Category: imported_weekly
The Rugby World Cup is showing New Zealanders what is possible when we all unite behind a common purpose. Imagine how far we could go as a country if we all got behind a goal like lifting our living standards! Becoming a wealthy county again would certainly be within our reach.
The world is in a danger zone. In 2008, many people said they did not see the turbulence coming. Leaders have no such excuse now. And dangerous times call for courageous people. Some developed country officials sound like their woes are just their business. Not so. I still think that a double-dip recession for the world’s major economies is unlikely. But my confidence in that belief is being eroded daily by the steady drip of difficult economic news. A crisis made in the developed world could become a crisis for developing countries. Europe, Japan, and the United States must act to address their big economic problems before they become bigger problems for the rest of the world. Not to do so is irresponsible. But I know well that acting on them means honest and difficult discussions with parliaments and publics. Delay will narrow choices and make them harder and more costly. All of us across developing and developed economies have a stake in how they handle it. - World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick, Sept 22, 2011.
A Maori academic who says that immigration by whites should be restricted because they pose a threat to race relations due to their white supremacist attitudes, is leading an Independent Maori Working Group on constitutional reform. According to Iwi Chairs Forum member Margaret Mutu the group will develop a constitution to be given to the Crown as a model for New Zealand. She claims that their working party has the blessing of not only the Maori Party leader Pita Sharples, but also National Party leader and Prime Minister John Key.[1]
For those New Zealanders concerned about the relentless rise in the price of power, the New Zealand Energy Strategy, released last month by the National-led government, offers little hope of relief.[1] The strategy is a complex mix of common sense and green ideology. On the one hand there is a strong emphasis on utilising New Zealand’s natural minerals and fuel resources to drive energy security and economic growth. That can only be good for the country. But on the other hand, much of the report could have been the work of a Labour-Green government with its green mantra of sustainability and its overarching focus on extreme environmentalism.
To those of you who have experienced difficulties with our New Zealand Centre for Political Research website at www.nzcpr.com over the last few weeks, our apologies for any inconvenience caused. The technical problems with the server that hosts our NZCPR website have now been resolved by our ISP, and the full functionality of the website has been restored. However, the difficulties we experienced have highlighted the fact that the NZCPR website has outgrown our current technology platform - and the server.
“Nia Glassie died in Starship Hospital on 3rd August 2007 aged three years. She had been on life support for 13 days. She had such severe brain damage that she was unable to breathe without life support. The medical evidence at the trial established that the horrific injuries and swelling to her brain were consistent with blows, and possibly, kicks to the head...” Coroner’s Report, Wallace Bain August 2011[1]
The debates over the place of the Treaty in our law, constitution and national life are not legal debates. Maori prefer to phrase them in legal terms, because it would do their cause no good to see their claims revealed in their greedy racist nakedness. But claims are not a matter of law. They are - I say this not as metaphor, but as actual fact - the colossal programme of confidence men, accompanied by carefully-judged doses of hard luck stories, flattery and menaces. It is highly convenient to disguise them as law, and Maori as artless lovable hard-done-by innocents, but it is not true. That is why Treaty claims will not end until we say ‘No’. – David Round (Time to Say “No!”).
There are no excuses for the rioting and hooliganism that took place in Britain in recent weeks. It was criminal and cowardly behaviour – the worst form of opportunism by (mostly) young delinquents. That the government has made a commitment to the British public that the rioters will face the full force of the law is as it should be. The tragedy is that the initial response to the crisis by the Police was so inadequate that rampaging mobs were able to create widespread mayhem and death.
Lord Christopher Monckton, a former policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and one of the world’s leading climate change realists, has been visiting New Zealand reminding audiences that the world’s climate is not in the grip of catastrophic man-made global warming - as alarmists would like us to believe – but is instead continuing to change within the bounds of natural variability as it has always done. He warned that attempts by politicians and bureaucrats to control the climate through complex and expensive emissions trading schemes are a futile waste of time and money. He reiterated that because climate science is not settled - with new discoveries on the impact of oceans, volcanoes, sunspots and other natural phenomena on the climate emerging almost daily - the public should strongly reject all attempts by politicians and bureaucrats to impose controls aimed at saving us from ourselves.
As a representative democracy New Zealand’s system of government is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. So why do our ruling parties go to such great lengths to prevent the public from having a proper say on how we are being governed? With an election just around the corner, isn’t it time that voters collectively demanded the right to hold governments to account?
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