Category: imported_guest
Earlier this year the National government appointed a working group to look at ways of reducing welfare dependence. The group has consulted widely, too widely in my opinion. But they wanted to be seen to be making a fair job of it. The conference they ran at Victoria University in June gave the first public indications that all would not be plain sailing, and it was naive to assume it could be. The traditional left/right divide became quickly apparent with many attendees characterising the initiative as ‘beneficiary bashing’. Prominent in the detraction were Sue Bradford, the Child Poverty Action Group, the ex Children’s Commissioner, and various church and community groups who have latterly joined forces to form an alternative welfare working group.
The Government’s RMA (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Act 2009 came into force on 1st October 2009.
The National-led government’s attempts to sanitize its controversial “remedy” to the Foreshore and Seabed Act (2004) grow ever more curious and contradictory by the day. It is quite clear that the government and Maori interests already do not see eye-to-eye over what the proposed replacement legislation will mean in practice, and that the government cannot hold a consistent line when explaining to the wider public what will happen when Maori tribes lay claims to title over the foreshore and seabed.
Any good economics student in year 11 will tell you that the cost of everything is what you give up to get it. By that logic the cost of a weekend's binge drinking can be 48 hours of life; drinking, recovering, drinking and recovering again with nothing but sclerotic memories and an empty bank account to show for it. That's without considering the risk of catastrophic costs, which should be widely understood after too many alcohol related tragedies.
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.
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