Category: Politics
There is an old joke, which I am afraid I have used more than once on occasions where speeches may be required to run along very familiar lines, in which one remarks that ones job as a speaker is a little like the challenge which faced Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth husband on their wedding night ~ he knew what to do, but he didn’t know how to make it interesting. Something similar, I fear, must be the lot of those who write on the subject of the Treaty. There is only so much to be said. After that one can only repeat oneself.
It’s been an odd sort of government, these last three years. The one thing they’ve done really well, namely the slick PR job on Mr Key (and the awful one on the hapless Mr Goff) should be enough to get the National Party back on the treasury benches. Looked at more dispassionately, however, the economic consequences of the Key Gang are pretty disturbing.
Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once quipped, “A week is a long time in politics”. Last week was a long time in politics! Within one week new forces have emerged at both ends of New Zealand’s political spectrum: on the left in the form of MP Hone Harawira with his new Mana Party, and on the right the former National Party leader and reformist Don Brash with the takeover of ACT.
The demands by the Maori elite are as relentless as a rising tide. Not content with securing the future ownership of the public’s foreshore and seabed - including invaluable mineral resources which should belong to all New Zealanders not privatised to corporate iwi – Maori leaders are now coming back for more. This time they want $600 million of taxpayers’ money for iwi to pay for something they should arguably be doing for themselves - teaching their children the Maori language.
The great Maori language rort is one of a series of frauds being perpetrated on New Zealanders by part-Maori looters of taxpayer funds and Crown assets (or in the case of the foreshore and seabed, ex-Crown assets).
In the same week that the Coastal Coalition took a step towards forcing greater accountability on Parliament, by initiating a Citizens Initiated Referendum to repeal the Marine and Coastal Area Act and restore public ownership of the foreshore and seabed, National was trying to change Parliament’s rules to reduce accountability! Treaty Negotiations Minister, Chris Finlayson is attempting to gerrymander the Parliamentary process to enable a raft of Treaty settlement bills to be fast-tracked into law before the November election. [1]
There are so many untruths and uncertainties about National's highly controversial Marine and Coastal Area Act that the public has been vindicated for massively opposing it. The Act claims to address the uncertain issue of Maori customary rights in 1840, something that nobody alive today has any direct knowledge of.
As 2011 begins, academic staff at New Zealand Universities will emerge from all the ‘formative exercises’, ‘mentoring’ and ‘coaching’ sessions of recent years, to get straight into the real thing: the 2012 round of Performance Based Research Funding. This will be the third (and, dare one hope, the last) in a sequence of formal evaluations of the value of academic research, which began in New Zealand in 2003 and was repeated in 2006.
There appears to be a growing undercurrent of disillusionment with New Zealand’s system of representative democracy. Some are saying our elected members of parliament are turning their backs on voters who put them into office. Instead of representing the public’s views, they are displaying an appalling arrogance by belittling those who dare to voice a contrary opinion.
Last year New Zealanders were informed a new Marine and Coastal Area Bill, scheduled to replace the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act would mean “nothing would change.” Despite this claim, further down the track New Zealanders were presented with a 101 page Marine and Coastal Area Bill which appears to deliver the contrary and places that statement in the political misinformation file. New Zealanders have every right to rationalize if “nothing would change” then why a 101 page change?
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