Cullen headed a government that, in economic terms, did a rotten job of running the country. Regardless of the worldwide economic crisis, this past Labour government, headed by an autocratic prime minister and finance minister feared for his waspish tongue, managed to turn an accumulated $6 billion dollar asset into a huge deficit. Michael Cullen is regarded as largely responsible for the ridiculous price Labour paid to buy back our train network. Toll Holdings, its owners, Australia's largest freight company, reportedly couldn't believe their luck. But then Labour’s leaders didn't pay from their own pockets - the country’s taxpayers did. It’s always easier with others’ money.
This was a government whose efforts went not into increasing productivity in this country, nor in taking on board lessons learned from east European countries formerly regarded as basket cases - until they drastically lowered their taxation rates - and their economies started to surge ahead. Clark and Cullen, old Lefties to the core, apparently didn't want to learn the even basic lessons of how to free up businesses, professions and trades from unnecessary, time-wasting, expensive and resource-consuming strictures, rules and regulations. They loaded them on.
Labour forced city councils to operate as an arm of central government, taking into account expanding peripheral issues and areas of development in the social environment, the art and culture spheres far more appropriate to private enterprise and to individuals themselves. Rather than simply tending to their core businesses, local bodies and councils, attempting to respond to expanding, top-heavy government requirements, have increasingly ground down ratepayers by that secondary form of taxation (if one excludes GST as well) called rates. Their burdensome demands now run well above the rate of inflation, and have become an intolerable burden for our low wage, under-producing economy, for retirees, superannuitants and those on benefits .
It is hard to think of any area of our national life into which the Clark-headed Labour government did not intrude(let alone the scandal of Paintergate). The Prime Minister's donations to arts funding, although grandiosely-named, did not in fact come out of the Prime Minister's own pocket. Nor does the funding of the captured left-wing literary in-groups, recycling their highly lucrative grants among the chosen few approved writers of the day in a system bearing unpleasant comparisons to that in the former USSR. Arts funding is simply not the core business of government - and has inevitably become highly politicised.
Meanwhile, the education sector continues to grind out ill-educated young New Zealanders cheated of anything remotely approaching a basic, good all-round education in our state schools, put to shame by their visiting peers from European countries - unable even to speak and use their own language as well as those taught it in Germany, France, Sweden, or Denmark as a second or third language. Instead, the schools have been long misused by the Left as a major opportunity to capture and politicise the thinking of our young - and to indoctrinate them with the socialist thinking of a third-rate, basically antidemocratic government. Socially and personally damaging, anti-family, anti-parental edicts have been issued and practices introduced - such as premature, valueless sex-education inappropriately forced on children by parliament’s bovver boy, Trevor Mallard. Occasionally referred to in passing as the former Prime Minister's rottweiler, while inexplicably (some would argue inexcusably) appointed as Clark’s Minister of Education, Mallard decided that children should be forced to endure classes in sex education - whether their parents liked it or not.
So much for individual freedom, for parental choice and wisdom. And yes, by all means - why not allow a 12-year-old girl to have an abortion without her parents’ consent? After al, those who are taught about a new subject are often interested enough to try it on - as with having preteen and teen sex. Never mind that that child is one day going to have to face the fact that she destroyed another growing child - her very own son or daughter - and moreover, that she now has a far greater chance of breast cancer later in life - or of becoming sterile. I don't recall Helen Clark's Minister of Education emphasising these things.
Families? Miss Clark understands very well how to bring up children - having never had any of her own. So what more appropriate than that she should give her backing to another expert in child-rearing from a non-conservative family background ?- Sue Bradford - so far to the left on that sector of the deep-Green, neo-Marxist political sphere that it is commonly referred to as red. Parents in future are to bring up their children according to Miss Clark and Ms Bradford's theories on child rearing - with respect to the kind of punishment that these highly experienced gurus have decided are appropriate.
The increasing lawlessness and anti-authoritarianism of an increasing number of children has, of course, nothing whatever to do with the growing lack of respect shown towards parents, whose hands they know are tied - and who can be reported to the police for administering a well-deserved spanking. Children are very quick to sense who holds the power. When their demoralised parents don't, then an inch very quickly becomes a mile.
It is hard not to surmise that this past Labour government deliberately set out to destroy the social fabric of our society with its doctrinaire intrusions, summed up in the words of one observer as a government which removed the right restrictions - and imposed the wrong ones.
In economic terms its mistakes have been huge. The ridiculously naive (if not deliberately destructive) endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol - far from gaining $500 million for the country, has cost us all, at a recent conservative estimate, well over $900 million. The almost frantic spending by the government, pre-election, on vote-buying, when government coffers were already worryingly low, was fiscally irresponsible. Little regard was being given to the sound internal economic system of this country.
Carbon trading, too, is essentially a nonsense - doing nothing at all to reduce carbon dioxide levels - but a very lucrative scam for both governments and big business. Trading emission schemes belong in the same basket, the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere having little if anything to do with the industrial revolution and its man-made aftermath - not when core ice samples from some millions of years ago show that in previous warmer periods the levels of CO2 were many times higher than today.
The major legacy of the Clark-Cullen government has been the overburdening of the productive sector of society, and the encouraging of every apparent kind of welfare dependency available, even though its effects on the productivity of the country have long been well and truly substantiated. Moreover, the moves, pre-election, by Finance Minister Cullen to expedite tribal Maori claims such as the Te Arawa settlement, which, on the strong historical evidence from the times should never have been paid at all (see INVESTIGATE March 2009 - Waitangi Rort - with regard to this astonishing “Tree Lords” handout), have apparently cost the country a whopping 500 million dollars.
And this is on top of the equally questionable Ngai Tahu and Tainui settlements from which the country at large was disenfranchised - with regard to providing input challenging inaccurate and highly distorted representation of actual facts. In essence, our hard-earned money has been thrown with minimal accountability at manipulative Maori activists (by no means representative of Maori at large) inventing continual new claims to bludge on the taxpayer. As Mrs Harawira has reminded them - the squeaky wheel gets the most grease. They’re squeaking.
Not without good reason the taxpayer has a now highly-jaundiced view about the actions of both National and Labour governments' greed for votes these recent decades - and about being taken for a ride by greedy tribes and their lawyers, doing very nicely out of their advocacy, thank you.
It is possible to write a great deal about Helen Clark's tenure as Prime Minister heading a left-wing party which has left New Zealand in far worse shape than when she took over. Traditionally the three main requirements for a government embrace the defence of the realm, upholding the currency in terms of fiscal responsibility, and defending the law of contracts. In the first sphere Labour stands indicted because of the Clark-led attack on our defence capabilities - first and most shockingly, by unilaterally dismantling the combat wing of our air force - followed by reducing our protection by sea, and sending New Zealand soldiers ill-equipped to combat zones.
In the second sphere, this Labour government's tenure, with its failed, anachronistic socialist policies, have cost the country a great deal in economic terms. Clark and Cullen have been bad managers fiscally, in addition to encouraging businesses to leave the country to set up overseas, with an inevitable loss in employment - and in the ideological embracing of free trade agreements which arguably have left increasing numbers of New Zealanders far worse off. It makes no sense to be so purist in doctrine that harm is done to one's own country. The unprecedented numbers of disillusioned, disheartened New Zealanders fleeing the country for Australia and elsewhere are grim testimony to the Clark-Cullen legacy. The largest must be the fact that the electorate tossed them both out in the recent election.
Why then, John Key’s glowing endorsement of individuals whom many regard as having done so much damage to the country in economic and social areas that it may take decades to reverse it? If cronyism began to run rampant under the Clark-led Labour government it is, however, seemingly reaching new heights, or rather depths, with the now Prime Minister's extraordinary patronage of the two who led such a government - resoundingly rejected by the electorate - but now extraordinarily well-rewarded by the chameleon-like Key. What is his excuse for inflicting on the United Nations an autocratic, dictatorial, extraordinarily manipulative former Prime Minister whose government was characterized by accusations of sleaze, dishonesty and cronyism? What is this new love affair, as with John Key’s reported constantly calling of Clark, then promoting her in what the majority of the country must regard as utterly inappropriate, glowing terms to a top UN job?
As one disillusioned commentator wrote “the United Nations is arguably so corrupt that her promotion will probably make very little difference.” But the inexplicable raving of the media - parroting John Key - about her suitability for the job simply because she is a New Zealander is mindless and sycophantic. A country with a genuine concern for the effectiveness of the United Nations would barrack for the best man or woman to be chosen. It is parochial and insular to argue that the leader of a failed government which has damaged the country in so many respects should be supported - simply because he or she is New Zealander! This argument has nothing whatever to do with national pride: we would not be supporting a mass murderer, for example, simply on the grounds of being a New Zealander. What it does apparently have a great deal to do with is the kind of dismaying back-scratching which in recent years has seen outgoing members of the parliamentary hierarchy knowing they can rely on their political opponents to look after their interests - on the understanding that there will be a quid pro quo for them in return along the line.
New Zealanders at large are well aware of this and are not impressed. Nor are the Australians, as in a typical observation from an experienced political and former diplomatic service commentator. “ It's really sad to hear what’s happening over there with Key. What a bitter disappointment, and one that hoards of us over here sympathise with you over. The UN appointment is a shocker, especially coming so soon after the Dragon Lady’s rejection by the electorate.”
However, there was no echo of any such sober, even astonished reaction by our own mainstream media. Yet their role should have been an evaluative one subjecting the Prime Minister's sudden extraordinary enthusiasm for Miss Clark - and possibly one of the worst finance ministers the country has ever had - to the kind of hard-boiled scrutiny which is essential for a free press to be respected. Much of Key’s hyperbolic praise of Clark is simply political wind-baggery.
Other typical reactions? “I can't believe that I'm the only one who squirms uncomfortably at the gushiness of the media and political leaders regarding the imminent appointment of Helen Clark as the head of the U.N. Development Programm. How is it a win for New Zealand when we export onto a bigger stage the single worst political leader in living memory? Yes,she was great for the interests of the Labour party apparatchiks, the burgeoning class of bureaucrats, and the excessive intrusions of the nanny state minders, but that is hardly good news for New Zealand, is it? More people left this country than at any previous time in our history, taking with them the skills and talents needed to grow the wealth of the country and, in turn, taking with them the goods, services, and jobs we want.
“Under her watch, through the subterfuge of Working for Families, we now have more people who owe more of their livelihood to the state. We've had the ephemeral and unarticulated Treaty of Waitangi principles shoved down our throats to the point where institutionalized reverse racism is now the norm - under the ironic guise of 'equality'. Even the post-apartheid regime of South Africa has curtailed our rugby exploits by turning away a team because its constituent players were racially selected! What an utter nonsense. And... parenting has been undermined by the ever-present watchful eye of the state. I ask you, how is that progress?
“It's obvious why the Labour party want to inflict Clark on the world - the position not only allows her to continue her modus operandi within their own ideological framework but, more pragmatically, for new leader Phil Goff, it gets her out of his way. What is perhaps less immediately understandable is why National seem so keen to promote her. After all, having her sit in parliament casting her considerable shadow over Phil Goff is tactically the smart thing to do unless... her presence serves to remind John Key that he's not much different and that continued comparisons might place him in the poorer light? Let's face it, what's really changed? Few of the things Helen Clark has imposed on us look likely for the dustbin. Most are simply being repackaged, renamed, and reasserted. They might be more efficient, less bureaucratic but... substantively the same.
“But putting aside such squabbles, as head of the UNDP, Helen Clark will be in charge of a budget of around $10 billion. Her appointment is predicated on achieving three things: solving third world debt; promoting democracy; and reducing poverty.
“Well, she knows a lot about all three. During her tenure as prime minister she reduced New Zealand further towards being a third world country. She will disperse money like a good bureaucrat without having the faintest idea of how to raise it other than by the efforts of others. As for promoting democracy? This is a woman who single-handedly pushed back the interests of equality by promoting (and whipping the support of) the pimping of women through the Prostitution Reform Act, egregiously giving in to the demands of the Green’s Sue Bradford to allow the state to have co-parenting rights with the anti-smacking Act; and who made the simple act of being Maori a prima facie case for 'special assistance.' Oh... and does anyone remember the Electoral Finance Act? But of course her crowning glory is her deep understanding of poverty. Her experience in very possibly causing so much of it will undoubtedly stand her in good stead.
"It has been said that politics is often a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable; in choosing Helen Clark for this role we have done both simultaneously. We can only hope that what may ultimately save us is the legendary inefficiency of the U.N. bureaucracy itself.”
Perhaps the most damning indictment of John Key’s highly enthusiastic promotion of a prime minister whom the country wanted to see the back of has come from an admission by an individual in the hierarchy surrounding the National Party government - summing up what many thinking New Zealanders rather suspected - in response to some outraged feedback about the new Prime Minister's actions. Her view was, “Oh well, it gets her out of the way.”
Enough said.
***************
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Labour - destroying the economy ?
Oct. 30th, 2008 | 11:03 pm
Labour: has it been deliberately trying to destroy the economy?
This year's election is Hobson's choice for too many. Either way, we're screwed, as a New Zealand Herald reader recently commented. The damage done to the economic, social, and arguably even moral framework of the country under the watch of Helen Clark and her sycophantic team is incalculable. The worst part of it is that even before the domino effect hit world economies, including New Zealand, the question was being seriously raised: Are Clark’s team just shockingly incompetent? Or is this Labour government actually trying to destroy the economy with ill-judged policy positions fronted by Finance Minister Michael Cullen?
From one former Labour Party supporter, the answer to the latter is yes. Reportedly defecting to ACT after a private conversation with Prime Minister Clark in which the former expressed her concern about a National Party victory, she was apparently shocked to get an assurance that Labour had more or less booby-trapped the economy. In essence, National might govern for a term, but would inherit an economy so crippled that it would be hamstrung: it would be a one-term government only. It would have little room to manoeuvre to implement planned policies, and those essential and substantial tax cuts which Dr Cullen has doggedly refused to acknowledge to date (discounting the still unforeseen effects of the present economic global tsunami)actually reversed failing economies of Europe in recent years.
We’re entitled to raise the question whether Labour's disastrous economic performance has simply been a result of sheer incompetence on the part of a dubiously qualified Finance Minister? - formerly a mere leftist, chip-on-his-shoulder history lecturer with a grudge against a philanthropic system which assisted him, as a promising scholarship lad, to Christ’s College - an experience for which he apparently felt no appreciation, judging by his graceless maiden speech in Parliament. But why has he not taken on board the lesson learned from those economies that dragged themselves out of the doldrums, reversing their economic decline, by adopting the low taxation policies from which he determinedly averts his eyes?
Parliament has been over-full in recent years with theorizing academics with no hands-on experience in the business or finance sector. The results have been poorly drafted, ill-thought-through legislation taking a considerable toll on New Zealanders’ economic well-being, especially the sector which actually provides the wealth and jobs.
Inexplicably, unless either stupidity or malice is the explanation, Labour Minister Trevor Mallard plans more of the same. It is hard to accept that the latter can simply be woefully ignorant of the fact that this present government’s intention to require businesses laying off workers to in future give their staff minimum notice periods and payouts will have the effect of making businesses even more reluctant to hire workers. Predictions of sharp rises in unemployment worldwide as the current financial crisis spreads make it obvious that for a government to make it even harder for workers to gain jobs is not only a bad move, but even morally culpable. Stupid is as stupid does. Or is there a concealed agenda?
The real question is whether this Labour government, dominated by dug-in old Lefties air-brushed for recycling, as with the Helen Clark fantasy-land poster, has been simply incompetent in its planning and policies, with little regard for their consequences. A deeper concern must be whether it has been engaged in a deliberate undermining of our Western democracy, according to neo-Marxist planning, transmogrified as “caring.” socialist programmes.
Certainly the same neo-Marxist ideology long rampant throughout the education politburo has showed no genuine concern for the demonstrable failure of so many young New Zealanders to achieve even basic literacy and numeracy these recent decades. Any genuine socialist concern would have seen the scrapping, long ago, of theories gravely disadvantaging New Zealand's children. On the contrary, the leftist education bureaucracy has fought tooth and nail to retain policies dumbing down what is on offer in our state schools - and sidestepped the genuine accountability it owes to cheated parents, to school pupils themselves, and to the wider community left coping with the lamentable results. It has been determinedly contriving a dumbocracy, where a minimal text messaging capacity is accepted as a substitute for genuine competence in language use. Nobody except the most utterly naive could possibly any longer believe that we have a prestigious, politically independent education system, nor indeed a genuinely independent public service. Too many of its departments and its heads in recent years seem to have had a puppet-like connection to this present left-wing government.
Some light can be shed on the Clark-led coalition’s shocking performance in so many areas now worrying New Zealanders if one remembers the old adage that socialists’ loyalty is not primarily to their own country, but to the movement itself. One has only to look at far-left governments (and for all its pretence, the Clark government is demonstrably ideologically left-wing, not centrist on policy, as it affects to be) to see that the Left world-wide have been historically, and still are, all too willing to sacrifice their own people in the name of their ideology. Mallard’s proposal to make it even more difficult for small businesses to hire the employees they may need, and for workers to get badly-needed jobs, is essentially an ideological get the bosses! It is already a fraught and damaging experience for many employers trying to sack people who simply aren't up to the mark. Does anyone really believe this Labour Minister is simply unaware that his proposal would load the dice even more against workers needing a job, and employers willing to give them a fair try?
What is undeniable is that in recent months and weeks, even, the Clark government has been extraordinarily profligate in spending. What is the explanation? Even since the current world economic crisis began to hit home, together with the knowledge that the country’s reputed $6 billion dollar tax take surplus has been turned into a corresponding debt (paralleling the Labour coalition’s reversal of the supposed multi-million dollar gains wrongly touted as befitting New Zealand as a result of its precipitate folly in signing the Kyoto Protocol), the squandering of public money on non-essential spending has amounted to scores of millions of dollars thrown at anything this government apparently thinks will win it votes - ill-timed, non-essential scatter-spending, including the buying of the St James Station, and the so-called compensation advance of $80 million dollars to tribes from the top of the South Island for the non-provision of areas for mussel farming - payment not even due in the immediate future (not in fact until 2014). This can rightly be regarded as shockingly irresponsible - let alone inexplicable, given the non-essential nature of any such settlement in these worrying times. On almost a daily basis, Miss Clark is announcing more millions of our taxpayer dollars for this and for that project, with full knowledge of our straightened economic circumstances, and of the fact that under her and Cullen’s stewardship, some billions of dollars of financial assets have transmogrified into multi-billion indebtedness.
Something ominous too is happening, with respect to the so-called settlement of Maori claims which were in fact already generously and fairly settled according to the governments and historians of the time such settlements were made. The existence of some genuine grievances overlays the fact that many are now being reinvented, exaggerated, and even fabricated (with the connivance of both Labour and National cynically seeking the so-called Maori vote). The predictable outcome is to advantage above all the radicalised tribal groupings within Maoridom predominately seeking self-aggrandizement and continual grabs for the public purse at the expense of everybody else.
The wily Pita Sharples’ acknowledgement that Labour and the Maori seats are joined at the hip is in reality, at the hip pocket. Shamefully, racial discrimination and preferment, long seen as a morally culpable policy in South Africa, now provides huge payoffs for this socialist government and a hotpotch of cynical, radicalised part-Maori. The latter are ignoring the message given by those of Maori descent who have turned their back on such manipulative manoeuverings to put themselves where all New Zealander belong - on the general role. The oily-tongued Tariana Turia’s ill-temper showed in her recent televised determination to exclude such Maoris from the huis she intends to hold. Obviously, fellow travellers only need apply.
So much for the ongoing pretence that this divisive minority party, based on a lack of definition, even, of what being Maori consists of, is here for the benefit of all Maori. On the contrary, it exists largely for the benefit of its members, for sheer self-advantage, which is why it is now applying what could be called a form of political blackmail, pressuring for the entrenchment of the anachronistic and unnecessary Maori seats, which the electorate, with very good reason, wants done away with.
Dr Cullen's extraordinary haste in facilitating such controversial re-settlements without apparent due scrutiny available for public inspection and explanation is more than disturbing. A recent $500 million dollar payout from all our pockets to Te Arawa, with regard to their claim concerning the state-planted Kaingaroa Forest, the largest forest in the North_Island and the largest plantation in the southern hemisphere, has brought forward no evidence that there is any legitimacy at all to this claim. To claim “compensation” under the treaty - when Te Arawa did not even sign the treaty, is no legitimacy at all. The public is entitled to ask questions and to get proper answers.
It did not get these in relation to the previous Ngai Tahu settlement claim ramrodded through by Prime Minister Jim Bolger and Treaty Negotiations Minister Doug Graham in the teeth of well-substantiated evidence that this tribe had already been, over-all, properly and generously treated in the past - together with the knowledge that a previous Maori Affairs Select Committee had already well and truly rejected Ngai Tahu’s inventive claims. It was a little late afterwards for the Crown Law Office to point out that it had lacked historically qualified graduates and lawyers to represent the New Zealand public at large, especially when the select committee had been instructed to basically ignore the reportedly nearly 400 submissions sent from New Zealanders who had thoroughly researched the issue - basically because of Graham’s directive to do so, on the grounds that the deed of settlement had already been signed by him and Bolger - chasing the Maori votes.
This resettlement of Ngai Tahu claims stands as a blot on our recent history. Even worse was the unfathomable provision that Ngai Tahu could make more outrageous claims on taxpayers in future, if the settlement of other tribes exceeded theirs. This now wealthy tribe, whose rank and file members to date have seen little benefit from their shared genetic heritance, seems to presently be intent on further helping itself to taxpayers’ constantly-raided pockets.
History now appears to be repeating itself with regard to the Kaingaroa Forest claim, when the historical evidence shows the price paid for the land at the time was not only apparently fair, but was accepted and welcomed by the paramount chief and his tribes. Yet no satisfactory explanation has been forthcoming from Dr Cullen, newly hugely enthusiastic in the rubber-stamping of recent settlement claims and asked under the provisions of the Official Information Act:</span>
"What was the supposed injustice/s associated with this sale that led to the Crown again paying out $500 million of taxpayers money to the tribes?". It is high time for the media to follow up this scandalous affair.
Something deeply problematic is happening here. An arguably fiscally incompetent government has been, and still is, throwing money around - throwing our money around - as if it can print as much as it wishes. Clark, of course, is an old hand at dominating the media, affecting to laugh off damaging questions as great fun, and assuming that distinctive fixed stare implying deep gravitas, when caught in a corner. The mainstream media falls for it every time - especially our radio and television interviewers, the greater majority apparently chosen for likeable lightweight personae, rather than for any real intellectual substance. A very few excellent commentators are still to be found here and there in the mainstream media - not from among the Dominion Post’s tediously recycled celebrity columnists - with the exception of Karl du Fresne, when on target - but from individuals such as James Weir, asking the tough questions and doing the hard thinking very much lacking elsewhere.
It was Weir, who in a recent column, highlighted Labour's spurious outrage at power rises, although the government’s own monopoly watchdog has unconscionably taken three whole years to complete its enquiry into the possible abuse of market power by energy companies. The irony of the government’s assumed concern at Contact’s recent price increase and its directors’ self-serving greed was pointed out by Weir, noting that the state-owned power companies have now announced combined annual profits of $446 million. This, together with the with massive dividends and tax takes indicate a sickening hypocrisy on the part of a Labour government unlikely to be unhappy to have such lucrative returns the ensuing to it.
And it was the NZ Herald’s Fran O'Sullivan who pointed out that this is not the time for Helen Clark to show yet again that, when it suits her purposes, she is willing to extract political capital from a major financial crisis. By excluding National’s John Key from any of the thinking involved in a decision to issue a 150 billion dollar government guarantee on New Zealand depositors’ savings, Clark exhibited what O'Sullivan describes as pure arrogance. More than arrogant - arguably ominous and duplicitous - is the news that Labour is designing a potentially large spending plan, but has no intention, before the election, of indicating how much spending or how much it may add to government debt.
The inadequacy of the daily news media in failing to provide much-needed, genuine critical analysis of too many situations which have now turned into issues of the government versus the people - rather than the government representing the people - as with its infamous anti-smacking legislation - calls into question the very necessity for the existence of our daily fish and chip wrappers. Genuinely significant stories on the issues of the day pop up in the weekly National Business Review, in Ian Wishart’s flagship - the monthly INVESTIGATE - uncovering the real stories and doing the hard yards for too many lazy daily journalists; in Muriel Newman’s outstanding website, the NZ Centre for Political Research, in one or two other periodicals, and in the best of the blogs. Some of the most pertinent criticism comes from the latter, and more intelligent comment comes from readers of the NZ Herald having their say than we ever hear from the mouths of our party-programmed, robotic political representatives.
In the eyes of many New Zealanders, getting rid of the destructive, anti-family Clark government is utterly crucial. IN NSW, for example intimate body-piercing for under 16 year olds is banned. But in New Zealand abortion for 12 year olds without Mum and Dad’s permission is all right? But then Mum and Dad don’t count any moreLabour thinks premature sexual education should be forced on their children, it makes it compulsory. Parents justifiably spanking a naughty child? Wait for the police to turn up at the door. Our parents and grandparents would be appalled at the way the cold hand of the State has, little by little reached out to latch on to our children.
However, the still major concern for those deeply worried about what has happened to our country under Labour’s fascist policies is the National Party’s abandonment of principle in its policies. New Zealanders’ disillusionment, anger, even disgust with politicians has reached an all-time high. The expectation is that it is more than high time for politicians to be answerable to the people - rather than dismissive of mainstream New Zealanders’ concerns in their rush do the deals they’re happy to dirty their hands with to get elected. The feeling is growing that there has to be a better way.
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Does National deserve your List vote? No.
Oct. 30th, 2008 | 11:00 pm
Does National deserve your list vote? Arguably no.
If National does not take an overwhelming majority of New Zealanders with it in the forthcoming election, it has only itself to blame. Arguably, it has let down many New Zealanders who saw it as their main hope in ensuring that a leftist Labour coalition was finally sent packing, so that at least the first step forward could be taken towards the healing of New Zealand. But National has botched its chances of ensuring the commanding lead over Labour that it had until even quite recently. Its obvious hunger for power at seemingly any price has led it to compromise over issues where knowledgeable New Zealanders expected it to show a principled commitment to staking out its own territory.
This has not happened. National's main advantage of a youthful leader with a pleasant personality has been squandered. One is not supposed to say this. Fervent National supporters will insist that a list vote for National is essential to get rid of the present Labour coalition which has caused so much damage to this country. Not to give National one’s list vote is apparently traitorous. It would serve those right who would even contemplate such a betrayal: in fact, it would be their fault if we were afflicted even longer with Parliament’s present rainbow coalition of radicalized, basically racist interest groups intent on imposing their extreme minority viewpoints on the rest of the country. Let’s look more closely at this claim.
Maori Party MP, Tariana Turia, has a nerve speciously fulminating against “the tyranny of the minority” - unchallenged by supine media interviewers whom she is expert at manipulating. The so-called tyranny of the majority is in essence, democracy, with all its faults, still the best system of government which has been devised to date. Moreover, within its operations, according to the Christian code of conscience which has historically ensured its survival, care has always been taken of the interests and views of minorities.
Cunning Mrs Turia is arguing for her preference, the dictatorship of the minority - and seeking in fact to ensure this by now calling for the entrenchment of the Maori seats within Parliament. Her move is to ensure that against the wishes of the majority of New Zealanders the Maori seats continue to ensure their occupants a thoroughly unrepresentative role in Parliament, arguing primarily for radical Maoridom’s own self-interest. However, this is a blatant example of a manipulative minority having an warranted influence on the political affairs of the day - basically a racially divisive party employing a kind of political blackmail to get its own way - and to hell with what majority New Zealanders want.
Labour, of course, is happy to continue with any old arrangement to cling onto political power. However, while the Bolger-Graham version of Old National was keen to do deals with newly radicalized tribal groups intent on self-advantage - for the sake of the so-called Maori vote - a new day of promise dawned for National with former leader Don Brash’s principled stand against the ongoing manipulation, fabrications and outright lies attacking the original intent of the Treaty of Waitangi, contained in his utterly unexceptionable Orewa speech. Demonised by a mindless and malicious witch-hunting media for saying no more, no less than that the way forward for New Zealanders is as one people, Brash nevertheless struck a chord with New Zealanders and led the National Party very close to an election victory.
What National supporters have long wished to feel about their party is that it is a party of principle. Under its present leadership and inner circles that time has gone. Pragmatism is the in-word, the in-policy. What this means, in essence, is that apparently the present National Party will do almost anything to gain power again. The expectation that mainstream New Zealand has long held, that this party could be relied upon to stick to its promise to abolish the Maori seats, has received a major let-down. This alone, as much as its mindless capitulation over minority Green Party Sue Bradford’s infamous anti-smacking legislation, and its buying into the whole global warming rort, has produced deep anger, even despair among many New Zealanders concerned about what has happened to the country. They can no longer rely upon a National Party once envisaged as a party of principle, as standing for the freedom and rights of the individual.
The first equivocation about getting rid of the racist, divisive Maori seats came with the postponing of a date for their abolition. But it must have severely shocked many of goodwill and belief in the politics of principle to hear National’s leader John Key recently fudge the truth on television, denying any “formal” agreement with the Maori Party to back off its commitment to the public. Those who took this as a denial that any betrayal of National's promise to get rid of them was forthcoming, must have been somewhat shocked, if not outraged, to find Key back-footed by the manipulative Pita Sharples, who had a witness to the closed-door conversation in which Key indicated his lack of commitment to what has long been a matter of principle, as far as a majority of New Zealanders concerned.
It is all very specious for Sharples and Turia to claim that the Maori seats should be abolished only by the agreement of Maori. Who does this particularly advantage? And if Key does not opt to be a politician of principle, what claim can he then have to be regarded as principled?
The public has had enough of politicians welshing on their undertakings. The tail-wagging of the MMP system has seen minority parties wielding inordinate influence by the compromises they demand to get their own way. However, the public is fed with politicians that roll over, instead of representing them. Why then should they vote for them?
One of the most dismaying aspect of the National Party's gradual abandoning of principle in favour of deal-doing, tarted up as pragmatism, is the way it, too, now treats grown men and women as sheep to be herded into a pen when matters of conscience arise. The fact that some National Party members must have strongly disagreed with John Keys’ ill-considered, totally unnecessary decision to ignore the wishes of 89% of the country in his eagerness to line up with Clark and Bradford over the anti-smacking issue has grave implications. He, as well as Clark, deprived grown men and women within the party of the right to vote according to their own deeply-held beliefs.
Arguably, a party that can be so manipulated by its hierarchy to ignore the well-founded wishes of the majority of New Zealanders does not deserve the country's Party vote. Individual electorate members such as Nelson's Nick Smith, who have worked hard for the community, may well deserve the electorate vote. However, their electorates still have a right to feel let down over their individual capitulation on the anti-smacking issue in particular. Its direct attack upon the rights of good parents (with their superior knowledge of their own children),to discipline them as they think fit, evokes shades of Nazi Germanyand the knock on the door from the police.
What has happened to the rights of our political representatives to think issues through for themselves, and to take even a moral stand on principles, when politicians boast that they are team players, or party people? Politics is more than simply a sport, and the country has had enough of party people. What are desperately needed are politicians of principle, with enough integrity to make a stand, on behalf of their electorates, for what they believe is right.
Lockwood Smith recently, should not have been disciplined for speaking out about what he had been told by fruit growers experiencing problems with seasonal workers. Nor should honest, arguably brave Maurice Williamson have been told by the party leader to be quiet when confronting the issue of how massively expensive new roading is to be paid for. We need those who will speak out.
There are other areas where National is proving a damp squib. The question the country may have to face is: which party is going to contrive the most damaging future - one led by an extraordinarily crafty and domineering woman surrounded by what are seen as Labour's patsies, those who apparently offer her no opposition at all when she takes the country where she wishes, imposing on us decisions of supreme arrogance, such as destroying our air force’s combat capability? - because of her ridiculous assumption that “we live in an incredibly benign environment.”
Against her as leader of the other main political party is a man who is apparently a pleasant individual, experienced in the financial market, but demonstrably no deep thinker, giving no indication that he has taken on board the deep philosophical and historical lessons and wider knowledge that one would hope for in any individual with aspirations to lead his country.
It is worrying, for example, that John Key apparently is completely unaware of the fact that the United Nations is not only functionally impotent in too many areas of its responsibilities, but that it is now also deeply antipathetic to the West, largely controlled by Third World countries basically particularly hostile to that one country which epitomises freedom and hope to so many oppressed peoples throughout the world - the United States of America.
Yet Key is on record as insisting that he would take the lead from the deeply compromised United Nations, rather than our traditional allies, in matters of foreign policy. He appears to be way out of his depth. A crucial question then is: Who can do the most damage, the destructive leader - or the ignorant leader? As the National Business Review warned in an excellent account of the conference at Bali to assess some of the uncertainties in global warming pseudoscience, “not look to United Nations officials to defend our basic human rights. All those who are so keen to hand over sovereign power to this organization should have been at Bali to witness their attitude to free speech at first handmassive bureaucracy, which normally could not be relied on to blow up a paper bag, was remarkably flexible and innovative, when squashing our dissenting voice.”
Ignorant is as ignorant does. In Key we have a man who is either honest or naenough to express his admiration for lightweight overseas politicians and film stars, and who thought highly of Al Gore's self-serving, fact-twisting rubbishy film tapping into the media cult of the global warming hysteria. Gore stood to make many multi-million dollars by whipping up worldwide concern, while failing to highlight his financial interest in Lehman Bros, the now collapsed global finance house poised to control the worldwide market in carbon trading emissions. This film, essentially a crock, was naturally immediately seized upon by the Left, forcing young New Zealanders to view it throughout our state school system.
If the truism is correct that we get the government we deserve, we have a problem, if getting rid of the dangerously damaging Clark coalition means a List vote for a party selling us all out on the nonsense of carbon trading emissions, and with no apparent understanding of the politics of principle - no apparent understanding, in fact of the many deeper issues which essentially underpin democracy.
When individuals decide they want to become Prime Minister “ because it's a revered position in the community, a position of influence,” this still doesn't explain why they think they are fit for the job. As has been pointed out before, apparently. in this country anyone can become leader. But who will do more damage as leader - the ignorant or the willful?
Yet there is arguably also a certain willfulness in a National Party leader recently instructing party delegates voting to allocate List membership to contravene the party’s constitution, and to agree to rubberstamp the first 50 “loyal” list members, whose placings apparently - with undoubted help from the inner National party control centre - had already been decided on. The fact that such a compromised move has placed potentially excellent candidates such as Christchurch's Marc Alexander way down on the party List rankings is another very good reason why it is hard to justify giving National the Party vote.
Who does deserve it then, given the bidding war going on between both major parties, both seeking to bribe the electorate with whatever they have to hand - although Helen Clark is way ahead in the apparently shameless lolly-scrambling stakes - almost as if she is out of control.
The answer has to be that the new Kiwi Party deserves serious consideration. As a minor party of influence it is philosophically opposed to Labour and the Left, and could hardly make a worse mess of our economic situation than the Labour coalition has already done. And it uniquely saw to the heart of the most ominous legislation to have been enacted last year, the anti-smacking legislation striking at the core of our democracy.
The Libertarianz did too, and although the ACT Party also deserves consideration because of this issue, it has been foolish enough, in the teeth of public perception, to bring Roger Douglas back on board, blamed for the precipitousness of the reforms of the 80s, some undeniably needed, others too hastily and damagingly imposed on vulnerable communities. It also lost support when it was cynical enough to demote its deputy leader, Muriel Newman, arguably its biggest asset together with Rodney Hide, before he was pressured out of his perk-busting, independent ways, and conned into becoming “a statesman”.
However, it was the Kiwi Party which rolled up its sleeves and fought tooth and nail for the referendum which will eventually overturn this fascist legislation. It is the only party which so-called ordinary men and women throughout the country flocked to help over months of dedicated hard work, standing on street corners, turning up at AMP shows, passing round petition forms at every possible kind of group meeting - its members essentially doing everything in their power to make a stand for what they, and overwhelmingly most New Zealanders, believe are parents’ rights. They deserve our List votes.
And the question of leadership? Arguably, at times in history, the willful have been more destructive than any other social category. The very concept of leadership is deeply flawed. Leadership has contrived some of the most damaging, appalling, essentially evil outcomes inflicted on those who have come under the authority it assumes as of right.
It continues today, worldwide, to do so. The question whether those of today's societies which still promote the concept of leadership over that of grown men and women’s individual responsibility for their actions - including politicians’ - have in reality failed to come of age - is one with which we are going to be increasingly concerned.
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How to reclaim our democracy
Apr. 10th, 2008 | 11:45 pm
Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. You heard it here first. How to reclaim our democracy.
Former politician Mike Moore is, as usual, half wrong and half right. For example, pushing for a republic, as seems to be one of his pet projects, is no way to limit politicians’ power. It is the constitutional framework of our relationship with the British crown which has long acted as a restraint on politicians increasing their own power - one reason why the Left’s persistent push is for contriving a republic - while it argues wrongly, but manipulatively, that it is “inevitable".
Mr Moore is right when he says that New Zealand is no longer a Parliamentary democracy. But his thinking is simplistic. He rails against New Zealand's First’s inherently reasonable refusal to endorse the recently signed “free-trade” deal with China - with all its inherent fishhooks - because, just as with the general public - the important details about this historic agreement had been kept from this party. Moore apparently would like fired those politicians who did not fall into line, but who voiced strong doubts about the morality, let alone the wisdom, of being manipulated by a very powerful militarily aggressive country with designs on the Pacific. He shows little comprehension that there are deeper questions at issues here than just the advantages to New Zealand of economic benefits which may well have more downsides that have apparently been taken into account.
The state of the nation? Few doubt that we are in a poor shape politically, and the social climate has greatly deteriorated in recent years, in some considerable degree due to the machinations of both major political parties. Labour has overseen an increasing attack on the sovereignty of parents over their children; the shocking performance of our education system; the increasing criminalizing of the country - contriving a downward spiral in almost every socio-political area. One party is seen as very crafty, engaged in policies that are undermining our democracy. One is seen as out-manoeuvered, intelligent, but blundering, led by a decent individual who is apparently thoroughly out of his depth on (nor with any background in) issues apart from the economy. John Key was foolish recently to apparently to think that his image can be strengthened by using “virile” words like “buggered”. He, however, does not engage in malicious phrases such as “rich prick” or “feral in-breds”.
So, what the electorate sees is Hobson's choice. Getting rid of Labour at all costs is now imperative for the majority of the voting public, although Labour seems to have taken steps to attempt to make it difficult, if not, appallingly enough, actually illegal to say so in some circumstances. But what real choice is there, what hope under National for reversing the flawed policies that most concern thinking New Zealanders? Apparently planning to simply apply more icing to a crumbling cake of social disintegration, it, too, seems poised to throw more undeserved treaty settlements to opportunistic Maori radical groups grossly distorting our combined history for financial benefit, and for the centre-staging of a microphone thrust at them, apparently to feed a self-important, bloated mana.
Not only New Zealanders as a whole, but many mainstream Maori have escaped the country to remove themselves and their children from what they see clearly as an ongoing, never-ending rort. Nor does anyone now trust National over its firm commitment to abolish the Maori seats. It looks - as ever, these days - that principles are going to be abandoned in favour of that age-old grab for power, and the country is fed up.
But there is a way forward, and like most of the best ideas, it is inherently simple. The most advanced parliamentary democracy in the world, and arguably, the most effective direct democracy of all, demanded, nearly 150 years ago, the right to be free from the hands-down impositions of a central government. It is over time for us to insist on the same right. And no - it is not simply the right to referenda, per se. There is another far more important step which would have to first be taken - an essentially simple one - but one which would, for the first time, give New Zealanders a genuinely democratic government.
It has been pointed out that referenda do not succeed where the public is basically apathetic mis,- or ill-educated and under-informed. There is no doubt that this is a fairly accurate description of decent, well-meaning, but often confused New Zealanders who have begun to feel that they can make little difference, and have almost no input into what is happening to this country, and who, for this very reason are leaving, in many cases - because they can't stand to see what's happening to it.
Switzerland is the country which the rest of the world recognizes as having the most successful democracy of all. However, it also been said that to run a democracy like Switzerland, you need a public as intelligent as the Swiss. Yet if New Zealanders were to take on board the fact that what they said and thought really would make a difference to our future directions, some of the apathy that afflicts many would be removed.
Is there any particular reason we should emulate Switzerland? Well, we can take into account the fact that it has had over 500 years of democracy and peace, “that it has one of the world's most stable economies, a skilled workforce, internationally recognized export companies, a sound currency and remarkable social harmony, given that Switzerland has four national languages and great religious diversity.”(See: American.com - March/April 2008 issue, filed under World Watch, Economic Policy).
But above all, Switzerland has what we have no excuse whatsoever for not demanding: its people have a high degree of personal freedom as the result of their system of direct democracy. Helen Clark would never survive as leader, dug-in as she has, in Switzerland. They would never be prepared to put up with her, and with the edicts of her politburo. The contrast? Nobody that I have encountered can name the Swiss President, for the very good reason that in order to prevent one individual's - or an oligarchy's - monopoly of power, an executive council of seven, chosen from all parties, votes in Switzerland for a different president each year from among their number.
There is no reason why we should not do the same. The Roman Republic itself recognized the danger of any one individual leading the country for longer than one year, which is why it instituted the system of two consuls - each with a right of veto over the other and with therefore the checks and balances needed to prevent its government becoming too entrenched, too powerful, and too little answerable to its people - as has happened in this country.
It is true that Switzerland has a federal system of government, but this need not prevent our demanding the most important provision of all that they have had for nearly 150 years. It is the right of the Swiss nation to insist on scrutinizing any law that the government passes.
No law can actually come into effect for a hundred days. i.e. for just over three months after it has been passed. If it is a law that the public does not like the look of - as so often has happened with the New Zealand public being presented with late night legislation on Christmas Eve; as with overbearing politicians forcing late-night sittings of the House; with the infamous anti-smacking legislation; with some of the deeply flawed treaty settlements; and most recently, with, for example, the new trade agreement with China the details of which the government determinedly actually refused to supply to New Zealanders themselves before they signed it - by which time, as everybody knows, it is too late - then, as in Switzerland, the public would have the ability to toss it out.
This is basically what we now need in this country. It would need no major change to our traditional government framework, and would avoid the usual suspects reportedly drawing up, no doubt with the hope of trying to ram through, a new constitution embodying a suspect agenda. It would remove people's concerns about MMP: Sue Bradford’s bill, for example, would never have got past first base. In Switzerland, it is no use the minor parties trying to push through unpopular legislation by hijacking the major parties. All there know the reality of these situations. Forcing legislation through will not do. It would be a waste of time, as the public would throw it out.
Neither would we need to make any major changes to our voting system, which the public finds complicated enough already. We simply need now to claim the right which the Swiss already have and which has made them star achievers in any quality-of-life index. We need to be able to say to politicians i.e. You can pass any law you like, but we New Zealanders, too long excluded from anything like a true democratic process, demand the same rights as any real democracy should have - the right to say no - the majority does not want this.
This right can be achieved, quite simply, by a nationwide movement to insist that no law can actually come into effect for the first hundred days after it is passed. In the Swiss system, if concerned opponents of the legislation can amass 50,000 signatures to challenge the legislation, then referenda must be held, and the electorate itself decides. That is, the people of the country are allowed to make the decision as to whether or not they support this new legislation. Their vote is binding on government. Like most great ideas, it is as simple as that. And like most great ideas, its time has come.
The usual objections will be mustered against it - that it would bring the country to a halt. It doesn't in Switzerland. There can be no reason why this would happen here. However, there is often a very good reason why new legislation should be brought to a halt. A proviso could be added that in times of genuine national emergency such as war, the government must have the right to proceed. But this is an issue that can be debated.
Another objection is that the electorate can get issues wrong. So can the government - and it has often, disastrously. Moreover, as Barbara Tuchman reminds us, governments get most issues wrong. If the public at large gets an issue wrong, then it is their mistake and can be reversed.
One MP has complained that Parliament would never be able to proceed with its business, that he votes on 27 issues a week, and that referenda can't be held on all of these. This is an utterly simplistic objection. In most instances, the public would not be sufficiently concerned to mount objections through a referendum. Moreover,, politicians would tend to be far more circumspect and put more thought into issues on which they were voting if they knew that they would be challenged if the public was concerned.
The essential simplicity of providing that no law take effect for a hundred days after it has been passed would ensure that politicians would be far more circumspect, careful and considered about issues that they would vote on. When the public knows that it has real power to determine outcomes; when individuals know that their votes are not wasted - they take an interest in what they are voting for. As with an MMP system, the tail can no longer wag the dog, because it knows it will be challenged; that radical, power-hungry policies from the extremes of far Right or far Left will not be endorsed by the public, and that it is simply a waste of time to try and ram them through.
Undoubtedly, this is going to be the way for future. Politicians of most parties in New Zealand are now being seen to have grossly abused their power. An electorate that is feeling helpless is looking for a new way to the future. Nothing could be more simpler than that provision - that legislation cannot be implemented for the period of a hundred days - and that if even 50,000 people take the trouble to object in that time, this represents a substantial body of public opinion. In the interests, then, of a real democracy, to which politicians at present simply pay lip-service, a referendum must be held, and the public's decision is binding. After all, it is the public that is the democracy.
There is no doubt that this idea is eminently workable. There is little doubt, too, that politicians from all the major parties will find all sorts of excuses to try to prevent this coming to pass. They will argue that the Swiss system is different; that what works in Switzerland will not work here. They are quite wrong. It can and it will: they just will not want it to. No wonder. But if they argue against it, it will be very obvious that their concern is for themselves and for their own power structures, and that they are intent on disenfranchising the public - not serving it. Any MP who opposes this can right be accused of being basically anti-democratic.
So what will the public have to do to persuade politicians that they are not prepared to put up with a corrupt political system any longer? The answer is that public will have to be prepared to withhold what politicians most want - and this is now the party vote. Arguably, neither National nor Labour deserve it. Good constituent MPs deserve to be supported. But supporting the party as a whole is another matter. We should make any support conditional.
National will argue that if its supporters do not give it the party vote, then horror of horrors, Labour will again be returned to power. It is true that Labour has caused incalculable damage to this country - but so then has National. This party has not worked hard enough to listen to, and to engage with the country at large in recent years. It should have no possible objection - as the party of the centre, i.e. standing for individual freedom and democracy against the essentially totalitarian Left - to argue for this essential provision - that the people of a country should themselves have the right to say yes, we approve - or no, that they do not want any more centralized government decisions forced on them. But we can suspect, given its own increasingly totalitarian directions, that National, too, wants its own way over the electorate's.
The answer to National’s soliciting for the list vote should be - you will not receive this until you pledge to remove Sue Bradford's infamous anti-smacking Bill from our legislation. It has been one of the most dangerous and destructive pieces of legislation passed in recent years. National, having voted for it, does not deserve the list vote. It is time - as a quid pro quo - for National to pledge to remove it. Or no list vote.
No doubt the Swiss fought hard and long for this 100 day provision for their people to be able to limit abuse of government power. We are going to have to do the same. But the time is obviously right. This is not a political party initiative. This is a reminder to individuals that they have more power than they ever realize - and that if New Zealanders really want a democracy, this is essentially - and obtainably - the way forward. There is nothing like the power of an idea whose time is right.
Former politician Mike Moore is, as usual, half wrong and half right. For example, pushing for a republic, as seems to be one of his pet projects, is no way to limit politicians’ power. It is the constitutional framework of our relationship with the British crown which has long acted as a restraint on politicians increasing their own power - one reason why the Left’s persistent push is for contriving a republic - while it argues wrongly, but manipulatively, that it is “inevitable".
Mr Moore is right when he says that New Zealand is no longer a Parliamentary democracy. But his thinking is simplistic. He rails against New Zealand's First’s inherently reasonable refusal to endorse the recently signed “free-trade” deal with China - with all its inherent fishhooks - because, just as with the general public - the important details about this historic agreement had been kept from this party. Moore apparently would like fired those politicians who did not fall into line, but who voiced strong doubts about the morality, let alone the wisdom, of being manipulated by a very powerful militarily aggressive country with designs on the Pacific. He shows little comprehension that there are deeper questions at issues here than just the advantages to New Zealand of economic benefits which may well have more downsides that have apparently been taken into account.
The state of the nation? Few doubt that we are in a poor shape politically, and the social climate has greatly deteriorated in recent years, in some considerable degree due to the machinations of both major political parties. Labour has overseen an increasing attack on the sovereignty of parents over their children; the shocking performance of our education system; the increasing criminalizing of the country - contriving a downward spiral in almost every socio-political area. One party is seen as very crafty, engaged in policies that are undermining our democracy. One is seen as out-manoeuvered, intelligent, but blundering, led by a decent individual who is apparently thoroughly out of his depth on (nor with any background in) issues apart from the economy. John Key was foolish recently to apparently to think that his image can be strengthened by using “virile” words like “buggered”. He, however, does not engage in malicious phrases such as “rich prick” or “feral in-breds”.
So, what the electorate sees is Hobson's choice. Getting rid of Labour at all costs is now imperative for the majority of the voting public, although Labour seems to have taken steps to attempt to make it difficult, if not, appallingly enough, actually illegal to say so in some circumstances. But what real choice is there, what hope under National for reversing the flawed policies that most concern thinking New Zealanders? Apparently planning to simply apply more icing to a crumbling cake of social disintegration, it, too, seems poised to throw more undeserved treaty settlements to opportunistic Maori radical groups grossly distorting our combined history for financial benefit, and for the centre-staging of a microphone thrust at them, apparently to feed a self-important, bloated mana.
Not only New Zealanders as a whole, but many mainstream Maori have escaped the country to remove themselves and their children from what they see clearly as an ongoing, never-ending rort. Nor does anyone now trust National over its firm commitment to abolish the Maori seats. It looks - as ever, these days - that principles are going to be abandoned in favour of that age-old grab for power, and the country is fed up.
But there is a way forward, and like most of the best ideas, it is inherently simple. The most advanced parliamentary democracy in the world, and arguably, the most effective direct democracy of all, demanded, nearly 150 years ago, the right to be free from the hands-down impositions of a central government. It is over time for us to insist on the same right. And no - it is not simply the right to referenda, per se. There is another far more important step which would have to first be taken - an essentially simple one - but one which would, for the first time, give New Zealanders a genuinely democratic government.
It has been pointed out that referenda do not succeed where the public is basically apathetic mis,- or ill-educated and under-informed. There is no doubt that this is a fairly accurate description of decent, well-meaning, but often confused New Zealanders who have begun to feel that they can make little difference, and have almost no input into what is happening to this country, and who, for this very reason are leaving, in many cases - because they can't stand to see what's happening to it.
Switzerland is the country which the rest of the world recognizes as having the most successful democracy of all. However, it also been said that to run a democracy like Switzerland, you need a public as intelligent as the Swiss. Yet if New Zealanders were to take on board the fact that what they said and thought really would make a difference to our future directions, some of the apathy that afflicts many would be removed.
Is there any particular reason we should emulate Switzerland? Well, we can take into account the fact that it has had over 500 years of democracy and peace, “that it has one of the world's most stable economies, a skilled workforce, internationally recognized export companies, a sound currency and remarkable social harmony, given that Switzerland has four national languages and great religious diversity.”(See: American.com - March/April 2008 issue, filed under World Watch, Economic Policy).
But above all, Switzerland has what we have no excuse whatsoever for not demanding: its people have a high degree of personal freedom as the result of their system of direct democracy. Helen Clark would never survive as leader, dug-in as she has, in Switzerland. They would never be prepared to put up with her, and with the edicts of her politburo. The contrast? Nobody that I have encountered can name the Swiss President, for the very good reason that in order to prevent one individual's - or an oligarchy's - monopoly of power, an executive council of seven, chosen from all parties, votes in Switzerland for a different president each year from among their number.
There is no reason why we should not do the same. The Roman Republic itself recognized the danger of any one individual leading the country for longer than one year, which is why it instituted the system of two consuls - each with a right of veto over the other and with therefore the checks and balances needed to prevent its government becoming too entrenched, too powerful, and too little answerable to its people - as has happened in this country.
It is true that Switzerland has a federal system of government, but this need not prevent our demanding the most important provision of all that they have had for nearly 150 years. It is the right of the Swiss nation to insist on scrutinizing any law that the government passes.
No law can actually come into effect for a hundred days. i.e. for just over three months after it has been passed. If it is a law that the public does not like the look of - as so often has happened with the New Zealand public being presented with late night legislation on Christmas Eve; as with overbearing politicians forcing late-night sittings of the House; with the infamous anti-smacking legislation; with some of the deeply flawed treaty settlements; and most recently, with, for example, the new trade agreement with China the details of which the government determinedly actually refused to supply to New Zealanders themselves before they signed it - by which time, as everybody knows, it is too late - then, as in Switzerland, the public would have the ability to toss it out.
This is basically what we now need in this country. It would need no major change to our traditional government framework, and would avoid the usual suspects reportedly drawing up, no doubt with the hope of trying to ram through, a new constitution embodying a suspect agenda. It would remove people's concerns about MMP: Sue Bradford’s bill, for example, would never have got past first base. In Switzerland, it is no use the minor parties trying to push through unpopular legislation by hijacking the major parties. All there know the reality of these situations. Forcing legislation through will not do. It would be a waste of time, as the public would throw it out.
Neither would we need to make any major changes to our voting system, which the public finds complicated enough already. We simply need now to claim the right which the Swiss already have and which has made them star achievers in any quality-of-life index. We need to be able to say to politicians i.e. You can pass any law you like, but we New Zealanders, too long excluded from anything like a true democratic process, demand the same rights as any real democracy should have - the right to say no - the majority does not want this.
This right can be achieved, quite simply, by a nationwide movement to insist that no law can actually come into effect for the first hundred days after it is passed. In the Swiss system, if concerned opponents of the legislation can amass 50,000 signatures to challenge the legislation, then referenda must be held, and the electorate itself decides. That is, the people of the country are allowed to make the decision as to whether or not they support this new legislation. Their vote is binding on government. Like most great ideas, it is as simple as that. And like most great ideas, its time has come.
The usual objections will be mustered against it - that it would bring the country to a halt. It doesn't in Switzerland. There can be no reason why this would happen here. However, there is often a very good reason why new legislation should be brought to a halt. A proviso could be added that in times of genuine national emergency such as war, the government must have the right to proceed. But this is an issue that can be debated.
Another objection is that the electorate can get issues wrong. So can the government - and it has often, disastrously. Moreover, as Barbara Tuchman reminds us, governments get most issues wrong. If the public at large gets an issue wrong, then it is their mistake and can be reversed.
One MP has complained that Parliament would never be able to proceed with its business, that he votes on 27 issues a week, and that referenda can't be held on all of these. This is an utterly simplistic objection. In most instances, the public would not be sufficiently concerned to mount objections through a referendum. Moreover,, politicians would tend to be far more circumspect and put more thought into issues on which they were voting if they knew that they would be challenged if the public was concerned.
The essential simplicity of providing that no law take effect for a hundred days after it has been passed would ensure that politicians would be far more circumspect, careful and considered about issues that they would vote on. When the public knows that it has real power to determine outcomes; when individuals know that their votes are not wasted - they take an interest in what they are voting for. As with an MMP system, the tail can no longer wag the dog, because it knows it will be challenged; that radical, power-hungry policies from the extremes of far Right or far Left will not be endorsed by the public, and that it is simply a waste of time to try and ram them through.
Undoubtedly, this is going to be the way for future. Politicians of most parties in New Zealand are now being seen to have grossly abused their power. An electorate that is feeling helpless is looking for a new way to the future. Nothing could be more simpler than that provision - that legislation cannot be implemented for the period of a hundred days - and that if even 50,000 people take the trouble to object in that time, this represents a substantial body of public opinion. In the interests, then, of a real democracy, to which politicians at present simply pay lip-service, a referendum must be held, and the public's decision is binding. After all, it is the public that is the democracy.
There is no doubt that this idea is eminently workable. There is little doubt, too, that politicians from all the major parties will find all sorts of excuses to try to prevent this coming to pass. They will argue that the Swiss system is different; that what works in Switzerland will not work here. They are quite wrong. It can and it will: they just will not want it to. No wonder. But if they argue against it, it will be very obvious that their concern is for themselves and for their own power structures, and that they are intent on disenfranchising the public - not serving it. Any MP who opposes this can right be accused of being basically anti-democratic.
So what will the public have to do to persuade politicians that they are not prepared to put up with a corrupt political system any longer? The answer is that public will have to be prepared to withhold what politicians most want - and this is now the party vote. Arguably, neither National nor Labour deserve it. Good constituent MPs deserve to be supported. But supporting the party as a whole is another matter. We should make any support conditional.
National will argue that if its supporters do not give it the party vote, then horror of horrors, Labour will again be returned to power. It is true that Labour has caused incalculable damage to this country - but so then has National. This party has not worked hard enough to listen to, and to engage with the country at large in recent years. It should have no possible objection - as the party of the centre, i.e. standing for individual freedom and democracy against the essentially totalitarian Left - to argue for this essential provision - that the people of a country should themselves have the right to say yes, we approve - or no, that they do not want any more centralized government decisions forced on them. But we can suspect, given its own increasingly totalitarian directions, that National, too, wants its own way over the electorate's.
The answer to National’s soliciting for the list vote should be - you will not receive this until you pledge to remove Sue Bradford's infamous anti-smacking Bill from our legislation. It has been one of the most dangerous and destructive pieces of legislation passed in recent years. National, having voted for it, does not deserve the list vote. It is time - as a quid pro quo - for National to pledge to remove it. Or no list vote.
No doubt the Swiss fought hard and long for this 100 day provision for their people to be able to limit abuse of government power. We are going to have to do the same. But the time is obviously right. This is not a political party initiative. This is a reminder to individuals that they have more power than they ever realize - and that if New Zealanders really want a democracy, this is essentially - and obtainably - the way forward. There is nothing like the power of an idea whose time is right.
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The death blows to privatisation hype
Apr. 10th, 2008 | 10:01 pm
A pox on both their houses - the death blows to privatization hype.
Why is it that ideologues espousing the extremes of far Left as opposed to far Right philosophy - or, say, the far Right as opposed to Far Left - never seem to understand that they both represent different sides of the same coin? Essentially they have far more in common than the middle ground which separates them.
The far Right maintains its mandarin-like contempt for what it calls “the middle ground”, as if this contains merely those too moral or intellectually flabby to follow the shining path it alone monopolizes to the rarefied air of its uplands. Free-markets are its mantra. But there is nothing at all free about a market dominated by wealthy corporations, just as centrist and as powerful in their own way as a state monopoly of institutions meant to serve the public. The only true free market can ever be one of small businesses, where competition is as close as possible to a level playing field.
The self-serving cliche of the far Right that a rising tide lifts all boats is ridiculous. A rising tide can in fact sink boats struggling to stay afloat. An aggressive tide can throw them up on the rocks and hole them below the waterline. While unfortunately named, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc’s philosophy of Distributism, that is, of a genuine free market of small property-holding individuals and family or local businesses - threatened neither by the iron glove of the State from the far Left, nor the velvet glove of wealthy corporations squeezing them from the far Fight - is due for re-examining.
The list of state-owned institutions sold in the heady days of Rogernomics - and subsequently poorly performing - seems to carry home no message to those of the far Right, locked as ever in their own closed circle of self-sustaining thinking. Why it was ever thought that the new mega-businesses which would operate without genuine competition, and whose main purpose was to maximise returns to the their shareholders, were ever going to perform in a superior fashion, is a great mystery. The roll call of sold public assets whose inferior performance is quite obvious, and which has disadvantaged the public at large, includes Telecom, New Zealand Railways, the generation of electricity, Air New Zealand, with its shocking tax-payer bail-out of private investors - and New Zealand Post, with its increasingly poor performance.
Telecom, which had all the advantages of being a virtual monopoly formed as new technology was flooding the area of telecommunications, performed badly in its overseas ventures, and has dragged its heels at home in providing the best possible outcomes for New Zealanders. But then, its actually stated main purpose was apparently to maximize returns to shareholders - some of whom were no doubt its own directors. Not before time has it been forced to improve its performance, and to have seemingly belatedly discovered that multi-optic fibres are vastly superior to its outmoded copper wire technology. One cheer for Telecom.
Telecom continues, too, to show the public lack of respect for their time wasted in the irritating delays and tedious multi-choice options inflicted when one is unfortunate enough to have to call it. It selection of crass pop muzak forced on customers is simply insulting. A small mercy - it has replaced the gauche mis-pronunciation of its former female number-provider giving two as toe.
New Zealand Railways has been a horror story of its own. It was sold for only $328.3 million dollars to a business consortium around the time when David Richwhite was deputy chairman of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, and when such prominent organizations were close to government in their advocacies. Ruth Richardson actually later thanked Richwhite for assisting with her with his advice (so, too, Doug Myers, Chairman of the Roundtable) in areas relating to her portfolio while she was National Party Minister of Finance. The subsequent sale of this state asset to the private consortium resulted in rundown rail stock; railway lines that buckled, poorly repaired; and the phasing out of consumer services - in other words, significant underinvestment in the rail infrastructure and a flurry of deaths - which some attributed to this. Later, there were attempts to actually remove the main rail return link up the North Island from Wellington to Auckland - hardly an improvement from state ownership - on the contrary. Moreover, our roads are now increasingly congested and damaged by overlong, over-heavy, mammoth transporters which have increased the danger to drivers. Formerly, a lot of what they are carting from one end of the country to another would have been carried by rail.
We all know that the price of electricity has risen beyond the ability of many families to keep on top of hefty bills, (though I was assured by a Business Roundtable representative that the costs of electricity forms a very small part of family expenses. Perhaps not for the wealthy family. But for ordinary families, they have become crippling). Moreover, crises loom each winter with the actual supply of power, as investment in the upgrading of cables and the guaranteeing of supply has been shockingly neglected. Correspondingly, environmental fascists inveigh against the use of coal as a pollutant, while we happily export it for other countries to use such as our up-graded trading partner, heavily-polluted China. The hypocrisy is rank.
Equally questionable is legislating as the Nelson City Council has - foremost in environmental extremism in this deep Green part of the country - to leap to obey government edicts and to refuse to allow those building new houses to install clean-burning, enclosed wood burners. Given the current price of electricity and its unreliability, this imposition is almost criminal. People's lives can depend on their being sufficiently warm in winter. An indifferent and prohibitively expensive electricity supply necessitates other forms of home heating, and clean-air wood burners are ideal. The road to fascist government interference is shorter than many might have realized. Would our parents' generation have believed that one day the government would have forbidden New Zealanders to have fireplaces in their homes? And where is the ensuing outcry?
Very few New Zealanders support the concept of a socialist State, ominously intruding, as the Clark government has, into more and more areas of private, family, and public life. But the health of the nation does not lie, either, in fantasizing about the virtues of Big Business. Its undue advantages and lack of social conscience can be as equal a threat to the prosperity and health of a country - in more than just economic areas - important as these are - to the viability of small businesses, and to the families and homes which depend on them. It is taxpayers who have been paying so far, and who will pay more, for the buying back of vital assets which should never have been sold.
********************
Why is it that ideologues espousing the extremes of far Left as opposed to far Right philosophy - or, say, the far Right as opposed to Far Left - never seem to understand that they both represent different sides of the same coin? Essentially they have far more in common than the middle ground which separates them.
The far Right maintains its mandarin-like contempt for what it calls “the middle ground”, as if this contains merely those too moral or intellectually flabby to follow the shining path it alone monopolizes to the rarefied air of its uplands. Free-markets are its mantra. But there is nothing at all free about a market dominated by wealthy corporations, just as centrist and as powerful in their own way as a state monopoly of institutions meant to serve the public. The only true free market can ever be one of small businesses, where competition is as close as possible to a level playing field.
The self-serving cliche of the far Right that a rising tide lifts all boats is ridiculous. A rising tide can in fact sink boats struggling to stay afloat. An aggressive tide can throw them up on the rocks and hole them below the waterline. While unfortunately named, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc’s philosophy of Distributism, that is, of a genuine free market of small property-holding individuals and family or local businesses - threatened neither by the iron glove of the State from the far Left, nor the velvet glove of wealthy corporations squeezing them from the far Fight - is due for re-examining.
The list of state-owned institutions sold in the heady days of Rogernomics - and subsequently poorly performing - seems to carry home no message to those of the far Right, locked as ever in their own closed circle of self-sustaining thinking. Why it was ever thought that the new mega-businesses which would operate without genuine competition, and whose main purpose was to maximise returns to the their shareholders, were ever going to perform in a superior fashion, is a great mystery. The roll call of sold public assets whose inferior performance is quite obvious, and which has disadvantaged the public at large, includes Telecom, New Zealand Railways, the generation of electricity, Air New Zealand, with its shocking tax-payer bail-out of private investors - and New Zealand Post, with its increasingly poor performance.
Telecom, which had all the advantages of being a virtual monopoly formed as new technology was flooding the area of telecommunications, performed badly in its overseas ventures, and has dragged its heels at home in providing the best possible outcomes for New Zealanders. But then, its actually stated main purpose was apparently to maximize returns to shareholders - some of whom were no doubt its own directors. Not before time has it been forced to improve its performance, and to have seemingly belatedly discovered that multi-optic fibres are vastly superior to its outmoded copper wire technology. One cheer for Telecom.
Telecom continues, too, to show the public lack of respect for their time wasted in the irritating delays and tedious multi-choice options inflicted when one is unfortunate enough to have to call it. It selection of crass pop muzak forced on customers is simply insulting. A small mercy - it has replaced the gauche mis-pronunciation of its former female number-provider giving two as toe.
New Zealand Railways has been a horror story of its own. It was sold for only $328.3 million dollars to a business consortium around the time when David Richwhite was deputy chairman of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, and when such prominent organizations were close to government in their advocacies. Ruth Richardson actually later thanked Richwhite for assisting with her with his advice (so, too, Doug Myers, Chairman of the Roundtable) in areas relating to her portfolio while she was National Party Minister of Finance. The subsequent sale of this state asset to the private consortium resulted in rundown rail stock; railway lines that buckled, poorly repaired; and the phasing out of consumer services - in other words, significant underinvestment in the rail infrastructure and a flurry of deaths - which some attributed to this. Later, there were attempts to actually remove the main rail return link up the North Island from Wellington to Auckland - hardly an improvement from state ownership - on the contrary. Moreover, our roads are now increasingly congested and damaged by overlong, over-heavy, mammoth transporters which have increased the danger to drivers. Formerly, a lot of what they are carting from one end of the country to another would have been carried by rail.
We all know that the price of electricity has risen beyond the ability of many families to keep on top of hefty bills, (though I was assured by a Business Roundtable representative that the costs of electricity forms a very small part of family expenses. Perhaps not for the wealthy family. But for ordinary families, they have become crippling). Moreover, crises loom each winter with the actual supply of power, as investment in the upgrading of cables and the guaranteeing of supply has been shockingly neglected. Correspondingly, environmental fascists inveigh against the use of coal as a pollutant, while we happily export it for other countries to use such as our up-graded trading partner, heavily-polluted China. The hypocrisy is rank.
Equally questionable is legislating as the Nelson City Council has - foremost in environmental extremism in this deep Green part of the country - to leap to obey government edicts and to refuse to allow those building new houses to install clean-burning, enclosed wood burners. Given the current price of electricity and its unreliability, this imposition is almost criminal. People's lives can depend on their being sufficiently warm in winter. An indifferent and prohibitively expensive electricity supply necessitates other forms of home heating, and clean-air wood burners are ideal. The road to fascist government interference is shorter than many might have realized. Would our parents' generation have believed that one day the government would have forbidden New Zealanders to have fireplaces in their homes? And where is the ensuing outcry?
Very few New Zealanders support the concept of a socialist State, ominously intruding, as the Clark government has, into more and more areas of private, family, and public life. But the health of the nation does not lie, either, in fantasizing about the virtues of Big Business. Its undue advantages and lack of social conscience can be as equal a threat to the prosperity and health of a country - in more than just economic areas - important as these are - to the viability of small businesses, and to the families and homes which depend on them. It is taxpayers who have been paying so far, and who will pay more, for the buying back of vital assets which should never have been sold.
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NZPost don't even say thank you
Apr. 10th, 2008 | 10:00 pm
New Zealand Post don’t even say thank you! Deteriorating customer services.
In every area, apart from its excellent phone-answering representatives, the quality of New Zealand Post’s services has deteriorated. Moreover, it is not customer-friendly. It took months of tedious correspondence for an original suggestion of mine, both to save customer time and queuing - which would therefore free up staff and save the company itself money - to be adopted - even to be understood. Now at last it has done so it is touting the idea it owes to a customer - see the illiterate “The real.simple guide” it has just issued - as if it was its own.
A simple explanation. When one is uncertain as to whether a letter or packet will fit inside the wooden slot counter staff use to gauge a letter or packet’s thickness, one has to queue up at the counter to see if additional postage is needed. As the queues in the central Nelson Post Office often reach from the counter to the door, moving interminably slowly, I took the trouble to point out to management that if New Zealand Post would issue cardboard replicas to customers to use at home, the public could be aware in advance whether or not additional postage would be needed, and could apply it at home, to then drop a letter in the postal box without having to queue. Accumulatively, the time and saving to both its customers nationwide and New Zealand Post would be considerable.
Wooden slots and wooden heads. While busily explaining why they are curtailing so many other services, and rejecting other worthwhile suggestions (such as supplying at least a few of small trolleys now available - to save elderly people, mothers with children and those with back pain from having to wait in the queue while carrying heavy parcels) at least the suggestion of supplying customers with these cardboard letter width measurements seemed to strike home. Wrongly, of course. It was announced triumphantly that they would henceforth be supplied at the counters in Post Office, for customers to measure their letters themselves.
With better things to do with time, I counted to ten. Then again I took up my pen, metaphorically speaking. If customers still had to go to the Post Office to test letters for width, they would still have to queue to make any adjustments to postage. Attempting to use short words, I patiently again explained that customers need to be able to make these measurements at home, where most of us keep supplies of stamps, to save our and New Zealand Post's time and costs.
Silence. But in a new glossy mail-out, New Zealand Post triumphantly announces that from March to 28, customers may now: Use the new Domestic Letters Checker to work out the size and postage price for your letters... No hint at all of Dear customers we love your excellent suggestions - as with this one. Thanks to all of you still bothering to deal with us.
Deteriorated NZPosts’s services have, and the process is ongoing, This ridiculously complicated new booklet - The real. simple guide - (what’s wrong with using correct grammar, instead of the cringe making “real simple”? ) is anything but simple. The wording is misleading, and it’s hard to credit that NZ Post isn’t aware of this. Nor is it making most services simpler. New, confusing size categories for both letters and parcels make it more complicated. It is harder, not easier, to evaluate postage rates, in spite of new options available for ways of sending small packets and parcels. But who has time to even take on board the myriad details in this confusing mail-out?
The delivery of ordinary letters is also shockingly slow. One from Auckland or Rotorua, for example, will take at least four working days to reach Nelson Whereas the local Post Office used to open at quarter to eight in the morning, so that those starting work at eight o'clock could conduct any business beforehand, it now doesn’t open until 8 a.m. The special counter where one could formerly take a yellow card dropped in one’s private PO box to collect an over-large package is now closed after 10 am. One has to rejoin the long queues snaking to the door simply to pick up a packet.
Worse, it is now not uncommon to wait puzzledly for several days for a courier parcel only to find, after asking for a search to be made, that the parcel has been on the back shelves, and left there. It's just that nobody bothered to put the yellow card in your Post Office box to let you know that it was there. This has happened several times to my knowledge, with time-dependent business correspondence from Auckland and overseas involving toll calls and lost time to try to clarify what had happened and to find missing courier packsweren’t delayed after all.
More? One can arrive at the counter, be given long forms given to fill in, and be told to rejoin the queue when finished. Refuse and stand one’s ground!... You want to send a parcel to be signed for? You won't be able to address this special courier envelope before you get to the counter, because they are now kept behind the counter in case people fill them in wrongly. So again, everyone's time is wasted while you hold up the ever-present queue, filling in details that could have been done elsewhere... You plan to post a letter over the weekend, and until recently, could do so up to 12 noon on Sunday. Not any more. Sunday 9 am is now close-off time - too early for a tradititional day of rest. In fact, the whole of Easter is close-off time, too, as all postal services grind to a long-halt. You have a post box? If you’re unlucky enough, locally, to be in the apparently arbitrarily chosen B foyer, a virtually comprehensible letter in obscure dialect will have told you that your mail is not guaranteed to be in your box until an hour later than for those in the A category. Apparently volumes of mail have decided what foyer boxes would get preferential treatment - an unreal criterion, as some within both sections with have both higher and lower volumes of mail.
This is not a pattern of the improved services and customer relations that NZ Post is misleading the public about. It is all about NZ Post cost-cutting for profit - hardly the same thing. Its lack of receptiveness to customer feedback also entails its playing loudly piped pop songs, advertisements and gabbling DJs from speakers placed just above queued customers’ heads - and ignoring feedback asking for this to be dispensed with. It is not alone here. There is no possible excuse, in an age where people are more and more affected by stress-related noise, for banks, post-offices and airports - let alone restaurants and shops - playing crass and overloud rubbishy muzak directed at customers who can’t avoid it. The assumption that most people now operate at adolescent level is not one for public institutions to make. They are insulting their customers.
On it goes. And don't look to the New Zealand Post website for help. It’s confusing, doesn't answer appropriate search questions, and is, in my experience, basically useless. However, it claims it is making life “that bit easier”. Hasn't anyone told them? But perhaps someone got a large bonus for the year, just for that slogan alone.
Prices up, services curtailed and far more complicated for the public? This is a business now performing considerably more poorly. So much for the virtues of privatization. But a pat on the back for its live telephone help - its staff being exceptional. And I’ll bet on those the new trolleys - eventually!
***********************
In every area, apart from its excellent phone-answering representatives, the quality of New Zealand Post’s services has deteriorated. Moreover, it is not customer-friendly. It took months of tedious correspondence for an original suggestion of mine, both to save customer time and queuing - which would therefore free up staff and save the company itself money - to be adopted - even to be understood. Now at last it has done so it is touting the idea it owes to a customer - see the illiterate “The real.simple guide” it has just issued - as if it was its own.
A simple explanation. When one is uncertain as to whether a letter or packet will fit inside the wooden slot counter staff use to gauge a letter or packet’s thickness, one has to queue up at the counter to see if additional postage is needed. As the queues in the central Nelson Post Office often reach from the counter to the door, moving interminably slowly, I took the trouble to point out to management that if New Zealand Post would issue cardboard replicas to customers to use at home, the public could be aware in advance whether or not additional postage would be needed, and could apply it at home, to then drop a letter in the postal box without having to queue. Accumulatively, the time and saving to both its customers nationwide and New Zealand Post would be considerable.
Wooden slots and wooden heads. While busily explaining why they are curtailing so many other services, and rejecting other worthwhile suggestions (such as supplying at least a few of small trolleys now available - to save elderly people, mothers with children and those with back pain from having to wait in the queue while carrying heavy parcels) at least the suggestion of supplying customers with these cardboard letter width measurements seemed to strike home. Wrongly, of course. It was announced triumphantly that they would henceforth be supplied at the counters in Post Office, for customers to measure their letters themselves.
With better things to do with time, I counted to ten. Then again I took up my pen, metaphorically speaking. If customers still had to go to the Post Office to test letters for width, they would still have to queue to make any adjustments to postage. Attempting to use short words, I patiently again explained that customers need to be able to make these measurements at home, where most of us keep supplies of stamps, to save our and New Zealand Post's time and costs.
Silence. But in a new glossy mail-out, New Zealand Post triumphantly announces that from March to 28, customers may now: Use the new Domestic Letters Checker to work out the size and postage price for your letters... No hint at all of Dear customers we love your excellent suggestions - as with this one. Thanks to all of you still bothering to deal with us.
Deteriorated NZPosts’s services have, and the process is ongoing, This ridiculously complicated new booklet - The real. simple guide - (what’s wrong with using correct grammar, instead of the cringe making “real simple”? ) is anything but simple. The wording is misleading, and it’s hard to credit that NZ Post isn’t aware of this. Nor is it making most services simpler. New, confusing size categories for both letters and parcels make it more complicated. It is harder, not easier, to evaluate postage rates, in spite of new options available for ways of sending small packets and parcels. But who has time to even take on board the myriad details in this confusing mail-out?
The delivery of ordinary letters is also shockingly slow. One from Auckland or Rotorua, for example, will take at least four working days to reach Nelson Whereas the local Post Office used to open at quarter to eight in the morning, so that those starting work at eight o'clock could conduct any business beforehand, it now doesn’t open until 8 a.m. The special counter where one could formerly take a yellow card dropped in one’s private PO box to collect an over-large package is now closed after 10 am. One has to rejoin the long queues snaking to the door simply to pick up a packet.
Worse, it is now not uncommon to wait puzzledly for several days for a courier parcel only to find, after asking for a search to be made, that the parcel has been on the back shelves, and left there. It's just that nobody bothered to put the yellow card in your Post Office box to let you know that it was there. This has happened several times to my knowledge, with time-dependent business correspondence from Auckland and overseas involving toll calls and lost time to try to clarify what had happened and to find missing courier packsweren’t delayed after all.
More? One can arrive at the counter, be given long forms given to fill in, and be told to rejoin the queue when finished. Refuse and stand one’s ground!... You want to send a parcel to be signed for? You won't be able to address this special courier envelope before you get to the counter, because they are now kept behind the counter in case people fill them in wrongly. So again, everyone's time is wasted while you hold up the ever-present queue, filling in details that could have been done elsewhere... You plan to post a letter over the weekend, and until recently, could do so up to 12 noon on Sunday. Not any more. Sunday 9 am is now close-off time - too early for a tradititional day of rest. In fact, the whole of Easter is close-off time, too, as all postal services grind to a long-halt. You have a post box? If you’re unlucky enough, locally, to be in the apparently arbitrarily chosen B foyer, a virtually comprehensible letter in obscure dialect will have told you that your mail is not guaranteed to be in your box until an hour later than for those in the A category. Apparently volumes of mail have decided what foyer boxes would get preferential treatment - an unreal criterion, as some within both sections with have both higher and lower volumes of mail.
This is not a pattern of the improved services and customer relations that NZ Post is misleading the public about. It is all about NZ Post cost-cutting for profit - hardly the same thing. Its lack of receptiveness to customer feedback also entails its playing loudly piped pop songs, advertisements and gabbling DJs from speakers placed just above queued customers’ heads - and ignoring feedback asking for this to be dispensed with. It is not alone here. There is no possible excuse, in an age where people are more and more affected by stress-related noise, for banks, post-offices and airports - let alone restaurants and shops - playing crass and overloud rubbishy muzak directed at customers who can’t avoid it. The assumption that most people now operate at adolescent level is not one for public institutions to make. They are insulting their customers.
On it goes. And don't look to the New Zealand Post website for help. It’s confusing, doesn't answer appropriate search questions, and is, in my experience, basically useless. However, it claims it is making life “that bit easier”. Hasn't anyone told them? But perhaps someone got a large bonus for the year, just for that slogan alone.
Prices up, services curtailed and far more complicated for the public? This is a business now performing considerably more poorly. So much for the virtues of privatization. But a pat on the back for its live telephone help - its staff being exceptional. And I’ll bet on those the new trolleys - eventually!
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