Category: Guest Posts
Many of you will no doubt remember the Sanitarium advertisement from the 1960s, “Kiwi kids are Weet-bix kids.” During the long summer evenings you may have enjoyed a glass or two of Cabernet Sauvignon from New Zealand’s oldest winery, Mission Estate. Down in the South Island, during the day tourists will have had the thrill of a jet-boat ride on the Shotover River, courtesy of Shotover Jet. What you probably did not realise is that these apparently commercial organisations, operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Marist Holdings (Greenmeadows) Limited, and the Ngai Tahu Charitable Group, have charitable therefore income tax exempt status.
There has been an astonishing amount of alarmist comment – certainly in the “New Zealand Herald” and even on Radio New Zealand – about the possibility that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand could impose a “Cypriot-type” tax on bank deposits in the event of a bank failure. People have expressed outrage at the idea, and Russel Norman has suggested that a deposit insurance scheme would be a “much simpler, well-tested alternative” to what the RB is proposing, formally called Open Bank Resolution.
New Zealand’s constitution is working perfectly adequately. Nothing is broken; nothing requires fixing. But the government, at the Maori Party’s behest, established a ‘Constitutional Advisory Panel’ to consider (as well as a number of obvious political non-starters) ‘the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in our constitution, and how our legal and political systems can reflect tikanga Maori’
Some time back in the 1990s, I wrote an article that began: “The newspaper you are holding in your hands is an endangered species.” The risk to newspapers that worried me then had to do with media freedom. That remains a matter of concern to journalists – probably always will be – but it has been replaced by a far more urgent threat. Dismal financial results reportedly recently by the two big newspaper groups, APN News and Media and Fairfax Media, confirmed what had long been obvious: that the newspaper industry is reeling from the impact of the internet.
Something strange happened on the road to our much-celebrated post-industrial utopia. The real winners of the global economy have turned out to be not the creative types or the data junkies, but the material boys: countries, states and companies that have perfected the art of physical production in agriculture, energy and, remarkably, manufacturing.
Many people believe that electricity prices are too high. They find it difficult to understand why, when most of our electricity is generated by old hydropower stations, the price has escalated at well above the rate of inflation since about 2002 when the market first started to function as it was designed to do. They would be right.
In January 2013 I was asked by the secretariat of the Government Constitutional Advisory Panel to take part in audio and video taped interviews. The invitation was probably issued on the basis that I have written extensively about Treaty issues and that I am a member of the Independent Constitutional Review Panel that has its presence on this NZCPR website. I wish to share these interviews with NZCPR readers and raise troubling issues that emerged for me while doing the interviews.
If history has anything to teach us, it’s that we should never take anything for granted. We need to be vigilant in protecting what’s good about our society. New Zealand has so much to be proud of. We have led the world by ensuring equality of all citizens before the law, introducing universal male and female sufferage, and we’ve largely had great and integrated race relations. So when the Ministry of Education starts demanding that schools give people of one ethnic descent superior rights to all others, the hackles ought to be rising.
The Constitutional Advisory Panel has kicked off its public consultation efforts. One of the issues the panel will look into is the term of Parliament, most likely by assessing whether it should be increased to four years, and whether we should have a fixed election. Of all the matters it is discussing, this seems likely to be the one that is most likely to see some traction.
The Waitangi “season” is here - that time of year when our political leaders embark upon their political pilgrimages of atonement and appeasement, firstly to Ratana pa, then on to Waitangi in Northland. This annual charade will culminate in the “official” Waitangi Day “celebrations”, when the northern clans traditionally indulge in their offensive, often violent and always insulting behaviour, only this time, it happens where the treaty was signed.
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