Category: imported_guest
Often when people ask my wife where I am she replies, “Oh, he’s off somewhere saving the world.” Well the other day I said to her, “I’ve now worked out how I’m going to do it.” “How?” she asked. I said, “a quarter acre at a time.”
Thirty years ago, Phil Silva (the founding director of the Dunedin Study) wrote that New Zealanders invested more time and care in maintaining their cars than they did their children.
Law and order is the foundation of a properly functioning society. History shows that for any nation, where law and order goes, there too eventually goes their society. Thus, the substantial rise in violent crime seen over the last eight or so years of this Labour government should be cause for serious concern and urgent action to those charged with the responsibility of protecting New Zealand society.
There are few futuristic ideas that have lost their sheen as quickly as the notion that settlements of Maori grievances would improve New Zealand’s race relations. Our ancestors were sceptical. There were inquiries into grievances in 1921 and 1927, and Prime Minister Peter Fraser told Maori in the 1940s that he would settle the eleven sets of identifiable grievance that Maori had against the Crown. Several “full and final settlements” were made between 1943 and 1947. But most of the money paid to Maori trust boards was wasted.
Every time the All Blacks lose to the Wallabies, New Zealand endures a familiar grieving process. First comes grief, then blame, soul-searching, and finally brainstorming over the right tactics to beat them.
A soprano thrillingly hits her top-A, sighs with relief at achieving the desired effect, and moves on. But not the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose climate alarmism started to crescendo in 2001 in the Third Assessment Report (3AR) with the statement that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely (66% probable) to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”.
Thirty years ago, I told the Labour Party conference that New Zealand stood at the economic crossroads. That there were no soft options left. That unless we changed our ways, New Zealand was headed for disaster. That proved to be dead right.
The years of the Clark administration have seen a steady expansion of the influence of politicians in the economy and society. In this election year the voters will choose a government partly on what they think have been the results of this and whether they approve of it in principle. The list of illustrations is a long one.
I would like first of all to thank the organizers of this important conference for making it possible and also for inviting one politically incorrect politician from Central Europe to come and speak here. This meeting will undoubtedly make a significant contribution to the moving away from the irrational climate alarmism to the much needed climate realism.
Join the dots here. The New Zealand Olympic Committee, with the backing of the Minister of Sport, tries to muzzle athletes taking part in the Beijing Games. The police are issued with instructions allowing protesters to be blocked or moved from view if they offend a visiting VIP. Parliament passes an extraordinarily elaborate set of laws protecting Rugby World Cup sponsors from competitors’ advertising. The Government and its supporting parties bulldoze through Parliament a Bill placing unprecedented restrictions on what people may legally say about politics during election year. Immigration officials ban an ageing, discredited academic from entering New Zealand to expound his odd theories about the Holocaust. An arrogant Minister of Health publicly attacks elected members of a district health board, then tries to forbid them from speaking out in their own defence. The Race Relations Commissioner calls for tighter controls on TV programmes that cause religious offence. And the Prime Minister rebukes newspaper editors who dared to publish the so-called Muhammad cartoons.
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