Category: Regulation
The Maori Party’s attempt to use the Maori seats to rig the election should be the final nail in their coffin - an attack on democracy, stability, and Parliamentary Sovereignty, that the Coalition can no longer ignore. They need to now promise that if they are re-elected, a referendum on the Maori Seats will be held as a matter of urgency.
Te Pāti Māori has often prospered from the canny use of tactical voting in the past. What it wants to do now, however, is a serious escalation. The party has asked supporters not to give it their party vote. It is campaigning for electorate votes only. The obvious potential effect is to create an overhang that could give it disproportionate influence in the next Parliament.
Here’s the real question: How can it be appropriate that the Electoral Commission — a public sector agency that’s meant to be politically neutral and independent of Government policy — entrenches the highly political doctrine of “Te Tiriti” and the values of Tuhonohono, Arataki, Uakaha, Manaaki, and Tika, and requires staff to demonstrate allegiance?
The ToW campaign to which we have all been subjected for many years now (and continue to be) is a “political cause” pure and simple. So surely the Electoral Commission is not playing by its own rules when forcing an applicant for a temporary part-time (or any) position to “agree to learn about our values and grow your knowledge of Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.
The reality is that the promotion of TOP as a centrist does not stand up to scrutiny. TOP’s plan to tax homeowners, bring down property prices, introduce a universal benefit, strengthen net zero, decriminalise drugs, lift the age of criminal responsibility to 25, and back He Puapua is anything but centrist! And the fact that National has already ruled out working with them after the election, means a vote for TOP is a vote for Labour.
What we need is a nationally coordinated market with the prime objective of providing a reliable and economic supply based on long-term contracts with generators. Under this market, wind and solar would have to compete on genuinely equal terms, because the system coordinator would factor in their true cost by including the cost of the backup capacity and extra transmission they require, rather than passing this cost onto all consumers.
There are many reasons the Coalition should press pause on their local government reforms, but the most important is their fundamentally undemocratic and draconian approach. They are not only disrespecting the wishes of local communities but trampling on their rights to determine how their voices are represented around the decision-making table.
For all the noise about “simplifying” local government in Northland, one question remains unanswered: where has bigger ever proven better? No one can point to a single example in New Zealand where amalgamation has delivered lower costs, better services, or stronger communities.
The bureaucratic architecture driving New Zealand’s climate compliance is, in effect, “gold plated” because government institutions were directed by the Ardern administration to embed extreme modelling assumptions into every level of decision-making.
The retirement of implausible baseline climate scenarios is now starting to have real-world consequences as decision makers realize they’ve been making decisions that have had unnecessary real-world, negative impacts on their constituents and clients.
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