4 November 2007
 Persecution of Dog Owners
By Karen Batchelor

"Castration, Death for Danger Dogs in Proposed Law Changes" reads the headline in the New Zealand Herald 1 November 2007 - click to view>>>

The New Zealand public needs to wake up to the machinations of our politicians in enacting bad law that so adversely affects our daily lives.  The Pit Bull Terrier beat-up is a prime example of politicians whipping up a storm of hysteria over a problem that does not actually exist and then enjoying the gratitude of a gullible Joe Public when they come up with a 'fix' for a problem that didn't exist in the first place.

The Modus Operandi has been the same the world over.  Take the United Kingdom for example.  In 1989 Kelly Lynch was mauled to death by 2 Rottweilers, so in 1990 Kenneth Baker, the then Home Secretary enacted a breed ban on fighting dogs.

New Zealand politicians are following Baker's bad example.  Koro Dinsdale was killed by his pig-dogs, a Northland woman bled to death after being bitten by a Malamute, a Dunedin woman was mauled to death by her Mastiff, Virginia Ohlsen died after being mauled by a couple of cross-breeds, so our politicians aim their bad law at the fighting dogs and the public obediently parrot the 'killer dog' hype and willy-nilly buy into the bunkum.

Recently children have been disfigured by a Jack Russell, a Golden Retriever, an American Staffordshire Bull Terrier and a cross-breed.  So our politicians have ramped up their attacks on the Pit Bull.  What is that REALLY all about?

Nanaia Mahuta (Labour - Tainui) misleads the public in claiming that mandatory neutering of the 'dangerous' breeds will see them taken out of the breeding population.  With the U.K. standing as a conspicuous example of the dismal failure that is BSL how can Ms Mahuta justify her salary?  Seventeen years after a total breed ban on Pit Bull Terriers in the U.K. they still have Pit Bull Terriers, they still have organised dog fighting and, more importantly, people are still being bitten by anything and everything other than Pit Bull Terriers. Go here for the dog warden's take on BSL in the U.K. 

Lord Baker thought he could legislate Pit Bulls out of existence within a decade.  He has failed miserably but lacks the integrity to admit that his legislation is flawed, unworkable, and that persisting with it is inexcusable. Instead he blames the dog wardens for failing to properly implement it.  Now Ms Mahuta wants to repeat that disaster here, at the taxpayer's and the dog's expense.  How many dogs will die in New Zealand because of BSL?  How many have already died? How many deserving family pets sit on death row as I write this simply because they  have 'that' look about them?

Pit Bull owners will NOT comply with Mahuta's proposed law changes.  As happened when Brian Neeson, Christine Fletcher and Maurice Williamson were banging the BSL drum for the National government of the day after Koro died, the wannabes will abandon their dogs in their droves, give them to people not fit to have them or - like that psycho who gloated that it had taken 23 hammer blows to dispatch his little bitch - they will kill them. 

The panicked devotees will breed their dogs on for fear that there really is no tomorrow, and they won't be able to give the poor little buggers away, and still others will cross-breed their dogs in an attempt to create a new muscle dog exempt from the troubles besetting the Pit Bull.  Pit Bull lovers will go even further underground. They will not register their dogs. They will not neuter their dogs. Pit Bulls will survive but many of their numbers will take some pretty awful hits as a result of the stupidity and manipulation of the people paid such handsome sums to 'run' our country.

And all the while the Pit Bull has done nothing more to deserve this than to become a scapegoat for a cynical political agenda.

Since I manage the registry for the American Pit Bull Terrier Association, I can tell you that there are fewer than 6,000 genuine Pit Bulldogs in this country.  I can also tell you that organised dog fighting is just that - highly organised.  It is also highly covert.  You don't pay thousands of dollars for a line-bred fighting dog and then let it roam the streets to bite the postie or get hit by a car.  You don't see those dogmen and you certainly don't see their dogs.  Whatever is passing for a Pit Bull on the streets of South Auckland and elsewhere, it is not the Real Deal.  So why are the politicians taking aim at a dog that the vast majority of New Zealanders have never laid eyes on yet, through such systematic conditioning, fear like the Devil?

There will always be dog bite incidents as long as there are dogs.  But when you consider that you are five times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a dog you have to wonder why such a song and dance is being played out over the issue.  Yes, we have a hospital admission a day in this country due to dog bites, eight of them over a twelve month period - yes, EIGHT - incorrectly attributed to the Pit Bull type according to Peter Dunne (United Future).  So which breeds were involved in the other 357 incidents?

EIGHT serious incidents occurred over twelve months in a population of some 750,000 dogs and that justifies the persecution of the Pit Bull Terrier who figured in NONE of those incidents?  

How many children have been killed by dogs in this country compared to those killed by their parents?  How many New Zealanders can no longer afford their own home? How many New Zealanders are having to wait into their 30s and 40s before they can consider having a family?  How many cancer patients are going untreated for too long or offshore for treatment?  How many proven pharmaceuticals are un-funded?  How many able-bodied citizens are languishing on benefits for decades unchallenged? How many of our brightest and best have left our shores?  How many surplus billions have been taken from tax-payers and to be used how?

Our politicians have many more burning issues to address in this country before they turn the heat up on our dogs.  Perhaps it's a diversionary tactic to take the focus off yet another Labour party politician behaving badly, or perhaps it's a more insidious attack on the four-legged members of the New Zealand family.  Whatever it is really about, the New Zealand public need to wake up to the facts of the Pit Bull matter - they are being mercilessly duped.

BSL is typical of the low-grade legislation coming out of successive governments including such farcical examples as Sue Bradford's anti-smacking law.  You have to wonder what these people think about.

Not much, obviously.

Whatever is wrong with our politician's thinking it's time Joe Public started thinking for himself before the joy and benefits of the family dog become a distant memory along with our quarter acre paradise.

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4 November 2007
Misuse of Taxpayers’ Dollars in the Health System
By Dr Viv Roberts


For the last 20 years or so the health system has been captured by people with a business and accounting understanding, and in that time we have seen NZ drop from one of the best health systems in the world to well below Guatemala.

There are some things that business will never understand about medicine, and that makes it very difficult for a businessman to decide about spending health dollars.

Usually in a business the workers are relatively lowly paid, and people work their way up getting paid the most by running the place. In medicine the basic players in the system have very significantly more training than the managers / CEO and have a better understanding of the work done.  Skills gained in running an ice cream factory (such as one of the managers of Hawkes Bay Hospital was) do not necessarily translate. If there is a problem with an ice cream, you can dump it or dump the batch, at relatively low cost. If there is a problem with a patient, the cost is likely to get higher as things go on and it may well be that what looked like a low cost issue may be prohibitive.

Business managers will demand large salaries and even in an environment where wages are relatively fixed they will increase the wage by changing the title of the position.

Our problems will continue until it is clear that there is a Dr in charge who knows his job is on the line if he does not perform the way the local people want him to perform - an elected medical superintendent.

We had a very good system of nurse training with student nurses running a lot of the hospital tasks, again headed by a senior nurse, a Matron. The nurses earned money while training with the wages stepping up with each year they completed. This training has been hijacked by people with an ideology that says training should happen in a university. 

I have worked with both the old style hospital trained nurses and the newer university trained nurses; for the duration of the training the hospital student nurses were actually quite useful and for the first year or two post qualification the hospital trained nurses were much better to work with. At 5 years there is no difference and I have still yet to meet any nurse that I think was more useful to the health service from university type training than those who got hospital training.

During my time in hospitals I saw a lot of waste of the most valuable resource in the system – the staff time. I recall that at certain times of year some operations would not be done because the budget for that item (I think it was hip replacements) had already been spent.  Put that together with another observation I have that I sometimes assist visitors to New Zealand to access secondary services. Routinely a private hospital will cost the patient less than our public system. There are reasons why public access will cost more than private because of the range of things that need to be done in them. So why would we undertake a proportion of elective procedures at all in the public system. Why not contract the majority out. One factor would be training of specialists but why not have registrars funded publicly but working in the private system some of the time? It seems to me that the criteria for all of these decisions should be; “how can I get the best value for this dollar?”

The current approach of Pharmac in its drug buying policy is counterproductive and they are shooting us all in the foot. The process of getting a new drug introduced is very difficult to the point where I suspect the companies just don’t bother, and we end up with a closed market. Actually I see very little need for Pharmac at all. In terms of introducing new drugs we already have the FDA in the USA and several Euopean bodies as well as Australia. I think one doctor full time could review the safety issues and give the go ahead to register or not.

In terms of pricing I would return to the previous tried and true system of the system paying for the cheapest generic, and if a patient or doctor wants a specific product they can pay the difference between the generic and the named product. For example, if your doctor decides you need coffee, the system will pay for ‘Pams’ coffee, if you want Nescafe you pay the difference between Nescafe and Pams. (I’m not suggesting we should prescribe coffee, but it’s an easily understood comparison). This would bring true competition back into the market and we would see better medications available at competitive prices.  Another part of the equation is that spending more on a relatively expensive drug may lead to significant savings in hospital costs later on, but hospital costs are not part of Pharmac’s problem and sometimes don’t seem to be on its ‘radar screen’.

In terms of medical law and getting the best from doctors, we are currently at a point where some doctors feel that if they fail to ensure an unlikely diagnosis they may find themselves in front of the health and disability commissioner so they may undertake tests or offer treatments that are not actually necessary.

Some examples might be a sore ankle that looks like a simple strain but the doctor may do an x-ray to cover the 1 percent possibility of a facture. An x-ray costs around $40, apply this thinking to 100 patients and suddenly it costs $4000 to find that one facture. Or a child that has a cold but the parent fears there may be an emerging bronchitis or pneumonia that is not yet clinically apparent, The doctor may give antibiotic to cover that possibility not because he thinks it is appropriate but because the subsequent hassle of complaints might be a significant problem so again if he feels the risk of that is 2% or so he may give antibiotic. Cost of the course is around $15 so for 100 patients it ends up costing $1500 to treat 2 episodes of bronchitis.

In fact these are fairly common scenarios and there are many more, worse examples.

If the law were altered and the pricing on visits to the doctor were rearranged to make second consultations easier, there could be savings running in to millions of dollars.

There are lots of examples of our country being run by stupidity and the above are just a few relevant to Health.

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4 November 07
Threat to Freedom: global warming
By Ken Ring

"The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it": H. L. Mencken

We are a very tiny planet, so small that one million Earths could fit into the Sun. An alien from any area of space beyond our Sun would not be able to see us against our own sun’s glare. And even if with their superior intelligence and presumably superior sunshades they could see through that glare, and they came from Alpha Centauri in the Southern Cross which, at a quick four light years away is our nearest star neighbour, they would still not see us unless it is possible to see a peppercorn in NZ from 3000 miles away in Singapore.

Global warming alarmists seem to have no grasp of this scale. Our Sun emits more energy in a minute than all human industrial activity in history, and there is nothing we can do to change solar activity. The global warming we have been recently experiencing since the last ice age, the panic-causing 1C over the past 8,000 years, is caused by a 100,000-year solar cycle. How did the Earth, acting alone, all by itself orchestrate being brought out of the Ice Age? How did warming happen before Man came along? How did the Sun get into the sky before humanity? How did carbon dioxide get into the air before cars and factories? If the answer is something to do with natural processes, then why do people think that have these natural processes would have suddenly stopped, paving the way for man to determine climate? 

Yet the world is now divided between those who think Nature causes weather, that climate and weather are subject to cycles and that we have always had extreme weather events, and those who believe that man and his emissions are responsible for all the current catastrophes, that climate is irreversibly changing and we are seeing bizarre and freakish weather never experienced before.  Warmers point to the dark and smelly smoke coming out of factory chimneys and the sooty smoky fumes from logging trucks and shriek “Eek..we are being poisoned.” They do not know that what they are seeing is mostly dirty water in the form of steam. Carbon dioxide is colourless, odourless and invisible. It may or may not be there, but no one would see it any more than you can see your breath. CO2 is not a pollutant, or black sooty stuff would come out of everyone’s mouth when they exhaled. Dark factory chimney smoke is steam plus wood gases which contain CO2 plus unburnt fuel. The CO2 is merely being returned to the air after being extracted some decades ago during the tree-growing process.

But pollution is getting nicely confused with climate such that politicians can design new tax opportunities. Soon, eco-green regulations will change the building industry, with new and more expensive compliant materials, new permits needed, creating more work for consultants and lawyers and providing a rationale for a whole new bureaucracy. All this is based on the convenient lie that CO2 is a pollutant.

Unfortunately skeptics don’t get a look in. No skeptic receives research funding. If anyone has an alternative viewpoint they are expected to develop it in their own time and for free. No debate is sanctioned by government and the submissions process is a well known farce. Worse, calls for debate are labeled unpatriotic and treasonous. The official line is that an international "consensus" of scientists exists negating the need for debate, or that "the time for debate is over." Global warming skeptics are either industry shills, incredibly misguided, or evil needing to be silenced.  British foreign secretary Jack Straw said that "skeptics should be treated like advocates of Islamic terror and denied access to the media." Grist magazine called for Nuremberg-style "war crime" trials for those who deny that human beings are causing a global climate disaster. George Monbiot (author of The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order) wrote in Guardian magazine that "Every time someone drowns as a result of floods in Bangladesh , an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned."

To combat global warming, its militant adherents say we must all accept drastic reductions in our standard of living starting now, steadily increasing year-after-year, until much of industrial society is swept away. Only thus can the earth, and perhaps mankind, be saved. To achieve this radical restructuring of society, they demand that we give virtually unlimited power to government to control what we eat, how we travel, and how our industries operate, with no dissent or resistance permitted. Cars, jet travel for the public, air conditioning, refrigeration, and indeed many if not most of the conveniences of modern life will simply have to be abolished. As one environmental activist says, "Everything modern has to go." 

While intoning these demands, warmers seldom discuss the real cost of their proposals – in dollars and human terms. Just curtailing use of refrigeration would result in millions of human deaths from food spoilage and contamination. Restrictions on cars, airplanes and other means of transportation would wipe out much of the progress of the last 100 years. Drastically curtailing industrial activity would result in global depression, disease and a reduction in population.

If lawsuits in the US are anything to go by, emitters, that is, anyone who burns anything or runs an engine without a permit, may be in for a testing time. A federal judge on Monday, Sept. 17, 2007, tossed out the lawsuit filed by California that sought to hold the automakers accountable for their contribution to global warming. The state sued Chrysler Motor Corp., Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and the U.S. subsidiaries of Japan 's biggest manufacturers, Honda North America, Nissan North America and Toyota Motor North America. The accused were the six largest U.S. and Japanese automakers.  Thankfully the judge ruled it is impossible to determine to what extent automakers are responsible for global warming damages in California . Judge Martin Jenkins in San Francisco noted that many culprits, including natural sources, are responsible for emitting carbon dioxide.

The ruling was a defeat for California Attorney General Jerry Brown, who has made fighting global warming a priority. "The court is left without guidance in determining what is an unreasonable contribution to the sum of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, or in determining who should bear the costs associated with global climate change that admittedly result from multiple sources around the globe," Jenkins wrote. His inference was that courts should find a way of suing successfully. The Bush administration has consistently opposed any international treaty - including the 1997 Kyoto Protocol - that would impose cuts on greenhouse gases because it would harm foreign policy. Does that mean if the world population significantly shifted towards believing in global catastrophe the Greens would encourage the same lawsuits in NZ?

The doomsday theory is fraught with error and bad science. It is little more than a politically-motivated power grab by politicians and the far Left, who will continue getting more money and more power to "save us" from ourselves. While human industrial activity is not causing climate change, that has not stopped money-hungry bureaucrats from promoting moves towards new taxes, permits, and police-power over every business – from your corner dry cleaner to the largest industrial plants. The new disaster agenda is in fact that old "back to the earth" socialism, which longs for a simpler time, when the king's word was law, people seldom ventured beyond the village in which they were born and heated their homes with animal dung. To some that sounds romantic and "eco-friendly," but for billions it would mean their own catastrophes of poverty, slavery, and disease.

Only modern industrial capitalism, which has been knocked into a workable shape by three quarters of a century of trade union movement, can provide affluence and freedom of choice for all, and only the mass consumption of energy can make modern industrial capitalism possible. Rather than cutting back it would make sense to spend much more on fuel, to make the oil companies rich enough to begin real research into new technologies like water engines and cheap solar units that will benefit poor people. Of course we are not that stupid to trust that that would happen, as we know oil barons would just pocket more profits and governments skim more tax, so the problem is not solvable whilst cartels and governments work together to rip off the rest.

The new army of greens seek to make us all feel guilty about our wealth and our consumption of energy. If environmental extremists wish to live in 15th Century primitivism, let them move to Somalia or Madagascar , and leave the rest of us alone. Let us hope that as they demand we surrender our freedom and prosperity to prevent a climate disaster, so too do common people, who have always found ways to adjust to any perceived change of weather patterns, find strength and courage to speak out against Al Gore and this false alarmism which will lead to our ultimate inconvenience and expense whilst filling his own coffers.

For here is a man dedicated to the Al Gore Fund, which is where the proceeds of Live Earth! went. It is no secret but not widely publicized that he runs a business (General Investment Fund worth $750m) that sells carbon-credits to governments. Could it be that by generating panic the environmentalists, headed by Gore, advance tiny steps towards world government? It seems Gore is not really interested in the US presidency. Perhaps it is because he has his eyes on an even bigger prize, that of world government Leader. The recent once-prestigious awards he has won show only that he has many believing he is the next Messiah, the only man on the planet capable of saving it from itself. Politicians who curry favour with Gore are positioning themselves as close as they can get to the corridors of the UN, which since 1948 has been promoting itself as the only candidate for future world government.

Truth has already become a casualty. Gore will not allow himself to take part in a public debate about global warming, neither will our local politicians debate it. Yet political chambers used to be bastions of debate, which was reflected in the populace. For that reason we must not stop talking about the fallacy of global warming and the nonexistence of climate change. We must tell our children the truth, not the Gore/Clark so-called truth, and insist our schools also give balanced viewpoints. To all we meet we should point out the flaws in this popular pseudoscience that is trying to turn everybody’s brains to mush. Only by encouraging debate will we bring about an undoing of their stranglehold on our freedoms. The price of freedom is still eternal vigilance. It looks like the next international battleground may not be for territory, which in the computer age renders everything instantly global, but for the control of minds.

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31 October 07
Extremist government - Is this the route we want to take?
By Ian

Extremism and those that hold extremist views in general can be a good indicator as to the state of a social group. Their existence, providing they are non violent, can show the boundaries that society has to operate between and the mere fact that they exist shows that there is a measure of freedom of speech and freedom of association within that society. The fact that many may not agree with their views should in no way result in them not exercising their right to hold these views. Their existence should also serve as a means of enabling constructive debate on emotive issues where all sides of the issues in question are examined, no matter how ridiculous these may seem.

Problems start to occur when non violent becomes violent, when sections of society begin to believe in their philosophies and act accordingly and their ideals start to impinge on day to day life to the point of being the norm.

Take for example the feminist extremists of the 60’s and 70’s. Part of their philosophy was to do away with the idea of a male dominated family base; they saw the family as the foundation of patriarchal capitalism, which they claimed was the source of all women's oppression. It came as no surprise then that the feminists neither supported the role of the family nor the part that the male played in it.

Couple this ideology with that of the agendas of a socialist government and you have the situation we currently find ourselves in where the role of the male in the family is more or less redundant, family values have been eroded resulting in high levels of teenage abortions, the existence of the domestic purpose benefit, high levels of child and gender abuse, high crime and substance abuse and all the other ills that befall a rapidly decaying social base. Of this group the DPB is probably the most insidious and destructive of all as its lessons of dependence and anti male are passed on to future generations.

Over the years policies like these creep up on society and usually manifest themselves out of  ideas which, at first glance, seem reasonable in isolation, but when combined can have a huge negative impact on the social structure in general with their negative aspects cascading and fuelling each other. This is an example of extremism becoming the norm.

A second example is the dangerous precedence being set with the hype on climate change where extremism is allowed to dictate what you can and cannot think and what are acceptable view points when debating on this, and other related, emotive subjects. A couple of years ago one group of environmental activists forced a local power company to spend millions of dollars on the relocation of rare snails which in the end were found not to be so rare after all. An expensive and embarrassing comedy of errors, yes, but this set a precedent where an extremist group could force their illogical ideas on a populace and nobody was able or willing to tell them where to get off.

Does this bring back memories of the greens and the Bradford anti smacking bill? Well it should because the same mechanism applies, this being to address an emotive subject, suggest ideas that are unacceptable to the general population and even to the head of government, publicise the solution in such a way that any disagreement or opposition will be seen as condoning child abuse and you have an instant recipe for success. Another unenforceable, un popular and potentially damaging piece of legislation has now become part of the New Zealand landscape. When you have the general media supporting this kind of scenario is it any wonder that confusion reigns.

How many more pieces of extremist and alarmist legislation have been introduced or is in the process of being introduced, how many people actually care - and this I believe is the main stumbling block to the control of this kind of extremist infiltration into what was once a democratic system. A large portion of the legislation is seen to not affect the average citizen directly because they try to address issues that in the main are not in the domain of the average family, who really cares about snails, “child or gender abuse doesn’t happen in my house”, even if it does, “I don’t know any terrorists so why should legislation supposedly addressing these issues be of any concern to me”. One only has to look at the voter turn out at the last local government elections to see that apathy prevails and as long as it does those making the laws or taking advice from the extremists will continue to do so without check.

In my opinion one of the most dangerous pieces to come up would be the Electoral Finance Bill because this could be the beginning of the end of freedom of speech. The hate speech bill is still in the wings waiting to jump out. Anyone saying that these laws don’t affect them should ask themselves what freedoms they actually have and are they happy with the current state of society. If they are then extremist government is definitely the route they want to take, like it or not.

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24 October 07
Holding us Back
By Brian Holden

The last couple of weeks have not been good.  Our once proud country has demonstrated that it is now anything but.  The days are steadily disappearing where we worked as a nation for peace and prosperity.  Maori and pakeha were seen to be working to close racial gaps and some progress, albeit painfully slow was being made in patching up the cracks in past Treaty settlements. There was hope.

In recent days as a result of the nationwide police raids I have seen a whole chunk of that hope being shot to pieces.  Be it overkill or not, the whole nasty business has uncovered a hard core group of angry dissidents hell-bent on seeking revenge.  Many simply have an axe or toki to grind, while others are dodgy at best, with a handful appearing to be out and out criminals.  I have to ask how anyone can justify having military-style weapons and Molotov cocktails in their home.  With the ages of the people involved in the raids ranging from 19 to 59 years, brown and white, it is clear that a wide cross section of the community is involved.

NZ Political Research is currently conducting a poll asking:  Whether you believe that radical dissidents pose a real threat to New Zealand.

Personally I doubt that these losers (they're certainly not winners) would have a powder keg's chance in hell of holding our country to ransom, but their attitude does bother me big time.  Our hopes of our country ever being able to move ahead seem pretty much dashed, not helped one iota by Dr Pita Sharples' stab in the dark with his claim that race relations have now been set back 100 years. 

On Friday night many viewers would have seen the eyes and teeth of a young man being interviewed on television wearing a rather silly looking mask (the type usually worn by losers) who said he attended one of Tama Iti's training camps.  He asserted that there was no sinister motive to the training and that it was designed as a "safety net" should his people ever come under threat and have to stand up for themselves.  When asked if he had any criminal convictions he said (after a pause) that he had - for fighting.

Our country is blighted with a faction of pathetic souls who aspire only to negativity and hatred, demonstrating a stubborn reluctance to roll up their sleeves and move forward with the rest of the world. 

We have just hosted friends on holiday from overseas and found it difficult to conceal our embarrassment caused by all this largely unjustified unrest.

In the last week or so on television news, we must have seen the file footage of our pillar of society - Tami Iti shooting our New Zealand flag at least a dozen times as well as the flaunting of his bare backside.  What a wonderful impression for our visitors. 

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20 October 07
Why Reparations for Maori Should Stop
By R R McLean

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL

1. I believe in equal rights for all the citizens of this country but I also believe that reparations for one ill defined section of our community for perceived past injustices is wrong.

REPARATIONS FOR PROPERTY TAKEN IN EARLIER TIMES ?

2. The evidence seems to be clear that land and other property was unfairly taken from the Maori people in earlier times but what good is done by making reparations in this day and age to people not all of whose ancestors have necessarily suffered and some of whose Pakeha ancestors have been the very people who perpetrated the wrongdoings ?

COMPENSATION FOR INJUSTICES AGAINST MAORI BY PAKEHA BUT NOT FOR INJUSTICES AGAINST MAORI BY MAORI ?

3. In pre-European times and even in European times ( e.g. the musket wars ) Maori perpetrated terrible injustices against other Maori, including enslavement and cannibalism. Where is the logic which says that there must be compensation for injustices perpetrated by Pakeha against Maori but not for injustices perpetrated by Maori against Maori ?

DECIMATION OF MORIORI PEOPLE BY MAORI

4. Maori tribes decimated the Moriori people but no one suggests that the descendants of those tribes should be punished, presumably because they did such a good job that no descendants of the Moriori have survived. How can it be logical to punish the descendants of people who may have been guilty of wrongdoing where the people who suffered have survived but to let off scot-free the descendants of the people who did such a good job that nobody who suffered survived ? Perhaps the answer is that the principle is compensation and not punishment and there are no Moriori left to compensate.

NOT ALL PAKEHA BENEFITED

5. There were many Pakeha who did not benefit at all from the injustices and acquired land and other property legitimately by paying the fair price prevailing at the time. Why should their descendants owe a debt ? What about the descendants of Pakeha who tried to prevent some of the bad practices which developed ? Should they pay?

WHAT ABOUT BENEFITS CONFERRED BY PAKEHA ON MAORI ?

6. The claims by Maori seem to take no account of the other side of the ledger - when the Europeans arrived in this country the Maori people were living at a subsistence level that can only be described as miserable. They had destroyed the moa bird which was their only substantial source of protein other than fish and human flesh, cannibalism was rife, the tribes were continually fighting each other and it was wet and cold in the winter. Some historians doubt whether they would have survived. Admittedly the Europeans brought diseases and other problems but it has been said that the bottom line is that the advent of the European has on balance brought great benefits to the Maori. Never is this a factor in the deliberations of the Waitangi Tribunal which instead of assessing the evidence in an objective manner seems to be acting as an advocate for the claimants.

REVIVAL OF CLAIMS RESULTS IN A CRIPPLING SENSE OF VICTIMHOOD

7. The revival of the Maori treaty claims has resulted in a renewed sense of grievance among many Maori. To focus the social passions of Maori on what some Europeans may have done to their ancestors 150 years ago is to burden them with a crippling sense of victimhood. I see this in the neighbourhood in which I live. Recently I was talking to a Maori fellow who lives nearby and who had been objecting to a protection measure to be implemented in order to protect some Taupo lakeside properties from erosion. The proposal when implemented will benefit everyone, Maori and Pakeha alike, in that it will ensure that there is always a beach for people to walk and ride horses along. I asked why he objected and he said that it was very complicated but that he and his people continue to hurt because of all the injustices that have been done to them ( whatever that has to do with a proposal that will benefit everyone ). This attitude is not making him at all a happy person. A Maori elder ( now dead ) whom I much respected told me that this particular fellow should get a job and get a life rather than continuing to complain about perceived past injustices which have not been visited upon him by any of the people presently living in this country. A good Maori friend of mine who also lives in our neighbourhood works hard as a fishing guide and by his behaviour clearly has decided that there is no point in moaning and groaning about past grievances and that his people need to get over it and get on with the job. He seems to be a much more contented and happy person than the other fellow.

BENEFITS CONFERRED HAVE NOT RESULTED IN HEALING

8.Many benefits have already been conferred upon Maori in the form of retransfer of lands, welfare benefits and positive discrimination in the workplace and in education. It is said that reparations are necessary to achieve a healing between Maori and Pakeha. I see no evidence of much healing amongst the Maori activists who, notwithstanding all the benefits which have already been conferred, never seem to express any gratitude to people living in this country at the present time who have given to them without ever having taken from them. Many of them respond by making more and more demands. If what has already been given is not enough to achieve a healing then when will it ever be enough ? Also I see little evidence of healing amongst Pakeha, great numbers of whom are becoming increasingly bitter as largesse continues to be bestowed on seemingly ungrateful people.

IN SOME CASES WHAT DID MAORI REALLY GIVE AWAY ?

9. Some historians claim that the Maori were duped into disposing of vast areas of their land for a pittance. The disposition of most of the South Island by a Maori chief is cited as an example. But what did this chief really give away ? The Maori tribes only exercised jurisdiction over a minute part of the South Island, the rest of which was a wilderness which nobody could properly claim to own.

WHY SHOULD IMMIGRANTS BE REQUIRED TO PAY ?

10. Since the injustices, real and imagined, that were visited upon the Maori all those

years ago there have been waves of immigration of people of all races and creeds whose ancestors had probably never heard of New Zealand let alone exploited the local populace. In the law firm of which I was a partner there was a black female Sri Lankan lawyer whose parents had emigrated to this country. She is definitely one of the most intelligent and likeable people to have worked in our large firm. She simply could not understand why she and her parents should be called upon to pay for the misdeeds of people from a bygone age that her ancestors had had nothing to do with. She loves this country and as far as I know has never felt the stigma of racial discrimination.

HOW CAN PROCEEDS OF CLAIMS BE FAIRLY DISTRIBUTED ?

11. How can the proceeds of successful claims possibly be fairly distributed ? What about the person who has one eighth Maori blood and seven eighths of the blood of the very people who were responsible for the injustices ? Do we ever hear of offers to return seven eighths of Treaty spoils ? The situation is so farcical that it now appears that anyone who feels “ Maori’’ can participate in the gravy train without having to prove a trace of Maori blood.

ALL OUR ANCESTORS HAVE BEEN RAPED AND PILLAGED

12. My ancestors came from Scotland. Their clan was raped and pillaged by another clan which took much of their property. The Normans came and took land from the Saxons. The Romans took land from everyone. None of this matters now. What does matter is that everyone should be treated equally in this land without regard to race, religion, culture, colour, sex or political opinion. The apparently never ending claims for reparations by Maori is hardly conducive to the achievement of these objectives.

SHOULD THE STATE BE LIABLE FOR PAST WRONGDOINGS ?

13. It is said that, while the descendants of wrongdoers may not be liable for the sins of their ancestors, a state endures and the state must make reparations for past wrongs perpetrated by the state. For how long does the state remain liable ? One century - or perhaps four centuries - five centuries ? The state comprises the people who live in it and if it is inequitable that those people should have to pay as individuals then why should the state have to pay since in reality the state and the people are one and the same. In any case I believe that in the earlier days in New Zealand there were many cases where the injustices were carried out by individuals not in the name of the state. There is no logic in the proposition that the people who live in a particular country should have to pay for the misdeeds of the people of a bygone era who lived in the same country.

AM I A RACIST FOR WRITING THIS PAPER ?

14. I hear the howls of abuse from the members of the Waitangi Tribunal and other people in their ivory towers in Wellington who will claim that I am a racist for writing this paper. Let them come and see where I live in a predominantly Maori community. Let them come fishing up the rivers with my Maori friend who says his grievance industry mates should get a life and stop moaning. Let them talk to the other Maori people whom I know, like and respect and ask them if they think I am a racist.

SETTLED CLAIMS HAVE OPENED THE FLOODGATES

15. I appreciate that it can be argued that now that the floodgates have been opened and claims by some groups of Maori accepted it would be unjust to deprive subsequent claimants who have what appear to be equally valid claims. However, from my observation I think it is reasonably clear that for the most part the more recent claims have been made by people who are climbing on the gravy train. I believe that any claims which have not yet been made should be rejected as being too late and existing claims which are accepted as being as meritorious as the claims which have already been settled should be dealt with as soon as possible. All other existing claims should be rejected. If all of us in this country are to walk into the sunset together the powers that be must bite the bullet and end the farce of endless claims to the Waitangi Tribunal as soon as possible.

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13 October 07
Are we Tolerant or Merely Indifferent?
By Just Brian

What is this thing called Multiculturalism?  It is, as somebody once suggested, purely a form of separate but equal development, in others words a CULTURAL APARTHEID.

Although Multiculturalism is deemed a policy, it is just the opposite; for a policy is "A programme of action", which in itself is a positive approach to a problem.

Multiculturalism is a non-policy, it is an idea formulated in the ivory towers of liberalism, by people who would be principally never concerned with its effects, never confronted with its problems and who would take very good care they never live cheek by jowl close to it.

Of course Multiculturalism appeals to New Zealanders, to our high mindedness, to our emotions, but never to the actual practicalities of bringing a variety of people from totally different backgrounds and expecting them to behave in their own cultural way and at the same time, accepting New Zealand cultural values. Good citizens are not made so with a stroke of a pen, or some fancy words from the incumbent Minister of Immigration.

Unless immigrants are from similar western democratic countries to our own, the chances of success in getting them to accept the New Zealand Way and at the same time encouraging them to virtually transpose from their previous way of life, which in the case of refugees is what they came here to get away from in the first place; seems somewhat nonsensical.

Liberals state America as an example, they achieved this integration with the diverse communities which poured into that Continent for over a hundred years ago and  STILL achieving it..WHY ?

Waves of immigrants into the USA have been absorbed and integrated by a programme of Americanization, starting in schools and throughout the whole immigrant society.

How is it done?  By a pledge of allegiance, by its Civic lessons, and by bringing America to the immigrant as an achievement, a desire and a proud fulfillment to become an American citizen.

But here in New Zealand we don't want that kind of super patriotism, none of that rubbish of  standing to attention hand on the heart and saluting the flag, (especially so, if the design of our flag is to be changed).  Also what is the point of all that "pseudo ex British colonial nonsense" are we not a free democratically (Well at least 60 of our M.P.s are elected) which is half way to being democratic.

We have missed the point, American children do salute the flag, do recite a pledge of allegiance, do revere their pioneer forefathers, whose struggle for liberty brought forth  the greatest founding document of any nation, starting as it does with "We the people.."

They learn a few years later the Constitution, memorize it, they learn that government exists of three branches- the executive, the legislature and the judiciary and :-

"THAT THESE THREE HAVE THE POWERS TO CHECK ONE ANOTHER."

Those American children remember that without the Constitution their nation would not exist, and being a people is an American-ness which is of value to them all.

"Ah there's the rub"

So when do our school children learn about our Government, instead of the Treaty and its wrongs.  When are they encouraged to write to Members of Parliament on specific issues of legislation, and on why such a law was passed or rejected?  And more to the point get sensible replies based on facts rather than ideology.

"Tis' a consummation devoutly to be wished"

Regretfully so long as New Zealand is infected with the present socialistic virus, future immigrants will still continue to wonder at what they should be, and how they can hold on to their old allegiances, cultural identities and at the same time accommodate a fresh New Zealand allegiance.

Let us hope that they never have to make a choice between the two!

We would do well to follow Prime Minister John Howard and place Multiculturalism firmly into the rubbish bin of history.

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10 October 07
The Value of Carbon Trading
By Nick Kile

Little political perception is necessary to see predictable events unfolding to ones horror...

Due to lost communication with the Electorate, voters are unable to influence the Parliament and these difficulties are increasing ever day.  Even 80% voter majority does not seem to make a difference as politics undertakes its own direction and agenda.

It is vital that we do not abrogate an interest in politics at a crucial age where our freedoms are being eroded as socialist vested interest is given priority over political direction chosen by the wishes of the majority of voters.

There is a critical need for opposition parties to provide a credible alternative and “Oppose” the government rather than act as a committee by blending policy attitudes that are consistently challenged by the Electorate. 

After much research, concerning the above topic, it is evident that a multitude of warnings are available from active technical specialists. 

THE PREDICTION...

The Socialist Carbon Trading Scheme will open the door to corrupt practises that will exploit the consumer and enable accountability to be avoided by the government.  Also, many companies will profit from increased costs passed on to the consumer as prices for services and commodities rise.  No identifiable technical solutions will eventuate and this failure will be exploited by parliamentary activity and increased legislation to conceal identification of unaccountable tax gains.

THE ANALOGY...

The analogy is best explained by using the Share Market.  The VALUE of a share is clearly visible to the Trader in the Share Market.  Many qualified professions are identified with quantifying share value.  Risk is also identifiable enabling dependable trading to be undertaken.  (Even under these professional circumstances fortunes are lost!)

The VALUE of a Carbon Credit is unquantifiable and therefore entirely speculative.  Attempts to value such a commodity will be obscured by vested interest cultures and as such the scheme is corruptible and open to fraud.

No credible unit of Carbon Emission exists nor is it likely to because of the sheer complexity, when considering the vast numbers, of carbon producing machines in the world today.

Additionally, the Carbon Trading Scheme enables the Government to avoid focussed decision-making that may offend various industries.  Thus failing their elected responsibilities to the nation.

THE TAXATION SYSTEM...

Currently, the Taxation System and its use is clearly evident and accountable to the public.  The Carbon Trading Scheme replaces the valid function of budget allocation of tax monies that are targeted to specific programs, with the opportunity for government to abrogate its own accountability.  

Where are the specific programs?

Scientific evidence indicates that the perpetrators of critical carbon emission are the combustion engine and coal burning industries.  The opportunities for alternative methods of replacing the combustion engine are abundant today. 

Clean Coal technology is here with by products from the capability that could provide chemicals needed for alternative engines.  For example, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen both could be used in electric vehicles and their accompanying charging combustion motors.

So the analogy is:  Why not just fix the bloody problem using the publicly accountable taxation system and targeted programs?

The upcoming federal elections in Australia should be a great reminder that the proverb “Never underestimate the thinking power of the electorate!” always should be considered by political parties.

The Australian poll analysis reveals that a landslide victory will go to Labour in the Australian Election 2007 and the Liberal Coalition parties will not hold government at any level, State or Federal, in the nation.  I believe it takes the electorate about two years to understand adverse ideological policy.

THE FUNDAMENTAL NEED...

Under MMP, Opposition Parties have a responsibility to “Oppose” corrupt practices.  This attempt by Socialist Labour to introduce a Carbon Credit Trading scheme is open for indefinite future political manipulation and corruption…

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10 October 07
GST - a tax on a tax on a tax
By Vigilant of Tamaki

Today,  everyone contributes one dollar in four from their food budget to GST.  Rich man, poor man, babe in arms, no one escapes.

This is New Zealand 2007. People in the U K  do  not  pay VAT when purchasing food.

The N Z baker, the butcher, the supermarket, the grocer’s, accounting costs are added to the tax.  This  will   cost  one additional dollar every time you spend four dollars on your days food bill, half of which goes straight into the tax mans coffers. And the hidden amount has paid the cost of  administration. 

You knew that. Did you realise that  hidden in the price  you have paid is the  cost of computers,  maintenance,  the operators time, calculating  costing and deducting the GST content numerous times, as well as approval by accountants, submitting taxation returns, and forwarding payments  to the tax. department . This takes place at every stage of  progression, from raw material  to the checkout, when the consumer’s wage packet   pays the piper.

This disaster taxation system  GST goes in circles. The cost of living to those who  contribute at the beginning of  a food process run, for example those who have supplied services or worked for the farmer who grows the wheat,  will all have to bear the final cost when purchasing a loaf of bread. The flour miller, his staff,  the delivery men, the distributor, and retailers expenses, all add  one after another to the retail price.  Another example is the dairy farmer, his  processing staff along the dairy food  production line. The cost to  all workers who will require a greater wage to pay GST when purchasing their own food .   This simplified explanation shows the manner in which GST goes round in circles, resulting in economic stagnation peculiar to New Zealand.

Who pays for this elaborate scheme, which has made every one a tax collector? It is the cost of  your basic food purchase,  not 12.5% ( one dollar in eight.) but one dollar in each four dollars which you spend on your daily bread.

Many countries do not tax the poor man, the baby, as they do to all who live in New Zealand.  Some countries employ a far more simple system, where all basic food is known as, zero rated, eliminating the calculation, recording,  collection and payments. This means everyone benefits, production costs less, and the shoeless toddlers need no longer go hungry to school.

Pause for a moment and think how much you would benefit buying home produced food were it zero rated.  The amount saved on each day’s food, which to your household. would be the  equivalent of a considerable wage increase. Well above the amount achieved by a few weeks of strike action.

Dare one ask any pensioner?  When and if you purchase one hundred dollars worth of zero rated food would you be happy to still have twenty five dollars left in your pocket?

Take a look at your supermarket shelves and notice the vast number of items which are imported.  Well known quality production foods bearing the names Nestles  and Hellabys are  now imported from overseas.

One dairy quality product comes from Scandinavia!

High food prices elevating wages to a non affordable degree, exciting workers to flock away, leaving  this country to move overseas  to greener pastures.   Well known established manufacturers are now actively transferring their production lines to overseas countries.

Many imported products cost less than home produced items, one example which comes to mind is Australian quality wines.

Those who voice the opinion that a better and fairer tax would be difficult to regulate,  ignore the benefit of the VAT system widely used overseas.   There are no complications  with Zero rating,  It would eliminate the present over weight NZ chain of accounting   systems which penalises all producers, who are at present compelled to increase the cost of basic home produced foods.

For example - from grain to finished loaf -  when production workers  purchase the finished product they are disadvantaged   necessitating a larger wage  to  pay their food bill, starting the circular chain  reaction over again.

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10 September 07
Comments on Transpower’s Line Proposal
By Bryan Leyland MSc, FIEE, FIMechE, FIPENZ, MRSNZ, Consulting Engineer



Transpower’s latest proposal is to build a new 400 kV line but to operate it at 220 kV until load growth increases to the extent that the additional capacity achievable with 400 kV operation is needed. This is expected to be around 2030. But it could easily be several – or many - years later.  By taking their study horizon out 36 years to 2042, Transpower have been able to show that, on a present value basis, this proposal has a slightly lower cost than alternative proposals.

Transpower state that there is an urgent need for a decision on the 400 kV line.  But Transpower's current proposals take no account of the new 45 MW gas turbine at Southdown, Top Energy’s now committed 15 MW expansion at Ngawha or the 400 MW combined cycle unit now planned to be built at Otahuhu.   Transmission enhancements like the Drury switching station and the upgrade of the 220 kV “C” line will also defer the need for a decision.  The Southdown and Ngawha expansions and the transmission enhancements will defer the need for a decision on the 400 kV line by two or three years. There is a high probability that Otahuhu C will proceed to construction and if it does, it will defer the line for several more years. Genesis have plans for a 300-400 MW station north of Auckland and Mighty River Power plan to recommission Marsden B on coal.  If these also go ahead, they will further defer the need for the line.  I have no evidence that any of these have been taken into account by Transpower. There is therefore, ample time for proper investigations of alternative scenarios such as those mentioned below that could defer the need for 400 kV until beyond the foreseeable future.

The major - and very serious - weakness with the 400 kV proposition is that Transpower have had to extend the study out to 2042 in order to justify the 400 kV option over the other options. The "standard" time horizon for studies like this is 20 years or less - 25 years at the most. So it appears that their decision in favour the 400 kV rests entirely on benefits that may or may not accrue between 2030 and 2042. Putting it another way, Transpower are suggesting that we commit a considerable amount of extra money and also close off other options on the basis of future benefits that may never be realized.

Before a decision is made we need to know how the NPV comparisons stack up for time horizons of 15, 20, 25 and 30 years.  If as I suspect, 400 kV is best only if the comparison is taken beyond 2036, the small advantage it appears to have needs to be weighed against the strong possibility that the predictions of the future are way off mark.  This, of course, happens more often than not.

Here are some of the possible developments that could arise in the next 20 years that would leave us regretting that we had built a 400 kV line:

1.  New large power stations are built in or North of Auckland. For instance, it is quite possible that long before 2042, public opinions on nuclear power will have reached a high level of acceptance.  (It is already happening in Europe and the USA.)

2.  Major new power stations are planned for the lower South Island. These could be hydropower, gas fired (from offshore gas fields off Canterbury, Oamaru and the Great Southern basin) or from the coal fields in Southland. On the radio on the 21^st November, a spokesman from Crown minerals said that the chances of finding large quantities of gas and oil in the Great Southern Basin are very high.  All these options would require a new direct current link from the new power stations to central Auckland or, better still, across the isthmus.  This could well eliminate the need for 400 kV.

3.  The technologies in direct current transmission, overhead lines  and underground cables for direct current improve to the extent the that they have overtaken 400 kV transmission on technical and economic grounds. This has already happened in China where many point to point DC links are in service amd more are being built.  It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that one or more new DC links from newly discovered gas fields in Taranaki or off the East Coast turns out to be the best way of getting power to Auckland.

All these are strong reasons for deferring any decision to build a 400 kV line until we know more about where future power stations might be located. Then we can decide whether or not 400 kV is the best option in the short term as well as the long term.

I, and many other experienced engineers, believe that the best option in the short-term is to upgrade the existing "flat top" 220kV A and B lines. Transpower have done a desk study which, they claim, shows that it is too expensive.  As I understand it, grounds for questioning the conclusions include:

1.  It has been assumed that the cost of compensation to landowners resulting from a change from single conductor to twin conductor would be about the same as the cost of compensation for the new 400 kV line. This, to me, seems to go against common sense. It is easy to believe that the environmental effects will be barely noticeable so any compensation payable should be quite small. It must not be forgotten that compensation was paid when these lines were originally built.

2.  It has been assumed that many of the towers will require major strengthening to carry the extra weight and wind loading arising from a change from one to two conductors. The information that I have is that these were "standard" 220 kV towers designed to withstand snow loading along the desert road. Therefore, in areas where snow loading will not be a problem, they may well be adequate.

3.  Transpower have rejected the possibility of using modern high temperature conductors that will carry high currents without the need for twin conductors. Their argument is that this is not "proven technology". I am sure the same argument could have been used - on much stronger grounds - when the original direct current link - ten times larger than any in operation at that time - was first proposed. What we need is a rational evaluation of the risks against the benefits.  The cost estimates are based on uprating using twin conductors but an initial uprate using a single conductor may be a very viable option in the shorter term and leaves options open in the longer term.  Discounting over a 15 – 36 year time horizon as suggested above would be revealing.

4.  I am not sure that enough attention has been paid to the possibility of converting the 220 kV lines to direct current when extra capacity is needed. This would result in a large increase in the amount of power that can be transmitted and, because the current is constant rather than alternating, it eliminates the grounds for environmental concerns based on (unproven) fears of harmful electromagnetic radiation.

There appears to be a belief that the 400 kV line would substantially increase the security of supply to central Auckland. This is not strictly true. The supply to central Auckland is insecure mainly because it is supplied by a single 220 kV line from Otahuhu to Penrose. This is easy to remedy simply by using the existing line from Otahuhu to Pakuranga - which is designed for 220 kV - to  provide a backup supply to Penrose via Pakuranga. This could be done in less than two years and I believe it is already approved by the Electricity Commission. Once this is done, and the new 400 MW combined cycle unit is in service at Otahuhu, the 400 kV line would only make a small improvement to the security of supply for Auckland.

I would suggest that further investigations on the following would be well worthwhile:

1.  Whether or not committing to the 400 kV now purely because of benefits that may or may not accrue beyond 2030 is both unwise and risky.  An assessment showing NPVs for a range of time horizons is needed.

2.  Does committing to 400 kV at this stage effectively rule out the possibility of taking advantage of future developments in transmission technologies including direct current links and lower cost direct current underground cables?

3.  Will committing to 400 kV at this stage turn out to have been the wrong decision if major generation is developed in or North of Auckland or in the lower South Island? 

4.   Do we have plenty of time to study the options more carefully before committing to 400 kV - or another better option - because the projects below defer the need for a decision:

a.  Recently committed transmission improvements (Drury switching station and uprating the C line.)

b.  The new 45 MW unit at Southdown and the 15 MW expansion at Ngawha;

c.  Contact are very close to committing to a new 400 MW combined cycle station at Otahuhu

d.  Genesis have reasonably firm plans for building a 200-400 MW station north of Auckland.

5.  The high costs that Transpower are putting forward for upgrading the existing 220 kV lines rely on assumptions that are not necessarily correct. As this was only a desk study, more comprehensive investigations are warranted and we now have time to embark on them.

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10 September 07
Putting Children at the Centre
Speech by Bev Adair for the Every Child Counts Conference - Wellington




1. We would be interested in your assessment of how New Zealanders currently view children and young people.

I think there is a growing awareness of how far we have gone away from what it ‘use to be’ and an increasing awareness of people asking’ how did we end up here?

It seems like our core values that so many of us grew up with and to a certain extent have taken for granted and the expectation that people will make good choices and do what is right , is not there.

We have to look closely at what has bought about that change.

We seem to have a generation of parents that have been so into doing their own thing and trying to find themselves and our children have paid a high price for that.

Our children have not been valued and their needs haven’t been a proirity

Not all parents but enough of them for us to see results of this kind of parenting , that doesn’t step up to the plate and love by modelling and and giving loving leadership for our children.

Everything begins in the home.

Good stuff and bad stuff.

If we are going to look after the best interests of the child we have to address their parents and families.

We need to seek to understand what puts our children at risk and then work towards strengthening the things that will help protect them.

2. What are you seeing out there in your communities?

Good and bad- People trying but not sure how – to ask or who or where to go for help
We sometimes mistake what a handup and handout really means –
Trust
Disconection
Pain
Anger
Lack of value

3. What have you experienced in your own lives?

See "Bev's Story" - click here>>>  

4. What can be done to improve attitudes so that our young citizens are treated with respect, as people, and nurtured to their full potential?

We need to encourage personal responsibility and accountability.

We need to help them with budgeting, cooking, parenting skills eg how to set boundaries and follow through on the consequences, how to having a warm, loving relationship with their child.

5. Do you have a view on the role of community leaders in helping to achieve positive change for children?

Community Leaders play a huge part in the life of a child and their family. They’re at the grass roots level. They live , breath and nuture the community. They generally have the heart beat of their City. They fight fro the community nad have a better understanding of the problems and have built releationship to be a part of the way forward. They should have the control of local funding…they know the people…

6. What about local government/ councils? Or MPs and central government?

From a Government Policy perspective we need to encourage family friend policy initiatives eg providing tax relief for stay at home mums [acknowledging the vital importance of attachment to the parent in the first 3 years of life]

When a dual income family becomes a one income family and addressing paid parental leave

It’s great step in right direction having tax deductability for donations to charities that will come into play next year

7. Why do you think it is important to get it right for children and place them at the centre of all that we do in government and in communities?

In New Zealand we have woven through our health and education system – our Maori Health Model, Te Whare Tapa Wha. This suggests that we have to have the four walls of our houses or lives strengthened before we can put the roof on.

These walls are depicted as family, taha whanau; physical, taha tinana; spiritual, taha wairua and mental, taha hinengaro.

The spiritual aspect of our lives is important and we need to work with and utilize those groups out in our communities that seek to uphold and strengthen this aspect of our lives

eg Pacific Health are acknowledging this and are trialing a ‘Parish Nurse’ programme which brings the health and religious communities together for the best interests of their local children and families.

– we need to ask – “what are the things that are working?’

“ what are the things that are lost from our memory that need to be restored?”

Would like to see all facets of a local community LOOKING AT EACH OTHER, LISTENING TO EACH OTHER AND WORKING TOGETHER.

Eg schools, city councils and church groups and voluntary organizations

THERE ARE MANY EXCELLENT PROGRAMMES BEING RUN BY NGOs [Non Government Organisations] in the community that could be better resourced and utilized

8. What positive examples of work have you seen going on?

eg: Parenting Inc ‘Tool Boxes’ for the different age groups
Focus on the Family’s How to DRUG PROOF YOUR KIDS PROGRAMME
Affirming women
Hip Hop – Street Dance
DZIAH
DCYPHER
Desire to Dream
Homes Of Hope
Debbie Baker’s work with prostitutes
Parish Nurse programme that is being piloted by Pacific Health
Brothers in Arms mentoring programme where young adults volunteer to mentor an at risk youth – committing for a year
Utilising Sports programmes and creative communities programmes – Wyners
Churches running programmes like ‘Adopt an Old Person’s Home’ / ‘Adopt a school’ - helping with pedestrian crossings, school lunches, asking school what needs they have and seeking to meet them / breakfast clubs

9. And if you had one key message for the nation’s leaders … what would it be?

Listen to the silent cries and the loud cries…….make your choices and policies that will encourage and help, Mums and Dads to be better parents

Listen to the local community empower them to make the changes in their communities, lets give the enabling power back to the community for the community.

Remember:

Children are the arrows we send into the future – they are our promise – children don’t survive without parents, family, community – they need security, nurturing, love, identity, fun , a place that is there’s, a community that they are a part.

We need to strengthen and resource parents to be better parents – give them some tools and keys on how to care for, protect and nuture their children.

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10 September 07
Back Off!
By Lance Davy



A temporary organization formed for the express purpose of uniting likeminded freedom lovers under one pro-freedom banner to march on parliament and deliver a message to the incumbent and future governments of New Zealand that enough is enough and it is time to Back Off.

With powerful and influential groups like ASH commending and supporting recent draconian suggestions coming from the Oceania Tobacco Control Conference; the imminent mandatory mass medication of the New Zealand population with folic acid; the ongoing nationalisation of land under the fascist Resource Management Act; the increasingly pervasive nature of health legislation as a whole in New Zealand, Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro calling to "make it compulsory for every newborn's caregiver to nominate an authorized provider to assess their family's progress through home visits" it is time to make some noise.

While the main thrust of Back Off is to challenge the horrifying nature of the New Zealand government’s campaign against self ownership –an individual’s sovereignty over his own body, it is also concerned with what it sees as other directly connected issues of freedom in New Zealand:

Freedom of Expression and Property Rights

The proposed Electoral Finance Bill is now before the Justice and Electoral Committee, public submissions are now closed, but Back Off does not want the issue to slip from the forefront of people’s minds. The Electoral Finance Bill seeks to restrict freedom of expression as guaranteed under the New Zealand Bill Of Rights Act 1990 § 14, the Bill of Rights does allow for other legislation to restrict free expression provided it is justified and reasonable. The responsibility for ensuring the Electoral Finance Bill’s consistency with the Bill of Rights went to Attorney General Dr Michael Cullen. It is the opinion of Back Off founder Lance Davey that “that such a totalitarian bill was checked against the Bill of Rights and passed by the deputy leader of the very party that will gain the most from the bill is enough reason on its own to squash it immediately and without amendment”. Back Off also wishes to see the archaic Blasphemy and Sedition laws repealed.

New Zealand has NO protection of property rights under the Bill of Rights.

Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

"Article 17

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property. "

We do not have such protection in New Zealand. Not only do we not have protection for the right to own and keep property, the fascistic RMA simultaneously limits and dictates what we must and mustn't do with our property. The RMA is NOT a benevolent piece of nature-loving legislation, it is needless bureaucracy.

The goal of Back Off is to bring as many freedom loving people in New Zealand together at one time to step forward and tell Nanny State, peaceably and simply to ‘Back off’. Back Off aims to imprint that message in the minds of the current and future governments; "I want to see it become as much of a catch phrase as ‘nanny state’ itself is now. If this could be pulled off with the right support, publicity, timing and marketing, a campaign like Back Off! would give two simple words for all New Zealanders to use that could carry the full weight of a protest march, and everything Back Off as a campaign represented. Imagine if you will, irate callers on talk back saying that nanny state needs to ‘back off’, political bloggers using it every time nanny tries to introduce anti-freedom legislation, opposition parties in the parliamentary debating chamber, each time invoking that one day, that one protest, that one very clear message.

I seek nothing less than to completely reverse the anti-freedom trend in New Zealand.

The problem in New Zealand has been the fragmented 'I'm all right Jack' nature of purported freedom lovers. Back Off! is not about smoker's rights, marijuana laws, or free speech, it's about freedom. It's about an adult's right to make informed choices, without being infantalised, monitored or dictated to by Nanny State It's about the imminent need for every freedom lover in the country to come together at one time and tell Nanny State that it's time to Back Off! Yes it is ambitious, what's your point?


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30 August 2007
Methadone Programmes – a waste of money?
By Michael Moore

When I commenced my pharmacy career some years ago, the rationale for providing methadone was "abstinence".  The addict would be slowly weaned of opiates and provided with counselling support to achieve this goal.  Obviously without proper motivation on the part of the addict success rates were minimal.  I believe the failure was also down to there not being in place sufficient penalties for drug seeking behaviour.

The emphasis is now "maintenance".  To put it bluntly the addict can now have opiates for as long as they choose to.  This is consistent with "harm minimisation".  The idea being give them an orally effective pharmaceutical quality drug (methadone) which just might keep them off other drugs and the addict and society are both better off.  The addict no longer runs the risk of injecting street drugs with the associated health problems and no longer has to commit crime to fund the habit.

In an ideal world the above theory would in practise work.  I believe there are two main reasons why it doesn't.

(1).  Not enough emphasis is placed on meeting the addicts’ aspirational needs.  These people are practically told that they are sick and society has no right to expect anything from them.  Hence maintenance promotes parasitism.  It is my belief that substance addiction is a spiritual problem not a medical one.  You only need to look at the successes of the AA program with the 12 step procedure for evidence - AA promotes abstinence.

(2). There are no effective penalties in place for not correcting behaviour associated with the drug lifestyle.  Essentially they are being given free drugs so you would expect some improvements in their lifestyles and behaviour.  In my experience it happens in about 5% of those being maintained.  The others are pretty much left to do as they please with no real sanctions imposed upon them.  In spite of behaviours which should justify their removal from the programme I have yet to witness one person so removed.

I believe that too many staff at Alcohol and Drug Services are just keeping themselves in jobs.  If every addict abstained tomorrow these people would have to go and find a real job.  They are in fact keeping these people down for their own self interest.

In summary, I believe that methadone programs are a shocking waste of tax payers’ money.  More needs to be done to integrate these people into society and to encourage them to accept personal responsibility.  Methadone should just be the by-product of doing this, not the reason finale. 

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  30 August 2007
A lighter look at global warming and other prophecies of doom
By John Clements (Aged Pilot, Flight Examiner & Serious Sceptic)
This article appeared in ‘Investigate’ in NZ in February this year.

‘As I was going to the fair,

I saw a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today,

Oh! how I wish he’d go away’.

So, approximately, goes the little ditty I learnt long, long ago.  It seemed ‘right’ then. But now one sees the flaw in the logic. It took a while!   It’s a faulty premise leading to an illogical conclusion. Yet perhaps one can, in one’s imagination, ‘see things that aren’t there’.  If you really, really, want to believe someone or something you can. Just as some people believe in those that profess to talk to the dead, some folk hypnotize more easily than others, and some reckon there are UFOs. But why do they have to ‘fly’ and be ‘objects’?   It sells better - that’s why.

That’s how it is for global warming prophets of doom (for profits of doom?) like Al Gore, Greens, Prince Charles, the IPCC and sundry others. There is nothing to see, nothing tangible - but they reckon it’s there. They can ‘see’ it.  I can’t.  Their main prop, the ‘hockey stick’, indicating an upturn in ‘global’ temperature in the 20th century has, it seems, been proved wrong.   But to hell with that, forget it. Mercilessly press on with the doom and gloom message.  We’re gonna die or at least drown. Mr Gore tells us we must get on bikes.  Tried - fell off.  Change light bulbs.  Done that.  Plant a tree.  I’ve planted dozens of ‘em as have millions of other global citizens - yet we’re told we’re still spinning crazily towards ‘over temp’. Clearly bikes, bulbs and trees aren’t working.

But of course it suits well intentioned ‘green’ people and those aspiring to political office, to push the barrow for other reasons - sensible ones.  We do need to reduce pollution because it’s bad for the lungs. And we should reduce the number of smoking cars on the road. They’re most ‘inconvenient’- when I go shopping. And not so sensible ones - like dubious taxes.

Tree ‘sinks’, it seems, are the answer.  Well they were when NZ Labour tried to figure out how many we need to soak up our carbon emissions. That the government missed the arithmetic by tens of millions of dollars and trees and - wow - discovered that far from being in ‘credit’, we were in deep excrement, is not surprising since they couldn’t even figure out how much they’d spent on their election campaign.  

It sounds awful when genuine conservationists say warming is caused because Asians and South Americans are ‘decimating rain forests’.  That is bad.  But has anyone bothered to count the brazillions of trees being planted on a daily basis ‘planet-wide’ by people like, er……, me?   No.   So the maths is utterly flawed and may be even impossible to do. In passing, one has to wonder where all the smoke from those ‘decimated’ rain forests goes.  And at the same time wonder where all the CO2 goes.

‘We Must Save The Planet’.  How?  By getting on bikes, changing light bulbs and planting things?  What bunkum!   And what profound arrogance to think that mankind is so omnipotent that we might be able to change - even slightly influence - God’s grand plan for the planet.  A plan frequently modified and adjusted through natural cycles and occasional ‘catastrophes’ - like Al Gore.

Now, after The Book: ‘Earth in Balance’ Al gives us The Film: ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. The ‘inconvenience’ of truth works both ways.  But Al steers well clear of any possibility other than that we are warming up. It woud be hellishly ‘inconvenient’ to find that we may not be. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.  Some places (on the planet) are in fact cooler and some warmer.  Eg, my back yard is cooler than it used to be but no one has even asked me why.  It’s because I planted a bunch of trees that cause shadow that reduces the heat.  It’s a highly complex phenomenon.

Ice in the Antarctic and other places is accreting.  Elsewhere it is not.  We only get pictures and reports (strangely in some reputable magazines) of places where ice has ‘disappeared’. The odd glacier in Switzerland has ‘disappeared’.  No half measures.  Gone.  Surely all glaciers would ‘disappear’, or at least reduce in size, if affected by these alleged ravages of global warming?

Sea levels are predicted to rise by 23 feet or a few inches - depending on how alarmed you want to be. A 23 foot rise would wipe out vast tracts of India , Vietnam , China and Bangladesh - to say nothing of my back yard.   But it had better get a move on because in the past 50 years the tidal range where I live has changed not one millimetre.  Since most oceans are ‘connected’ surely the rise would affect all coasts?  Not just a few places under the ‘ideal fluids property’ where tides (and gasses) can gather in huge quantities if enough scientists, environmentalists and politicians say they can.  To hell with physics.  

And all of a sudden we are believing politicians.  Holy mackerel!  74% of Americans, we are told, are ‘more convinced now about global warming than a couple of years ago’.  They would be.   Many have now seen The Film. Yanks tend to be ‘moved’ by movies.  Folk are brainwashed by movies and TV.  But hang on a minute.  95% of US residents believed Mr Bush’s take on Iraqi WMDs.  Now many folk don’t.  There’s an odd mix here of faith, fashion, fear, ignorance and gullibility.  Mostly the last one.

And with slight over generalization, the problem is: ‘Worse than anyone thought’.  Well, that’s not right because I don’t think it’s worse. And I doubt that everyone has been asked.  What about the Masai for example?  Or the Taliban?  Have they made a comment? A mate of mine doesn’t think it’s ‘worse’ either and he’s a PhD with an awesome knowledge of science - and a lot of common sense. So not everyone does think ‘it’s worse’.

An earnest young lady, looking distinctly in need of a job, asked me on the street: ‘Are you concerned about saving the planet?’  That’s a loaded question and she knew it.  If I say ‘No’ I’m labelled an inconsiderate twit (and there is some truth in that so my wife tells me) but if I say ‘Yes’ I am trapped into planting more trees, changing yet more light bulbs - or recycling my excrement.  So I said: ‘No, I think God, through nature, is coping very well thank you’.  She said: ‘Well piss off then!’.   I did. 

But being in a contemplative mood I thought about the young lady’s question again as I sauntered away, her strikingly green eyes boring a hole in my fifth vertebra.   I really do believe that the planet (well the fair amount of it that I’ve seen) has proved itself very capable of ‘saving’ itself.  God moves in a mysterious way….etc.   Of course it hasn’t had to try that hard given man’s feeble attempts to, er..……………‘destroy’ it. 

On the contrary, I reckon mankind has done quite a bit to assist Mother Nature.  For example, our ‘planetary’ drainage (except for some rural places in the UK ) is way ahead of what it was in the 19th century.  Many countries re-cycle quite well (which should impress Al Gore given his predilection with bikes).  And I see there is a move to get ladies to use re-usable tampons.  That, it seems, will reduce global warming.  I can’t see it catching on!  Oh, and car emission technology is now brilliant.        

Hot and cold flushes   

Not bicycles, in this case, but cyclical forecasts by ‘world scientists’ over the last 100 years or so.  They go like this:

1895  ‘The world may freeze up again’

1912   ‘Encroaching ice age’

1923   ‘Ice age coming’. ‘ Canada and Switzerland will be wiped out’ (are you still there Canuks?)

Then, a mere 10 years on…

1933 ‘Longest warm spell since 1776’

1974 ‘Near certain crop failures (due cold) in a decade’

1975 ‘Mass starvation, anarchy and violence due to cold… blah , blah, blah’

Nothing much happened ‘temperature-wise’, either up or down for 30 years, then …

2005  ‘ Greenland gaining ice and mass and warmer than it was in the 1930s’

2006‘North polar ice cap melting at an alarming rate’ 

2007Worse than anyone thought’.  ‘The climate is crashing’. Duck!  ‘The              worst problem facing mankind’

Of course, no ‘global warmers’ mention that NZ has just suffered one of its coolest winters on record.  Is it not just possible that some places are a bit warmer and some cooler?   Instead we get: ‘ Kiribati , 6ft above sea level, is vanishing (sic) and we need to prepare for a mass exodus’. Welcome to Godzone chaps! In July Tuvalu was supposed to have been swamped.  It wasn’t.  Ask the odd Tuvaluan about it and they say: ‘Rubbish, we’ve had these tidal surges for years’. 

…And on and on it goes it goes. Selective reporting.  Nothing to counter it. A sham.

The Labour Government thought ‘fart tax’ a good idea for NZ farmers but as soon as the Poms found an economist with a knighthood (and blinkers?) to say there should be a Kiwifruit transport tax, it’s a bad idea.  Where’s the consistency?  Both ideas are crap (to stick with the vernacular). Just unsubtle methods of screwing producers with more tax.     

But what about the great seer Nostradamus? You’d think he’d have foreseen earth’s ‘meltdown’. Not so. For 2007 his major forecast is: ‘Death of France beginning’.  Yeah right.  And for the next 50 years, during which time, according to Al Gore,  Greens, Prince Charles, the IPCC, etc, much of the planet will be ‘swamped’ or ‘vanish’ dear old Nostra’s best guesses are that a few ‘Popes and Asiatic Leaders’ will get the chop.  

He could attend to a few punters closer to home I reckon!

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25 August 07
A Different Drummer?
By Paul Martin, Director, Rainbow & Brown Ltd

Ever feel out of step with everyone else?  I’m still wrestling with this climate change thing and, as much as I’d like to jump aboard the “It’s All The Fault of Rich White Guys” bandwagon, I am hesitating.  Wracked with doubts.  Consumed with reservations.  Agonising with arrière-pensée, as the French say.  They do; they say that all the time. 

Scepticism for me began at the end of the 1960’s when a wildly-popular book called “The Population Bomb” swept the world in a way not dissimilar to Al Gore’s climate change movie.  The author, Paul Ehrlich, forecast a massive and imminent world overpopulation crisis.  He claimed that in the 1970’s and 80’s hundreds of millions would die of starvation, and that by the 90’s there would be global war.  He said that it was already too late to avoid this catastrophe, but that radical action was essential to limit overpopulation and to at least save some of humankind to rebuild the post-apocalyptic world.  Politicians and the media embraced Ehrlich’s predictions, and smugly assured us that it was all our own fault.   But the great Population Bomb simply failed to explode.  A dud.  

Then in late 1972 in my native Australia there was another popular mass movement that saw Gough Whitlam’s Labor government elected on the back of the slogan, “It’s Time!”  We’d had conservative governments for about two hundred years (well, perhaps not that long, but for all of my lifetime anyway), so I was unconvinced and voted otherwise.  Yet nearly everyone was swept up in this wild “It’s Time!” craziness.  But after just a couple of years of the predictable orgy of socialist madness, fiscal lunacy, political cronyism and self-interest, Whitlam’s Labour government imploded.  It wasn’t Time after all.

And during that same era there was a further popular cause-of-the-day known as the New Ice Age.  Yes, that’s a global cooling scare!  The alarm was based on dire predictions of increased glaciation, and there were widely published maps showing a future Arctic ice shelf extending down to somewhere around Portugal, I think.  And yet today the Portuguese are still strolling around in baggy shorts and grubby singlets, and still taking dives in the soccer World Cup.

Then in the early 1990’s New Zealand was considering adopting the MMP electoral system.  It was supposed to limit the size of parliamentary limousines, or provide pin-striping subsidies to guarantee Winston Peters a secure suit supply, or some such nonsense.  Whatever it was supposed to do, it was certainly wildly popular, and was eagerly voted into existence by the Kiwi voters.  My own view, and the reason I voted against MMP, was that it would put extremists and crackpots into parliament … well let’s say put more of them into parliament … and that it would compound this mistake by giving them actual power.  And I rest my case.

More recently we had the global Y2K alarm, when all the computers would simultaneously shut down and all the world’s aircraft would crash into orphanages.  It spawned a whole industry of earnest and expensive consultants frantically beavering away to “Y2K-Proof” your business before 31st December 1999, so you could hope to survive the subsequent chaos.  And yet when the dreaded day finally dawned what did we get?  We got 1st January 2000. That’s all.  

 And now we have global warming.  Or we have climate change, as it has come to be called since the evidence revealed that the actual warming has stopped for a few years now.  Is it real, or just another popular cause de jour?  Many eminent and sober scientists insist it’s a fact, so that’s pretty impressive support.  But Albert Gore and the United Nations are both enthusiastic climate change alarmists, and that in itself has to be compelling evidence that it’s all just another big con job.  Dr David Bellamy, Professor Bob Carter and the late Augie Auer all say, “Yes the climate’s changing, but it’s due to natural phenomena”.  And against that, Nandor Tanczos says that it’s all the fault of fat white dudes without skateboards. 

 I don’t know what to think.  My natural inclination, after my nearly 40 years of experience from Ehrlich to Y2K, is to distrust any movement that is wildly popular.  Once an idea becomes a Crusade, I generally bail out. But this time, I’m not so sure. 

But one thing I do know for sure is that if it’s all a crock and the climate change alarm movement goes the way of whale oil lamps and buggy whips, nobody will admit to ever having believed in it.  I don’t know anybody who believed in the population bomb or the new ice age, or who voted for Gough or for MMP, or who really took Y2K seriously.  Really, not anybody!  You just ask ‘em.  Now.       

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24 August 07
Politicians, Media Manipulate and Exaggerate to Justify More Bad Law
By Karen Batchelor

Peter Dunne (United Future), John Anderson (Carolina's father) and no doubt countless other profoundly ignorant commentators are calling for even more stringent dog control laws and a ban on Staffys, Mastiffs and Pit Bulls after the recent mauling of a 2 year old in a public park.  Susan Bell - President of the Dog Warden Association UK - points out why this is dumb in the following article.

How will banning the abovementioned dogs have saved the child bitten in the face by a Golden Retriever at a wedding reception?  Or the Australian 2 year old killed by his family's Border Collie? Or the Australian 13 year old killed by his brother's Great Dane cross. Or Koro Dinsdale killed by one of his pig dogs. Or the Northland woman killed by a Malamute? Or any of the other countless examples of people bitten or killed by anything other than the vituperated breeds?

At the very least John Anderson wants these sort of dogs muzzled in public.

How will a law requiring muzzling of such dogs in public have prevented this dog - thought to be safely in his owners yard - from escaping un-muzzled and attacking someone?

Perhaps these commentators need to take a deep breath and have a think about what's really going on here.

Firstly, the number of so-called bull terrier types offending is more likely in direct relation to their popularity and therefore greater numbers – see Pit Rules - than any inherent propensity to attack and of the course there is the media's readiness to scream "Pit Bull" as soon as a short-haired medium sized dog offends.  Secondly, more than half of dog bite victims are bitten by their own dog, and more than half of those are young children - see CHIRPP.   Obviously there is more to dogs biting than type.

Instead of rushing to enact more bad law, our politicians need to take advice from those qualified to give it rather than cave in to the demands of those given endless air time by the media, whose only interest is in boosting ratings and selling copy.

Peter Dunne recently stated in the New Zealand Herald that there have been 8 serious attacks in the last year, all involving these types of dog ( see ) Well, Mr. Dunne, according to ACC there is a hospital admission a day in this country as a result of serious dog bites. Which breeds featured in the other 357 cases?

"The community is simply not a place for large, aggressive, territorial attack dogs." Mr Dunne says.  Well, Mr. Dunne, all dogs are territorial and if you talk to the experts you'll find that even Sydney Sylkies can kill.  And, once again, can we advise you that fighting dogs are not 'attack' dogs, although any dog can be man-trained. 

As has been said time and again, before rigor mortis sets in on the last Pit Bulldog (or type), those interested in fighting their dogs or using them as weapons will have bred up another fighting dog and another biting dog.  Meantime, unrealistic parents and dog owners will continue to run foul of each other while the dogs continue to take the blame.

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24 August 07
What Lies Behind Islamic Terrorism
By Ray Baiter

Often overlooked in our analysis of Islamic terrorism is the bigger picture. Militant Islam is being used by Russia , China , North Korea and their stooges inside Western democracies to wage a proxy war against America , Israel , and Western culture and values. It is these states that have for decades supplied Muslim states with their armaments, and their terrorist groups with training.

Modern Islamic radicalism traces back direct to the Islamic Brotherhood (a front for Marxist-Leninist agitprop amongst Arab university students), which was set up in the 1920s after Stalin identified Islam as a force that could be harnessed and directed to serve Soviet regional aspirations.

The Communists soon recognised that Islam could be mobilised into a dialectical conflict with Western culture and values on a far broader stage. If your goal is a one-world Socialist state, you can march a long way beside those whose goal is a one-world global theocracy before you must part company.

Marx claimed that society is evolving inexorably toward socialism through a process called dialectical materialism. Here, an existing social condition (thesis) comes into conflict with a new condition (antithesis) that is attempting to emerge. Out of the dialectical conflict between these two opposing forces a new, higher condition (synthesis) emerges. This is then put through the process again as the new thesis, until full socialism is achieved.

Lenin expanded Marx’s dialectical analysis from its early focus on economic relationships to take in social and political relationships, thus widening the role of the revolutionary as a change agent. The task of the revolutionary was now to identify and exploit pressure points for dialectical conflict both within nation states and on a supra-national scale, thus undermining the legitimacy of the existing social and political order, and hastening the eventual triumph of socialism.

In the early 1930s, Lenin devised a strategy for weakening and subverting democratic societies that changed the nature of revolutionary politics forever, while profoundly increasing the threat that revolutionaries posed. Until then, Communist parties in non-Communist countries had openly declared their anti-capitalist, anti-Western and anti-democratic agendas. They called for the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and advocated “civil war” in the western democracies to bring this about. Because most people in free societies remained unconvinced of the need for a violent socialist revolution, Communists remained a fringe minority with little political clout.

In 1935, Communist parties everywhere adopted a new tactic, “the Popular Front”. The agendas of the Popular Front were framed in terms of the fundamental values of the societies the Communists meant to destroy. In place of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “international civil war,” the Communists organised coalitions for “democracy, justice and peace.”

Nothing changed in Communist philosophy and goals, but by seemingly advocating “democracy, justice and peace” they were able to forge broad alliances with individuals and groups blind to their true agendas, or believing them to be less sinister and dangerous than they were.

Working through the Popular Fronts they formed with “liberal” factions, the Communists were able to hide their conspiratorial activities, form “peace,” and “human rights” movements, and greatly increase their numbers by mobilising non-Communists to do their work for them. These are the people that Lenin referred to as “useful idiots.”

Communists are the lead organisers of US “anti-war” groups such as International ANSWER ("Act Now to Stop War and End Racism") and NION (“Not in Our Name").

International Answer is a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. It was formed a few days after 9/11 as a "new anti-racism, anti-war, peace and justice" group and led its first protest weeks later against the impending US-led attack on Afghanistan .  It went on to oppose the war and occupation of Iraq , homeland security measures and alleged American racism against Middle Easterners, Muslims and people of colour.

ANSWER is pro-Palestinian and spearheaded efforts to tie the anti-war and pro-Palestinian movements together. It boasted that it had sponsored "the largest demonstration in US history in support of Palestinian rights" on April 20, 2002, and that this was a "breakthrough since the anti-war and peace movement in the US has historically considered Palestine a 'taboo' subject."

ANSWER co-opted the anti-war rallies to push its larger anti-US, anti-Israel and anti-capitalist agenda. The University of Michigan Daily warned students attending the January 2003 anti-war rally sponsored by ANSWER that "many who read about the rally afterward will assume the crowd [of useful idiots seeking opportunities to engage in moral preening] showed up to support ANSWER's agenda rather than to learn about or participate in the anti-war movement."

NION was launched on March 23, 2002 by longtime Maoist activist C. Clark Kissinger, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). This is Marxist-Leninist-Maoist group calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a Communist dictatorship.

NION publicly denounces America 's post-9/11 policies, both foreign and domestic. Its "Pledge of Resistance," condemns "the injustices done by our government" in its pursuit of "endless war"; its greed-driven "transfusions of blood for oil"; its determination to "erode [our] freedoms"; and its eagerness to "invade countries, bomb civilians, kill more children, [and annihilate] families on foreign soil."

The Communist agenda is to use the “War on Terrorism” to expand the role of Marxist “Critical Theory” in helping the gullible and easily led into a destructive criticism of their own culture, As Patrick Buchanan puts it in Death of the West: “Critical Theory eventually induces 'cultural pessimism', a sense of alienation, of hopelessness, of despair where, even though prosperous and free, a people comes to see its society and country as oppressive, evil and unworthy of loyalty or love. The new Marxists considered cultural pessimism a necessary precondition of revolutionary change.”

Islamic terrorism and its accompanying “anti-war” movement are twin pincers of a decades-long attack, from both within and without, on the fundamental values of a free society.

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24 August 07
Nanny State, Political Correctness or Cultural Marxism.
By Michael Palmer

It is impossible to have an informed opinion on every issue. There's too much to know. Pro western philosophies such as classic liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, objectivism, traditional Christian values and common sense are helpful guides but on many issues they conflict. Some areas of conflict include legalisation on marijuana, prostitution, homosexual marriage and anti smoking, drinking laws but there are many more.

 These conflicts provide the Cultural Marxists (as represented by the Labour party) with opportunities to further their destructive programs. I propose a useful rule of thumb when evaluating contentious issues, namely this. If Labour is for it then by definition it is bad. If Labour is against it then further inquiries are needed.

Any Labour initiative (or oversight) in either its nature and/or implementation should therefore be investigated on the grounds that it is likely to be destructive to freedom, family, and progress. To accuse Labour of mere incompetence is naive. They are focused on the destruction of Western Civilisation and the establishment of a totalitarian tyranny. The dominance of cultural Marxism in the media, academia and government institutions means that they are well on their way to success and I predict that before the next election they will implement anti hate crime legislation to silence opposition.

It is a grave strategic error to attack Labour as a nanny government for two reasons.

1. Grand parents are benevolent, genuinely caring and pro family. To associate Labour with nanny characteristics morally elevates Labour and hides the nature of their evil.

2. Grand parents are a significant and decisive voting group. Their fundamental importance as focal points for dispersed and extended families needs acknowledgement particularly when advocating welfare reform.

In the coming battle of ideas in the next election those who oppose Labour must reconcile their differences. For example, those who deride Christianity need to understand the historic importance it has played in the development of Western Civilisation. As a social blue print the ten commandments has much to recommend it. Christians also need to appreciate that free market economics are not Christian strong points. To further understand these issues and the development of Cultural Marxism I highly recommend reading Craig Read's articles on his Canadian website.

Political Correctness as a concept has not disappeared from the public consciousness it has merely been derided or purposely overlooked by the pc media on the instructions of a Cultural Marxist government who fears exposure. It is time to revive and link it to Cultural Marxism.

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12 August 07
Where does Child Abuse Begin
By Don Donovan

We are becoming so appalled at the abuse of our children that we have now passed the anti-smacking legislation, we are daily agonizing over the torture or murder of the innocents, and we're now going to instruct our nurses and doctors to ask intrusive 'have-you-been-abused?' questions of women presenting for hospital treatment. With respect to those who would do good it seems to me that we're sticking plasters on a suppurating wound that goes far deeper in our warped national psyche.

At the same time as we are morally outraged we substantially condone the most extreme abuse of our unborn children. If you believe, as I and many others do, that a child's life begins with conception then child abuse is deeply ingrained in our society which permits nearly 18000 abortions a year. That callousness might carry through to some people's attitudes to born children.

In the three years ending December 2006 there were 170 005 live births. In the same three years 53 670 abortions were performed. Thus 24% of those 223 675 conceptions ended in abortion. The ratio of live birth to abortion is
3:1. Setting aside for one moment the emotions of the subject, that seems a terrible waste. At a time when we need vigorous population growth from childbearing we are condoning the destruction of a quarter of our potential.

I must confess a personal distaste for abortion on demand. I feel that with the possible exceptions of obvious cases (rape conceptions, termination on medical grounds because of physical threat to the mother or defect of the foetus etc) we have become too permissive and are too easily destroying much needed brains and bodies - even the odd genius - with present policies. The protest from women that they can do what they like with their bodies doesn’t sit well with me; it takes two to make a baby and besides, there’s an obligation to our species that is more important than the individual. The protest that abortion is preferable to an unwanted pregnancy leaves me cold; I can’t believe that the long psychological aftermath of having, for selfish reasons, disposed of a living being is worse than carrying a child to birth - especially when adoption is an option.

Which brings me to another statistic: during that same three years, 308 New Zealand babies were non-family adopted. To put it another way, there were 174 abortions for every adopted baby. I find that an extraordinary ratio; does it not suggest that an easy start might be made upon improving our human stock by simply encouraging (bribing perhaps) young women to complete their pregnancies and then offer their offspring for adoption? According to Adoption Option Trust, the number of would-be adoptive parents significantly exceeds the newly born children of New Zealand mothers that are offered for adoption.

My bias comes from being an adoptive parent. One of our two girls once thanked us and her birth mother for saving her from being aborted. My daughters are now adults and have given us four grandchildren.

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5 August 07
The Real Threat of Global Warming
By Dr Walter Starch

Over the past century CO2 in the atmosphere may have increased from around ³/₁₀₀ of 1% to about ⁴/₁₀₀ of 1% and average global temperature may have increased by about 0.6 C°.  I say “may have” because both figures are derived from complex statistical treatment of thousands to millions of individual measurements which are subject to both high levels of natural variation and a variety of errors.  Predictions of ongoing future warming are based on computer models of global climate.  While impressively complex such models are still only crude, greatly simplified approximations of the actual climate system. They include numerous assumptions, estimates and uncertain measurements.  They have also been elaborately adjusted until they produce results the modellers deem appropriate.  This is then called “optimising”.  Different models give different outcomes and all can be “optimised” to produce quite different results. Predictions of climate catastrophe are not based on either measurements or models but are simply speculations about possible consequences.  Speculation of possible benefits is equally plausible.

Regardless of popular or even scientific opinion, catastrophic global warming remains highly uncertain. It is however, distracting attention to a threat that is much more immanent and certain and prohibiting consideration of the only clear interim solution that can be implemented in the necessary time frame.

Liquid fuel for transport and mobile machinery are vital to our economy. Present global demand is pressing the limits of production. Despite significant advances in exploration technology new discoveries are not keeping pace with increasing demand. Tight supply has resulted in a 400% price increase over the past decade. Ongoing growth in demand, shortages, significant further price rises and a dampening effect on the global economy are almost certain over the next decade.

Irrespective of global warming, alternative energy technology must be developed but its effective adoption will require decades.  Petrol and diesel from coal is a proven technology and can produce fuel cheaper than current prices.  A plant can be ordered now and be producing in a few years. Oil from shale also looks promising but still has some unanswered questions.

Despite the current boom the Australian economy is in a highly vulnerable position.  Manufacturing is in decline and at 13% of GDP is the lowest in the developed world.  The trade balance remains in chronic deficit with no improvement forseeable.  Foreign debt is growing at twice the rate of the economy.  At over $500 billion and greater than 50% of GDP its level is the highest in the developed world.  The current boom depends on high commodity prices and commodity booms normally only last a few years before increased production spurred by high prices ends the boom.  With or without any added effect from a global economic slowdown an end to the boom will result in a slump in the $AUD and a blowout in foreign debt. 

In the increasingly likely event of fuel shortages leading to substantial price increases and a global recession a large debt obligation that could not be met would result in a collapse in the $AUD.  Being dependent on imports for most manufactured goods would exacerbate the problem. Having an economy that is independent of world markets for our own energy needs would be a huge advantage.

Australia’s contribution to global CO² emissions is about 1.4%.  This is equal to about six months growth in China’s emissions.  Natural sinks over Australia’s land and EEZ area absorb half-again more than this. Whatever we do or don’t do will be trivial to the global situation either in quantity or even as an example.

Global Warming is a distant and uncertain possibility of a problem that may or may not actually exist. It can only be meaningfully addressed by developments that will require decades and in any event must be undertaken even without the threat of warming.  Severe economic hardship that could be greatly alleviated by development of our own liquid fuel supplies is an immanent probability.  It would be far easier to do this now in a time of prosperity than trying to do so in a severe recession.  Having such capacity already in place might well even avoid the problem altogether.

From the basic radiative physics through all of the myriad complexities of  hydrology, metrology and oceanography to influences of orbital mechanics and solar activity, climate is a vast interacting system of immense complexity.  Every aspect is subject to differing interpretations and high levels of uncertainty.  The claim that the threat of global warming is 90% certain is simply a figure of speech reflecting the speaker’s commitment to a belief .  It has no mathematical basis and should be seen as only marginally less certain than the 100% certainty professed by religious devotees that theirs is the one true faith.

Precaution in the face of uncertainty may sound sensible but the realm of hypothetical risk is without limit. Risks do not pop into existence just because they have been proposed. Many perceived risks turn out to have no reality.  Remember the Y2K scare? We cannot build fortresses against every shadow of doubt. Risks must be carefully evaluated and any proposed action weighed against alternatives as well as consideration of its own consequences.  Precaution itself is not without risk.  Obsessing over distant uncertain risks while ignoring immediate consequences is poor precaution.  Drastic cuts to carbon emissions to prevent global warming is to climate what anorexia is to obesity.

A global warming catastrophe will become self fulfilling prophesy if it leads us to do nothing to prepare for coming fuel shortages.

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4 August 07
NZ's World Status
By John Mills

New Zealanders who used to worry about our descent to Third World status, need worry no longer. We have arrived!

Our education system is failing to produce well-balanced citizens with adequate skills to meet the needs of a modern democratic society.

Our health services are failing to meet the needs of our people, and indeed,  are in a state of near collapse.

Our police force shows corruption and illegal practices in the highest ranks of the service.

In our parliament our politicians take no notice of the clearly expressed wishes of the majority of the people. I refer here to the anti-smacking Bill. They seem far more concerned with maimtaing their individual places in that place.

The latest Privy Council decision on the Bain case shows up major flaws in our judicial system.

New Zealanders are quite justified in having mo confidence at all in the systems that once did serve us very well

It seems that the first step to recovery is to clear out the personally ambitious cowboys [ and cowgirls] that infest our parliament, and replace them with citizens that put the country’s  needs first , before their own selfish wishes. Perhaps the first step would be to remove the MMP system of representation and replace it with a system in which the members would truly support the wished of the majority in the electorate that elected them.

If not, we could always sing “God defend New Zealand ” before each meal.

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7 July 07
Fundamentalism, Romanism and Americanism
By Just Brian

The events of September 11 2001 and its aftermath have become etched forever as “Terrorism at Home”, before this happened America seemed invulnerable with its superiority in business, technology, and industry.

The United States, if one can draw a comparison was in a way very much like the Roman world around the 1st and 2nd centuries. Let us imagine ourselves in that period, as a retired Roman. Our Roman Expecdus is living out his remaining years probably on a vineyard, or an olive grove overlooking the blue Mediterranean sea.   “Shades of a dreamy retirement at Mt Maunganui or Havelock North, and letting the rest of the world go by’?

What would we find in this idyllic situation? That Expecdus spoke Latin, which like the English of today was the universal language, and when he looked eastward he perceived the great military threat the Parthian Empire had been defeated? His Rome like America still controls the global economy, He thought, like the Americans did prior to September 9/11, that nothing could change the established order.

But since 9/11, nowhere is safe from the suicide terrorist, certainly not from the fundamentalist terrorist. However our world will not end by terrorism, neither will the American “Imperium” because two buildings have been destroyed. But one has the feeling that because of this situation created on September 11 it is an irrational one.

To combat the irrational is extremely hard when dealing with a handful of men and women who consider martyrdom as a sublime way to reach Heaven. Roman society faced a similar problem with the advent of Christianity whose martyrs filled their amphitheatres and provided a weekly spectacle. (Much in the same order but without the bloodshed (sometimes!!) as our weekly rugby matches) Pliny the Elder, writing forty years after the birth of Christ said “Neither body nor mind has any more sensation after death than it had before birth”. He failed to realise that a “cult religion” had taken a firm grip on the Roman Empire, with martyrs equally dedicated as today’s Muslim Fundamentalists.

Under many administrations the Romans endured the pangs of the establishment of Christianity, which systematically undermined the Empire’s strength with its all embracing Liberalism.  What did the Romans do? The only thing they could do, they embraced Christianity, and within a hundred years the Pagans had sacked Rome; the lights of civilisation went out, and the so-called “Dark Ages” enveloped Western Civilisation.

It is of course not very likely that America will follow suit and become Muslim, so Western Civilisation is left with the problem of trying to defeat the irrational terrorist by rational means.

Can the USA, Britain and their allies defeat terrorism?;  and at the same time, handle Israel and the Palestine problems? Contain the Balkans, protect Taiwan, and keep the peace in Korea, and India & Pakistan from all out war? Not to mention trying to deal with an ever-increasing worldwide population crime, drug and refugee problem?

It is a tough call and no matter how far away in physical terms we in New Zealand appear to be, it is our problem and on our doorstep. Our esteemed Prime Minister hides behind our “Be nigh Environment” in the vain hope it will never arrive at our door. 

Madam the tumbrels are already rolling!!

Furthermore it is going to be a “very long and bloody encounter” if we continue to use only defensive methods in dealing with the terrorist.

In fact there is no chance of victory against the terrorist unless we in the west forget the defensive and take up the offensive. Not a popular choice in a N.Z. where any suggestion of an armed force creates panic among the liberal chardonnay wine drinkers and left wing American hating academics.

A far greater problem is that of defeating ourselves by cynicism and disillusionment, and in the final analysis by a lack of confidence.

Over a hundred years ago the Irish Poet, W.B. Yeats wrote: -

                                       Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

This has been true of our Western Civilisation for a long time, especially in a society like ours, which is based mainly upon “Heroic Materialism”.

It may give us a victory of sorts, but it is not enough, and we know it.

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7 July 07
New Zealand's Housing Market
By Danny Simms


I have followed with interest the protestations of Reserve Bank Governor Allan Bollard about “the overheated housing market” in New Zealand and his increasing insistence that we must break our “love affair with investment in residential property.” Through this I had become convinced that in New Zealand we are investing in houses at a rate that eclipses all other comparable nations.

Not so: In the Herald for Wednesday 14th of March I discovered that from 1997 to 2006 house prices in NZ rose by 105%, South Africa 351%, Ireland 253% Britain 196% Australia 135%.

Also I am told that over the last 100 years house prices in New Zealand have on average doubled every ten years. Certainly in my personal experience from the mid sixties this is so. If you doubt me try a little research, it is not difficult to find and follow the trends of the last 50 years.

I feel deceived by Dr Bollard and cheated by the increases in interest rates that were supposed to fix the “problem”. Clearly we are significantly below world trends in house price inflation.  

We are in a global market and our house prices are far enough below the average increases to create a vacuum and result in overseas or corporate investors taking over from the Kiwi families who will be priced out of the market by the increasing interest rates. (a vacuum is ALWAYS filled)

The problem in New Zealand quite obviously is not rampant house price inflation. Rather it is the increasing un-affordability of houses caused by the diminishing purchasing power of the average wage which is now being exacerbated by interest rate hikes.

A survey over the last ten years of comparative wages and tax rates (ie net wages after taxation) and purchasing power of those wages across the economies I have listed in the house price comparison would be a salutary lesson.

These facts cannot have escaped Dr Bollard and the Government so one must ask what the agenda really is.

We must ask a simple question: is there a surplus of housing in New Zealand and specifically is there a surplus of rental accommodation? Clearly if this was the case investment would dry up rapidly.

The answer in both cases is no. Rental properties falling vacant are rapidly filled and in every city and in many towns new housing subdivisions are springing up everywhere. There is a strong demand for housing fuelled of course by population growth and the division of families.

Building is a seriously productive sector of the economy, with every house built value is created.

Why should the housing market be a target at all, let alone the first target to dampen consumer spending?

I suggest that housing investment does not even meet the definition of consumer spending in that housing creates value.

 I would have thought that true consumer spending should be the target, spending that consumes without productivity, spending on imported consumer goods that add nothing to our economy and deplete our nations reserves.

 Those things bought on “no payment for two years and interest free terms”, non reparable planned obsolescent consumer goods. Goods that are purchased on the ever increasing options available in plastic cards and thrown away when they breakdown or become unfashionable.

One is forced to the inescapable conclusion that the driving force behind the attack on Kiwi families’ investment in housing is not economic but political.

The interest rate rises strike first at existing home owners, many of them young families struggling with a big mortgage on their first home, they have few if any options.

Then it hits those who are responsibly investing in second or third homes in response to actual market demand.

Can it be that this Socialist Government does not want financially independent families with secure investment owning their own homes and not needing their benefits?

Already 80% of Kiwi families draw a benefit of some type and are dependant on the government for continuation of those benefits that can be tantalisingly tweaked each election year.

Dependency on benefits is the method by which Socialist Governments control the people and they will not relinquish that control without a fight.

This attack on kiwi families attempts to secure their future by sensible investment  in a product (housing) with a proven demand and which by any international comparison is undervalued is very hard to understand

The New Zealand housing market could be likened to an undervalued stock ripe for a corporate takeover.

The end result of ever increasing interest rates inevitably will be the forcing of Kiwi families first out of owning rental investment properties and eventually out of personal home ownership as the corporates and overseas investors take over and build evermore monolithic slabs of apartments.

Along side this will be the destruction of the export sector by the insanely high dollar. As local manufacturing is destroyed imports will burgeon and the balance of payments deficits run out of control.

Now we have the latest idea. In response to the increasing difficulty first home buyers have in affording mortgage repayments we read that banks in Australia are offering home buyers 20% of the purchase price interest-free, in return for 40% of the capital gain.

There is considerable interest in this product and commentaries I have seen express the hope that the banks in New Zealand will follow suit. This plan once again proves that there is no such thing as a free lunch (or an interest free loan)

Simple arithmetic: On average over the last 100 years house prices in New Zealand have increased by 100% every ten years. (As they have over the last 10 years) For simplicities sake let’s take a $500,000 home. 20% of its value $100,000; Interest at 8% per annum accumulates to $80,000 over 10 years.

If taken, the interest free loan giving the lender 40% of the capital gain, using the historic increases in value of housing would give the lender a return of $200.000 at the end of 10 years.

That is a return to the lender of 20% per annum on the advance.

Interest free, I think not.

The borrower would be far wiser to take an interest free loan instead and take the capital gain themselves.

Simple arithmetic again will show that the saving in weekly payments is at least as great as the "interest free" 20% and the householder receives the capital gain of $200,000 after 10 years.

Again the issue is so clear one has to ask what the agenda is, this time the answer is simple. Bank profits.

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1 July 07
NZ's Anti-Smacking Law Most Extreme in the World
By Dr Robert E. Larzelere

After 28 years of research, I came to New Zealand on behalf of her children, her parents, and her ethnic and religious minorities with the boldest claim I have ever made in the public arena: "There is no sound scientific evidence to support a smacking ban." The best evidence the
Children's Commissioner could muster against that claim on the Campbell Live TV program was about my written reply to an anti-smacking article in a scientific journal 14 years ago - not because of its content, but because the journal was sponsored by a Ph.D.-granting Christian
university! (emphasis mine, JW). How could someone as knowledgeable as Dr. Kiro emphasize such a ridiculous criticism? She got that criticism from her Canadian consultant Dr. Joan Durrant, the Pied Piper who wants to lead New Zealand's children to the Swedish utopia that she could not lead her own country's children to - because the Canadian Supreme Court retained their country's version of Section 59 after considering both sides of the scientific and legal evidence. 

What does this Swedish utopia look like? One year after Sweden's smacking ban, 3% of their parents admitted beating up their child - 2 to 5 times higher than the overly high American rate. Physical child abuse increased almost 6-fold during the next 15 years, according to Swedish criminal records. Criminal assaults by minors against minors increased over 6-fold during that same time period. The ability of parents to enforce appropriate discipline continued to erode until only 31% of 10 to 12-year-olds thought that parents had the right to use grounding in 2000. All these statistics come from Swedish anti-smacking authors. 

Even more worrisome, the imminent New Zealand smacking ban is more extreme than Sweden's ban in three ways. Using force to correct children will be subject to full criminal penalties, although the government's politically clever but inconsequential concession gives police the discretion not to prosecute mild offences. Sweden's ban had no criminal penalty. In addition, New Zealand's bill bans the mildest use of force to correct children, not just smacking. This removes most disciplinary enforcements parents have used for generations, especially for the most defiant youngsters. Finally, the required change in disciplinary enforcements will be the biggest change ever imposed on parents.

The New Zealand bill's proponents claim that missionaries were responsible for introducing smacking and bashing to the Maori and other South Pacific peoples. The irony is that they are doing the same thing they accuse missionaries of - imposing a European philosophy of child correction on native ethnic groups - this time enforced with criminal penalties. In addition, the gap between what will be technically criminal and what will be prosecuted opens the door wide for discriminatory enforcement. 

The bill is motivated by a commendable desire to reduce child abuse, but it will make it a crime to bring the most effective treatment for abusive parents to New Zealand. In a review of 20 years of treatments for abusive parents, eminent abuse researcher Dr. Mark Chaffin showed that none of them turned out to be effective. He then developed a new treatment that decreased recidivism of child abuse charges from 49% to 19%. It will be a crime to bring that treatment to New Zealand, however, because it includes a non-smacking type of force to enforce time out.

Everything seems backward to me in New Zealand - people drive on the left side of the road and are now preparing for winter instead of summer. And it is the liberals rather than the conservatives who take absolutist positions and impose their values on everyone else, including over 80% of Kiwis who oppose this ban. They also show little cultural sensitivity toward others who are different in religion or ethnicity. 

The pervasive confusion about what will be permitted under the new law makes the pre-existing law allowing parents "reasonable force to correct their children" seem reasonable indeed, although it needs to be updated to clearly exclude physical abuse. 

As Bill Clinton said of abortion, smacking ought to be safe, legal, and rare. His successor had an overly optimistic view about invading Iraq because they heard only one optimistic side of the scenarios. Now our country is in a quagmire with no good way out. For the sake of New
Zealand's children and future, I hope they have a better exit strategy than George Bush. 

With this bill, New Zealand will leapfrog the field to ban more forms of traditional disciplinary enforcements than any other country. But their ban runs counter to scientific evidence, previous experiences with similar bans, and the wisdom of previous generations as far back as we
can remember. It illustrates the world's increasing inability to work out well-reasoned balanced positions rather than forcing people to choose between polarized extremes.

As I prepare to leave New Zealand, I have difficulty holding back the tears whenever I see its beautiful children, knowing they are about to be victimized by the most extreme and unproven social experiment in history. I feel like the engineer who predicted that the O-rings on the
Challenger space shuttle were likely to fail, but no one would listen. His tragic prediction proved all too accurate. I hope I am less accurate about the forthcoming failure of New Zealand's smacking ban than that engineer was. 

Dr Larzelere is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at the Oklahoma State University, and was brought to New Zealand by Family First NZ as a scientific expert on child correction.

1 July 07
GE Food Trial Approved
By Hugh Cronwright

ERMA in their collective wisdom, have finally approved full field trials of GE crops in New Zealand, and it’s an event which has passed with very little public comment. That is disturbing enough, but I reconcile it with the thought that many Kiwis are now too far removed from the reality of growing their own food, to appreciate the threat this disgraceful decision presents to our country.

One of the biggest advantages NZ has in exporting agricultural products is the “Clean Green” image so well established for our land. We are as far from our customers as it is possible to get. It costs more to deliver that anyone else. Our agricultural exports earn us the majority of our overseas currency which we must have to pay for our imports. So it is an absolutely vital part of our economy.

We are facing the added threat of “Food miles” which will increase resistance to our agricultural exports. Why create even more resistance?

Some of NZ's international customers are really steadfast in their resistance to any suggestion of GE use in food production. Japan being the leader here and one of the most profitable markets NZ has. Much of Western Europe is opposed, and a number of GE field trials have been refused in those countries. See ERMA’s web site http://www.ermanz.govt.nz/index.html,   Application Code GMF 06001 for full details. But for ease of reading, I have extracted relevant sections and comments.

But first, comment from one of the researchers from Food & Crop Research who made this application, on the National Radio Program recently, highlighted for me the stupidity of this approval. She was asked how this GE process worked. She advises that they take genes from two different bacteria and insert it into the brassicas (Cauliflower, Cabbage, Broccoli, and Kale). This makes the plant toxic. When a caterpillar eats the leaves it is poisoned and dies. Do we really want to feed this sort of food to our people, or children, the mothers of unborn children?

The opponents of spraying crops with insecticide (which this process is aimed at preventing) will tell you that with a spray program, the poison is on the outside, and its effects are short lived and measurable. You can test for residual toxicity and know when/if the crop is safe for human consumption. Not so with GE crops. They will be toxic from day one until they rot, there will never be a time in their life cycle when they are not toxic and so safe to eat!

2.3.5. The Committee identified increased allergic or toxic reactions in humans (environmental /occupational exposure) as potentially significant adverse effects on human health and safety. 

2.8.5.8 The Committee considered the potential for GM brassica plants to be more allergenic or toxic to humans than unmodified brassicas. 

What is the benefit to NZ of allowing this trial?

2.9.12    Overall, the Committee considers the enhancement of knowledge and understanding of agronomic practices for GM brassicas to be a non-negligible benefit.

I have no idea what a non-negligible benefit is, maybe someone with an Agricultural Degree can explain this to me. But they go on to say in this same section

However, the Committee notes that it is difficult to assess the value of this benefit, as while the beneficial effects are acknowledged, these will accrue to only a few individuals, and there is no guarantee that these staff will remain in New Zealand.  Therefore, while the Committee considers that upskilling of staff and an increase in experience of working with gene technology in the field is likely, the magnitude of the effects is considered to be at most minimal. Nevertheless, the Committee concludes that this benefit is non-negligible.

ERMA has addressed the threats of pests building up resistance to the BT genes, the possibility of pollen contaminating other crops or entering wild vegetation, affecting “good” insects such as bees and bumble bees and so on, in a simply brilliant fashion put to them by Crop and Research. So their rationale seems to be:-

• There is no real gain to the country by this research

• But there is no obvious risk that we can think of, having followed the precautions suggested by Crop and Research

• No-one else has done it before, so lets be the first to do so.

So what is the special secret that is going to prevent those risks occurring?

They are not going to let any of the crops flower. They are going to physically inspect all of the plants every few days, and remove any showing signs of flowering. No flowers means no pollen to spread in the wind, and no attraction to bees.

They are going to find any surviving caterpillars and kill them off. So no chance to build up resistance to the toxins in the crop.

2.8.11. Further, there are alternatives to manage insect resistance, such as the use of other pesticides, should resistance to Bt develop in these insect pests.

EH!! Is that not the whole point of the experiment, to grow crops without insecticides?

Ever heard of Aphids? They love these crops. But I can read no-where that the risk of these pesky and damaging little critters are going to be monitored or controlled. So there is every likelihood they will develop immunity to the BT toxin, and will be able to spread into commercial crops. How then will farmers kill them off?

I challenge a ERMA staffer to show me how they intend to manually kill any surviving Aphids on a field full of plants. They are not even talking of attempting to do so. 

The only real practical value can be for such a trial is to establish if GE modified crops of these food types can be successfully grown commercially. But no-one in their wildest imaginings can expect commercial crops to be hand checked for caterpillars every few days, or for the onset of flowering. Therefore it must be inevitable that the real risk which the Committee acknowledge to the environment, must occur in commercial plantings.

So why waste Taxpayer money and scientific time in trialling something that cannot possibly ever be commercialized?

This experiment places in jeopardy our Clean Green image in our Export markets. For no perceivable benefit than that of the ego of the Committee who approved it as a First, and the few scientists who want to see if it can be done. Someone in Government needs to take a really hard look at this decision, and take action to scrap it!

Why are we not seeing a massive outcry from the Green Party to this appalling and dangerous decision? We have to ask if the victory in getting their Anti Smacking Legislation through the House is part of the reward to them for backing away from confrontation over this matter. 

ERMA report receiving 959 submissions on this Application. Only 14 supported it! How many scientists will be paid to work on this trial, maybe 14??

Yet another example of this Government frittering away taxpayer surplus funds, while the real economy continues to sink toward 3^rd world status.

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1 July 07
A Burning Issue
By Hugh Rose

For people who live in town life can be fairly straightforward when it comes to lighting fires

Don’t annoy the neighbours and make sure you have a permit from the council unless you have an approved incinerator.

Out here in the country it’s a little different. First of all IF YOU SEE SMOKE, CALL THE FIRE BRIGADE! That’s what the advert says! I wonder how much revenue fire authorities have collected from that little gem by levying charges against farmers who were burning off diseased and unwanted plant matter but failed to ensure they had a Fire Permit?

The worst case scenario is for those persons who are unfortunate enough to be within one kilometre of forestry or reserve administered by the Department Of Conservation. The problem with DOC as a neighbour is they often do little in the way of pest management or contributing towards local rates however expect adjacent land owners to comply with a raft of legislation such as the fire permitting and access.

Fire is used as a management tool by farmers to promote fertility and to kill off unwanted micro organisms and often enough to remove hazards to stock and property in the form of dried grass and brush before it becomes a fire risk during dry spells.

Currently if a country person wishes to light a fire they need to ensure they have a permit in place from the local council if within one kilometre of forestry and within one kilometre of DOC a permit from DOC!.

Our Kaipara council employs (our money folks!) a local as a contractor to issue permits for a maximum period of one month whilst locally DOC employs a really nice person who’s first language is not English and has limited knowledge of the district.

If you need a fire permit the authorities may take up to six working days to issue it. Not good if you wish to use a window of opportunity to clear cut over scrub whilst the interior is dry and a spell of rain has soaked the surrounding grasslands. Six days can be a lot of drying time. Further the cost to the tax/ratepayer is huge as the contractor/government employee is obliged to travel to remote regions to inspect the area to be burnt prior to issuing the permit.

Fire regulations in my opinion currently work to the detriment of the community

I will be placing a submission to Council, Doc and the Minister of internal affairs requesting they adopt the option available to them in the Forest & Rural Fires Regulations 2005 of appointing neighbourhood volunteers to issue permits within local regions.

Within the Kaipara micro climates abound and to have a blanket fire ban is unfair especially when after torrential rain the ban remains in force as has happened on numerous occasions.

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25 June 07
Professionalism and Police 
By David Turner

I belong to a profession which states that should I fail to maintain a minimum number of ongoing professional training hours per year (and thus maintain a high level of professionalism) I would lose the right to call myself a chartered accountant.

Not only that, but I agree to subject myself to a periodic review every five years to ensure that I am meeting that requirement.

But if we ask is this is a requirement of the NZ Police, where a drop in standards can cost lives this is sadly lacking. In fact, I would NOT define the police as a "profession" which is equivalent to being a chartered accountant for this very reason.

Annette King confirms that ongoing training is "available" to our police force, but is NOT compulsory.

I have been a care giver under the Mental Health (Compulsory Assessment & Treatment) Act 1992 Act for over 13 years and from various discussions with people of different professions, I am aware that under Section 114 of the Act police are excluded from the definition of "responsible officer".

I find this both frustrating and abhorent because while responsible clinicians are given legal powers outside the scope of their core professional training (medicine) to release a sufferer from compulsory treatment without reference to a solicitor or court judge, police are not included in the section definition.

Yet Police by definition, must have a greater knowledge of the law than the medical profession. Police are charged with the execution of day to day law.

I believe police should be included within the definition of s114 as "responsible officers" as I know for a fact they are not.

By including the police within the definition, we would almost certainly see a reduction in crime involving the mentally ill (i.e. manslaughter & the such like) and secure the health of sufferers at an earlier stage of their illness, possibly reducing the prison population.

In fact, from statistics forwarded me by Damien O’Connor, Minister for Corrections, 1 in every 2 prison inmate sufferers from some pre-diagnosed form of serious mental illness!

I believe that if police were made "responsible officers" under the Act, it would almost certainly therefore cut crime by up to a half.

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25 June 07
Where is the morality in paying more taxes? 
By Just Brian

"No tax cuts please; we're Kiwis." New government budgets have been delivered on both sides of

WHERE IS THE MORALITY IN PAYING MORE TAXES?

In its election manifesto the Government indicated that in order to pay for more services it will be necessary to increase taxes, and that New Zealanders, will be perfectly willing to accept this scenario as necessary to improve this country.

On the face of it these new taxes are another Government measure to ensure more money to fill its coffers, to offset its social engineering policy since being elected; of tipping an avalanche of money into various, rather dubious projects.  

Such as the “nationalisation”, or as the Prime Minister called it “a bail out” to the tune of one Billion plus extras to save Air New Zealand. Also in this category, is the formation of a government funded ethnic T.V. channel; to the tune of eighty five million dollars, an increase in fuel taxes to rectify Auckland’s traffic debacle.

In requiring New Zealanders to accept extra taxes, the Socialist government has asked a morally loaded question.  “Would you be prepared to pay more tax in order to improve education, health services or road problems” (which of course, can only be answered in one way). 

The government should have asked the real question not only of the general public, but also of itself. “Do you think that this higher taxation will result in better schools, better teachers, better hospitals, and better doctors, less road congestion or the more efficient distribution of welfare to the real needy among our population?

There is enough tax collected both directly and indirectly within New Zealand right now to furnish adequate Hospitals, Schools, Defence and Public services. What is wrong is the allocation, distribution and spending of these taxes, which has been diverted and used for political ends pouring into basically into non-essentials, or to secure votes at the next election.

For those socialistic/urbanites in our major cities who indulge themselves in this Labour /United “noblesse oblige”, it must add to their prestige and mana around the cafes when they state that they are quite willing to pay more taxes for social services.

One must wonder how long they can remain convinced of this theory, with the recent announcement of new economic policies, in a heavily veiled form of socialism.

Enabling a total control and continual interference into commercial business, compliance regulations and blackmail payments to Iwi.

We need to recognise that when the Government tells us it spends (or invests as the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance call it) in social engineering; it is totally different from ordinary people and businesses who pay taxes, invest and produce the wealth, which contribute to our standard of living.

That of course, is a capitalistic evil.

The Labour party and its fellow travellers seem unable to learn that the most beneficial policy it can hand to business is to remove its repressive and bureaucratic legislation in the tax field, the crippling environmental compliance costs and its ever increasing instuitional bureaucracy.

Over the time Labour has been in power it has off loaded many taxes onto Local Government for collection, again a Stealth Tax, this accounts for many increases in rates by local government authorities to cover rising administration costs.

With this comes the dictum that we must accept:-

“The total adoption of United Nation decrees and laws, which are superseding our own laws”

Only the total rejection of the 1951 United Nations Convention (now very much out of date) on refugees/illegal immigrants will save us from the continuing influx of undesirables into New Zealand.

But there is one thing above all others it is the overriding fear that this is merely a cover-up for a more permanent move towards the eventual domination by a UNITED NATIONS SUPER STATE.                                  

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3 June 07
Four Lunches and  Funeral
By Paul Martin, Director, Rainbow & Brown Ltd

"No tax cuts please; we're Kiwis." New government budgets have been delivered on both sides of the Tasman. Both economies are in healthy surplus, so it's interesting to compare what the respective Treasurers made of the opportunity.

Australia's Costello cheerfully announces substantial tax cuts for all Australians.  "It's your money", he says, "we're just giving it back to its rightful owners".  Well, he didn't use those exact words, but it's clearly what he meant.

NZ's Cullen, who apparently regards talk of tax cuts as an act of right wing insurrection, takes a different view.  He recently remarked that if you give people tax cuts, they'll just spend the money.  Those aren't his exact words either, but they're close, and that is quite clearly what he meant. 

Same opportunity, but different attitude!  The exact opposite attitude, in fact. All of which got me thinking about money and our attitude to spending it.

I'd recently re-read the classic commentary by the economists Milton and Rose Friedman about the Four Ways of Spending Money.  Here's what they said (once again, not their exact words):

"First, you can spend your own money on yourself." You buy yourself lunch. You look for nutrition, taste and reasonable value for money.  But, if you've had a good week, you might consider starting with half a dozen Bluff oysters and a glass of a decent local gold medal wine.  

"Second, you can spend your own money on other people." You buy lunch for your in-laws . you want outstanding value for money, reasonable quality and, above all, limited menu choices.  You suggest the 'one-course chalk-board special' and a small carafe of the house white.  A serve of garlic bread to share.  And you quickly scoop up all of the menus before anyone can read past the 'Salad and Starters' section. 

"Third, you can spend someone else's money on yourself." You enjoy an expense account lunch . you'll have a full dozen first-day-of-season Bluff oysters to start, the whole grilled lobster with butter sauce of course, and the Mousse au Champagne to follow, naturally. You ask the sommelier to suggest suitable grand cru wines to properly complement each of your courses.  Then fresh-ground coffee, a selection of imported cheeses, and hand-made Belgian chocolates with a cognac to finish. Well, perhaps a couple.

"Fourth, you can spend someone else's money on other people." You have to arrange lunch for 300 delegates to the national conference on Standardisation of Dairy Rubberware . so you send the caterer a quick fax saying, "300 mouths at fifteen bucks a head; fill 'em up with whatever's cheap and fast.  And don't forget to stick a wee Kiwi flag on each table."

After all, what the hell do you care what they get?  You won't be eating the stuff; you'll just nip out to that little place with the Mousse au Champagne again (Hmmm . better make that 300 mouths at fourteen bucks a head).

And, observed the Friedmans, almost all government spending falls into that fourth category.  Except when it comes to their own dining; that's the third category.

And there lies the difference in the two budgets.  It's a philosophical difference . a difference in attitude.  One budget takes the view that you'd prefer to spend your money in the first category, while the other says you'll be far better off with almost exclusively fourth category spending (and a wee Kiwi flag).

If this keeps up it won't just be a lunch, it'll be a wake.      

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3 June 07
Bring Back Common Sense
By John Burgess

The saying, ‘common sense is not as common as it used to be’ could well be companion to ‘reasonable thought is no longer as reasonable as it used to be’. This is exemplified by the pugilists fighting in the ring of Section 59 of the Crimes Act who appear to be in advanced stages of punch drunkenness as they doggedly bludgeon each other. The ‘anti-smacking’ debate demonstrates how ideology can suppress both common sense and reason.

Common sense may be defined as beliefs which seem self evident. Reason though requires beliefs to reflect reality in practice and all outcomes must validate those beliefs.

I am a recently retired school principal who witnessed the furtive legislation that removed corporal correction from our nation’s schools and observed changes in student attitudes and behaviour over the next 15 years. On the basis of its outcome I seriously question the validity of the grounds upon which such legislation was founded. The group called Campaign Against Violence in Education (CAVE) fought their case on two axioms: children having equal rights with adults and the need to model non violent behaviour in schools to reduce its prevalence in society.

So what has been the outcome? Evidence reveals increased violence in both form and severity in our schools and communities since the legislation was enacted. Bullying continues at deeply concerning rates and with greater ‘sophistication’. Attacks on classroom teachers have escalated and become serious enough for some schools to develop personal protection policies and provide playground supervising teachers with electronic communications. Resource Teachers for Learning and Behaviour (RTLB’s) have been introduced to the school system not just to assist teachers with learning challenged students but to help stem the flood of seriously aggressive behaviour in ‘out of control children’. Alarmingly, this is resulting in ‘stand downs’ even at preschools.  Both common sense and reason should predict that decontextualising personal rights and removing serious sanctions for serious misbehaviour is a molotov cocktail lit and ready to be hurled. Can anyone see some commonality with the repeal of Section 59? (Hello. Is anyone there?)

In the light of these outcomes I support the use of reasonable force in schools, including corporal correction, even if this was on the grounds of individual school boards' decisions. I do not condone gratuitous violence in any form and safeguards would need to be installed to prevent the possibility of such acts within the teaching profession. We of older generations can no doubt recall the occasional teacher who delighted in the use of strap or cane and should never have been allowed to administer corporal correction. However, abuses of civil behaviour occur in every domain of human activity and legislation should deal with the abuse not the genre.

In recent years there has been a stream of legislation and regulation provoked by abuses which has then been inflicted upon the majority of caring, law abiding and thoughtful citizens. I fear that the outrageous rise in sexual abuse cases will be dealt with by our legislators making all sex unlawful. Self defeating I know but after all is it not the same in principle?

But here is a real fear. Repeal of legislation which many regard as being injurious to a healthy society is most unlikely to occur. Why? Because contemporary ideologies are so infused with evolutionary dictates that to do so is regarded as regressive and a return to more primitive (read 'barbaric' in liberal extremists minds) human behaviour. I wonder what can be more 'barbaric' than the stream of violence on our streets and in dysfunctional homes that we read of on a daily basis. And this has occurred since corporal correction has been removed from our nation's schools. I wouldn't claim this to be THE CAUSE, but it cannot be dismissed as a contributing, even significant, factor.

Now you pugilists, in the light of recent experience what does common sense and reason suggest about the repeal of Section 59 ?

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21 May 07
Electoral Reform 
Chris Archer

I think it is somewhat ingenuous to encourage yet another surge of political angst over MMP. Undoubtedly, there are many excellent MPs who owe their parliamentary seat and, therefore their political voice, to the MMP electoral system. Some of us have even gained a grudging appreciation for Sue Bradford in the wake of her handling of the "spanking" scenario. We may not support her ideology but Ms Bradford has shown herself to be an effective politician. She has championed a cause which has been unusually unpopular and has held tenaciously to her principles despite an  onslaught of political opposition and personal ridicule.

MMP as a system has allowed, even encouraged, MPs like Sue Bradford to enter politics and it has permitted them to ride on agendas which have had very little widespread, electoral appeal.  This is the reality across the political spectrum. We have all come to see that the "political party" is an entity which operates apart from electoral scrutiny. The recent uproar over Labour's proposal to fund the electoral aspirations of political parties and thereby entrench them, courtesy of State funding, is an indication that the General Public is not entirely oblivious to this danger. However, since all minority parties stand to benefit from supporting current electoral practices I doubt that any party with serving list-parliamentarians will ever vote to change it or support a referendum that threatens to scrutinise the politics of MMP.

FPP had well-publicised deficiencies but one point in its favour was that it required every potential MP to submit to direct electoral scrutiny at each election. Nobody entered parliament without being voted in by “the people” even if they were nominated and supported by a political party.  Parties may have been an accepted, collective vehicle for policy promotion and implementation but every MP was accountable to a regional electorate. 

Under MMP traditional concepts of direct electoral scrutiny were sacrificed to a new ideology which promoted the neo-democratic virtue of “minority representation.” The semantics of politics disguised the repudiation of this corner-stone of traditional democratic practice. Under MMP it made no difference whether “List” candidates were party hacks or a national heros. If Party selection committees placed them high enough on the Party List the appointee would, effectively, be shielded from direct electoral scrutiny.

The current Parliament is currently well-endowed with non-elected people, some of whom occupy very senior Government positions. They may be very talented individuals but their right to be in Parliament has never been scrutinised by the electorate. These people are accountable only to their parties and we have all seen what happens to their political careers should they fall from their party’s favour.

Until such Gerrymandering is honestly addressed the bemused electorate will continue to watch the parliamentary circus and democracy will continue to be hijacked by minority political interests. Perhaps few people want this state of affairs to continue but I have no doubt that the hand-wringing will continue and action will be a long time coming.

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21 May 07
The Decline of Western Consciousness (NZ) - continued... 
By Colin Rawle (this is the final instalment of this article)

To the same measure that Euro New Zealanders have progressively fallen into these ideological / social  errors the Maoris have been given stones for bread in the moral / social sense. Herein lies the real, and unsuspected, source of their sense of grievance or betrayal, not in any real or imagined loss of land,  resources, or "suppression" etc - these being simply opportunistic substitutions for the lack of a proper social example they had a right to expect from the last two or three generations of Euro New Zealanders. 

Even so, the Maori radical response to these tragic circumstances reflects no better on them than the present dangerous social situation does on the secular humanist "pakehas" principally responsible for them. Even allowing for the imperfections of the early colonists and the infinitely greater blunders of their current "holier than thou" critics, the many benefits which flowed to Maori from colonisation outshines its detrimental aspects as the sun outshines a candle.

Rare indeed is any acknowledgement of the simple fact that the colonists and their immediate descendants rescued Maori from a dead end road of savage primitivism and total geographic and social isolation, and by means of that most priceless of gifts - education, offered them the world.  

Further to the tiresome fixation on all matters racial these days, it is abundantly clear that those who have been infected by this modern delirium are not opposed to racism per sec, they are only opposed to white racism - an attitude which, of course, epitomises racism .

Irrefutable proof of this is the fact that nothing in this country's short history has aroused so  much passion and unity of purpose, ( or perhaps mass hysteria ), than the Springbok rugby tour of 1981. Yet even the most blatant and legalised anti white racism anywhere in the world, ( instance Zimbabwe ), provokes hardly a murmur of protest from the legions of erstwhile morally outraged anti apartheid protesters.

The towering hypocrisy of this is frequently pointed out by a small but growing, handful of free thinking individuals - to a response of utter silence.

Obviously  it is not a case here of unequivocally damning all tribal cultures, ( for all things there is a season ), or of an uncritical apologia of Western civilisation, which like all previous leading civilisations throughout world history is the best and worst of all possible things. 

Obviously the main weight of this critique properly falls upon the English speaking world of circa the last 2-4 generations,  ( i.e. since its near complete capture by atheistic / Marxist-type mentality )........ ( To be continued next week.)

At the present time in history a fatal combination of ideological extremism among the intelligentsia and some politicians, and a cleverly engineered ignorance and indifference ( largely via the education system ) among much of the general public, has come perilously close to completely destroying the foundations laid with blood, sweat, and tears, by our forebears, of a germinal cosmopolitan world, unified by universal education, language, suffrage, and values.

With regard to the central importance for a civilised society of a sound sense of values I again quote C.S.Lewis :  "....... I draw the following conclusions. This thing which I have called for convenience the TAO, and which others may call The Natural Law, or Traditional Morality, or the first principles of Practical Reason, or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained.

The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory.   

There has never been, and never will be, a radical new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purports to be new systems or ( as they now call them ) "ideologies", all consist of fragments from the TAO itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the TAO and to it alone such validity as they possess........the human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in "

 "The Abolition of Man" - ( "The Way" ).

The fact must be squarely faced - the comparatively recent and catastrophic degradation of Western European consciousness, ( irrespective of the contributing failure of other peoples ), is the first cause of current world problems. Theirs the greatest responsibility, theirs the greatest culpability.

Those who find this observation as hard to admit as did  the writer, need only consider that the type of people who are at last beginning to attract severe criticism ( thank goodness ) from free thinking people are precisely the ultra Left-wing, anti-Western,  politically correct, Europeans.      

It is no ordinary war that we presently engaged in. It's nature is unprecedented in history. The theatre is not on the physical  plane , nor is it fought with physical weapons. The battle is being fought in the psycho / spiritual arena with psycho / spiritual weapons. Nor is the prize limited to the usual territory, earthly power or "spoils of war" etc. The contest is for nothing less than the human soul. We are fighting for our very soul - and our civilisation. The stakes could not be higher.

 New Zealand is no isolated aberration in this regard of course - ( Britain itself is nowadays in a shameful state ) - and if the concept is extended over the former British / European colonial world, ( instance Africa ), then light is thrown upon the cause of much current international chaos and suffering. 

Human history is the story of the evolution of human consciousness.

One important manifestation of this evolution is the journey from the earliest forms of tribalism, through priestly rule, monarchies, to democracy ( beginning at the genesis of Western civilisation in ancient Greece ) ; and on into the future when the sovereign individual must increasingly take his personal moral / social responsibility upon his own shoulders.

All these forms of human society are transitory - inasmuch as they are expressions of the prevailing consciousness of a particular time in history - tribalism being the earliest and most primitive form.

Therefore it is clear that the unfolding tragedy of this country is not that the Maoris have lost ( as an evolutionary necessity ), their spiritual / cultural heritage, but that Euro New Zealanders have lost theirs - and with it all sense of direction.

*New Zealanders of European ancestry.

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13 May 07
What has happened to agricultural research in our country?
By John Greenfield (Emeritus, Senior Agricultural Adviser, World Bank)

I recently retired and returned to New Zealand after over 40 years of working in developing countries all over the world, the last 18 years as Senior Agricultural Adviser with the World Bank. In that period I was fortunate enough to develop a completely new biological system of soil and moisture conservation that has now been accepted in over 100 countries. ‘Fortunate enough’ because my system, once I proved its value, was fully supported by my employer, the World Bank. This new technology is based on hedges of a completely unique plant known as Vetiver grass (Vetiveria zizanioides).

I am a New Zealander, and in the ‘50s, New Zealand had a tremendous reputation in all aspects of agriculture, we led the world in pasture production, Dr. C.P.McMeekan, the country’s leading livestock specialist had left the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in New Zealand and was ‘head hunted’ by the World Bank as Senior Livestock adviser, he had a tremendous reputation in live stock development. New Zealand had the best, most productive farmers in the world, fully supported by research workers in Ruakura, Wallaceville etc. Young farmers and research workers were trained at Massey and Lincoln Colleges. These Colleges had large farms where students could learn all the skills in the various farming practices.  We had research workers carrying out trials at these Colleges and Research Stations, getting great results.  The country’s agriculture was buzzing with ‘break throughs’ and respected throughout the world.

In 1950 I left New Zealand full of confidence, I had written to the World Bank and said, that I had graduated from Lincoln and was ready to start work for them in International agricultural development.  That’s how confident (and naïve) I was of the standard of NZ agriculture. We must surely be sort after by every organization in the business.  Needless to say I received a very polite letter saying “Thank you for your interest in the World Bank” - but ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’, which in fact they did 23 years later.

I found that to even be considered for a position in the World Bank, I would have to have had at least 10 years experience in a developing country or countries, nobody told me that at Lincoln.  I would also have to have an impressive track record in development work. After close scrutiny of my work in the field, I might be asked to join the Bank as an agriculturalist working out of Washington DC. So I set about to get that experience, it was a bit like joining the ’Foreign Legion’. Wars, Coups, Counter-coups, crash landings, bombs on planes, life in some of the most difficult countries in the World, including Iraq. But it really taught me my ’trade’, and how little I really knew about or was taught about International agriculture.

I spent years in the Middle East and Africa doing development work, privately until the Ghanaian government decided to freeze foreign bank accounts and I couldn’t pay my children’s school fees so I joined the UN, Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) for less money but more security. Ultimately ended up in Viet Nam, but was evacuated from there in what I stood up in and posted to Jordan, where I was able to double Jordan’s wheat yields at reduced cost using my system of moisture conservation.

The World Bank was impressed with my work in Viet Nam and then in Jordan and offered me a position with them.  This allowed me to ‘introduce’ and perfect my system of biological conservation, ultimately with their full support.

I retired and returned to NZ in the ‘90s, to find the country completely changed, I felt like Rip van Winkle. Agriculture had been shunted in to the back ground. I could not get a handle on what research was being done, I tried to get my Vetiver System of biological hedges that had been so successful overseas at preventing erosion established here in New Zealand, but ran in to a brick wall. They wouldn’t try it. They didn’t want it, it wouldn’t work in New Zealand. The only scientist that had tried the Vetiver system in Gisborne had been made redundant for his effort.

Massey and Lincoln were now Universities but without farms attached and teaching little agriculture. Wallaceville and Ruakura seem to have gone!  Crown Research Institutes had sprung up everywhere.  “Crown” where had we got the Crown from?  If you really wanted to upset ex-colonial countries, just mention the word “Crown”. So this was a stupid accolade if ever I had heard of one.  Why change the DSIR name when it was so famous?

Erosion was out of control; possums were out of control; rabbits were out of control.  It seems that the country has been taken over by a bunch of happy clapping Maurice Dancers, who call themselves the “Greens”. Incompetent, inexperienced but unfortunately in charge, and are doing far more harm than good. They know nothing about soil conservation but have set them selves up as the authority on it, they are outspoken and out of control.  They advise our Minister of the Environment, and Minister of Agriculture who in fact knows nothing about agriculture either and would be the first one to admit it.

Agriculture is still the major contributor to the country’s  economy, but the agriculture sector as far as our politicians are concerned, doesn’t represent a very large vote, so can be taxed, dictated to and persecuted without the fear of losing many votes.

Farmers are a significant and economically influential population group which may not surface until someone highlights their concerns, but surface they must, or our country’s agriculture will become a laughing stock of pointless regulations foisted on to the farmers by a bunch of laptop bearing bureaucrats. Farmers today are not being served by the Government’s efforts or investment in agricultural research and development.

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30 April 07
Tino Rangatiratanga - Truth or Fiction?
By Denis Hampton

Plucked from the second article of the Treaty of Waitangi, the term tino rangatiratanga has become a battle-cry for all manner of opportunists and activists. Said to mean full authority, self-determination, highest chieftainship, and even total Maori sovereignty, these two words are now in everyday use.

A Google internet search came up with 46 thousand hits.  It has become common parlance in government departments, local authorities, universities, churches, and activist groups.  But is tino rangatiratanga really a traditional Maori concept?  My research suggests this to be far from the case.

A search of books on Maori culture drew a blank.  These included  Raymond Firth's  “Economics of the New Zealand Maori”,  Joan Metge's  “The Maoris of New Zealand: Rautahi”, and even Angela Ballara's relatively recent “Iwi”.

Published in 1984 was Donna Awatere's feisty little book “Maori Sovereignty”.  It, too, made no reference to tino rangatiratanga.  If it had been in even infrequent use, Awatere would most certainly have used it!

The term in fact first surfaced in the mid 1980s in Waitangi Tribunal reports.  But, lobbied with a range of opinion by submitters, the Tribunal struggled with its interpretation.  In its Orakei Report of 1987, it noted that there is no precise English equivalent and it is used in the Treaty in an 'un-Maori' manner.

Dr Cleve Barlow, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Auckland wrote in 1991 that the term does not occur in the traditional schools of learning in Ngapuhi (i.e. in Northland where the Treaty was written and first signed).  He suggested that 'arikitanga' was the correct word to describe supreme Maori power and authority. (1)

New Zealand's first Chief Justice Sir William Martin once referred to the Treaty giving Maori “full Chiefship”. (2)  This soon drew comment from former British Resident James Busby.  Well versed in the ways of pre-Treaty Maori, Busby observed of the chiefs:--  “They had no power but that of violence.” (3)

The Treaty of Waitangi ushered in a radically new era for Maori.  Most importantly, it guaranteed them property rights.  This was not something they had previously enjoyed!

Drafted by Busby and Captain William Hobson, the Treaty was then translated into Maori by Anglican missionary Henry Williams.  He, too, had been in New Zealand for some years and was thoroughly conversant with its native tongue.

For the descriptor “full exclusive and undisturbed” Williams chose “tino”.  It is a word giving emphasis, and means variously: very, full, total or absolute.  It was a good choice.

For “possession” (of property), he chose “rangatiratanga”.  On the surface this suggests chieftainship, but like English, Maori words can have more than one meaning.

In his Maori-English Dictionary, H.M. 'Hori' Ngata said 'owner' translated to 'rangatira' , and 'ownership' to 'rangatiratanga'.  Ownership of property was a function of chieftainship.  The same word can be used for both.

Tino rangatiratanga can mean full chieftainship, but in the context of the Treaty it did not.  Without doubt, Article 2 was about property – tangible property.  It was certainly not about sovereignty (which had been ceded in Article 1) or authority over all manner of intangibles, such as language, culture, flora and fauna etc. etc.

In 1922, Sir Apirana Ngata (grandfather of Hori) was critical of the wishful thinking on the part of many Maori groups re the Treaty.  As he saw it, the authority referred to in the second article was simply about rights to land and possessions such as one's canoe, spear, kumara pit and cultivation.

Sir Apirana said that although some minor parts were left out of the Maori version, it nevertheless clearly explained the main provisions of the Treaty.  Article 2 provided for for Maori the permanent establishment of title to their land and their property. (4)

These rights, of course, are now enjoyed by all New Zealanders.  But some are still not satisfied.  Invoking the Treaty, and under the Tino Rangatiratanga banner, they seek special status and additional privileges.

Must the Treaty forever divide us?

(1)               “Tikanga Whakararo: key concepts in Maori culture”, Cleve Barlow, 1991.

(2)               “The Taranaki Question”, Sir William Martin, 1860.

(3)               “Remarks on a pamphlet entitled The Taranaki Question ...”, James Busby, 1860.

(4)               “The Treaty ofWaitangi: An explanation”, Sir Apirana Ngata, 1922.

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30 April 07
Gun Control? It's Mental Health, Stupid!
By Dr Lech Beltowski

To anyone able to think rationally the most obvious and important lesson to be learned from the tragedy at Virginia Tech is that the authorities simply cannot ever adequately protect ordinary law-abiding citizens from criminal violence and madness, no matter what they claim. It is yet another example of how the false promise of gun control has once again cost innocent lives.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, the response of the gun control lobby world wide has been totally predictable. Yet part of the reason for their hysterical  (and as the facts become clearer, increasingly illogical) calls for “tougher gun laws now” may well be that many of their high profile activists are now belatedly starting to realise that they may well be at least partly responsible for such incidents.

Their frantic and emotive calls, (which started incidentally from the moment the news first broke rather than from the time the background facts started to become known which is the point at which intelligent people start to form opinions) also demonstrates that they are less interested in solving this problem and thus saving lives and more interested in pursuing their theoretical social agenda.

In reality, there are only three questions that need to be answered if we are to arrive at why it happened and what needs to be done to prevent (or at least very significantly reduce the risk) of such incidents happening in future.

Three simple questions: What allowed it to happen in the first place? Why did the police/FBI check fail to pick up Cho as being severely mentally disturbed and needing treatment less than two years previously? Why was he able to kill so many?

All questions the gun control lobby have fudged for years, questions they have time and time again successfully prevented from being asked and acted upon. They know it’s not a gun issue, but they don’t want you to realise it!

What allowed it to happen? Virginia Tech incident is simply one of a number of high profile murder suicides that have occurred throughout the world over the last few decades. Yes- MURDER-SUICIDE! That’s what really happened at Virginia Tech - the worst form of psychiatric violence. So it’s simply not a gun issue but a mental health issue. Common sense- albeit a scare commodity these days, especially among supporters of gun control- would surely suggest that any attempt to fix a mental health problem with a tougher gun law is doomed to failure.

So what we really need to ask before anything else is precisely how and why this seriously disturbed and psychiatrically deteriorating young man was allowed to remain in the community, almost certainly inadequately medicated (if medicated at all) and apparently unsupervised by mental health services. Because that is the real cause of the Virginia Tech shooting and until this mental health loophole is addressed there cannot be any real solution.

The second question, why did the police/FBI check fail to pick up Cho as being severely  mentally disturbed and needing treatment less than two years previously, is also a non-brainer once all the facts are available. Yet the “mass market’ media continue to censor or distort important information and even days afterwards their articles and editorials show a massive bias against legal guns and towards more gun control. 

For example, the Herald, in one of its “Campus massacre” articles on Thursday April 19^th offered its readers the information (given alongside a picture of two hands holding a Glock pistol and the caption “Easy Target”) that Cho Seung-Hui needed “only” three pieces of identification and to pass a security check to buy a Glock pistol. Would a fourth, fifth or even tenth piece of ID have made any real difference? Of course not

The reality is that the Virginia gun laws worked exactly as they were designed to work. The reason Cho was able to buy a pistol legally was not because the gun laws “failed” in some ill-defined and mysterious way but because the state police/FBI lacked a vital piece of information and did not know Cho had been mentally ill in 2005. In short, the police/FBI vetting failed because Virginia mental health services had not flagged Cho as having a serious mental health problem. Now whether that was because he had been lost to follow-up, because of privacy issues or through human error, it does not change the fact that mental health professionals failed in their most basic and important responsibility to the community that employs them. This is another mental health loophole that needs tightening up urgently.

Furthermore, those baying for tougher gun laws need to admit the logic that, even if Cho had  been prevented from buying a gun legally, he have still have been able to obtain guns illegally had he so wished. And what if, instead of a gun he had used a knife, sword, bomb or poison?  Once all these other totally possible different scenarios are thought about logically, it is clear that the “solution” offered by the anti-gun lobby is nothing more than a dangerous sham, a blatant and deceitful illusion.

The third and final question need an urgent answers is why so many people were killed in this particular incident?

As renowned civil rights lawyer and researcher David Kopel has written, the most important characteristic shared by sites where mass murders have occurred in recent years is that they were all “gun free zones” That was precisely the situation at Virginia Tech, which had a policy of banning all guns on campus (except for police and university security guards) with even lecturers and professors being prohibited from keeping their own legally held and licensed guns in their cars.

So when Cho broke this university regulation by bringing his guns onto campus, he knew before he started shooting that there could not be any effective resistance for a considerable time.

In short, it was Virginia Tech’s own “gun free zone” policy that allowed Cho to maximise his kill rate, to kill so many professors and fellow students with total impunity. The original justification for this naïve and dangerous relic from the gun control lobby’s efforts in the late 80’s, that it “would help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on campus”, rings very hollow now and will surely cause the administration of Virginia Tech much legal and financial anguish in future. Don’t you wish you were a litigation attorney in Virginia just now!

Past supporters of gun control, the people whose efforts and donations helped push the concept of “gun fee zones”  into legislation, must now accept that a large number of the victims at Virginia Tech (probably the majority) are dead because of their misguided efforts.    

Three simple questions;

What allowed it to happen in the first place?

Why did the police/FBI check fail?

Why was he able to kill so many?

The answers show that if authorities are really serious about preventing such acts of criminal insanity they need at long last to focus their efforts on the way mental health services function and on avoiding the tokenism of gun control laws that in reality never disarm criminals or the criminally insane.

And now that you also know, there is now no “not knowing” otherwise you too may have innocent blood on your hands. Like the gun control lobby.

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7 April 07
Do We Need Lower Taxes?
By Carl Peterson

If you think we need lower taxes simply because the government has an 8 billion dollar surplus, you may be half right. Right about lower taxes; wrong about the reasons. There simply is no surplus. How can there be a surplus when the country has a $14 billion trading deficit, and has borrowed another $21 billion from offshore through the private banking system last year?

And if you think reducing taxes and reducing services is going to make all our problems go away, you must be dreaming. There are a lot of New Zealanders dependant upon present benefits and services. We’ve earned them and we deserve them. The truth is, we simply won’t stand for it. The last election result is ample evidence of that. That leaves us in somewhat of a predicament.

There must be something fundamentally wrong with the way we understand taxes when every single government over the last 100 years has changed the tax system in one way or another; either raising or lowering taxes, or doing both at the same time.

Maybe we’ve been operating out of a false paradigm all these years. Maybe there is no workable tax system. Maybe taxes in the widest sense simply do not and cannot work to bring about the outcomes desired. Our social problems have grown right alongside increases in taxation. The odds against this relationship being merely coincidental are about a million to one.

Just because everyone believes taxes fund government doesn’t make it true. The fact is, there is no evidence supporting that belief. And there is a huge body of evidence available that contradicts it. Unfortunately, none of it is ever revealed on our mainstream media channels. And there is a very good reason for this. A few people at the very top of the world banking system benefit immensely from taxation. And they own the mainstream media. End of story.

Let’s face it. lots of people hate income taxes. And income tax rates take up a significant amount of political debate at every national election. Maybe all our politicians have simply been asking the wrong questions. Maybe we should be debating whether taxes work in any shape, manner of form?

Overall, it makes very little difference just what the individual rate of income tax may be. Any government that believes that taxes fund services will simply restructure the tax base another way whenever politically expedient. If government lowers income taxes, you can bet your bottom dollar they will take that dollar another way. And believe me, a tax by any other name still smells like…a tax.

To understand taxation, you must first understand what money is and where it comes from. If you don’t know this, there is simply no point in continuing this “conversation”.

Just Where Does the Money Come From?

I’m not just talking about the cash in your pocket; the cash that only amounts to around 3% of the total money supply. I’m talking about money in its widest sense; the sum of all negotiable instruments including bank deposits, mortgages, credit card debt, ledger entries, and in fact every thing symbolic of and exchangeable for that stuff you’ve got in your pocket. Economists call that “M3” money, and that’s what makes the world go round in its present unflattering way.

In case you haven’t noticed, the world economy has been growing at around 4% per year; which means much more businesses, industry, and commerce. And the money supply has been growing at around 7.5% per year. This means lots more money floating around.

All this new money is added to our economic system by the banks as interest-bearing debt. Our local banks themselves borrow this new money from offshore sources at fluctuating interest rates. And we then pay a higher rate when we borrow from the local bank to pay for our home or vehicle; which is really just borrowing to replace our lost tax dollars.

Because the money is borrowed from offshore, no one in New Zealand , government included, knows of its true source. Someone somewhere is creating this stuff out of thin air, and we have to sell our souls in debt slavery and mortgage debt in order to get some of it.

In other words, the entire New Zealand money supply and economy is controlled by anonymous international bankers; bankers who depend on local taxes to suck  money out of the system in order to shore up demand for new loans. This may explain why there is little left in New Zealand still owned by us. Those same bankers can then use their profit to buy our remaining assets, control our media, and subjugate our own government. The result is called Globalization; which is actually Death by Taxation. Taxes taketh away, and the banks giveth.

Solving the Problem

We need to eliminate income taxes. Our government then can create the $21 billion taken as income taxes in the same way these overseas bankers do now. This money will be interest free, leaving $21 billion of extra stosh in the hands of our citizens and businesses. That $21 billion will generate new private investments, new research, more efficient technologies, a new consumer market, additional GST, lower costs (as wage taxes fall away), and lower interest rates allowing many more people to own their homes.

These two simple steps would in a twinkling of the eye wipe away thousands of unnecessary statutes regarding banking, finance, accounting, taxation, and compliance issues now strangling society. Life would become simpler, and more stress-free. Businesses would become more profitable. Government would have more ready means to police industrial pollution and environmental mischief. We may even find a truer meaning in life; other than sheer survival. And perhaps offer a workable blueprint to the rest of the world. Before it’s too late.

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7 April 07
Understanding the Treaty
By Denis Hampton

It is often now said that the Treaty of Waitangi is a `living document'.  Surely this can apply only if we first know what its 1840 signatories understood.

The English text is clear.  In Article 2, Maori were guaranteed possession of their property.  This was translated by missionary Henry Williams as `rangatiratanga' of their `taonga'.

In the 1980s Sir Hugh Kawharu translated the Maori text back into English.  Whereas Williams in 1840 had little choice, Kawharu had a variety of words to choose from.  For `rangatiratanga' he chose `chieftanship'.  For `taonga' he chose `treasures', and noted that these included the non-material (1).

This interpretation has led to huge and often unrealistic expectations by Maori today.  But is the Kawharu translation really what the 1840 Maori understood by the Treaty?

The Maori text was read to the chiefs, but before they signed, the Treaty was fully explained to them.  Hobson's instructions were that the missionaries were to explain the Treaty's `principle and object', which Maori were to `clearly understand' before they would be permitted to sign (2).

Henry Williams later recalled:- "I told them all to listen with care, explaining clause by clause to the chiefs, giving them caution not to be in a hurry..." (3).  At Waitangi, at least, there was much discussion before the signings.

 It seems inconceivable that the missionaries would focus entirely on the Maori text.  They would be well aware of the terms laid out in the English text.  It was their task, as best as they could in the Maori language, to ensure that the chiefs fully understood these terms.  As men of integrity they were bound to do so.

In conclusion, from the available evidence I am convinced that 1840 Maori understood that Article 2 was not about chieftanship and treasures, but simply about ownership of property - tangible property.

(1) Kawharu, I.H., (ed.), "Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha  Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi", 1989, p 319 & 320.
(2) Orange, Claudia, "The Treaty of Waitangi", 1987, p 69.
(3) Rogers, Lawrence M., "Te Wiremu: A Biography of Henry Williams", 1973, p 165.

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25 March 2007
Bringing Up Baby
By Mike S


I would just like to express my own view on the matter of this Con Job smacking bill.  I know that this has probably been said before but this would be one of the most ridiculous and stupid laws that could ever be bought into NZ.  Parents have the right to bring up their children as they see fit - albeit that a very minute number will fall prey to some kind of violence, but hey isn't that the way of nature?

Talking like a futurist, I foresee the day very shortly when parents will have to pass an exam in order to be able to get a document enabling them to even consider having a baby in the first place.  Then on the day that the child is born the parents have a quick hug with baby and then it is taken away to be brought up by the state in a foster home with parents who, themselves may not be the best people either. 

We do not ever want to see this kind of society. We do not want to have a society that is ruled by the politically correct minority.  We all know that the world is not a pleasant place.  The people of NZ, the children of the future cannot be bought up in a cacoon or be led to believe that this world is anything like pleasant, as once they start to get old enough to leave home they will be like scared little rabbits cowering from the big bad wolf called the outside world. They will be too scared to even be able to lead any kind of productive life. 

We should be bringing up our children to know the real world, and in some cases they need to experience it first hand.  I say this in a kind manner.  Just think of the crawling child that moves around a floor and suddenly decides to stick an object into a wall socket, there are two ways to deal with this: sit back, relax, carry on watching TV while the baby fries, say ho-hum time to have another baby; or, get off one’s backside and deal with the situation, and remind the child that this action is dangerous. Let them feel some harmless pain (smack on the hand) and they should remember that life lesson - sticking my finger in there is painful; won't do that again!

I can remember when my own son was born way back in the 80s, within a few days of him coming home for the first time there we were being visited by this female who tried to tell us how to bring up baby.  I first asked her "How old are you?" She replied 17. I then asked, "have you had your own children yet?" She replied that she was not married and had no children.  "Where did you acquire this knowledge of yours?" and she replied that she got it from a book.  So there we are being told what to do by those who are completely and utterly ignorant of what to do.  I told her to leave and return once her own children are grown up.

Please do not let any more of our rights as parents be taken away from us.

The United Nations are not the most wondrous group of people in the world as we all know, and a quick search of the web will show that this group have their own agendas as to how they want to see the world run.  They are seriously bad folk and need to be dealt with very cautiously.

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25 March 07
Bradford Bill Becalmed
By Nick Lindo


Sue Bradford’s attempt to have Section 59 of the Crimes Act repealed has run into muddy water and stormy seas. Currently it is becalmed as subterranean manoeuvrings by the many factions involved take place behind closed doors in smokeless rooms.

In fact, “All is smothered in surmise, and nothing is but what is not,” as the Bard once so sagely observed. We really don’t know what to think. “To spank or not to spank” that too is the question.

Repealers in the ascendant

Earlier this month the repealers seemed well in control of the commanding heights of the moral high ground and looking down smugly on the puny forces of reaction struggling to get a foothold on the slippery slopes far beneath them.

Borrows’ band out-gunned

Mr Chester Borrows, former policeman and now National MP for Whanganui, could be seen striving to regroup and redeploy his shattered troops as the battle to introduce his amendment - to permit, still, a degree of force in the disciplining of children -  foundered, finally, on the rock of Maori support for the Bradford brigade. Inevitably there were casualties as Green snipers kept National heads pinned below the parapet with witheringly well-aimed comment and laser-guided logic.  

Solid phalanx

Ranged against this now rabble of a demoralised opposition a too, too solid phalanx of Labour members, all the Greens and, significantly - and in the end, crucially - the combined strength of the Maori Party. As the Second Reading figures were intoned to the House the pro-banners (of smacking children in almost any shape or form) were seen to have won the day.

Unconfined joy amongst the Bradford army, long faces and helpless shoulder-shrugging from its deflated challengers. 

Waiting for May 2

For Ms B and her Green and assorted cohorts it seemed now merely a matter of filling in the days and hours between then and May 2nd for the third and final reading and the triumphant passing into law of the bill. After that blessed day Section 59 will be no more, replaced by the clumsily entitled, all-contingencies-covered, “Abolition of Force as a Justification of Child Discipline amendment 2007.”

There’s more     

But wait; yes, there is, indeed, more. It is not an open and shut scenario. Suddenly, the goal posts are on the move, the playing field developing mysterious humps. Fissures are appearing in the wall of support for the long-winded amendment. Words are being twisted by disingenuous politicians who would have us believe we no longer understand what we are reading and hearing.

Pravda recalled

It’s a bit like Pravda, the organ of the USSR , used to sound. Never mind the “conventional” meaning, this is what it means today. (Something else tomorrow) 

PM leads

And leading this unexpected change in the shifting sands of the political landscape, the PM herself. Having obliged her 50 MPs to vote for Ms Bradford’s bill en bloc and willy-nilly regardless of any individual reservations they may, quite legitimately, have had about the matter, and having also assured us all of her undying repugnance at the thought of small children being “hit”, it now turns out that was by no means always her stance on the issue. Not a bit of it.

Classic U-turn

It looks like the classic “U turn” to me. Asked in an interview with Radio Rhema just before the 2005 election (less than two years’ ago) whether she wanted to see smacking banned she replied firmly and unequivocally,

“Absolutely not; well I think you’re trying to defy human nature.”

If that remark does not mean what it says, what does?   

Fall-out

In the resultant, and embarrassing fall-out from what is undeniably a complete volte-face - whether Ms Clark likes it or not - she has been trying to tell us that her words then are consistent with her anti-smacking support now of Sue’s attempt to have Section 59 repealed. Incredibly, she has gone on to say that she still does not support an anti-smacking bill and does not believe that is what the Bradford reform is meant to achieve.

Confusion

Confused? Of course, you are; it’s a spectacular example of political Orwellese, as per “1984”, where “doublethink” means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind and accepting both of them. Ms Clark is clearly an exponent of such mental agility. In that epoch-making book, too, the doomed Winston Smith is also convinced by the Party that 2 and 2 can add up to any number the Party wants it to. Good on ya, George; you’re still alive and well in NZ, 2007.  

Bradford shafted

Poor old Sue has been hung out to dry by this left-field lurch from her most prominent supporter. So much so she has also found herself mouthing Helen’s bewildering contradictions by “explaining” that, despite what we have been led to believe, her bill does not ban smacking in the way we all think it does. Let confusion be unconfined.

Doubters’ charter

All of which opens the way for the more than a few  Labour doubters, of whom there are said to be “at least eight” - “led” by Transport Minister, Harry Duynhoven - to break ranks and remain faithful to their consciences and their constituents. What a refreshing change that would be. How we would all cheer. If their Leader can, simultaneously, hold two opposing views at once why not them, lesser mortals though they undoubtedly be?   

Too many Hot-Cross buns

Meanwhile, and on another plane, we learn the diabetic / obesity epidemic amongst our young is now being fuelled, at this time of year, by an overdose of Hot-Cross buns. The mini cakes in question have reached gi-normous proportions, to which layers of butter, jam, honey and other dangerous substances are added making the resulting concoction another potentially lethal cocktail.

What next, I wonder? Should there now be a parliamentary amendment along the lines of, “The anti stomach-inflationary, health-imperilling provision of potentially-fatal confectionary” Bill. 2007?

At least, despite its wordiness, there would be no doubt about what it was trying to accomplish.

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25 March 07
Food for Thought
By Bill Hays, Uruguay


Farming is undergoing a major change of direction as with the high petroleum prices crops grown for bio fuel are in direct competition with those grown for food. Thus the price of bread will in the future be directly related to the cost of a barrel of oil. Meat prices will also rise as cereal ration becomes more expensive in the preparation of feedlot animals.

How is this to be managed by countries like NZ and Uruguay and other Southern Cross nations? Kiwis are already aware of this and are investing (particularly Wrightsons) heavily in agriculture in Uruguay.

A very strong Niña is forecast for 2008, which will bring massive droughts to Brazil and the other nations of the Mercosur and will also seriously affect crop production in the USA causing high volatility in prices of agricultural commodities.

Food (or fuel) for thought, don’t you think?

I read somewhere that the average western household spends around 17% of its budget on food. If this were to rise to say 25% what would be the economic and political consequences? The current consumer society would be extremely reluctant  to see its current consumption of widgets and other fripperies reduced leading to a round of wage increases and thus general inflation which would be difficult to contain.

What will our nanny governments’ reactions be to this?

1.) First blame the wicked racketeering farmers? Their vote does not amount to a row of beans - and tax the hell out of them.

2.) Subsidize food to the lowest paid - a great vote getter? Who pays? Probably, the farming classes.

3.) Prohibit food exports to keep internal prices down. Sounds crazy? Madam, its already happening. The Argentine president whose least innocuous nick name is the Penguin has already placed export quotas on beef and wheat to keep his voters happy. Here in Uruguay the more popular cuts of meat are fixed in price by the government. The result of all this will of course just propel international food prices even higher. Instead of an oil squeeze we will have a food squeeze. We can at a pinch do without oil, but food is really rather basic to our needs.

4.) The Saudis and others of that ilk must be laughing their socks off. By raising or lowering the price of a barrel of oil they can now direct the world economy. By raising the price they encourage more crops to be produced for biofuel so enabling to import food at almost any price for their scarce population. A sudden drop in oil prices would make biofuels uncompetitive releasing vast quantities of cereals onto the world market. These would probably be bought at rock bottom dollar by the oilers and stored. They then jack up petroleum prices again having bankrupted the world’s agricultural commodity producers.

5.) It’s a sobering scenario.

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