Category: Democracy
The ability to challenge ideas in a free and unfettered manner – even at the risk of offending others – is the foundation of liberty. Yet these days, the pressure within New Zealand society not to offend others, is increasing. For those who call a spade a spade, their fundamental right to free speech is now under real threat.
New Zealanders were once recognised as democratic, intelligent people, pragmatic and self-reliant, with a well-developed sense of social justice - the “fair go”, as it used to be known. There are still, of course, plenty of Kiwis who merit that description, but their proportion in the population is shrinking.
Following on from the controversial way the new Government was formed - whereby kingmaker Winston Peters chose a coalition of losing parties instead of the winning National Party - the 52nd Parliament also got off to a controversial start.
We learned a few days ago that on the day before the September 23 general election, Winston Peters kick-started legal action against National cabinet ministers - including then prime minister Bill English - party officials, a senior public servant and two journalists over the leaking of his superannuation overpayment. He took this action without disclosing it to either the National or Labour parties.
If anyone was hoping the election would deliver some form of reprieve from the hundreds of overlapping claims for the foreshore and seabed, resulting from National’s disastrous Marine and Coastal Area Act, they will be sorely disappointed.
It is now over six years since the racist Marine and Coastal Area Act came into force, under John Key’s National Government. The goal of the Act was give Maori tribal groups the right to claim control of New Zealand’s publicly owned foreshore and seabed.
The country’s new Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister have claimed that free market capitalism is failing New Zealand. Their comments indicate that they intend blaming areas of government and policy failure on capitalism.
I spent 11 wonderful years living and working in New Zealand, from 1993 to 2004. During that whole time one of my pet peeves was the MMP voting system, one of the world’s most proportional systems and the one the Americans imposed on the Germans after World War II.
“NZ Shock: Losers take power” was the headline in The Australian newspaper on Friday. They are not wrong. It is a shock to many that the party with substantially more votes than any other party is now in opposition.
So there we have it. MMP at work. A party that receives 7.2% of the vote gets to choose who runs the country. And they choose a party that received 36.9% of the vote, and that party enters into a coalition agreement with another party that received 6.3% of the vote.
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