Category: Guest Posts
The deadline for feedback on the draft Auckland Unitary Plan closed on Friday, 31 May. Assuming Aucklanders can navigate their way around the council’s Unitary Plan website and delve into its labyrinthine text and maps successfully, they will discover many hidden marvels such as the raft of policies that racially privilege Maori over all other Auckland residents.
What do a world-famous historian, a British author and a New Zealand cartoonist have in common? On the face of it, not much – except that all three have been embroiled recently in controversies that show how fragile the right of free speech has become in supposedly liberal democracies.
A conspicuous absence in the Constitutional Advisory Panel’s “conversation” is debate about the role of the Waitangi Tribunal, a body that exerts disproportionate influence over public life. The Waitangi Tribunal is the “elephant in the room”.
The New Zealand Labour Party has embraced the politics of diversity wholeheartly and with little self-criticism since the 1970s. This presentation explains the ‘cultural turn of the Left’ and its unintended and damaging consequences.
They say some politicians are just plain lucky. They seem to do the same things as other politicians who are perceived as failing, yet they somehow manage to charm voters or the media, or circumstances conspire to assist rather than defeat them. For four years Mr English must have wondered if he is one of the unlucky ones.
Singapore is admired for its spectacular economic success. You touch down at the island’s ultra-modern airport—routinely voted the world’s most efficient. Soon you navigate through lanes of gleaming new cars in a tropical garden setting. A glimpse of the sea reveals hundreds of ships in front of the world’s busiest container port.
A constitution is an agreement which a people has about some fundamental things ~ about how they are to be governed, and the principles on which they base their government and society.There has to be agreement ~ and the very fact that we are holding this debate is proof that the Treaty and its so-called principles should not be in our constitution, because on that matter there is no agreement.
For fans of government largesse, the temptation of relative poverty rates must be irresistible. These rates reliably rise during periods of market-oriented reforms, and fall during periods of government expansions.
A lifetime of observation and work in the social sciences has convinced me of one thing. George Orwell was partly wrong in his classic novel 1984. The threats to the open society do not come from above. They come from all around us: from our peers. The oppression is rooted in economic interest and professional capture.
I am a long time believer that an unwritten constitution of the sort you find in New Zealand today, or the United Kingdom before it was enmeshed in the European Union, is a very good sort of constitution indeed. Among its strengths are its flexibility and incredibly democratic nature.
Loading ...
