Category: imported_weekly
Open Letter to the Prime Minister...
It is not easy to rile New Zealanders, but Hone Harawira’s abusive email clearly did. By claiming that he was entitled to rip off taxpayers with his jaunt to Paris because Whities had been ripping off Maori for centuries, Hone Harawira exposed the racist thinking that underpins the Maori Party. As Labour’s former Tai Tokerau MP Dover Samuels said, Mr Harawira is “advocating what he really believes in. A lot of people sitting with him in Parliament believe the same thing”.
In his book The Vision of the Anointed, economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Thomas Sowell, describes how the great catastrophes of history have typically resulted not only from ill-advised policies, but from the fact that public feedback cannot get through to decision-makers. He says, “Typically, there has been an additional and crucial ingredient – some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented, so that a dangerous course of action could be blindly continued to a fatal conclusion. Much of the continent of Europe was devastated in World War II because the totalitarian regime of the Nazis did not permit those who foresaw the self-destructive consequences of Hitler’s policies to alter, or even influence, those policies.”
The fact that one man with a forklift was able to take out the power supply to the top half of the North Island shows how fragile New Zealand’s electricity network really is. Friday’s accident, in which a container hit a high-voltage power line in Otahuhu, caused extensive disruptions as some 280,000 homes and businesses lost power for several hours.
In 1985, New Zealand’s Attorney General, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, launched the ‘great quango hunt’. He threatened to strangle many of the useless ‘quasi autonomous national government organisations’. According to political reporter Jane Clifton, “Geoffrey got so excited about this, it was all staff could do to persuade him not to wear a pith helmet and safari suit to the press conference. Geoffrey had counted up hundreds, nay thousands of quangos – rabbit boards being among the most emblematic – wasting money. He was going to grub them out, root and branch. He was positively kittenish in his excitement. And what happened? The little buggers multiplied.”[1]
After decades of making jam as a fundraiser for the local hospice, a Good Samaritan from Kerikeri in the Far North was forced to lay down her wooden spoon and hang up her apron when officials from the local council demanded that she upgrade her kitchen to a commercial standard. They were, the Council’s damage control spokesperson said, acting on a complaint and had no option but to enforce the laws as passed by Parliament - despite there never being a case of food poisoning in the more than 20 years she had been making jam for worthy causes.
“I can assure you that the government has investigated the evidence on the science of climate change from a number of different sources and I can appreciate that there are many different perspectives on the matter. However, the government is convinced that climate change is a serious and legitimate issue and that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the most reliable information on climate change science. In its most recent assessment, the IPCC states that the evidence for climate change is unequivocal, that humankind’s emissions are very likely the cause of these changes and that, unless action is taken to reduce emissions, dangerous changes in the climate system will result.”
The current Global Warming Debate is not about temperature or CO2 levels. It is an ideological clash between those who want to change us (rather than the climate) and those who believe in freedom, markets, human ingenuity, and technical progress. The advocates of global warming alarmism ask for an almost unprecedented expansion of government intrusion, of government intervention into our lives and of government control over us. We are pushed into accepting rules about how to live, what to do, how to behave, what to consume, what to eat, how to travel. It is unacceptable.
The recent deal between the Maori Party and National over free insulation for Maori houses - whereby social assistance will be based on race, not need - lays a new paving stone on the path to a country divided by race.
Former Prime Minister David Lange is reputed to have described a capital gains tax as the sort of tax you introduce if you want to lose not just one election, but the next three! And he should know since the Fourth Labour Government considered a capital gains tax back in 1988, eventually rejecting it as being too difficult. Sadly, they also rejected the flat tax proposed by then Finance Minister Roger Douglas, which would have aligned personal income and company tax at around 23 percent. The introduction of a low flat tax - in conjunction with a low GST consumption tax - would have transformed New Zealand into a first world economy instead of the third world economy with first world spending habits that we are today.
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