Category: Guest Posts
Last year New Zealanders were informed a new Marine and Coastal Area Bill, scheduled to replace the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act would mean “nothing would change.” Despite this claim, further down the track New Zealanders were presented with a 101 page Marine and Coastal Area Bill which appears to deliver the contrary and places that statement in the political misinformation file. New Zealanders have every right to rationalize if “nothing would change” then why a 101 page change?
In the last five years there has been a shift in the strategies used by iwi in their quest for property rights and constitutional recognition. The shift is from a Treaty of Waitangi justification to a more comprehensive indigenous group rights argument. The group rights argument is used to claim customary rights, and in an extension, to claim that those customary rights are property rights guaranteed under English Common Law.
THE GOVERNMENT’S DECISION to rush through the remaining stages of the Marine Coastal Area Bill is as ill-considered as it is dangerous. For this is no ordinary piece of legislation, easily repealed by a newly-elected House of Representatives. It is a bill which confers upon Maori, by virtue of their indigeneity, a new kind of property right (Customary Title), along with a powerful new set of legal powers to enforce that right – powers which the legislation’s many critics believe will undermine the generally accepted principles of liberal democracy.
As with September’s earthquake and the Pike River disaster, the devastating effects of this week’s catastrophe are tempered by only one thing: the compassion, generosity and big-heartedness New Zealanders show to their fellow human beings when tragedy and hardship strike.
It’s 7 pm and you’re either making the dinner or eating it in peace. The phone rings. You think you know why, but family is always a concern, so you have to answer it. No, it’s not an Indian call centre trying to flog off time sharing or phone shifting. It’s a survey, and do you have a few moments? No, you don’t; or if you’re less polite, ‘bugger off and stop wasting my time!’ And the same for online surveys, of which I get one a week, all asking for ‘just ten minutes of your time’.
In the cop spoof comedy “Sledgehammer”, the policeman hero Mike Hammer used to pull out a huge silver gun in the presence of frightened women and children and say, “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” The National-led government is in the same position with attempting to force the Marine and Coastal (Takutai Moana) Bill through Parliament as soon as it can get away with it.
Minimum wages are a bit like minimum speed limits. For a while, they can seem not to matter too much. Then all of a sudden they start to bite.
I received a call from the press the other day asking me if I had any comment on the announcement from the Race Relations Conciliator that they were taking no further action on the complaint against me. My comment was “How do you know all this?” Especially when I was not aware that there was a complaint in the first place, nor who was it from, nor what had they alleged that I had done!
In New Zealand the chief threat to nationhood has been the Maori separatism which our leaders continue to promote, at the cost of the rest of us ~ costs both immediate, in terms of loss of assets and resources ~ the foreshore and seabed is next ~ and long-term, in terms of national disintegration.
With an election in eight months time and the prospect of having to vote a party rather than a person into office- I’m getting grumpy.
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