Category: Politics
Just in case you hadn’t heard, it’s now official; under the coalition Government’s proposed Foreshore and Seabed Act Mark II, customary title is recognised as ownership. No longer is ‘nobody is to own’ the foreshore and seabed, the way it was sold in the consultation document. Instead, iwi and hapu will have the right to claim a new form of title , which will sit over and above the residual public domain ‘in much the same way that fee simple title sits over the Crown’s radical title to land’, in the words of the Attorney General. From the economic point of view, that amounts to ownership. I am sceptical that it can even be reconciled with the weaker notion of public domain, which is left as an undefined residual and as such, subject to constant encroachment from activities and exclusions possible under the new title. So much for the reassuring words about an undefined ‘public access’ right.
A study released last year by the OECD on child wellbeing painted a grim picture of the status of children in New Zealand. It found that New Zealand children lived in poor conditions – average family incomes in New Zealand were low by OECD standards and child poverty rates high. In terms of the “health and safety” of children we ranked next to bottom – 29th out of 30, with by far the highest rate of youth suicide and an above average rate of child mortality.[1]
An American politician, the late Eugene McCarthy, described politics as a game. It is a game where the public see the performance, but not the behind the scenes planning. Much of the politics that we see is engineered. Some of the strategies are described in academic literature using terms such as “agenda setting”, “agenda denial” and “framing”. It is not entirely accidental that some issues get a lot of attention and others are ignored. It is the result of groups competing to set the agenda. When an issue does get attention, the aim is then to frame it so that a particular view and desired solution dominates. Mike Butler referred to this in his recent column, “Framing the race debate” http://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2010/06/mike-butler-framing-race-debate.html. I described it also some time ago in a column on politics and reasoned debate (http://www.nzcpr.com/guest121.htm).
It has now been confirmed that under the new constitutional arrangements National and the Maori Party are planning to push through before Christmas, Maori will become the legal owners of large tracts of New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed.
Whatever the outcome of coastal iwi quests for customary title to the foreshore and seabed, under Mark2 of the foreshore and seabed agreement, two lessons stand out. Firstly the National Party is only too happy for power and political expediency, to racially privatise public property such as the foreshore and seabed to iwi.
The madness of the Government’s new carbon tax is that New Zealanders will be the only people in the world paying it. It will drive up the costs of living and undermine the competitiveness of New Zealand business for negligible environmental gain. A further concern is its impact on inflation, interest rates and the exchange rate. It will add to the costs of fuel and power and these flow right through the economy to basics like food. This puts pressure on inflation, which in turn drives up interest rates and the kiwi dollar. The Government’s carbon tax is a classic example of the way the Government is making things tougher for the productive exporting sector. The worst aspect of the carbon tax is that it will not make one iota of difference to New Zealand’s emissions. Nick Smith 2005
Five years ago, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, visited New Zealand to consult with Maori. In the report he subsequently produced, he urged the then Labour Government to recognise Maori rights to self determination. In particular, he recommended that the government support the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that they repeal Crown ownership of the foreshore and seabed, and that they undertake a constitutional review in order to entrench the Treaty of Waitangi.[1]
There is, in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, one very surprising omission. Nowhere is there any definition of who or what exactly an indigenous person is. It would surely not be unreasonable to expect a definition. One is not needed in the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, because it deals with all human beings, and we know what they are. But who is indigenous?
“…long term worklessness is one of the greatest risks to health in our society. It is more dangerous than most dangerous jobs in the construction industry or working on an oil rig in the North Sea, and too often we not only fail to protect our patients from long term worklessness, we sometimes actually push them into it inadvertently…”
In Thursday’s budget speech the Minister of Finance, Bill English announced that this budget had four main objectives: “The first is lifting the long-term performance of the economy. The second is reform of the tax system, to make it fairer, more sustainable and more supporting of economic growth. The third is better delivery of public services, to make them better for users of those services and better for taxpayers. The fourth is to maintain firm control of the Government's finances, so we can return to budget surpluses and pull back our rising debt.”[1]
Loading ...
