Category: Economic Issues
Having seen the disastrous influence of UNDRIP in Canada, the continued existence of the He Puapua framework that Labour put in place to implement the Declaration in New Zealand represents an existential threat to our future. It's time that threat was removed.
The key decisions that set the food price crisis in motion were made by Labour. Framed as bold climate leadership by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, her 2018 Captain’s Call banning offshore oil and gas exploration, and the 2019 Zero Carbon Act introducing the harshest emissions restrictions in the world, came with predictable consequences: energy shortages and rising fuel prices, as the cost of carbon soared from $17 in 2017 to $88.50 in 2022.
As a former dairy farmer I was shocked to learn that Fonterra is selling its brands’ business. Call it emotional attachment rather than hard-headed commercial reality. For all my dairy farming years I heard that we needed to be closer to our consumers, that branding was an integral part of extracting profit from product sales and that we needed to better understand what our customers wanted. We needed to own the food chain – ‘plough to plate’.
Paying able-bodied people to stay at home and not earn their living is probably the biggest social miscalculation of the last sixty years. Unwinding it won’t be easy. There will be howls of outrage led by those who farm poverty.
Local government in New Zealand is facing significant challenges. After many years of entrenched policy positions councils now need to rapidly adapt and realign to the significant re-sets emanating from central government. All local councils are creatures of statutes and like it or not, central government and local councils must be inextricably intertwined.
Since one Parliament cannot bind another, National no longer needs to prop up a dangerous and highly destabilising law promoted by a Party that is now openly advancing anarchy. The fatally flawed Marine and Coastal Area Act should be repealed and the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act restored to provide certainty, security and to protect the public good...
This new law will be the most indescribable gift to Maori of an enormous part of the remaining public property and public wealth of this country. It will deprive the rest of us of any possibility of enjoying the immense economic opportunities which the foreshore and seabed affords and which, heaven knows, we so desperately need…
Looking at the wider picture, all over the world, liberal democracies are being threatened by authoritarian forces. We experienced it ourselves just five years ago, when almost every single one of our democratic rights and freedoms were stripped away without warning. It was into the democratic vacuum Jacinda Ardern created, that tribal rule was ushered in.
National wants economic growth. Opening up the agricultural sector to less regulated gene editing and the more wholesale use of GMO’s could be a quick way to get quantum leaps in production. But there are no guarantees and the evidence for increased production from gene manipulation is scant. Yet the changes are being hustled through.
If a line-by-line review had been carried out, Coalition Ministers would have been shocked to discover Labour’s toxic He Puapua programmes are still operating. De-funding those including “Rautaki Maori” policies to deliver preferential hiring practices for Maori. would not only have helped the Coalition to deliver on their election pledge to “Stop He Puapua”, but it would also have saved millions of dollars to reduce spending and pay down debt.
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