Category: imported_guest
Many are aware that there are two treaties, an 1840 treaty and a 1986 reinvention, and that people on both sides talking past each other when it comes to treaty politics. But beware of everyone who alleges the coalition government is “rewriting the treaty”. The treaty was quietly rewritten long ago and that rewritten treaty is behind the division that is on display at Waitangi today.
The Government will honour the Treaty. But unlike the Labour government, we will honour it without moving away from equal voting rights, without creating complex co-governance bodies and bureaucracies in Wellington to decide how central services should be delivered in the regions, and we will honour it while upholding the equality of all New Zealanders before the law.
There is now reason to be optimistic that our political institutions can return to implementing the policies upon which they were voted to office, and it will be our first truly MMP government which will make that possible.
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.
We have now had a glimpse of where we have been heading, we know what co-governance looks like and we know where it will take us if the agenda that under-pins it is not brought to an end.
80,000 delegates and 5,000 journalists are winging their way to Dubai from all corners of the world (including thousands in their personal jets) for COP28 of the UN’s FCCC. Their earnestly stated objective is to stop the world from warming by as much as 1.5° C above the levels of 1850. Yet they know this is a lie. They know it is unethical.
The Ardern government, like the Key and Clark governments before them, tried to tax the nation to prosperity. The principal outcome being to cut productivity growth in the same way it has in the past.
Our finally completed election results need to be viewed on several levels. On the surface, the change of government was caused because Jacinda Ardern’s and Chris Hipkins’ Labour ministries were weak in personnel and unable to extract even respectable performance from the current feeble bureaucracy when dealing with bread and butter issues.
Almost accidentally, Labour discovered what it would take to make the working-class stop voting for it. Making those citizens feel as though they had, somehow, to justify their right to participate in shaping their nation’s future: that was the crucial catalyst for electoral defection.
The way to hell is paved with good intentions and that is proving to be never more true than the legal circus which surrounds the interpretation of the Marine and Coastal area Act 2011.