Category: Democracy
"Colonisation by a nation of shopkeepers". So said Napoleon Bonaparte of the English, and as with many things he was close to the truth. He meant it as an insult of course but found to his dismay as did the Kaiser and Hitler that when poked with a big enough stick the shop keepers had a nasty bite.
A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today’s disadvantaged to become tomorrow’s privileged and, in the process, enables everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.
2019 was to be the year of delivery for Labour. We were told this new government would be transformational, and their policies would have a wellbeing focus. Reality has not lived up to the expectations.
A question that is increasingly being asked these days is whether we are now heading into another ‘Dark Age’, where common sense and rational thinking are again being replaced by fanaticism and superstition. In addition, the State is becoming more pervasive and people are feeling increasingly powerless to change or improve their lives.
The only effective safeguard for ordinary people is the ability to make a free personal choice among competing suppliers whose livelihood depends on satisfying the final consumer. Dedication to that principle from 1984 onwards is what places that Labour government squarely in the established Labour tradition of putting the needs of the common people first.
The way that Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-Green-New Zealand First Coalition Government is dealing with the quarter of a million law-abiding New Zealanders who make up this country’s firearms community is a disgrace. Given the trust that had existed, the Prime Minister’s crackdown was unexpected. Their democratic rights were trashed by wide-ranging and punitive restrictions that destroyed an important part of the Kiwi way of life.
The Commission’s work is vital. How a free society deals with the terrorism threat is serious everywhere. If the Commission can give us a report that counters current political temptations to whip up the fever, it should have all the time it needs. Many societies have been blighted, and ultimately undone, by leadership willing to exploit tragedies and panics and attacks, to distract their people.
A new radicalised narrative now claims that Maori have been oppressed since colonial times and their over-representation in disadvantage is the fault of the descendants of the colonisers. Meng Foon, Labour’s new Race Relations Commissioner is promoting this propaganda.
The Race Relations Commissioner demanded Andrew Hollis’s immediate resignation after posting on social media the Treaty is “a joke”. Point of Order sought clarification about the implications for the freedom of speech which should be cherished in a healthy democracy.
If it is the Minister’s role to monitor his staff, what’s to stop the Ministry of Truth from becoming the Ministry of Lies and muzzling those who wish to take a contrary view to the Government’s position.
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