Category: Guest Posts
The recent incident in Christchurch in which two police officers were shot and seriously wounded and a police dog killed once again highlighted the risks that frontline police officers face going about what most would consider routine tasks.
In a column in The Dominion Post in February 2008, I wrote that a law change requiring intellectually disabled workers to be paid the legal minimum wage was a triumph of human rights ideology over common sense. My column attracted a response from Ruth Dyson, then the Minister for Disability Issues, who told me in an email that in fact it was a triumph of fairness and common sense over ideology.
Just in case you hadn’t heard, it’s now official; under the coalition Government’s proposed Foreshore and Seabed Act Mark II, customary title is recognised as ownership. No longer is ‘nobody is to own’ the foreshore and seabed, the way it was sold in the consultation document. Instead, iwi and hapu will have the right to claim a new form of title , which will sit over and above the residual public domain ‘in much the same way that fee simple title sits over the Crown’s radical title to land’, in the words of the Attorney General. From the economic point of view, that amounts to ownership. I am sceptical that it can even be reconciled with the weaker notion of public domain, which is left as an undefined residual and as such, subject to constant encroachment from activities and exclusions possible under the new title. So much for the reassuring words about an undefined ‘public access’ right.
An American politician, the late Eugene McCarthy, described politics as a game. It is a game where the public see the performance, but not the behind the scenes planning. Much of the politics that we see is engineered. Some of the strategies are described in academic literature using terms such as “agenda setting”, “agenda denial” and “framing”. It is not entirely accidental that some issues get a lot of attention and others are ignored. It is the result of groups competing to set the agenda. When an issue does get attention, the aim is then to frame it so that a particular view and desired solution dominates. Mike Butler referred to this in his recent column, “Framing the race debate” http://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2010/06/mike-butler-framing-race-debate.html. I described it also some time ago in a column on politics and reasoned debate (http://www.nzcpr.com/guest121.htm).
Whatever the outcome of coastal iwi quests for customary title to the foreshore and seabed, under Mark2 of the foreshore and seabed agreement, two lessons stand out. Firstly the National Party is only too happy for power and political expediency, to racially privatise public property such as the foreshore and seabed to iwi.
Calls are mounting for the next phase of the government’s emissions trading scheme, due to commence on 1 July 2010, to be deferred. There are strong arguments for a temporary suspension of the scheme.
There is, in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, one very surprising omission. Nowhere is there any definition of who or what exactly an indigenous person is. It would surely not be unreasonable to expect a definition. One is not needed in the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, because it deals with all human beings, and we know what they are. But who is indigenous?
Last week I made the following submission to the Social Services Select Committee...
The annual budget is the main statement of the government’s overall economic and social programme. So in the first instance it needs to be evaluated in terms of the government’s own goals. The next key issues are its spending – both the quantity and quality – its revenue position, and the difference between them – whether it is running surpluses or deficits.
Family dysfunction ruins lives. We all know this; many of us will have personally seen its corrosive effects. Even if we’ve been fortunate enough to avoid this personal knowledge, we can’t escape the effects staring up at us from the pages of our newspapers. Two of the problems that have received the most attention in recent years are child abuse and neglect, and conduct disorder (severe anti-social behaviour) in children. Although these problems are frightening in their severity and scale, the good news is that although we can’t solve them completely, we can do something about them. Early intervention programmes offer a chance of breaking, even preventing, their cycle, if the programmes are truly effective. Unfortunately, not all of them are.
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