Category: imported_guest
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.
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.
A "rational optimist" like me thinks the world will go on getting better for most people at a record rate, not because I have a temperamental or ideological bent to good cheer but because of the data. Poverty, hunger, population growth rates, inequality, and mortality from violence, disease and weather - all continue to plummet on a global scale. But a global optimist can still be a regional pessimist. When asked what I am pessimistic about, I usually reply: bureaucracy and superstition.
Christmas and New Year! It is a time for relaxation and celebration; a time, too, to reflect on the past year, and wonder about and plan for the days to come. So let us gaze, if not into a crystal ball, at least into the clouds of the future. Perhaps through the clouds we may glimpse the land below occasionally, and sense, however haphazardly, the terrain that awaits us. When I last wrote I imagined the easy steps by which, if we did not rapidly acquire some gumption, we could have a written Treatyist constitution imposed on us without our consent. Let us go further today. Once we had been saddled with such a burden, what would that mean for New Zealand?
In this article I want to turn to the question of process, and how a country might legitimately change its constitutional arrangements. Let me lay my cards on the table straight up and say this: For a country in today’s democratic era to change its constitution without in any real way asking its own citizens would be a disgrace, the sort of thing one might expect after a military coup in Pakistan or as a consequence of a passing whim of Mr. Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Maori water rights issue that is fouling the National minority government’s mixed ownership model (MOM) partial selloff of state-owned hydroelectric power generators worse than didymo, think again. More serious problems are quietly emerging, despite the apparent truce that has descended since the hooey hui the government jacked up to pretend it was consulting Maori over MOM-related sweetheart deals.
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