Category: Politics

This plan for tribal control, which was to dominate the agenda of the new government, had been deliberately kept hidden from voters during the election. Labour feared a backlash that would have cost them votes if the public found out.

We have now had a glimpse of where we have been heading, we know what co-governance looks like and we know where it will take us if the agenda that under-pins it is not brought to an end.

We are witnessing a remarkable turnaround in New Zealand politics. The Coalition agreement entered into by National, ACT and New Zealand First reflects the first three-party coalition deal in our country’s history. Democracy can be seen to have prevailed, with MMP delivering what a majority of New Zealanders want.

80,000 delegates and 5,000 journalists are winging their way to Dubai from all corners of the world (including thousands in their personal jets) for COP28 of the UN’s FCCC. Their earnestly stated objective is to stop the world from warming by as much as 1.5° C above the levels of 1850. Yet they know this is a lie. They know it is unethical.

The problem we face is that few political leaders have the vision or courage to introduce transformational reforms that will genuinely empower New Zealanders to build a brighter future for themselves and their families.

The Ardern government, like the Key and Clark governments before them, tried to tax the nation to prosperity. The principal outcome being to cut productivity growth in the same way it has in the past.

Opposition parties are desperate to prevent the new government from exercising the mandate they have been given by voters to restore democracy and remove all traces of tribal rule and He Puapua from our statutes. Attempting to intimidate and bully the new Prime Minister – and the public - into submission is their strategy.

Our finally completed election results need to be viewed on several levels. On the surface, the change of government was caused because Jacinda Ardern’s and Chris Hipkins’ Labour ministries were weak in personnel and unable to extract even respectable performance from the current feeble bureaucracy when dealing with bread and butter issues.

Labour’s decimation in the polls represents a rejection of woke. New Zealanders do not want to be divided by race, nor by any other categorisation, and nor do they want to be threatened by exaggerated climate predictions to justify authoritarian control.

Almost accidentally, Labour discovered what it would take to make the working-class stop voting for it. Making those citizens feel as though they had, somehow, to justify their right to participate in shaping their nation’s future: that was the crucial catalyst for electoral defection.