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Challenging our media mediocrity
Jan. 10th, 2012 | 10:18 pm
Challenging our media mediocrity
Australian writer and commentator Bill Muehlenberg recently wrote a fine column questioning whether nation states simply drifted into decline, stagnation and degeneracy, or whether the process is aided by those actively seeking to undermine and subvert them. New Zealanders seem particularly unaware in this respect - but then our education system has seen to that. Its curricula, limited in both breadth and depth, are so far removed from standards of excellence that being able to recognise icons and graphic art counts as literacy, according to PISA assessments. Answers are virtually implied the way NCEA formula-type questions are written, and it's fine to use texting-type language as an example of competence in English.
All the same, given the long sabotaging of our education system, even denying young children access to phonic teaching methods, so that many thousands belatedly and often unsuccessfully have had to be enrolled in remedial teaching programmes, the damage already well and truly done, I was surprised when a commentator assumed that perhaps the switch to the absurd Look and Say method (where children, ignorant even of the sounds of the alphabet, were expected to recognise whole words) was an innocent experiment.
No doubt most teachers, uncritically embracing whatever destructive theorising originated from our predominately leftwing Ministry of Education, were simply doing as they were told. However, as Bill Muehlenberg points out, when a country is so undermined that it is set for self-destruction, this is not simply a question of inevitability. On the contrary, one of the great lessons available to students of history is that this valuable subject illuminates the path back through time to where groups dedicated to implement a destructive agenda worked obsessively to subvert their societies.
Our enemy has been cultural Marxism with its aim to eventually destroy the free West, using slogans such as “diversity”, “inclusive”, “relevant”, “progressive” to undermine our stability and fundamentally cohesive values. These, while strongly supporting the rights of individuals to make their own choices, are nevertheless basically essential for Western democracies to survive.
A sobering commentary on what has happened to this country is that, given the lack of genuine intellectual commentary from apparently under-informed and lazy media, we very much lack highly intelligent, well-informed analytical writers and commentators to warn us of the fact that we are actually genuinely under threat, both from without and within.
Ian Wishart’s investigative probing has penetrated where few journalists even bothered to look. Well-informed individuals can be found here and there, particularly within the universities, but they largely do not write publicly, where it counts. Even if they tried, their contributions would probably be suppressed, so trivialised and politically influenced have become our mainstream media.
Far superior thinking to that from largely second-rate newspaper columnists, for example, and from National Radio’s supposedly “liberal”, but basically left-wing commentary can be found in some community newspapers, such as Franklin’s Elocal, ZB commentators such as Leighton Smith, and some of the better blogs and talkback radio. HIS/HERS own Richard Prosser’s valuable columns on our now extraordinary vulnerability to outside attack are an indictment on the mainstream media, as well as on all the political parties in recent years. The activist Helen Clark's destructive influence as head of an anti-American, pro-communist China, Labour Party faction very much helped turn a party once dedicated to representing the working class to one infiltrated by left-wing academics with a quite different, socially damaging agenda undermining our social mores, ostensibly dedicated to global disarmament, but in actuality wedded to the highly destructive One World movement, incompatible with Western democracy.
Australia puts us to shame. Its highly intelligent, well-educated political commentators publicly stand up to confront the hijacking of Australian society, both from without and within. The eminent, widely respected Professor David Flint, who, among his many distinctions and positions held, was former Chairman of the Australian Press Council and the Australian Broadcasting Authority; has an award as a World Jurist Outstanding Legal Scholar; and is the public face of the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, has pointed out the importance of our constitutional safeguards against the creeping State. His lucid, brilliant analysis of the dangers which now face New Zealand, even more than Australia, are to be found in his unmissable Twilight of the Elites, and in Malice in Media Land.
It may interest those many thoroughly disillusioned New Zealanders at a loss to any longer know for whom to vote at the next election that Professor Flint has unequivocally written in support of our own 100 Days - Claiming Back New Zealand initiative - to be found at www.100days.co.nz - the only way forward offering a well-planned, practical, ongoing strategy to reclaim this country for New Zealanders.
One of Bill Muehlenberg’s most important reminders is of the 1963 US congressional record listing the 45 goals of those bent on overthrowing the US, based on an earlier book written by an FBI analyst. Among them, deserving widespread coverage, is the move to get control of the schools to use them as transition pathways for socialism and current communist propaganda, to soften the curriculum, get hold of teacher organizations, and put the party line into textbooks. Equally important? To infiltrate the press, get control of book review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions, gain control of key positions in radio, TV and motion pictures… to discredit the American Constitution - the list goes on.
If we substitute the institution of the monarchy, and the safeguard it provides, we encounter a level of adolescent comment from columnists who would very probably not regard themselves as subversive or politicized, but whose lack of respect and ridiculing of individuals shows an extraordinary degree of ignorance – plus that crudeness now found throughout much increasingly arrogant commentary – dismayingly so in particular, but not exclusively, among women columnists.
For example, in the only too common pillorying of Prince Charles, ignoring the many charities he heads for youth in Britain; his care to conserve the heritage of fine British buildings against the invasion of the same minimalist, “brutal” style of architecture which afflicts this country; and his fight to have the teaching of history reinstated in British schools, we find the Dominion-Post’s Linda Burgess’s snide and silly comments on Charles’s pride in showing viewers Highgate… “ Heaven help us if some pollen gets up the royal nose”… and referring to a “snot-rag”. Rosemary McLeod condescendingly patronises him as a “goofball” in a generally unpleasant putdown. The predictably down-market Jane Bowron feels free to call the hard- working heir to the throne “the old jug-eared one” and to welcome “a sickbag with a picture of Kate and Wills on the front…” Karl du Fresne, while disparaging the British tabloid press, himself loftily calls Charles “a twit”. Journalists obviously feel superior people. The Nelson Mail editorialist also feels free to call Charles “a buffoon”.
Accurate? Objective? Independent? David Flint’s highly readable Malice in Media Land well illustrates why today’s mainstream media are now regarded as tainted institutions, while highlighting “the almost suicidal lack of balance of opinion in public broadcasting”.
The challenging of our trivializing, rude, embarrassingly sheep-like commentators, unelected and unaccountable participants in the political process, has become well overdue - given the very real urgency of these times.
© Amy Brooke
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Unprincipled political parties
Jun. 15th, 2011 | 02:17 pm
Failure, incompetence or scandal
We are, as a democracy, in deep trouble. One would have to be a far Right or Left ideologist, an ever-wedded National, ACT, Labour Party or deep Green supporter not to realise this. The Maori Party, so successfully involved in deal-making with the now compromisedand discredited National Party doesn't make any pretence of being part of a democracy. Furthermore it plans to hijack a possible new constitution - not a move coming from the country itself, but one very much politically motivated. This party’s self-interest and machinations against majority New Zealanders to gain as much power, wealth, concessions and special treatment for its very few, radicalised fellow travellers, is not even supported by majority Maori.
One-eyed party supporters are not those who win elections. It is uncommitted New Zealanders who decide these, reluctantly forced to look at what has happened to the country since their last efforts to throw out this present government’s damaging predecessors and to work out whether leaving in National, its equally, if not more damaging, successor will be the lesser of two evils - or whether it is more urgent to teach National a well-deserved lesson. Invariably, because of their feeling of powerlessness, their knowledge that nothing they can say and do in between elections makes any difference to politicians with the bit between their teeth, most New Zealanders now find it painful to face the political, social, and economic realities of the mess in which successive governments have landed our country.
The writing is on the wall of course, worldwide, against the hijacking of democracy. New Zealand is no exception and change is on its way, although it will not happen overnight. However our strictly apolitical, non-aligned non-interest group movement - 100 Days - Claiming Back New Zealand - www.100days.co.nz <http://www.100days.co.nz> is already gathering momentum.
The essential factor of this initiative is that it is so very simple, so very achievable, in spite of what will be vigorous and determined opposition from most MPs. But nothing on the political scene has the force of an idea whose time has come. And come it will. The most stable, highly individual and successful democratic country in the world, conservative in the best sense - that of the Swiss people - finally added this brilliant, and, in hindsight, so very obvious provision to their constitution, 160 years ago. In spite of the fact that they had arguably the oldest democracy of all, they decided that too much power still remained in the hands of politicians. Hence the scrutiny period they demanded before any law passed by Parliament could be put into operation. Their reserving the right to say yes or no, for the Swiss themselves to make the final decisions , has turned out to be that country's greatest asset.
In contrast, I was very much struck at an annual Summersounds Symposium by the insistence of two right-wing politicians that New Zealanders shouldn't be allowed to make the decisions of the day which affect them. Under discussion was the man-made global warming rort, where a former MP said that, listening to both sides of the debate, he couldn't make up his mind - even though he thought he did more reading on such issues than most other MPs. Most in fact do not read even highly important material to any great extent. Their crowded meetings; travelling; electorate demands; dealing with, let alone reading mountainous correspondence; family obligations, trips abroad negate this possibility.
Nor are we largely dealing with reflective, well-educated, well-read, practical individuals. What characterises most MPs is that they are persuasive talkers with that facility with words described as fluency, “the most dangerous gift of all”, more commonly known as the gift-of-the-gab and found particularly among ex-teachers, academics, ambitious local farmer-politicians, economists, traders, media personnel. Contrast these with those running small businesses, employing others -(and increasingly overloaded with government-imposed compliance costs) - the very lifeblood of the economy - together with the working and middle-class, the professions, mother and fathers - doing the actual hands-on work.
The contempt in which MPs as a whole are now held is largely well-deserved. Some undoubtedly enter Parliament to make a difference. How long that lasts can be seen by the former MP mentioned above still insisting that only MPs should decide the country’s. No, he didn't have a clue which side was right on this issue, but boasted that he was “a good party man”.
In fact he was a yes-man, keen to remain within the circles of power even if it meant doing as he was told by a party leader with an agenda of his or her own. And we have moved from the frying pan, exchanging the damagingly autocratic Helen Clark for the equally autocratic, if smarmier “sexiest male politician” John Key who apparently views women according to whether they are “hot” and shows an inappropriate degree of self-esteem for an individual with so limited a background. Key compelled concerned National MPs to do as they were told in relation to the infamous anti-smacking legislation and our hugely damaging Emissions Trading Scheme with its fake “science”. Now, in spite of previously pledging not to proceed with the appallingly undemocratic Marine and Coastal Area Bill- if most New Zealanders were against it - he apparently had no intention of keeping his word. “Two-faced” is the description of a former fan.
Is it any surprise that political columnist Tracy Watkins can write; “It is so rare for MPs and ministers to leave in their prime that the questions (re Simon Power’s abrupt departure from politics) were understandable. The wheels out of the beehive are usually greased with failure, incompetence or scandal.“ She could have added or well-oiled, with promises of lucrative positions, directorships on board, diplomatic postings, key positions in corporations. Yet taxpayers, barely making ends meet, are obliged to pay for the rest of their lives for former MPs perks and air travel concessions - such as those of the wealthy, well-connected, much-travelled businesswoman Jenny Shipley’s, to take one example. Where is the fairness in these arrangements that sanctimonious ,arguably greedy parliamentarians managed to contrive as their due to compensate for their supposed unemployment after Parliament?
So many New Zealanders would like to have believed in the free market concept, knowing the reality of the oppressive Left throughout the 20th century. However, realisation has come that no, a rising tide it doesn't lift all boats; that corporate capture of the market invariably works against and even destroys small businesses; that the multi-million-dollar handshakes chief executives of big corporations award themselves are no more justified than the fact that America's 74 richest citizens receive more income than the bottom 19 million; and that the financial crisis showed the world that the move rightwards in these last two decades has produced as much corruption as its former lurch left.
A pox on both their houses sums up most New Zealanders’ reaction to our major parties and their unprincipled wheeler-dealing. However, those looking for a genuinely practical and achievable way to reclaim our country from what has become a political climate of self-interest can find it in the 100 Days movement. The alternative - giving up ? That doesn't sound like New Zealanders
We are, as a democracy, in deep trouble. One would have to be a far Right or Left ideologist, an ever-wedded National, ACT, Labour Party or deep Green supporter not to realise this. The Maori Party, so successfully involved in deal-making with the now compromisedand discredited National Party doesn't make any pretence of being part of a democracy. Furthermore it plans to hijack a possible new constitution - not a move coming from the country itself, but one very much politically motivated. This party’s self-interest and machinations against majority New Zealanders to gain as much power, wealth, concessions and special treatment for its very few, radicalised fellow travellers, is not even supported by majority Maori.
One-eyed party supporters are not those who win elections. It is uncommitted New Zealanders who decide these, reluctantly forced to look at what has happened to the country since their last efforts to throw out this present government’s damaging predecessors and to work out whether leaving in National, its equally, if not more damaging, successor will be the lesser of two evils - or whether it is more urgent to teach National a well-deserved lesson. Invariably, because of their feeling of powerlessness, their knowledge that nothing they can say and do in between elections makes any difference to politicians with the bit between their teeth, most New Zealanders now find it painful to face the political, social, and economic realities of the mess in which successive governments have landed our country.
The writing is on the wall of course, worldwide, against the hijacking of democracy. New Zealand is no exception and change is on its way, although it will not happen overnight. However our strictly apolitical, non-aligned non-interest group movement - 100 Days - Claiming Back New Zealand - www.100days.co.nz <http://www.100days.co.nz> is already gathering momentum.
The essential factor of this initiative is that it is so very simple, so very achievable, in spite of what will be vigorous and determined opposition from most MPs. But nothing on the political scene has the force of an idea whose time has come. And come it will. The most stable, highly individual and successful democratic country in the world, conservative in the best sense - that of the Swiss people - finally added this brilliant, and, in hindsight, so very obvious provision to their constitution, 160 years ago. In spite of the fact that they had arguably the oldest democracy of all, they decided that too much power still remained in the hands of politicians. Hence the scrutiny period they demanded before any law passed by Parliament could be put into operation. Their reserving the right to say yes or no, for the Swiss themselves to make the final decisions , has turned out to be that country's greatest asset.
In contrast, I was very much struck at an annual Summersounds Symposium by the insistence of two right-wing politicians that New Zealanders shouldn't be allowed to make the decisions of the day which affect them. Under discussion was the man-made global warming rort, where a former MP said that, listening to both sides of the debate, he couldn't make up his mind - even though he thought he did more reading on such issues than most other MPs. Most in fact do not read even highly important material to any great extent. Their crowded meetings; travelling; electorate demands; dealing with, let alone reading mountainous correspondence; family obligations, trips abroad negate this possibility.
Nor are we largely dealing with reflective, well-educated, well-read, practical individuals. What characterises most MPs is that they are persuasive talkers with that facility with words described as fluency, “the most dangerous gift of all”, more commonly known as the gift-of-the-gab and found particularly among ex-teachers, academics, ambitious local farmer-politicians, economists, traders, media personnel. Contrast these with those running small businesses, employing others -(and increasingly overloaded with government-imposed compliance costs) - the very lifeblood of the economy - together with the working and middle-class, the professions, mother and fathers - doing the actual hands-on work.
The contempt in which MPs as a whole are now held is largely well-deserved. Some undoubtedly enter Parliament to make a difference. How long that lasts can be seen by the former MP mentioned above still insisting that only MPs should decide the country’s. No, he didn't have a clue which side was right on this issue, but boasted that he was “a good party man”.
In fact he was a yes-man, keen to remain within the circles of power even if it meant doing as he was told by a party leader with an agenda of his or her own. And we have moved from the frying pan, exchanging the damagingly autocratic Helen Clark for the equally autocratic, if smarmier “sexiest male politician” John Key who apparently views women according to whether they are “hot” and shows an inappropriate degree of self-esteem for an individual with so limited a background. Key compelled concerned National MPs to do as they were told in relation to the infamous anti-smacking legislation and our hugely damaging Emissions Trading Scheme with its fake “science”. Now, in spite of previously pledging not to proceed with the appallingly undemocratic Marine and Coastal Area Bill- if most New Zealanders were against it - he apparently had no intention of keeping his word. “Two-faced” is the description of a former fan.
Is it any surprise that political columnist Tracy Watkins can write; “It is so rare for MPs and ministers to leave in their prime that the questions (re Simon Power’s abrupt departure from politics) were understandable. The wheels out of the beehive are usually greased with failure, incompetence or scandal.“ She could have added or well-oiled, with promises of lucrative positions, directorships on board, diplomatic postings, key positions in corporations. Yet taxpayers, barely making ends meet, are obliged to pay for the rest of their lives for former MPs perks and air travel concessions - such as those of the wealthy, well-connected, much-travelled businesswoman Jenny Shipley’s, to take one example. Where is the fairness in these arrangements that sanctimonious ,arguably greedy parliamentarians managed to contrive as their due to compensate for their supposed unemployment after Parliament?
So many New Zealanders would like to have believed in the free market concept, knowing the reality of the oppressive Left throughout the 20th century. However, realisation has come that no, a rising tide it doesn't lift all boats; that corporate capture of the market invariably works against and even destroys small businesses; that the multi-million-dollar handshakes chief executives of big corporations award themselves are no more justified than the fact that America's 74 richest citizens receive more income than the bottom 19 million; and that the financial crisis showed the world that the move rightwards in these last two decades has produced as much corruption as its former lurch left.
A pox on both their houses sums up most New Zealanders’ reaction to our major parties and their unprincipled wheeler-dealing. However, those looking for a genuinely practical and achievable way to reclaim our country from what has become a political climate of self-interest can find it in the 100 Days movement. The alternative - giving up ? That doesn't sound like New Zealanders
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Pernicious "sex education"
Jan. 3rd, 2011 | 04:32 pm
Sex education - premature and pernicious
It's called Inclusive Sexuality Education - or, if you want the shorter version - Nga Ahuatanga o te Tane me te Wahine. Oh, the nonsense being inflicted on us all. With every Maori now reportedly part-Maori, many have by far a greater dollop of European ancestry. This isn't a fact the neo-tribal in-groups like aired too much. Shouldn’t we wonder why..? However, all can speak English. So these tedious subtitles in a newly invented, arguably non-authentic Maori, intrude with their message of Maori children being “special” - of, simultaneously, warranting perpetual priority counterbalanced by their supposed racial disadvantage. Inappropriate, they are arguably damaging and condescending in an education system directed towards young New Zealanders from all backgrounds for whom proficiency in English should be the first goal.
The Ministry of Education’s sex education curriculum continues this advocacy of entitlement invoking “the unique place of Maori”, and a politically correct focus on a non-existent country called Aotearoa, invoking the weaving of a korowai gathering its own mauri, etc. Is this pseudo-mysticism, with its intrusion into areas of parental responsibility (while purporting to embrace all New Zealanders’ varying beliefs and diversity, focused through a child’s class teacher) meant to convey legitimacy? It doesn’t. The only expertise any subject teachers can be expected to have is competence in their own fields. Sex education, directed by the state, deliberately divorced from any concern regarding moral or ethical values, is more than intrusive: it’s utterly inappropriate.
So,too, the ministry’s resource booklets wrongly describe the Treaty of Waitangi as representing “the partnership between Maori and Pakeha” - the latter a word many Euro-New Zealanders strongly object to being used to describe them. Jargon and confusion in thinking persist throughout, as in repeating this radicalized claim concerning what never was a partnership. It has long been conceded that the word “partnership” was mis-used in the 90s, for political purposes, to inaccurately describe the interaction between Maori and the Crown (not the “Pakeha”), whereby Maori and colonists were simply guaranteed the same rights, in law, under the Crown.
It is important the ministry be challenged on its activism and jargonized terminology in this and other curriculum statements. These resource books read as if composed by the agenda-laden, assisted by earnest and naive do-gooders who never quite comprehend the consequences of feel-good thinking up against hard-nosed realities. For example, we have the inherent contradiction between “people feel included and valued if the material they receive is in their language and clear of jargon” - ignoring the fact that the phraseology throughout is not only jargonized, but, while ostensibly embracing the diversity of all New Zealand students, unmistakably centre-stages Maori, implying a special cultural superiority over all other ethnic minorities - let alone the European majority. The result is insensitive and tedious.
This supposed Inclusive Sexuality Education should more appropriately be called Intrusive Sexuality Education. It is not so much geared towards the objective, factual content we should expect of important school learning areas, but represents an underlying permissive philosophy which rightly disturbs many parents.
Moreover, although a recent letter from Anne Tolley claims in fine straw-splitting style that this is not a sex education curriculum (seemingly because it also ranges over other politically correct, radicalized topics promoted by those long infiltrating the schools curricula, to preach social change) it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
These resource guides to teachers contain topics, methods of approach, class practice, etc. specifically directed to sex education - and, for curious youngsters, leading to the inevitable experimentation that will follow with its damaging consequences. Instruction on methods of contraception, including the killing of a baby in the womb (“abortion” sounds so much more neutral); minimizing the risk of STDs; targeting, too, that same-sex attraction so very normal and typical of adolescent immaturity: we used to call it getting crushes on someone, and outgrew it with adolescence. Nowadays lesbian and homosexual teachers are ready to pounce to indoctrinate vulnerable teenagers via gay support groups at school.
This is not really education at all - it's manipulation in large doses, not the teaching of subjects of academic or practical value. The takeover of education in this country has led to squeezing out subjects of lasting value which aimed for excellence in education to be available to all, in favour of producing group conformity, of trivialised or politicized topics saturating our young with the leftist views of those who infiltrated our institutions with the intent of undermining them - aided by those who have never really learnt how to think.
How productive is it really for pupils to be expected to reveal and discuss in class their personal knowledge, or lack of knowledge, in relation to their own sexuality; their private interactions with family and friends; concerns such as developing pimples, coping with puberty; being slow to develop physically; for well-meaning teacher to draw naked male and female figures on board, fastening labels to appropriate parts, fitting condoms? What about individual children's feelings of embarrassment, of privacy? Where is the respect for their own and their family’s values and religious beliefs? Why are these sidelined in favour of the intrusion of government-controlled agenda? What about inappropriate and graphic sexual imagery, including descriptions of sexual intercourse, encompassing all possibilities? The teacher is obliged to answer pupils’ questions, and precocious adolescents are highly manipulative and often disruptive.
What about premature sexual information in a mixed-sex class room? The embarrassment of girls, given the readiness of adolescent boys’ arousal, together with their teasing and opportunism in the playground? What about the loss of innocence, so that the end of childhood, together with its very real shield of mental and emotional protection, is too soon taken from so many? And no, it's not good enough to point to sexually saturated media as a convenient excuse to blatantly intrude on our young, removing what should be parents’ rights to assess what is appropriate for their own child to know, and when.
The world is never the same for a child prematurely sexually awakened, embarrassed and confused, distracted from focusing on real learning in areas of considerable intellectual worth. Raging hormones can bring about new avenues of distraction shepherding them into the pop-rock world, that of too early boyfriends and girlfriends, of sexually inviting dressing. How sad now to see enthusiastic media write-ups of school rock concerts with 10-year-olds gyrating on stage; with little eight-year-olds being taught how to play an “air guitar” - the world of childhood being destroyed as the gates open into the trashy world of celebrity idolizing and imitation - regardless of its attack on enduring values, its all too inevitable reliance on alcohol, drugs, and the endorsement of promiscuous lifestyles.
And yes - it's compulsory. Parents can “request” their child to be excluded from a particular element of “sexuality education” in “a health education” programme (weasel words). However, their right to withdraw a child applies to one particular element of instruction (often with their having no idea of when this will occur). It does not apply to the whole course.
When is middle New Zealand going to claim back its own children, to protect them from what has become a now pernicious state education?
It's called Inclusive Sexuality Education - or, if you want the shorter version - Nga Ahuatanga o te Tane me te Wahine. Oh, the nonsense being inflicted on us all. With every Maori now reportedly part-Maori, many have by far a greater dollop of European ancestry. This isn't a fact the neo-tribal in-groups like aired too much. Shouldn’t we wonder why..? However, all can speak English. So these tedious subtitles in a newly invented, arguably non-authentic Maori, intrude with their message of Maori children being “special” - of, simultaneously, warranting perpetual priority counterbalanced by their supposed racial disadvantage. Inappropriate, they are arguably damaging and condescending in an education system directed towards young New Zealanders from all backgrounds for whom proficiency in English should be the first goal.
The Ministry of Education’s sex education curriculum continues this advocacy of entitlement invoking “the unique place of Maori”, and a politically correct focus on a non-existent country called Aotearoa, invoking the weaving of a korowai gathering its own mauri, etc. Is this pseudo-mysticism, with its intrusion into areas of parental responsibility (while purporting to embrace all New Zealanders’ varying beliefs and diversity, focused through a child’s class teacher) meant to convey legitimacy? It doesn’t. The only expertise any subject teachers can be expected to have is competence in their own fields. Sex education, directed by the state, deliberately divorced from any concern regarding moral or ethical values, is more than intrusive: it’s utterly inappropriate.
So,too, the ministry’s resource booklets wrongly describe the Treaty of Waitangi as representing “the partnership between Maori and Pakeha” - the latter a word many Euro-New Zealanders strongly object to being used to describe them. Jargon and confusion in thinking persist throughout, as in repeating this radicalized claim concerning what never was a partnership. It has long been conceded that the word “partnership” was mis-used in the 90s, for political purposes, to inaccurately describe the interaction between Maori and the Crown (not the “Pakeha”), whereby Maori and colonists were simply guaranteed the same rights, in law, under the Crown.
It is important the ministry be challenged on its activism and jargonized terminology in this and other curriculum statements. These resource books read as if composed by the agenda-laden, assisted by earnest and naive do-gooders who never quite comprehend the consequences of feel-good thinking up against hard-nosed realities. For example, we have the inherent contradiction between “people feel included and valued if the material they receive is in their language and clear of jargon” - ignoring the fact that the phraseology throughout is not only jargonized, but, while ostensibly embracing the diversity of all New Zealand students, unmistakably centre-stages Maori, implying a special cultural superiority over all other ethnic minorities - let alone the European majority. The result is insensitive and tedious.
This supposed Inclusive Sexuality Education should more appropriately be called Intrusive Sexuality Education. It is not so much geared towards the objective, factual content we should expect of important school learning areas, but represents an underlying permissive philosophy which rightly disturbs many parents.
Moreover, although a recent letter from Anne Tolley claims in fine straw-splitting style that this is not a sex education curriculum (seemingly because it also ranges over other politically correct, radicalized topics promoted by those long infiltrating the schools curricula, to preach social change) it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
These resource guides to teachers contain topics, methods of approach, class practice, etc. specifically directed to sex education - and, for curious youngsters, leading to the inevitable experimentation that will follow with its damaging consequences. Instruction on methods of contraception, including the killing of a baby in the womb (“abortion” sounds so much more neutral); minimizing the risk of STDs; targeting, too, that same-sex attraction so very normal and typical of adolescent immaturity: we used to call it getting crushes on someone, and outgrew it with adolescence. Nowadays lesbian and homosexual teachers are ready to pounce to indoctrinate vulnerable teenagers via gay support groups at school.
This is not really education at all - it's manipulation in large doses, not the teaching of subjects of academic or practical value. The takeover of education in this country has led to squeezing out subjects of lasting value which aimed for excellence in education to be available to all, in favour of producing group conformity, of trivialised or politicized topics saturating our young with the leftist views of those who infiltrated our institutions with the intent of undermining them - aided by those who have never really learnt how to think.
How productive is it really for pupils to be expected to reveal and discuss in class their personal knowledge, or lack of knowledge, in relation to their own sexuality; their private interactions with family and friends; concerns such as developing pimples, coping with puberty; being slow to develop physically; for well-meaning teacher to draw naked male and female figures on board, fastening labels to appropriate parts, fitting condoms? What about individual children's feelings of embarrassment, of privacy? Where is the respect for their own and their family’s values and religious beliefs? Why are these sidelined in favour of the intrusion of government-controlled agenda? What about inappropriate and graphic sexual imagery, including descriptions of sexual intercourse, encompassing all possibilities? The teacher is obliged to answer pupils’ questions, and precocious adolescents are highly manipulative and often disruptive.
What about premature sexual information in a mixed-sex class room? The embarrassment of girls, given the readiness of adolescent boys’ arousal, together with their teasing and opportunism in the playground? What about the loss of innocence, so that the end of childhood, together with its very real shield of mental and emotional protection, is too soon taken from so many? And no, it's not good enough to point to sexually saturated media as a convenient excuse to blatantly intrude on our young, removing what should be parents’ rights to assess what is appropriate for their own child to know, and when.
The world is never the same for a child prematurely sexually awakened, embarrassed and confused, distracted from focusing on real learning in areas of considerable intellectual worth. Raging hormones can bring about new avenues of distraction shepherding them into the pop-rock world, that of too early boyfriends and girlfriends, of sexually inviting dressing. How sad now to see enthusiastic media write-ups of school rock concerts with 10-year-olds gyrating on stage; with little eight-year-olds being taught how to play an “air guitar” - the world of childhood being destroyed as the gates open into the trashy world of celebrity idolizing and imitation - regardless of its attack on enduring values, its all too inevitable reliance on alcohol, drugs, and the endorsement of promiscuous lifestyles.
And yes - it's compulsory. Parents can “request” their child to be excluded from a particular element of “sexuality education” in “a health education” programme (weasel words). However, their right to withdraw a child applies to one particular element of instruction (often with their having no idea of when this will occur). It does not apply to the whole course.
When is middle New Zealand going to claim back its own children, to protect them from what has become a now pernicious state education?
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Greens re Pike River, Kapiti, Waterview.
Nov. 29th, 2010 | 01:31 pm
Pernicious Greens, Pike River Mine, Kapiti, Waterview.
In the light of the Pike river coalmine tragedy, let’s hope that the role of the Greens and their constant politicizing about damage to the environment - while ignoring the fact that human beings’ lives can be put in jeopardy and their homes, hopes, and happiness destroyed as a result of green fanaticism - begins to attract closer scrutiny.
However, the Green Party doesn't get everything wrong. Of all the political parties it has been the only one to point out the dangers to national sovereignty by the present government's sly resolve to allow Communist Chinese backed, ostensibly independent investment companies, buy New Zealand land. While our former currency trader Prime Minister, no doubt conditioned to operating largely in terms of profit-making, rounds on New Zealanders, accusing them of being North Korean in their implied “xenophobic” attitude, the Greens are the only party to have recognized that this is an issue of national sovereignty. Chinese companies actually owning New Zealand land is equivalent to the Communist Chinese Government’s being able to move in to own New Zealand territory any time it wishes to remove them, and to take control of these companies. Many of these in fact have direct investment in them by the Communist Chinese Party.
There are no doubt many rank and file Greens with a genuine love of their environment. But they are certainly not alone in this - most New Zealanders would feel the same. However, the party has long been well described as like a watermelon - green on the outside and red inside.
This long hijacked party basically has in its sights human beings as the enemy of the environment, of Gaia, the Earth Mother, together with all the pseudo-mystic mumbo-jumbo this involves. When it comes to the dignity, prosperity, and safety of human beings, the Greens hierarchy’s record, inherited from their parent group overseas, is that of turning against their fellows and sacrificing them to their basic Marxist ideology. In this respect they operate from a set of ideological principles and beliefs far different from that mere wish to protect the environment with which few New Zealanders would argue.
Their main recruiting ground has been propagandized schoolchildren, young university students or those still working within universities, those in well-paid media positions; professionals who are agnostic or atheist in their beliefs; arts and soft-option science graduates; often those uncommitted to relationships. Moreover, here and overseas the Greens have long been infiltrated at the parliamentary level with members of the far Left whose basic aim is the destabilization of Western society. Any mischief making which can damage the structure of families, including anti-male propaganda and in particular attacking the authority of fathers, of parents generally - especially conservative parents - such as by means of the anti-smacking campaign, by left-wing propaganda inserted into school social studies, Englist teaching and sex education programmes: all of these have long been grist to the underlying ideology of ecological Marxism.
As a recent article in the Australian News Weekly illustrates (27.11.10) the first of the two core beliefs of the Greens is that the environment or the ecology is to be placed above all else. The second, a Marxist philosophy aim, displays the same totalitarian tendencies of all other forms of Marxism when applied to political movements. This is “the subordination of the individual and the impulse to rid society of all elements that, in the eyes of the adherents, mars its perfection.” To the Greens, humans are only one species among others.” In fact, when a clash of claims emerges, in Green philosophy, human beings simply don't count.
There is no doubt that, with regard to the consents issued for Pike River Coal Ltd by the then Labour Minister of Conservation Chris Carter in 2004, the influence of the Greens, who are implacably imposed to mining, was strongly felt. I quote from a green website, the reasoning of which is so ridiculous that the word rational simply doesn't apply.
“It is very difficult to see where the benefit [of mining] is, unless one accepts the word of the mining industry itself. The government often parrots industry figures about job creation and economic opportunities, when in fact, there are very few protections and very little economic opportunity for the broader New Zealand community."”
This evasion of reality and the denial of how much mining contributes to the economic viability of the country and to much needed export earnings could essentially be described as a madness. It is also no doubt one of the reasons why this country remains so very poor, due to the Greens inordinate influence, especially as a party of the far Left constantly pressurizing both major parties when they need the support of a minor party in our disastrous MMP environment.
Overseas, there has been mounting criticism of the fact that in an area known for the dangers of methane gas and the plague of methane buildup, what has been described as Third World mining practices have been taking place in what is meant to be a First World country. The initial restrictions imposed upon the Pike River mine are going to be increasingly questioned
It is coalmining, of course, which has sustained the West Coast community for generations, fundamentally underpinning the West Coast economy - something that well-cushioned Green media propagandists apparently don't comprehend. Questions are going to be increasingly raised in connection with the fact that Green organizations, including Forest and Bird, and Greenpeace Aotearoa New Zealand (the radicalized version of our official name says it all) together with other far Left groups may, by their badgering and insistence on the imposing of ultimately damaging conditions, have had an inordinate and finally disastrous effect on the structure and development of the Pike River mine. Its owners found themselves having to meet the demands of the equally deep green Department of Conservation (well described as the government New Zealanders never voted for). Local Maori - never themselves historically renowned for their own conservation interests - applied constant pressurethe sort of centre staging we have become used to. (When hand-picked kaumatua were invited to escort live Archey’s frogs from the Paparoa forest area where the mine is situated, Peter Grove, a well-informed correspondent, recalls that the entire exercise resulted in disaster for the frogs in that they either died or got lost. Grove wonders whether the kaumatua concerned would have ever heard of Archey's frogs, let alone had the slightest concern for their survival.(
The fact is that New Zealanders have become tired not only of the constant posturing involved, but of the excessive demands of the green environmentalist movement which is not only damaging the economy, but destroying people's own personalised environments, those they have long cared for with love and attention, even with their whole lives’ investment - their very own homes and those of their families and friends.
A very good example of this at the moment is the current proposal for a revised route for the planned Kapiti Coast express way. New Zealand Transport Agency regional director Jenny Chetwynd is reported as announcing that up to 86 properties, including 50 houses would be “ affected” by the changes. This bland bureaucratese avoids the fact that people who own these homes will be utterly devastated. Their houses will be destroyed to make way for the new southern route of the expressway. “We have planted trees and seen them mature,” said one desperate homeowner. “We do not want to go. We are happy here and want to stay.” His neighbour, who received a guarantee from the district council five years ago, before buying his property, stating that there were no roading claims that would affect his own four acres, bought his property thinking that they would be there for ever. An elderly couple have spent 20 years developing their house and garden.
Too bad about their environment. Who cares? Not the district council who spent about 10 years “negotiating with iwi to avoid “an urupa" near the Waikanae river. Well, obviously they got their priorities right -“ iwi sensitivities” now invariably come first, in the minds of politicians and of officialdom, over the rights of all other New Zealanders. You don't know what “an urupa" is - and the council doesn't bother to explain in its media report? The answer is that a "urupa” is a Maori burial ground. But haven't either burial grounds elsewhere in New Zealand been simply moved to make way for new roading? Ah yes: but this is a Maori burial ground and Maori are apparently entitled to a more special consideration regarding the bones of their ancestors than Europeans. However, any sympathy we might feel or might not for such a notion should certainly invoke a niggling doubt whether the bones of dead ancestors should take priority over the lives and loving care put into their homes by those who are alive, paying taxes and rates, and deserving of protection both from the State and from their local councils.
Furthermore, why have both central and local governments not been informed that - (according to Jean Jackson, a highly ranked historian of Ngai Tahu descent who has considerable doubts about the activities of this opportunistic tribe, writing knowledgeably concerning both these and tribal history - there is evidence that Maori willingly sold graveyards, removing both chiefs’ bones and the tapu placed there, before they departed.
One would think there must be an extraordinarily important reason to remove both families and elderly New Zealanders from the homes and environment they have loved and cared for. The explanation of the council, which has of course not spent 10 years negotiating with the homeowners concerned, is that in this way “several key areas, including conservation land and sensitive iwi land have been avoided.”
New Zealanders at large should not be putting up with this. Quite simply, people, all people, not simply and primarily radical Maori activists (by no means representing majority of Maori) and deep Green fanatics, should take priority in decision-making have their wishes respected. However, highly politicized representations take priority over so-called ordinary New Zealanders - home-makers, garden lovers. The capitulation of councils and government to this kind centre-staging and politicized arm-twisting is contemptible.
So, too, with the proposal for the Waterview Connection as part of the Auckland Southern Western motorway extension which blithely opted to destroy people’s homes in order that a very small part of the mangrove swamps around Auckland should not be disturbed. Vigorous opposition by local residents trimmed back the proposal, but houses are still to be needlessly taken with the same disregard for everything a home means to families and individuals.
With the next election looming in 2011, New Zealanders need to be increasingly aware that the Green Party actually views people as more expendable than the environment, an extremist position which deifies the environment and ethnic minorities over civilized values and societies which can only ever be self-sustainable in terms of their productivity, of industries (including mining) of manufacturing, and farming. The Green belief in what has been called “a coercive utopianism” basically “advocates high levels of state ownership in the economy and an expanded role for the bureaucracy, including an extensive international regulatory bureaucracy” - i.e. our former socialist Prime Minister Helen Clark's One World Government.
The Greens are by no means a harmless group of well-meaning tree huggers, though they no doubt harbour many of Lenin's “useful fools”. They are a high tax party constantly advocating increased taxation with punitive outcomes attached to wealth generation and economic growth. Their excessive prioritising of the environment over people has lead to the adoption of quasi-fascist anti-people policies. For example, not only are open fires to heat homes in winter now disallowed, but even the installation of clean-air wood burners in new homes is banned by both Nelson and Hawke's Bay city councils, due to the pressure of leftist council bureaucrats. Yet the Greens are well aware of the punitive price of electricity -and even its unavailability, with the failure of electrical supplies in winter, a most important part of the year for the elderly, for families, for the ill and for the frail.
When it comes to the point that people are disregarded in value, their lives, livelihoods and homes endangered because of the Greens’ advocacies, and because of their pressurizing of government and local bodies, then we should be well aware of the damage their fanaticism is causing the country. All other New Zealanders should be questioning the consequences of their prohibitive interference in development and industry, in their opposition to mining and other wealth-generating industries, in their undue prioritizing of conservation land, of mangrove swamps and long-past Maori burial sites from which both tapu and bones can be removed - over, in essence, what ET once described in the phrase that resonates in all our minds as quite simply “home”.
Brooke
In the light of the Pike river coalmine tragedy, let’s hope that the role of the Greens and their constant politicizing about damage to the environment - while ignoring the fact that human beings’ lives can be put in jeopardy and their homes, hopes, and happiness destroyed as a result of green fanaticism - begins to attract closer scrutiny.
However, the Green Party doesn't get everything wrong. Of all the political parties it has been the only one to point out the dangers to national sovereignty by the present government's sly resolve to allow Communist Chinese backed, ostensibly independent investment companies, buy New Zealand land. While our former currency trader Prime Minister, no doubt conditioned to operating largely in terms of profit-making, rounds on New Zealanders, accusing them of being North Korean in their implied “xenophobic” attitude, the Greens are the only party to have recognized that this is an issue of national sovereignty. Chinese companies actually owning New Zealand land is equivalent to the Communist Chinese Government’s being able to move in to own New Zealand territory any time it wishes to remove them, and to take control of these companies. Many of these in fact have direct investment in them by the Communist Chinese Party.
There are no doubt many rank and file Greens with a genuine love of their environment. But they are certainly not alone in this - most New Zealanders would feel the same. However, the party has long been well described as like a watermelon - green on the outside and red inside.
This long hijacked party basically has in its sights human beings as the enemy of the environment, of Gaia, the Earth Mother, together with all the pseudo-mystic mumbo-jumbo this involves. When it comes to the dignity, prosperity, and safety of human beings, the Greens hierarchy’s record, inherited from their parent group overseas, is that of turning against their fellows and sacrificing them to their basic Marxist ideology. In this respect they operate from a set of ideological principles and beliefs far different from that mere wish to protect the environment with which few New Zealanders would argue.
Their main recruiting ground has been propagandized schoolchildren, young university students or those still working within universities, those in well-paid media positions; professionals who are agnostic or atheist in their beliefs; arts and soft-option science graduates; often those uncommitted to relationships. Moreover, here and overseas the Greens have long been infiltrated at the parliamentary level with members of the far Left whose basic aim is the destabilization of Western society. Any mischief making which can damage the structure of families, including anti-male propaganda and in particular attacking the authority of fathers, of parents generally - especially conservative parents - such as by means of the anti-smacking campaign, by left-wing propaganda inserted into school social studies, Englist teaching and sex education programmes: all of these have long been grist to the underlying ideology of ecological Marxism.
As a recent article in the Australian News Weekly illustrates (27.11.10) the first of the two core beliefs of the Greens is that the environment or the ecology is to be placed above all else. The second, a Marxist philosophy aim, displays the same totalitarian tendencies of all other forms of Marxism when applied to political movements. This is “the subordination of the individual and the impulse to rid society of all elements that, in the eyes of the adherents, mars its perfection.” To the Greens, humans are only one species among others.” In fact, when a clash of claims emerges, in Green philosophy, human beings simply don't count.
There is no doubt that, with regard to the consents issued for Pike River Coal Ltd by the then Labour Minister of Conservation Chris Carter in 2004, the influence of the Greens, who are implacably imposed to mining, was strongly felt. I quote from a green website, the reasoning of which is so ridiculous that the word rational simply doesn't apply.
“It is very difficult to see where the benefit [of mining] is, unless one accepts the word of the mining industry itself. The government often parrots industry figures about job creation and economic opportunities, when in fact, there are very few protections and very little economic opportunity for the broader New Zealand community."”
This evasion of reality and the denial of how much mining contributes to the economic viability of the country and to much needed export earnings could essentially be described as a madness. It is also no doubt one of the reasons why this country remains so very poor, due to the Greens inordinate influence, especially as a party of the far Left constantly pressurizing both major parties when they need the support of a minor party in our disastrous MMP environment.
Overseas, there has been mounting criticism of the fact that in an area known for the dangers of methane gas and the plague of methane buildup, what has been described as Third World mining practices have been taking place in what is meant to be a First World country. The initial restrictions imposed upon the Pike River mine are going to be increasingly questioned
It is coalmining, of course, which has sustained the West Coast community for generations, fundamentally underpinning the West Coast economy - something that well-cushioned Green media propagandists apparently don't comprehend. Questions are going to be increasingly raised in connection with the fact that Green organizations, including Forest and Bird, and Greenpeace Aotearoa New Zealand (the radicalized version of our official name says it all) together with other far Left groups may, by their badgering and insistence on the imposing of ultimately damaging conditions, have had an inordinate and finally disastrous effect on the structure and development of the Pike River mine. Its owners found themselves having to meet the demands of the equally deep green Department of Conservation (well described as the government New Zealanders never voted for). Local Maori - never themselves historically renowned for their own conservation interests - applied constant pressurethe sort of centre staging we have become used to. (When hand-picked kaumatua were invited to escort live Archey’s frogs from the Paparoa forest area where the mine is situated, Peter Grove, a well-informed correspondent, recalls that the entire exercise resulted in disaster for the frogs in that they either died or got lost. Grove wonders whether the kaumatua concerned would have ever heard of Archey's frogs, let alone had the slightest concern for their survival.(
The fact is that New Zealanders have become tired not only of the constant posturing involved, but of the excessive demands of the green environmentalist movement which is not only damaging the economy, but destroying people's own personalised environments, those they have long cared for with love and attention, even with their whole lives’ investment - their very own homes and those of their families and friends.
A very good example of this at the moment is the current proposal for a revised route for the planned Kapiti Coast express way. New Zealand Transport Agency regional director Jenny Chetwynd is reported as announcing that up to 86 properties, including 50 houses would be “ affected” by the changes. This bland bureaucratese avoids the fact that people who own these homes will be utterly devastated. Their houses will be destroyed to make way for the new southern route of the expressway. “We have planted trees and seen them mature,” said one desperate homeowner. “We do not want to go. We are happy here and want to stay.” His neighbour, who received a guarantee from the district council five years ago, before buying his property, stating that there were no roading claims that would affect his own four acres, bought his property thinking that they would be there for ever. An elderly couple have spent 20 years developing their house and garden.
Too bad about their environment. Who cares? Not the district council who spent about 10 years “negotiating with iwi to avoid “an urupa" near the Waikanae river. Well, obviously they got their priorities right -“ iwi sensitivities” now invariably come first, in the minds of politicians and of officialdom, over the rights of all other New Zealanders. You don't know what “an urupa" is - and the council doesn't bother to explain in its media report? The answer is that a "urupa” is a Maori burial ground. But haven't either burial grounds elsewhere in New Zealand been simply moved to make way for new roading? Ah yes: but this is a Maori burial ground and Maori are apparently entitled to a more special consideration regarding the bones of their ancestors than Europeans. However, any sympathy we might feel or might not for such a notion should certainly invoke a niggling doubt whether the bones of dead ancestors should take priority over the lives and loving care put into their homes by those who are alive, paying taxes and rates, and deserving of protection both from the State and from their local councils.
Furthermore, why have both central and local governments not been informed that - (according to Jean Jackson, a highly ranked historian of Ngai Tahu descent who has considerable doubts about the activities of this opportunistic tribe, writing knowledgeably concerning both these and tribal history - there is evidence that Maori willingly sold graveyards, removing both chiefs’ bones and the tapu placed there, before they departed.
One would think there must be an extraordinarily important reason to remove both families and elderly New Zealanders from the homes and environment they have loved and cared for. The explanation of the council, which has of course not spent 10 years negotiating with the homeowners concerned, is that in this way “several key areas, including conservation land and sensitive iwi land have been avoided.”
New Zealanders at large should not be putting up with this. Quite simply, people, all people, not simply and primarily radical Maori activists (by no means representing majority of Maori) and deep Green fanatics, should take priority in decision-making have their wishes respected. However, highly politicized representations take priority over so-called ordinary New Zealanders - home-makers, garden lovers. The capitulation of councils and government to this kind centre-staging and politicized arm-twisting is contemptible.
So, too, with the proposal for the Waterview Connection as part of the Auckland Southern Western motorway extension which blithely opted to destroy people’s homes in order that a very small part of the mangrove swamps around Auckland should not be disturbed. Vigorous opposition by local residents trimmed back the proposal, but houses are still to be needlessly taken with the same disregard for everything a home means to families and individuals.
With the next election looming in 2011, New Zealanders need to be increasingly aware that the Green Party actually views people as more expendable than the environment, an extremist position which deifies the environment and ethnic minorities over civilized values and societies which can only ever be self-sustainable in terms of their productivity, of industries (including mining) of manufacturing, and farming. The Green belief in what has been called “a coercive utopianism” basically “advocates high levels of state ownership in the economy and an expanded role for the bureaucracy, including an extensive international regulatory bureaucracy” - i.e. our former socialist Prime Minister Helen Clark's One World Government.
The Greens are by no means a harmless group of well-meaning tree huggers, though they no doubt harbour many of Lenin's “useful fools”. They are a high tax party constantly advocating increased taxation with punitive outcomes attached to wealth generation and economic growth. Their excessive prioritising of the environment over people has lead to the adoption of quasi-fascist anti-people policies. For example, not only are open fires to heat homes in winter now disallowed, but even the installation of clean-air wood burners in new homes is banned by both Nelson and Hawke's Bay city councils, due to the pressure of leftist council bureaucrats. Yet the Greens are well aware of the punitive price of electricity -and even its unavailability, with the failure of electrical supplies in winter, a most important part of the year for the elderly, for families, for the ill and for the frail.
When it comes to the point that people are disregarded in value, their lives, livelihoods and homes endangered because of the Greens’ advocacies, and because of their pressurizing of government and local bodies, then we should be well aware of the damage their fanaticism is causing the country. All other New Zealanders should be questioning the consequences of their prohibitive interference in development and industry, in their opposition to mining and other wealth-generating industries, in their undue prioritizing of conservation land, of mangrove swamps and long-past Maori burial sites from which both tapu and bones can be removed - over, in essence, what ET once described in the phrase that resonates in all our minds as quite simply “home”.
Brooke
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Parliament’s tribute insensitive
Nov. 29th, 2010 | 01:24 pm
I'm not the only New Zealander who was stunned and perturbed by the fact that when Parliament stood to remember the 29 fathers, husbands, sons and brothers whose lives have been lost in the tragic mining disaster in Greymouth, the Maori Party used this occasion to inappropriately grab the limelight.
It was incredible that members of this radicalized minority, who by no means represent mainstream Maori, should have the nerve to expect Parliament to sing a well-known European hymn in Maori, rather than how it was composed and meant to be sung, in English. It was equally incredible that Parliament actually agreed. What a sell-out of integrity.
If the Maori party were down at Greymouth offering help and support, the mainstream media forgot to tell us. But they didn't lose an opportunity to try and utterly inappropriately grab this tragic occasion to centre-stage themselves.
How great thou artis not a Maori song. Not one of the miners who have died in the mine appeared to be of predominantly Maori descent. Not one apparently had a Maori name. It is quite disgraceful that Parliament should so insensitively insult these men from New Zealand’s majority European culture by allowing a radicalized minor party to take over a well-known European hymn and sing it in a language most (if any) of these miners did not speak and would not even have understood.
How incredible that what should have been a prayerful tribute to them was not even delivered in their own language... And what poor judgment our supposed representatives showed by not pointing this out and insisting that a prayer for these men, as a celebration of their lives, should be delivered in their own language. Apparently all MPs went along with this, although by far the majority would not have known any Maori translation of this hymn, were obviously following a cue system, and had obviously practised before the TV cameras filmed them.
This should have been their time to think.
The now constant inappropriate thrusting of a highly politicized and radicalized minority (of what are now all part-)Maori people into the media limelight is achieving a well-deserved backlash from the majority of the population, including, to their credit, many Maori themselves. But as long as either of the two main parties is scrabbling for the tribal Maori vote, their subservience to an unrepresentative minority of Maori activists will continue.
National is beginning to be particularly disliked in this respect.It is regarded as having betrayed the electorate, since it came into power pledging quite the opposite. What can now reasonably regarded as its sheer opportunism, if not venality, has dismayed and even sickened many long-time National supporters. There is a limit to how long its leader's folksy personal charm is going to compensate for how it has basically deceived the electorate.
Sickening was the word I heard applied by a shocked viewer watching this performance on screen. It was also pointed out that not only is a Maori version of our national anthem inappropriately sung first at international rugby matches, taking precedence over the language of majority New Zealanders, but most Maori All Blacks don't even know the Maori words, or if they do, can't be bothered singing our anthem - in either Maori or English. Their performance is lamentable, given the pride overseas rugby teams show in their own anthems, singing them vigorously and with obvious feeling.
Radical Maoridom’s assumption of entitlement has reached the stage of sheer hubris. Very many New Zealanders are feeling they have more than had enough. The pseudo-mysticism, the spiritualized mumbo-jumbo, the personal escorts of kaumatua to accompany the transfer of various threatened species around the country ( including those Maori showed no particular interest in protecting) the trips overseas to remove ghosts from embassies, to officiously bring back traded heads their own ancestors removed; the hijacking of nearly every occasion, every new naming of ships, place names - government programmes and courses offering: all now virtually kowtow to politicized Maori pressure.
The intrusion of supposedly special Maori entitlement into so many aspects of New Zealand culture has reached such a deplorable state of affairs, that when the mother of a neighbouring friend was recently killed in a car accident on our main state highway, her children found out later that a local Maori minister, without asking their permission or even letting them know, had intruded on their family to the extent of visiting the site to supposedly remove some sort of tapu on the place where their mother was killed. She was European: none of the family are Maori.They understandably resented such a high-handed action. To those who question why this extraordinarily inappropriate intrusion ever took place, the answer came that obviously being able to tap into special funding was the reason.
Mana, or the constant demand for prestige and special recognition tiresomely and constantly invoked by activist Maoris is one anathema to other cultures where it can be equated with extreme egoism, snobbery, self-promotion and an inordinate demand for attention. Moreover, as the cynical have observed, this nebulous concept seems to be well satisfied with monetary compensation. Mana equals money has come to sum up the perception at large.
Moreover, while now extremely wealthy Maori tribes could well afford to run special language programmes for their own people and their own children, the taxpayer is still being continually bled dry to fund all things Maori. It is almost incredible that this funding amounted to approximately $260 million dollars last year, for the now largely reinvented Maori language promotion alone. This, while hospitals cannot afford to maintain cancer treatment facilities, even in the capital city, for child cancer patients and their families; while all over the country district health boards have to remove people from hospital waiting lists because of constraints on health funding; while our Armed Forces are expected to make savings of $40 million - and we supposedly can't even afford to pay $30 million each (as columnist Richard Prosser points out in his excellent column in this month’s Investigate) for the vital air combat jet fighters which should be a priority to provide vital cover for New Zealand solders in military manouevres.
But we can afford up to $260 million dollar annually, to promote a language than not even the majority of part-Maori - with their recognition of far greater priorities for them on the world scene - want to learn to speak? However, the neo-tribal power groups, with their promise of bloc voting for the political party of their choice, are desperate for young part-Maori children to be steeped in this reinvented Maori. The advantage to them is the ongoing recruitment of activists for their anachronistic and power-seeking neo-tribes.
However, the goodwill of many New Zealanders towards all things Maori, and a willingness to learn at least some of the language is rapidly evaporating, in light of the continual gracelessness and anti-“Pakeha” disparagement from Maori spokesmen - and other grandstanding radical activists. I recall the late great Frank Haden, a legendary newspaper man, with a now rare ability to ignore political correctness, recounting how willingly he had begun to learn a little Maori - and how he even more willingly deliberately abandoned the process as he became fed up with the constant thanklessness and distortion of our shared history by radicalized, ever thankless Maori activists.
Treasury Secretary John Whitehead, in a speech about lifting New Zealand's economic growth, recently outlined his concern about the costs both on government on government and on our society in general in a large number of areas, including poor educational performance and failure; the need to lift teacher quality; the growing number on state benefits - and other burdens on government. Oddly enough, he did not mention the constant hemorrhaging of taxpayer dollars on all things directed towards Maori preferment or the estimated seven to eight billion dollar Maori economy. In spite of the latter, money which could well be benefiting all New Zealanders is still being allocated to the tribal gravy trains in the continual bestowing of scores, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in ongoing compensation which in some cases at least, has been shown to be decidedly spurious - (see this months Investigate article on the treaty rorts in The case for abolishing the Waitangi Tribunal).
It is a great shame that a country which once had so much going for it and where majority European New Zealanders freely intermarried with Maori, a state of affairs taken for granted, is now divided and riven by the tension, and arguably, sheer greed of minority Maori groups for whom nothing is enough - neither enough compensation, nor enough media attention.
The black American writer Thomas Sowell warned that radicalized minorities can seize control of the country by their virtual blackmailing and emotive manipulation of the majority culture. Who would now doubt that to a very large extent this is now happening to our country - and that its effects are divisive and pernicious?
Many would have concurred with that incredulous reaction to watching our whole Parliament standing to pay tribute to brave men - while disparaging - by ignoring - the fact of their European cultural inheritance. Sickening indeed.
It was incredible that members of this radicalized minority, who by no means represent mainstream Maori, should have the nerve to expect Parliament to sing a well-known European hymn in Maori, rather than how it was composed and meant to be sung, in English. It was equally incredible that Parliament actually agreed. What a sell-out of integrity.
If the Maori party were down at Greymouth offering help and support, the mainstream media forgot to tell us. But they didn't lose an opportunity to try and utterly inappropriately grab this tragic occasion to centre-stage themselves.
How great thou artis not a Maori song. Not one of the miners who have died in the mine appeared to be of predominantly Maori descent. Not one apparently had a Maori name. It is quite disgraceful that Parliament should so insensitively insult these men from New Zealand’s majority European culture by allowing a radicalized minor party to take over a well-known European hymn and sing it in a language most (if any) of these miners did not speak and would not even have understood.
How incredible that what should have been a prayerful tribute to them was not even delivered in their own language... And what poor judgment our supposed representatives showed by not pointing this out and insisting that a prayer for these men, as a celebration of their lives, should be delivered in their own language. Apparently all MPs went along with this, although by far the majority would not have known any Maori translation of this hymn, were obviously following a cue system, and had obviously practised before the TV cameras filmed them.
This should have been their time to think.
The now constant inappropriate thrusting of a highly politicized and radicalized minority (of what are now all part-)Maori people into the media limelight is achieving a well-deserved backlash from the majority of the population, including, to their credit, many Maori themselves. But as long as either of the two main parties is scrabbling for the tribal Maori vote, their subservience to an unrepresentative minority of Maori activists will continue.
National is beginning to be particularly disliked in this respect.It is regarded as having betrayed the electorate, since it came into power pledging quite the opposite. What can now reasonably regarded as its sheer opportunism, if not venality, has dismayed and even sickened many long-time National supporters. There is a limit to how long its leader's folksy personal charm is going to compensate for how it has basically deceived the electorate.
Sickening was the word I heard applied by a shocked viewer watching this performance on screen. It was also pointed out that not only is a Maori version of our national anthem inappropriately sung first at international rugby matches, taking precedence over the language of majority New Zealanders, but most Maori All Blacks don't even know the Maori words, or if they do, can't be bothered singing our anthem - in either Maori or English. Their performance is lamentable, given the pride overseas rugby teams show in their own anthems, singing them vigorously and with obvious feeling.
Radical Maoridom’s assumption of entitlement has reached the stage of sheer hubris. Very many New Zealanders are feeling they have more than had enough. The pseudo-mysticism, the spiritualized mumbo-jumbo, the personal escorts of kaumatua to accompany the transfer of various threatened species around the country ( including those Maori showed no particular interest in protecting) the trips overseas to remove ghosts from embassies, to officiously bring back traded heads their own ancestors removed; the hijacking of nearly every occasion, every new naming of ships, place names - government programmes and courses offering: all now virtually kowtow to politicized Maori pressure.
The intrusion of supposedly special Maori entitlement into so many aspects of New Zealand culture has reached such a deplorable state of affairs, that when the mother of a neighbouring friend was recently killed in a car accident on our main state highway, her children found out later that a local Maori minister, without asking their permission or even letting them know, had intruded on their family to the extent of visiting the site to supposedly remove some sort of tapu on the place where their mother was killed. She was European: none of the family are Maori.They understandably resented such a high-handed action. To those who question why this extraordinarily inappropriate intrusion ever took place, the answer came that obviously being able to tap into special funding was the reason.
Mana, or the constant demand for prestige and special recognition tiresomely and constantly invoked by activist Maoris is one anathema to other cultures where it can be equated with extreme egoism, snobbery, self-promotion and an inordinate demand for attention. Moreover, as the cynical have observed, this nebulous concept seems to be well satisfied with monetary compensation. Mana equals money has come to sum up the perception at large.
Moreover, while now extremely wealthy Maori tribes could well afford to run special language programmes for their own people and their own children, the taxpayer is still being continually bled dry to fund all things Maori. It is almost incredible that this funding amounted to approximately $260 million dollars last year, for the now largely reinvented Maori language promotion alone. This, while hospitals cannot afford to maintain cancer treatment facilities, even in the capital city, for child cancer patients and their families; while all over the country district health boards have to remove people from hospital waiting lists because of constraints on health funding; while our Armed Forces are expected to make savings of $40 million - and we supposedly can't even afford to pay $30 million each (as columnist Richard Prosser points out in his excellent column in this month’s Investigate) for the vital air combat jet fighters which should be a priority to provide vital cover for New Zealand solders in military manouevres.
But we can afford up to $260 million dollar annually, to promote a language than not even the majority of part-Maori - with their recognition of far greater priorities for them on the world scene - want to learn to speak? However, the neo-tribal power groups, with their promise of bloc voting for the political party of their choice, are desperate for young part-Maori children to be steeped in this reinvented Maori. The advantage to them is the ongoing recruitment of activists for their anachronistic and power-seeking neo-tribes.
However, the goodwill of many New Zealanders towards all things Maori, and a willingness to learn at least some of the language is rapidly evaporating, in light of the continual gracelessness and anti-“Pakeha” disparagement from Maori spokesmen - and other grandstanding radical activists. I recall the late great Frank Haden, a legendary newspaper man, with a now rare ability to ignore political correctness, recounting how willingly he had begun to learn a little Maori - and how he even more willingly deliberately abandoned the process as he became fed up with the constant thanklessness and distortion of our shared history by radicalized, ever thankless Maori activists.
Treasury Secretary John Whitehead, in a speech about lifting New Zealand's economic growth, recently outlined his concern about the costs both on government on government and on our society in general in a large number of areas, including poor educational performance and failure; the need to lift teacher quality; the growing number on state benefits - and other burdens on government. Oddly enough, he did not mention the constant hemorrhaging of taxpayer dollars on all things directed towards Maori preferment or the estimated seven to eight billion dollar Maori economy. In spite of the latter, money which could well be benefiting all New Zealanders is still being allocated to the tribal gravy trains in the continual bestowing of scores, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in ongoing compensation which in some cases at least, has been shown to be decidedly spurious - (see this months Investigate article on the treaty rorts in The case for abolishing the Waitangi Tribunal).
It is a great shame that a country which once had so much going for it and where majority European New Zealanders freely intermarried with Maori, a state of affairs taken for granted, is now divided and riven by the tension, and arguably, sheer greed of minority Maori groups for whom nothing is enough - neither enough compensation, nor enough media attention.
The black American writer Thomas Sowell warned that radicalized minorities can seize control of the country by their virtual blackmailing and emotive manipulation of the majority culture. Who would now doubt that to a very large extent this is now happening to our country - and that its effects are divisive and pernicious?
Many would have concurred with that incredulous reaction to watching our whole Parliament standing to pay tribute to brave men - while disparaging - by ignoring - the fact of their European cultural inheritance. Sickening indeed.
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Mis-education and its “moral dyspepsia”.
Nov. 23rd, 2010 | 11:07 pm
The consequences of a destructive education system and its “moral dyspepsia”.
Dear Anne Tolley
Your recent letter set out your views on “national standards” in primary school education. The very fact that you are conscientiously trying to establish these is recognition that the politicised bureaucracy in charge of education in this country has failed our children - something Professor Margaret Dalziell foretold in her 1961 Disaster in the Primary School essay to which I often refer because of its important prophetic significance. What you are proposing will do little to re-establish genuine standards. But that you have even begun to invoke the concept of accountability from our children’s teachers has, of course, enraged the left-dominated teachers’ unions.
We all know the 60s was a watershed in many areas, not the sowing but the poisonous flowering of the far Left’s well-planned move to infiltrate and eventually destroy the West. The Italian communist Gramsci’s brilliant strategic advice on how to destroy democracy was by targeting Western societies’ underpinned Christian values. His method? - that familiar “long march through the institutions”.
Those who look in bewilderment at the increased corruption, moral confusion and gradual disintegration of our society might find illuminating his more detailed instructions: “ Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture, by infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media, by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Well, it’s succeeded in its destructive aim, hasn’t it? So very many primary teachers, themselves grossly undereducated, too often Lenin’s “useful” fools, have become “agents of change”. Their lack of knowledge of, and incompetence in basic subject areas makes them only too willing to rely on the concept of their young charges providing their own “education” while their teachers select from specified politicised “projects”, focusing on displacement activities and computer access to provide a smokescreen for their own ignorance - and to avoid actually teaching rigorously and well.
The capture of our Western culture has already largely taken place through the stranglehold of political correctness, the laying down of “right thinking” and the encouragement of excessive tolerance for what we should not tolerate - if the truth of issues is important to us. Given today’s accommodation of mental and moral laziness, indifference, even sheer cowardice, it has now become an act of courage to challenge the directions inflicted on us (including in education) by those dominating society with their bullying name-calling, such as “conservative”, racist”, “xenophobic” or “bible-bashing”. Individuals feel overwhelmed by the worryingly amoral, unprincipled policies that today’s ruling class are dumping on us - our self-serving politicians and bureaucrats - aided by cocky ignoramuses from the mainstream media. However , throughout Western society - and by our very own movement here - see www.100days.co.nz <http://www.100days.co.nz> - the tide is turning on people’s tolerance of being controlled by an autocracy.
New Zealand’s leftist state bureaucracy has long determined what is taught our young, what not. It has deliberately dumbed-down basic competencies in reading, writing and arithmetic - for the reasons revealed in Gramscsi’s planning. It jettisoned basic vocational courses once taught throughout New Zealand to provide practical skills in cookery, woodwork, metalworking and home-making. It replaced tuition in the techniques of drawing, of access to our great songs of the past, our literature and poetry, in favour of junk art projects and rubbishy pop music and verse. Even survival skills such as swimming and important physical education classes were slyly sidelined.
In our fellow democracies, parent groups are now demanding the right to do a lot better - with, first of all, the right to be free from politicised over-lordship - to ensure primary school children get the basic teaching necessary to be well-equipped for secondary school’s more advanced options in the sciences, mathematics, international languages - and in learning what our history can teach us. Commentator Simon Schama, attacking the hopelessness of the (now proletarianised) history curriculum in British schools points out that it has created an appetite for television history” It's a terrible thing for schools to make history boring - it's catastrophic.”
Equally catastrophic has been dumbing down all subjects taught in state schools. In the malevolent intent of “equality of outcomes” they all become boring when tainted by the Left’s capture of teaching theory to destroy what was once an education of far superior quality. The consequences have been the deliberate destruction of the intellectual, moral and spiritual values which must be taught to a country’s children for its survival. What has been substituted is what columnist Theodore Dalrymple calls “ the intellectual and moral Zeitgeist that intellectuals have created.” In a recent visit he commented on this transformation of New Zealand society, noting that in 1950, when we were one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we had “almost no crime whatever, or at least an irreducible minimum” that now we have “ one of the highest crime rates in the world, including crimes of violence.”
By no means a minimal contribution to the latter has been a deliberately fostered (not least by the education establishment) sense of apartheid and resentment among those of part-Maori descent increasingly encouraged to feel apart and hard-done-by - “victimized” - through unfair, anti-colonist distortions of our co-history. The lavishing of inappropriate special entitlements as of right, the growth in tribal resentments and reinvented claims for politicised advantage, together with the divisiveness and dumbing down of Maori children's education, have become an explosive mixture.
You state, Mrs Tolley, that you (personally?) have been able to learn from overseas experts “critical of inappropriate use of high-stakes testing and accountability mechanisms”. Your jargonized advice unfortunately appears to be from the usual fellow travellers - as usual, the wrong advice. You are aware that your “national standards” are not genuine, externally-tested national standards - merely the usual pick and mix set of options for “Teachers to use their professional judgment to discern what best describes a student’s achievement and progressby a range of appropriate assessment activities”.
In a long run, these assurances are meaningless. We've heard them all before. Yes good teachers are a national treasure, but you have plenty of evidence of incompetent, self-serving, average and worse teachers and are doing nothing effective about this. Imagine the hysteria from the left-wing unions if you were to attempt what New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s reform package is establishing. Teachers from kindergarten and primary school upwards will be required to pass tests in reading, writing and maths to be certified. His logic is “If you can't read, write or do basic math, you sure can't teach it”. His packet of reforms demands quality teaching replace lacklustre performances.
Reforming education won't come without control of our schools being removed from the education politiburo. A Minister of Education’s role should be to ensure that a worthwhile, academically-focused national curriculum, genuinely and externally tests all primary children - as was once the case when the Proficiency Examination ensured that failing children were not inappropriately forced to cope with secondary school. Overseen by an independent body supported by parents, it would be backed up by schools freed from the destructive ideologies of those who have targeted, politicized, inappropriately sexualized, and dumbed down our children's learning as part of a much wider agenda.
With respect, I found your well-meant answers regarding sex education in schools and the growing emphasis on computer use underinformed, even natransmitting the familiar bureaucratic theorizing one recognizes from our mis-performing education establishment - to be addressed in a future column.
The latter’s destructive achievements remind me of English writer Colin Wilson's observation that “ Man was never intended to underwork his brain. It produces a kind of moral dyspepsia”.
We can define this as a state of dysphoria, of mental and moral dis-ease now characterising our times. The disintegrating society we live in shows every sign of how successful has been Gramsci’s aim of capturing Western culture, to destroy it. What genuine culture is now on offer to our children?
Copyright Amy Brooke
Dear Anne Tolley
Your recent letter set out your views on “national standards” in primary school education. The very fact that you are conscientiously trying to establish these is recognition that the politicised bureaucracy in charge of education in this country has failed our children - something Professor Margaret Dalziell foretold in her 1961 Disaster in the Primary School essay to which I often refer because of its important prophetic significance. What you are proposing will do little to re-establish genuine standards. But that you have even begun to invoke the concept of accountability from our children’s teachers has, of course, enraged the left-dominated teachers’ unions.
We all know the 60s was a watershed in many areas, not the sowing but the poisonous flowering of the far Left’s well-planned move to infiltrate and eventually destroy the West. The Italian communist Gramsci’s brilliant strategic advice on how to destroy democracy was by targeting Western societies’ underpinned Christian values. His method? - that familiar “long march through the institutions”.
Those who look in bewilderment at the increased corruption, moral confusion and gradual disintegration of our society might find illuminating his more detailed instructions: “ Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture, by infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media, by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Well, it’s succeeded in its destructive aim, hasn’t it? So very many primary teachers, themselves grossly undereducated, too often Lenin’s “useful” fools, have become “agents of change”. Their lack of knowledge of, and incompetence in basic subject areas makes them only too willing to rely on the concept of their young charges providing their own “education” while their teachers select from specified politicised “projects”, focusing on displacement activities and computer access to provide a smokescreen for their own ignorance - and to avoid actually teaching rigorously and well.
The capture of our Western culture has already largely taken place through the stranglehold of political correctness, the laying down of “right thinking” and the encouragement of excessive tolerance for what we should not tolerate - if the truth of issues is important to us. Given today’s accommodation of mental and moral laziness, indifference, even sheer cowardice, it has now become an act of courage to challenge the directions inflicted on us (including in education) by those dominating society with their bullying name-calling, such as “conservative”, racist”, “xenophobic” or “bible-bashing”. Individuals feel overwhelmed by the worryingly amoral, unprincipled policies that today’s ruling class are dumping on us - our self-serving politicians and bureaucrats - aided by cocky ignoramuses from the mainstream media. However , throughout Western society - and by our very own movement here - see www.100days.co.nz <http://www.100days.co.nz> - the tide is turning on people’s tolerance of being controlled by an autocracy.
New Zealand’s leftist state bureaucracy has long determined what is taught our young, what not. It has deliberately dumbed-down basic competencies in reading, writing and arithmetic - for the reasons revealed in Gramscsi’s planning. It jettisoned basic vocational courses once taught throughout New Zealand to provide practical skills in cookery, woodwork, metalworking and home-making. It replaced tuition in the techniques of drawing, of access to our great songs of the past, our literature and poetry, in favour of junk art projects and rubbishy pop music and verse. Even survival skills such as swimming and important physical education classes were slyly sidelined.
In our fellow democracies, parent groups are now demanding the right to do a lot better - with, first of all, the right to be free from politicised over-lordship - to ensure primary school children get the basic teaching necessary to be well-equipped for secondary school’s more advanced options in the sciences, mathematics, international languages - and in learning what our history can teach us. Commentator Simon Schama, attacking the hopelessness of the (now proletarianised) history curriculum in British schools points out that it has created an appetite for television history” It's a terrible thing for schools to make history boring - it's catastrophic.”
Equally catastrophic has been dumbing down all subjects taught in state schools. In the malevolent intent of “equality of outcomes” they all become boring when tainted by the Left’s capture of teaching theory to destroy what was once an education of far superior quality. The consequences have been the deliberate destruction of the intellectual, moral and spiritual values which must be taught to a country’s children for its survival. What has been substituted is what columnist Theodore Dalrymple calls “ the intellectual and moral Zeitgeist that intellectuals have created.” In a recent visit he commented on this transformation of New Zealand society, noting that in 1950, when we were one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we had “almost no crime whatever, or at least an irreducible minimum” that now we have “ one of the highest crime rates in the world, including crimes of violence.”
By no means a minimal contribution to the latter has been a deliberately fostered (not least by the education establishment) sense of apartheid and resentment among those of part-Maori descent increasingly encouraged to feel apart and hard-done-by - “victimized” - through unfair, anti-colonist distortions of our co-history. The lavishing of inappropriate special entitlements as of right, the growth in tribal resentments and reinvented claims for politicised advantage, together with the divisiveness and dumbing down of Maori children's education, have become an explosive mixture.
You state, Mrs Tolley, that you (personally?) have been able to learn from overseas experts “critical of inappropriate use of high-stakes testing and accountability mechanisms”. Your jargonized advice unfortunately appears to be from the usual fellow travellers - as usual, the wrong advice. You are aware that your “national standards” are not genuine, externally-tested national standards - merely the usual pick and mix set of options for “Teachers to use their professional judgment to discern what best describes a student’s achievement and progressby a range of appropriate assessment activities”.
In a long run, these assurances are meaningless. We've heard them all before. Yes good teachers are a national treasure, but you have plenty of evidence of incompetent, self-serving, average and worse teachers and are doing nothing effective about this. Imagine the hysteria from the left-wing unions if you were to attempt what New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s reform package is establishing. Teachers from kindergarten and primary school upwards will be required to pass tests in reading, writing and maths to be certified. His logic is “If you can't read, write or do basic math, you sure can't teach it”. His packet of reforms demands quality teaching replace lacklustre performances.
Reforming education won't come without control of our schools being removed from the education politiburo. A Minister of Education’s role should be to ensure that a worthwhile, academically-focused national curriculum, genuinely and externally tests all primary children - as was once the case when the Proficiency Examination ensured that failing children were not inappropriately forced to cope with secondary school. Overseen by an independent body supported by parents, it would be backed up by schools freed from the destructive ideologies of those who have targeted, politicized, inappropriately sexualized, and dumbed down our children's learning as part of a much wider agenda.
With respect, I found your well-meant answers regarding sex education in schools and the growing emphasis on computer use underinformed, even natransmitting the familiar bureaucratic theorizing one recognizes from our mis-performing education establishment - to be addressed in a future column.
The latter’s destructive achievements remind me of English writer Colin Wilson's observation that “ Man was never intended to underwork his brain. It produces a kind of moral dyspepsia”.
We can define this as a state of dysphoria, of mental and moral dis-ease now characterising our times. The disintegrating society we live in shows every sign of how successful has been Gramsci’s aim of capturing Western culture, to destroy it. What genuine culture is now on offer to our children?
Copyright Amy Brooke
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Enemies of Society
Jun. 28th, 2010 | 08:58 pm
Enemies of society - the takeover of education
It's come to me recently with growing dismay that if Australia deserves to be called The Lucky Country we deserve to be called The Stupid Country. We had so much going for us until the 60s manifestation of groundwork well and truly laid down by our society’s enemies from both without and within. The Trojan Horse of Marxism, anti-the West, anti-Christian, anti-the notion of both the rights and responsibility of the individual (solid foundations of a New Zealand society formerly epitomized by the decency and independence of its people) has wreaked enormous damage here, particularly by means of its destructive takeover of our education system and other institutions.
What primarily sprang from a mindless hatred of the British Empire has seen what historian Paul Johnson reminds us has been the greatest transfer of power in human history, the values of our forebears cast aside, or inverted. Yet there is no evidence that civilization is any richer or more secure, as new tyrannies have replaced old ones.
Moreover, it has long been obvious that Australia is much more alert to the very real dangers that threaten its people than New Zealand. Closest to the largest Muslim country, Australians have been far more realistically hardheaded about restricting immigration rights than our soft-thinking politburo. Australians would never have been conned into abandoning the Anzus Pact; would have treated with incredulity and outrage a Helen Clark doppelganger’s attempt to destroy the combat wing of its air force; would never have allowed the Electoral Reform Finance Act, the purpose of which was to restrict New Zealanders’ rights to freedom of speech during an election year by what MP John Boscawen has described as “the most repressive election law in any English speaking Western democracy”.
The result of now three generations of New Zealanders deliberately under-educated, with state schools under the well-manipulated control of a both overtly and covertly neo-Marxist education bureaucracy, is shown in the poor quality of our Members of Parliament, including the loud-mouthed, the boorish - and even our poorly-spoken Prime Minister, a disappointment to concerned New Zealanders hoping for much better after the autocratic and dominating Helen Clark.
Meantime, the country's internal and external policies are frighteningly awry, with the deliberate fostering of adversarial race relationships by the duplicitous Maori Party. Its focus on self-advantage is damaging the internal cohesion of New Zealanders, both non-Maori and majority Maori, backed by equally manipulative tribal run by activist in-groups for their own advantage - while piously invoking “our people”. Whose people? Most individual Maori (all reputedly now part-Maori only) reap no benefit from the accumulative billions of dollars having haemorrhaged from taxpayers’ pockets. Scandalously, done deals between this vote-buying government and pressuring tribes now exclude any input from, or scrutiny by, New Zealanders at large.
I wonder if any Western country than ours could have so easily succumbed to what many New Zealanders regard as the basically stupid notion of opening the can of worms that enabled relitigating all tribal claims dating back to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi - given the history and on-going reality of inter-tribal competitiveness and hostility. Many scores of conflicting and competing claims have now been launched, some simply manipulative, and, according to human nature, with its eye to the main chance, others already previously well and fairly settled, as with the more than dubious Ngai Tahu claim. And now this National government, obviously learning nothing at all from being well and truly outwitted in the past, has plunged us further into the cauldron of deteriorating race relationships by providing for tribes with a grievance to take to court “customary rights” claims for the seabed and foreshore.
However, what Maori tribes are there now which lack grievances, given the considerable lucrative advantages in claiming such? While this present government, like its predecessors, naand smugly congratulates itself on abandoning the very necessary concept of the Crown owning a country's coastal waters and foreshore, dismayed New Zealanders out in the real world see stretching ahead even more decades of increasing and disastrously expensive litigation. Many have simply given up on this country: those leaving include troubled family Maori fearing an inevitably increasing backlash from the abandoning of the essential concept of equality in favour of racial and minority preference. Superior rights now embrace the tedious and unwarranted special consultation with centre-staging, by no means undemanding iwi in every sphere of national and local body politics.
Moreover, the constantly recurring and ongoing rort of Maori business and tribal development dominated by nepotism, by jobs for relatives and hangers on, has been highlighted recently in one of the government's biggest Maori business development projects. Te Tekau Plus, with the usual “names” on board, has long failed to deliver. One thing we can be sure about is that any who have apparently siphoned off the usual inappropriate fees and perks will not be required to pay these back to hapless New Zealanders forced to pay for this ongoing opportunism.
A now dismayingly stupid country? This description well deserves to be targeted not primarily at individuals themselves, although it is obvious that New Zealanders deprived of any opportunity to become well-educated contribute very largely to the growth of alcoholism, drug abuse and sexual promiscuity. Correspondingly, ill-educated young part-Maori have been deliberately imbued with a sense of grievance and rebellion, taught to feel hostility towards their own colonial forbears.
However, this country is not just being undermined from within by our educationists, but by also under-educated, even politicized state servants, including our troubling immigration and overseas investment bureaucracies. While our Australian cousins are now fighting to prevent Communist Chinese investment companies from gaining majority control of resource assets, our Overseas Investment Office, formerly Commission, has not automatically ruled out at the time of writing a quite shocking effort by a Hong Kong-fronted company to buy scores of dairy farms, some even bought without the IOI’s permission. The Lucky Country, aware of the danger of allowing Chinese corporations (financial entities overseen by the Chinese Communist Party) from gaining control of strategic industries, is fighting takeovers of major corporations in Australia. New Zealand, however, has been encouraging Chinese companies to invest here since the fourth Labour government. Large chunks of New Zealand land are now owned by foreign business interests.
Long aware of the white ant-ing of their own country and its consequences, Australia has begun the process of genuine education reform. As News Weekly reports, Western Australia’s Liberal-National Government has moved to trim the powers of education department bureaucrats over the state’s 770 primary and secondary schools. A new era of cross-Tasman education, following now bedded-in overseas reforms, is making it possible for schools to make decisions that are best responsive to the needs of their students and local communities. All state schools are being urged to apply for independent school status, with up to 30 schools already expected to move out of the education department’s orbit by the end of this year. Acquiring greater autonomy and flexibility, they are becoming free of much of the centralised red tape that prevents parents having a greater say in the running of schools.
Our own real fightback, however, has not yet even begun. Why not?
Copyright Amy Brooke
www.100days.co.nz
It's come to me recently with growing dismay that if Australia deserves to be called The Lucky Country we deserve to be called The Stupid Country. We had so much going for us until the 60s manifestation of groundwork well and truly laid down by our society’s enemies from both without and within. The Trojan Horse of Marxism, anti-the West, anti-Christian, anti-the notion of both the rights and responsibility of the individual (solid foundations of a New Zealand society formerly epitomized by the decency and independence of its people) has wreaked enormous damage here, particularly by means of its destructive takeover of our education system and other institutions.
What primarily sprang from a mindless hatred of the British Empire has seen what historian Paul Johnson reminds us has been the greatest transfer of power in human history, the values of our forebears cast aside, or inverted. Yet there is no evidence that civilization is any richer or more secure, as new tyrannies have replaced old ones.
Moreover, it has long been obvious that Australia is much more alert to the very real dangers that threaten its people than New Zealand. Closest to the largest Muslim country, Australians have been far more realistically hardheaded about restricting immigration rights than our soft-thinking politburo. Australians would never have been conned into abandoning the Anzus Pact; would have treated with incredulity and outrage a Helen Clark doppelganger’s attempt to destroy the combat wing of its air force; would never have allowed the Electoral Reform Finance Act, the purpose of which was to restrict New Zealanders’ rights to freedom of speech during an election year by what MP John Boscawen has described as “the most repressive election law in any English speaking Western democracy”.
The result of now three generations of New Zealanders deliberately under-educated, with state schools under the well-manipulated control of a both overtly and covertly neo-Marxist education bureaucracy, is shown in the poor quality of our Members of Parliament, including the loud-mouthed, the boorish - and even our poorly-spoken Prime Minister, a disappointment to concerned New Zealanders hoping for much better after the autocratic and dominating Helen Clark.
Meantime, the country's internal and external policies are frighteningly awry, with the deliberate fostering of adversarial race relationships by the duplicitous Maori Party. Its focus on self-advantage is damaging the internal cohesion of New Zealanders, both non-Maori and majority Maori, backed by equally manipulative tribal run by activist in-groups for their own advantage - while piously invoking “our people”. Whose people? Most individual Maori (all reputedly now part-Maori only) reap no benefit from the accumulative billions of dollars having haemorrhaged from taxpayers’ pockets. Scandalously, done deals between this vote-buying government and pressuring tribes now exclude any input from, or scrutiny by, New Zealanders at large.
I wonder if any Western country than ours could have so easily succumbed to what many New Zealanders regard as the basically stupid notion of opening the can of worms that enabled relitigating all tribal claims dating back to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi - given the history and on-going reality of inter-tribal competitiveness and hostility. Many scores of conflicting and competing claims have now been launched, some simply manipulative, and, according to human nature, with its eye to the main chance, others already previously well and fairly settled, as with the more than dubious Ngai Tahu claim. And now this National government, obviously learning nothing at all from being well and truly outwitted in the past, has plunged us further into the cauldron of deteriorating race relationships by providing for tribes with a grievance to take to court “customary rights” claims for the seabed and foreshore.
However, what Maori tribes are there now which lack grievances, given the considerable lucrative advantages in claiming such? While this present government, like its predecessors, naand smugly congratulates itself on abandoning the very necessary concept of the Crown owning a country's coastal waters and foreshore, dismayed New Zealanders out in the real world see stretching ahead even more decades of increasing and disastrously expensive litigation. Many have simply given up on this country: those leaving include troubled family Maori fearing an inevitably increasing backlash from the abandoning of the essential concept of equality in favour of racial and minority preference. Superior rights now embrace the tedious and unwarranted special consultation with centre-staging, by no means undemanding iwi in every sphere of national and local body politics.
Moreover, the constantly recurring and ongoing rort of Maori business and tribal development dominated by nepotism, by jobs for relatives and hangers on, has been highlighted recently in one of the government's biggest Maori business development projects. Te Tekau Plus, with the usual “names” on board, has long failed to deliver. One thing we can be sure about is that any who have apparently siphoned off the usual inappropriate fees and perks will not be required to pay these back to hapless New Zealanders forced to pay for this ongoing opportunism.
A now dismayingly stupid country? This description well deserves to be targeted not primarily at individuals themselves, although it is obvious that New Zealanders deprived of any opportunity to become well-educated contribute very largely to the growth of alcoholism, drug abuse and sexual promiscuity. Correspondingly, ill-educated young part-Maori have been deliberately imbued with a sense of grievance and rebellion, taught to feel hostility towards their own colonial forbears.
However, this country is not just being undermined from within by our educationists, but by also under-educated, even politicized state servants, including our troubling immigration and overseas investment bureaucracies. While our Australian cousins are now fighting to prevent Communist Chinese investment companies from gaining majority control of resource assets, our Overseas Investment Office, formerly Commission, has not automatically ruled out at the time of writing a quite shocking effort by a Hong Kong-fronted company to buy scores of dairy farms, some even bought without the IOI’s permission. The Lucky Country, aware of the danger of allowing Chinese corporations (financial entities overseen by the Chinese Communist Party) from gaining control of strategic industries, is fighting takeovers of major corporations in Australia. New Zealand, however, has been encouraging Chinese companies to invest here since the fourth Labour government. Large chunks of New Zealand land are now owned by foreign business interests.
Long aware of the white ant-ing of their own country and its consequences, Australia has begun the process of genuine education reform. As News Weekly reports, Western Australia’s Liberal-National Government has moved to trim the powers of education department bureaucrats over the state’s 770 primary and secondary schools. A new era of cross-Tasman education, following now bedded-in overseas reforms, is making it possible for schools to make decisions that are best responsive to the needs of their students and local communities. All state schools are being urged to apply for independent school status, with up to 30 schools already expected to move out of the education department’s orbit by the end of this year. Acquiring greater autonomy and flexibility, they are becoming free of much of the centralised red tape that prevents parents having a greater say in the running of schools.
Our own real fightback, however, has not yet even begun. Why not?
Copyright Amy Brooke
www.100days.co.nz
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Ratana, tribal activists, the government...
Feb. 4th, 2010 | 01:23 pm
Ratana, Maori tribal activists, and the government - none of these now represent the majority of New Zealanders.
What do New Zealanders owe Ratana, that they expect special rights? What have this small sect done for New Zealand?
There is what might fairly be called a kind of soft corruption in a fringe religious Maori group with a past of doubtful loyalty to the country expecting as of right to be given four winnable seats on Labour's list at the next election. How very supine the media have been with regard to this issue. What an outcry there would have been if the Anglican or Catholic Churches had demanded these same four seats.
Part-Maori of often highly attenuated descent who, after over two centuries of co-existence and intermarriage, refuse to be integrated into the country as New Zealanders, but insist on playing a shameful race card of quite untrue deprivation and separatism, arguably should not be fawned on by our major political parties. So why the annual trek of obsequious National and Labour leaders? It is well overdue for anachronistic, self-centred and arguably selfish tribal cliques to be reminded that New Zealanders who do not put the interests of this country first over their own wrangling for priority, for special interest and preference considerations, are no asset to us all.
On the contrary, the arguably venal vote-buying and haemorrhaging of totally unrealistic and unearned scores, even hundreds, and now cumulatively billions of dollars from the pockets of middle and lower income New Zealanders (the wealthy managing to avoid paying much tax at all) to buy off those milking the tribal grievance industry, can be argued as an on-going disgrace.
While New Zealanders are renowned for a sense of fair play, there is little fair play involved in the reawakening, reinventing, if not downright fabricating of claims against the Crown which today’s New Zealanders, who had no part at all in the original agreements, are being forced to pay for some of these newly reawakened claims well and truly previously settled - with agreement on both sides that the previous settlements were fair.
Moreover, the evidence is undoubtedly there that although there were inevitable injustices in the past, these were also certainly on both sides, as today. The extraordinary, quite shocking Titford case, able to be researched on the web, shows where the government (with the honourable exception of David Lange) and police scandalously colluded with the brazenly opportunistic, aggressive and physically threatening behaviour by bullying local Maoris to force the Titford family off land to which they indisputably have legal title. This shameful outcome remains as much a blot on our co-history as the shocking government treatment of the innocent Berryman family,forced off their land when a bridge poorly built by the army collapsed, killing a local beekeeper - and the army in effect lied at the Berryman trial by withholding documents which essentially proved the Berrymans innocent. These two happenings alone should by now have made us very wary about trusting our government to protect the rights and private property of its citizens.
National’s record to date of what can be regarded as bribing special interest groups dominating Maori “tribes” - i.e. controlling power groups - is even worse than Labour’s. It is to Labour leader Phil Goff's credit that he has to date rejected the recent Ratana demand for high places on the party list. It is to Ratana’s shame that they even demanded them. The mindset of special entitlement characterizing self-seeking part-only Maori groups has been a blot on our co-history. It is deliberate, initially very much fanned by the young radical Maori activists hand-picked in the 60s to attend Marxist indoctrination camps abroad, and who, coming back, worked indefatigably to cultivate a hostile anti-Pakeha sense of grievance against which young, gullible, and easily propagandized hothead Maori have had no defence. The indoctrination in our state schools of a special Maori “entitlement” has been equally pernicious - let alone the propaganda fed to young minds in the specially-funded Maori schools.
The result has been not only an even swaggering sense of being special and more important than any other New Zealanders, but the never-ceasing demands for more and more payouts, more and more media attention; more and more special consideration and a rise in the kind of violence brought about by the kind of resentment that arises when a people are one-sidedly told they have been “ripped off” by the European generations before them.
Ratana’s inappropriate demand for parliamentary List seats to be given to them as of right is no worse than that the manipulation of tribal executives from the larger tribes such as Ngai Tahu, The central North Island or "Treelords" tribes, those known as Top of the South, and Tainui. But Ratana might perhaps be expected to keep a lower profile, considering questions raised about their actual loyalty as New Zealanders during World War II. This East Coast tribe was not the only one to have reportedly been sympathetic to the notion of a Japanese invasion of New Zealand. But the fact that the government of the day, alerted by the Home Guard, was sufficiently concerned to have the police visit the Wairoa Pa at Rangiahua to confiscate the tribes’ rifles stored overnight in the schoolhouse until they could be taken out of the district, is a conveniently overlooked piece of our history .
Ratana’s feeling of affiliation for the Japanese, visited by their leader himself in 1924, is explained in terms of Wiremu Tahupotiki Ratana’s belief that both Maori and Japanese belong to the long-lost tribe of Israel. However, the by-no-means homemade badges which Ratana children were wearing to school in 1941 - badges of the Rising Sun on the martial Japanese flag - at a time when the Japanese invasion of the Pacific was a very real and threatening prospect, raises questions which have been sympathetically brushed aside by our revisionist academic historians.
The List seats in parliament are increasingly viewed as antidemocratic. At the last election the National Party dismissively treated its own constitution which provided for List candidates to be chosen at grass roots level, selected by delegates chosen by the local electorates and meeting nationally to scrutinize those seeking List election. The present National leader, John Key, apparently blithely disregarded this requirement to choose the first 50 list placings. In essence, this ensured that any National Party candidates owe their loyalty to Key himself as leader - they were not chosen by the party grassroots.
To be fair, he had a precedent. The aspiring Prime Minister and National leader before him, Don Brash, also personally stacked the list-ranking committee, but more timidly. His insistence was on choosing the first 25 members, who would then obviously owe their loyalty to him.
These initiatives by two wannabe Prime Ministers are disturbing - certainly undemocratic. It no doubt goes a long way towards explaining the reason why not one National Party MP stood up to be counted when the present Prime Minister decided that his own personal views should prevail, rather than those of over 80% of New Zealanders, when it came to bringing up their own children. MPs who should have represented their own constituents on this issue instead played follow-the-leader.
These are very troubling directions we’re moving in. If a party’s List candidates don’t represent the grassroots members choice, and are not voted into parliament, what are they doing there? What in essence marks their presence as different from individuals chosen by political leaders in anti-democratic, fascist or communist countries? Being good mates with top political figures? Paying contributions into party coffers - or being thought to be in a position to do so in the future? Being thought to wield important influence in various spheres? Being useful yes-men - “party men”? These are all questions that must inevitably follow. To ignore them is to ignore the whittling away of our democratic rights - and of our freedom.
Undoubtedly, the badly flawed List system makes it much easier for the politically ambitious to leapfrog into parliament. The term “democratic” cannot possibly be applied to it. Even those who don't want a return to a first-past-the-post system with all its potential for the two major powers to do behind-the-doors deals between them, should be strongly opposed to the insult to the electorate offered by leaders imposing their own personal preferences on the country. Such behaviour belongs to an autocracy - not a democracy, offering advantages to individuals and special interest groups who would never otherwise have been elected.
It is not just the Maori Party which is profoundly un-representative of even mainstream Maori. And of course the word Maori should now be qualified in view of the fact that all those clamouring for special rights for Maori are today part-Maori only. Moreover, in many cases it can be demonstrated that while claiming disadvantage and discrimination, they themselves have been and are considerably privileged.
National’s unholy alliance with this present radicalized Maori Party is troubling many New Zealanders. Its public mouthpiece may be the one-eyed Hone Harawira, but its leaders - more wary and carefully-spoken - themselves represent extremist viewpoints of separatism, an essential anti-colonialism and a belief in their special entitlement.
Worse, given that the Maori Party attracted little over 2% of the (part)Maori vote in the past election, and that this percentage cannot possibly be claimed to represent a majority (part)Maori, many are asking why National's John Key is going to great and undemocratic lengths to accede to its demands of special welfare entitlement. Extraordinarily enough - even given her sense of entitlement and her anti-European mindset (her infamous “holocaust” accusation is not likely to be forgotten) it is co-leader Tariana Turia who has demanded this funding. And, not unexpectedly, she has also argued for her small party to be the ones managing it. However, simultaneously she manages to blame “Pakeha” government’s long, over-generous distribution of welfare funding among a Maori underclass for having contributed to damaging consequences, including its shameful, hands-out expectations and lack of a work ethic.
No doubt this is no more having a bob each way than the large tribes demanding that fair settlements in the past, made more than once with every expectation that they would at last be full and final, should now be revisited. The wily Ngai Tahu have now been given a highly imaginative and lucrative add-on to a (re)settlement - an extraordinary postscript to the previous full and final settlement signed at Kaikoura by then Prime Minister Jim Bolger, and his sidekick, Doug Graham.
This previous Kaikoura settlement itself shocked many capable researchers and has long been a bone of contention. This was particularly so given that the Crown Law Office at the time subsequently admitted, in essence, that it simply did not and could not have done its job properly. It lacked sufficient qualified researchers and funding, and was hampered by the Waitangi Tribunal culpably allowing Ngai Tahu to refuse to be cross-examined on their claims. Ngai Tahu’s claim was considerably facilitated by the highly experienced, senior Bell Gully lawyer, Chris Finlayson, now the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, and apparently warmly sympathetic to tribal claims.
Ngai Tahu have been even more successful recently. Incredibly enough, conservation land belonging to all New Zealanders has been given for their exclusive use for tree-planting purposes. This particularly clever, opportunistic tribe has argued that the value of its previous full and final settlements has been undermined by the carbon credit tax envisaged as part of the penalties forest owners will incur because of the government’s too hasty endorsement of the deeply flawed, global warming theory. Whether this has itself been due to government gullibility - or to its recognition that buying into this excessive CO2 theory is a ready-to-hand way of increasing wide-ranging taxation, and acquiring even more power over businesses and individuals unable to meet such absurd requirement, is debatable. But inexplicably, National’s acquiescing to Ngai Tahui’s demands has left the way wide open for other opportunistic tribal groupings to claim the same “rights” over land that properly belongs to all New Zealanders.
These are troubling times. It is arguable that these claims should not be settled simply by negotiations between the National Party - overseen by the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations - but should be decided in a proper court of law, where they could be open to much-needed challenge and public scrutiny. The amount in taxpayer paid-out claims amounts now to not even hundreds of millions, but accumulatively billions of dollars taken from the public purse - “compensation” all completely disregarded in the rabid claims of unbalanced (part)Maori radicals perpetually claiming that they have been cheated, and hard-done by. Meanwhile questions of public accountability to all intents and purposes have now simply been swept aside - as far as the electorate is concerned.
Who thinks this is good enough? What is indisputable is that since the National Party has got back into power, many who expected better things from the party that once stood for the freedom of the individual against creeping state control are disturbed, and disappointed. The Prime Minister, John Key’s glowing endorsement of our former socialist Prime Minister Helen Clark and her finance minister Michael Cullen, leaders of the left-wing coalition that has arguably done so much damage to a country formerly much more stable in social and economic respects, has disturbed many thinking New Zealanders.
What we now have is the emergence of a distinct political class whose members preferentially favour one anther, promote and apparently safeguard the interests of one another, recycle plum directorships - and even high-level diplomatic jobs among themselves, rather than appointing trained diplomats - and who hijack aspects of our democratic system that stand in the way of their achieving their personal ambitions.
No Upper House will solve this problem, not while it has the potential to be stacked by the usual power groupings and the usual suspects, many of whom have caused immense political damage to this country in recent years. Nor will an alternative system of voting. Moreover, the ongoing activism of the Human Rights Commission now attempting to entrench the Treaty of Waitangi as part of an essentially government-controlled, constitutional review the country has not asked for - i.e. the politically correct version of the treaty - is part of the push to ensure the ongoing unreal and radicalized separatism which has done so much harm already to race relations in this country.
What we must look towards now is claiming back a democracy in the only practicable way that it is achievable - the provision for that 100 days scrutiny by the electorate (already launched as Claiming Back New Zealand) to prevent the political parties, dominated by autocratic leaders, from having their own way when ramming through profoundly undemocratic legislation that the country simply doesn't want.
The time is right. The same thinking is being echoed in the UK and overseas, as other formerly democratic states and countries realize to what extent their own democracies are being hijacked.
Prime Minister John Key’s allowing the Maori Sovereignty flag to fly alongside our own New Zealand Flag on Waitangi Day is either an act of extraordinary folly - or of extraordinary ignorance of what is actually at stake.
It is time to address the hijacking of New Zealand. But meantime we need to recognize what has been said before: if we are to champion a genuine democracy, we must first practise it. This is demonstrably no longer happening the case in this country today.
****************
What do New Zealanders owe Ratana, that they expect special rights? What have this small sect done for New Zealand?
There is what might fairly be called a kind of soft corruption in a fringe religious Maori group with a past of doubtful loyalty to the country expecting as of right to be given four winnable seats on Labour's list at the next election. How very supine the media have been with regard to this issue. What an outcry there would have been if the Anglican or Catholic Churches had demanded these same four seats.
Part-Maori of often highly attenuated descent who, after over two centuries of co-existence and intermarriage, refuse to be integrated into the country as New Zealanders, but insist on playing a shameful race card of quite untrue deprivation and separatism, arguably should not be fawned on by our major political parties. So why the annual trek of obsequious National and Labour leaders? It is well overdue for anachronistic, self-centred and arguably selfish tribal cliques to be reminded that New Zealanders who do not put the interests of this country first over their own wrangling for priority, for special interest and preference considerations, are no asset to us all.
On the contrary, the arguably venal vote-buying and haemorrhaging of totally unrealistic and unearned scores, even hundreds, and now cumulatively billions of dollars from the pockets of middle and lower income New Zealanders (the wealthy managing to avoid paying much tax at all) to buy off those milking the tribal grievance industry, can be argued as an on-going disgrace.
While New Zealanders are renowned for a sense of fair play, there is little fair play involved in the reawakening, reinventing, if not downright fabricating of claims against the Crown which today’s New Zealanders, who had no part at all in the original agreements, are being forced to pay for some of these newly reawakened claims well and truly previously settled - with agreement on both sides that the previous settlements were fair.
Moreover, the evidence is undoubtedly there that although there were inevitable injustices in the past, these were also certainly on both sides, as today. The extraordinary, quite shocking Titford case, able to be researched on the web, shows where the government (with the honourable exception of David Lange) and police scandalously colluded with the brazenly opportunistic, aggressive and physically threatening behaviour by bullying local Maoris to force the Titford family off land to which they indisputably have legal title. This shameful outcome remains as much a blot on our co-history as the shocking government treatment of the innocent Berryman family,forced off their land when a bridge poorly built by the army collapsed, killing a local beekeeper - and the army in effect lied at the Berryman trial by withholding documents which essentially proved the Berrymans innocent. These two happenings alone should by now have made us very wary about trusting our government to protect the rights and private property of its citizens.
National’s record to date of what can be regarded as bribing special interest groups dominating Maori “tribes” - i.e. controlling power groups - is even worse than Labour’s. It is to Labour leader Phil Goff's credit that he has to date rejected the recent Ratana demand for high places on the party list. It is to Ratana’s shame that they even demanded them. The mindset of special entitlement characterizing self-seeking part-only Maori groups has been a blot on our co-history. It is deliberate, initially very much fanned by the young radical Maori activists hand-picked in the 60s to attend Marxist indoctrination camps abroad, and who, coming back, worked indefatigably to cultivate a hostile anti-Pakeha sense of grievance against which young, gullible, and easily propagandized hothead Maori have had no defence. The indoctrination in our state schools of a special Maori “entitlement” has been equally pernicious - let alone the propaganda fed to young minds in the specially-funded Maori schools.
The result has been not only an even swaggering sense of being special and more important than any other New Zealanders, but the never-ceasing demands for more and more payouts, more and more media attention; more and more special consideration and a rise in the kind of violence brought about by the kind of resentment that arises when a people are one-sidedly told they have been “ripped off” by the European generations before them.
Ratana’s inappropriate demand for parliamentary List seats to be given to them as of right is no worse than that the manipulation of tribal executives from the larger tribes such as Ngai Tahu, The central North Island or "Treelords" tribes, those known as Top of the South, and Tainui. But Ratana might perhaps be expected to keep a lower profile, considering questions raised about their actual loyalty as New Zealanders during World War II. This East Coast tribe was not the only one to have reportedly been sympathetic to the notion of a Japanese invasion of New Zealand. But the fact that the government of the day, alerted by the Home Guard, was sufficiently concerned to have the police visit the Wairoa Pa at Rangiahua to confiscate the tribes’ rifles stored overnight in the schoolhouse until they could be taken out of the district, is a conveniently overlooked piece of our history .
Ratana’s feeling of affiliation for the Japanese, visited by their leader himself in 1924, is explained in terms of Wiremu Tahupotiki Ratana’s belief that both Maori and Japanese belong to the long-lost tribe of Israel. However, the by-no-means homemade badges which Ratana children were wearing to school in 1941 - badges of the Rising Sun on the martial Japanese flag - at a time when the Japanese invasion of the Pacific was a very real and threatening prospect, raises questions which have been sympathetically brushed aside by our revisionist academic historians.
The List seats in parliament are increasingly viewed as antidemocratic. At the last election the National Party dismissively treated its own constitution which provided for List candidates to be chosen at grass roots level, selected by delegates chosen by the local electorates and meeting nationally to scrutinize those seeking List election. The present National leader, John Key, apparently blithely disregarded this requirement to choose the first 50 list placings. In essence, this ensured that any National Party candidates owe their loyalty to Key himself as leader - they were not chosen by the party grassroots.
To be fair, he had a precedent. The aspiring Prime Minister and National leader before him, Don Brash, also personally stacked the list-ranking committee, but more timidly. His insistence was on choosing the first 25 members, who would then obviously owe their loyalty to him.
These initiatives by two wannabe Prime Ministers are disturbing - certainly undemocratic. It no doubt goes a long way towards explaining the reason why not one National Party MP stood up to be counted when the present Prime Minister decided that his own personal views should prevail, rather than those of over 80% of New Zealanders, when it came to bringing up their own children. MPs who should have represented their own constituents on this issue instead played follow-the-leader.
These are very troubling directions we’re moving in. If a party’s List candidates don’t represent the grassroots members choice, and are not voted into parliament, what are they doing there? What in essence marks their presence as different from individuals chosen by political leaders in anti-democratic, fascist or communist countries? Being good mates with top political figures? Paying contributions into party coffers - or being thought to be in a position to do so in the future? Being thought to wield important influence in various spheres? Being useful yes-men - “party men”? These are all questions that must inevitably follow. To ignore them is to ignore the whittling away of our democratic rights - and of our freedom.
Undoubtedly, the badly flawed List system makes it much easier for the politically ambitious to leapfrog into parliament. The term “democratic” cannot possibly be applied to it. Even those who don't want a return to a first-past-the-post system with all its potential for the two major powers to do behind-the-doors deals between them, should be strongly opposed to the insult to the electorate offered by leaders imposing their own personal preferences on the country. Such behaviour belongs to an autocracy - not a democracy, offering advantages to individuals and special interest groups who would never otherwise have been elected.
It is not just the Maori Party which is profoundly un-representative of even mainstream Maori. And of course the word Maori should now be qualified in view of the fact that all those clamouring for special rights for Maori are today part-Maori only. Moreover, in many cases it can be demonstrated that while claiming disadvantage and discrimination, they themselves have been and are considerably privileged.
National’s unholy alliance with this present radicalized Maori Party is troubling many New Zealanders. Its public mouthpiece may be the one-eyed Hone Harawira, but its leaders - more wary and carefully-spoken - themselves represent extremist viewpoints of separatism, an essential anti-colonialism and a belief in their special entitlement.
Worse, given that the Maori Party attracted little over 2% of the (part)Maori vote in the past election, and that this percentage cannot possibly be claimed to represent a majority (part)Maori, many are asking why National's John Key is going to great and undemocratic lengths to accede to its demands of special welfare entitlement. Extraordinarily enough - even given her sense of entitlement and her anti-European mindset (her infamous “holocaust” accusation is not likely to be forgotten) it is co-leader Tariana Turia who has demanded this funding. And, not unexpectedly, she has also argued for her small party to be the ones managing it. However, simultaneously she manages to blame “Pakeha” government’s long, over-generous distribution of welfare funding among a Maori underclass for having contributed to damaging consequences, including its shameful, hands-out expectations and lack of a work ethic.
No doubt this is no more having a bob each way than the large tribes demanding that fair settlements in the past, made more than once with every expectation that they would at last be full and final, should now be revisited. The wily Ngai Tahu have now been given a highly imaginative and lucrative add-on to a (re)settlement - an extraordinary postscript to the previous full and final settlement signed at Kaikoura by then Prime Minister Jim Bolger, and his sidekick, Doug Graham.
This previous Kaikoura settlement itself shocked many capable researchers and has long been a bone of contention. This was particularly so given that the Crown Law Office at the time subsequently admitted, in essence, that it simply did not and could not have done its job properly. It lacked sufficient qualified researchers and funding, and was hampered by the Waitangi Tribunal culpably allowing Ngai Tahu to refuse to be cross-examined on their claims. Ngai Tahu’s claim was considerably facilitated by the highly experienced, senior Bell Gully lawyer, Chris Finlayson, now the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, and apparently warmly sympathetic to tribal claims.
Ngai Tahu have been even more successful recently. Incredibly enough, conservation land belonging to all New Zealanders has been given for their exclusive use for tree-planting purposes. This particularly clever, opportunistic tribe has argued that the value of its previous full and final settlements has been undermined by the carbon credit tax envisaged as part of the penalties forest owners will incur because of the government’s too hasty endorsement of the deeply flawed, global warming theory. Whether this has itself been due to government gullibility - or to its recognition that buying into this excessive CO2 theory is a ready-to-hand way of increasing wide-ranging taxation, and acquiring even more power over businesses and individuals unable to meet such absurd requirement, is debatable. But inexplicably, National’s acquiescing to Ngai Tahui’s demands has left the way wide open for other opportunistic tribal groupings to claim the same “rights” over land that properly belongs to all New Zealanders.
These are troubling times. It is arguable that these claims should not be settled simply by negotiations between the National Party - overseen by the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations - but should be decided in a proper court of law, where they could be open to much-needed challenge and public scrutiny. The amount in taxpayer paid-out claims amounts now to not even hundreds of millions, but accumulatively billions of dollars taken from the public purse - “compensation” all completely disregarded in the rabid claims of unbalanced (part)Maori radicals perpetually claiming that they have been cheated, and hard-done by. Meanwhile questions of public accountability to all intents and purposes have now simply been swept aside - as far as the electorate is concerned.
Who thinks this is good enough? What is indisputable is that since the National Party has got back into power, many who expected better things from the party that once stood for the freedom of the individual against creeping state control are disturbed, and disappointed. The Prime Minister, John Key’s glowing endorsement of our former socialist Prime Minister Helen Clark and her finance minister Michael Cullen, leaders of the left-wing coalition that has arguably done so much damage to a country formerly much more stable in social and economic respects, has disturbed many thinking New Zealanders.
What we now have is the emergence of a distinct political class whose members preferentially favour one anther, promote and apparently safeguard the interests of one another, recycle plum directorships - and even high-level diplomatic jobs among themselves, rather than appointing trained diplomats - and who hijack aspects of our democratic system that stand in the way of their achieving their personal ambitions.
No Upper House will solve this problem, not while it has the potential to be stacked by the usual power groupings and the usual suspects, many of whom have caused immense political damage to this country in recent years. Nor will an alternative system of voting. Moreover, the ongoing activism of the Human Rights Commission now attempting to entrench the Treaty of Waitangi as part of an essentially government-controlled, constitutional review the country has not asked for - i.e. the politically correct version of the treaty - is part of the push to ensure the ongoing unreal and radicalized separatism which has done so much harm already to race relations in this country.
What we must look towards now is claiming back a democracy in the only practicable way that it is achievable - the provision for that 100 days scrutiny by the electorate (already launched as Claiming Back New Zealand) to prevent the political parties, dominated by autocratic leaders, from having their own way when ramming through profoundly undemocratic legislation that the country simply doesn't want.
The time is right. The same thinking is being echoed in the UK and overseas, as other formerly democratic states and countries realize to what extent their own democracies are being hijacked.
Prime Minister John Key’s allowing the Maori Sovereignty flag to fly alongside our own New Zealand Flag on Waitangi Day is either an act of extraordinary folly - or of extraordinary ignorance of what is actually at stake.
It is time to address the hijacking of New Zealand. But meantime we need to recognize what has been said before: if we are to champion a genuine democracy, we must first practise it. This is demonstrably no longer happening the case in this country today.
****************
