Category: Politics
It is not easy to rile New Zealanders, but Hone Harawira’s abusive email clearly did. By claiming that he was entitled to rip off taxpayers with his jaunt to Paris because Whities had been ripping off Maori for centuries, Hone Harawira exposed the racist thinking that underpins the Maori Party. As Labour’s former Tai Tokerau MP Dover Samuels said, Mr Harawira is “advocating what he really believes in. A lot of people sitting with him in Parliament believe the same thing”.
‘White motherf*****s have been raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries….’ This is, it seems, the sincere personal view of Hone Harawira, a member of the New Zealand Parliament, and one, indeed, whose party forms part of our coalition government. He expressed it in a private e-mail to Buddy Mikaere, a former director of the Waitangi Tribunal who had ventured to inquire about who ~ Harawira himself or the taxpayer ~ was paying for a side-trip to Paris for sightseeing which Harawira and his wife had taken when in Europe on parliamentary business.
In his book The Vision of the Anointed, economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Thomas Sowell, describes how the great catastrophes of history have typically resulted not only from ill-advised policies, but from the fact that public feedback cannot get through to decision-makers. He says, “Typically, there has been an additional and crucial ingredient – some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented, so that a dangerous course of action could be blindly continued to a fatal conclusion. Much of the continent of Europe was devastated in World War II because the totalitarian regime of the Nazis did not permit those who foresaw the self-destructive consequences of Hitler’s policies to alter, or even influence, those policies.”
A political system that allows the select few of the ruling elite to dominate the life of the ordinary person has come to be known as …..“Plato’s conceit”.
I am writing this article in response to Muriel's question "why is electricity so expensive"? There is a simple answer to this question. "The electricity 'market'". But explaining how and why it drives up prices and will continue to do so, is rather more complicated. I will try to do just that.
In 1985, New Zealand’s Attorney General, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, launched the ‘great quango hunt’. He threatened to strangle many of the useless ‘quasi autonomous national government organisations’. According to political reporter Jane Clifton, “Geoffrey got so excited about this, it was all staff could do to persuade him not to wear a pith helmet and safari suit to the press conference. Geoffrey had counted up hundreds, nay thousands of quangos – rabbit boards being among the most emblematic – wasting money. He was going to grub them out, root and branch. He was positively kittenish in his excitement. And what happened? The little buggers multiplied.”[1]
The National government is now considering areas where they can reduce government expenditure. I would like to draw attention to a class of government departments that have been created with the intention of maximizing welfare for certain groups of New Zealanders. These departments have admirable goals which they aim for by providing information and policy advice. They have now been in existence long enough to give us an idea if they have been successful in achieving their goals, or have they just become tax-payer funded lobby groups.
Speech at AUT University delivered soon after Don’s appointment to chair the 2025 Taskforce.
“I can assure you that the government has investigated the evidence on the science of climate change from a number of different sources and I can appreciate that there are many different perspectives on the matter. However, the government is convinced that climate change is a serious and legitimate issue and that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the most reliable information on climate change science. In its most recent assessment, the IPCC states that the evidence for climate change is unequivocal, that humankind’s emissions are very likely the cause of these changes and that, unless action is taken to reduce emissions, dangerous changes in the climate system will result.”
The current Global Warming Debate is not about temperature or CO2 levels. It is an ideological clash between those who want to change us (rather than the climate) and those who believe in freedom, markets, human ingenuity, and technical progress. The advocates of global warming alarmism ask for an almost unprecedented expansion of government intrusion, of government intervention into our lives and of government control over us. We are pushed into accepting rules about how to live, what to do, how to behave, what to consume, what to eat, how to travel. It is unacceptable.
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