Category: Maori Issues

Jacinda Ardern is the embodiment of new-age socialism. But what’s actually been thrust onto the country is simply a public relations make-over of the ugly failed socialism of old, that represses freedom of expression and perpetuates failure. As a result New Zealand is now more oppressed and divided than ever before.

Prior to this compulsory cultural renaissance people managed their own conflicts. Tension would have existed always but so did the freedom to choose. What kind of society wants to remove that freedom? One in which the collective trumps the individual.

Anyone pressing for constitutional change in this political climate, no matter what their intentions, would be opening up the country to capture by separatists. There are no two ways about it - a new constitution would lead to Judge-led tribal rule.

Once we get a written constitution, a higher law which binds parliament itself, there will be no stopping judges as they interpret it as they please. The entire argument for a written constitution is an attempt to remove matters from parliament’s’ authority and hand them over to judges.

The most depressing feature of Fire and Fury was that amongst its repeated warnings about threats to democracy it never once mentioned the elephant in the room — namely Ardern’s government steadily undermining democracy by threading a radical view of the Treaty as a 50:50 partnership with iwi throughout legislation with absolutely no mandate

More likely, is that LGNZ has become an integral part of the government’s strategy to promote the implementation of He Pua Pua and the so called “partnership” principles of the Treaty of Waitangi - notwithstanding that they are a factual and jurisprudential nonsense. If this so, then LGNZ should stop its media spin and make a clean breast of it to its members and the public.

But there’s a much deeper reason for National’s decline in the polls. The honeymoon of hope and expectation around the new leader has subsided. Some will be disappointed with Christopher Luxon’s impassive stance on a number of issues - but particularly Labour’s attack on democracy through co-governance.

Regrettably, in today’s New Zealand there are people who, putting racism under new management and rejecting equality before the law, advance race-based co-governance as a serious proposition for New Zealand’s future. Now, public health, drinking water, sewage, storm water, local body governance, aspects of resource management and so on. Tomorrow, who knows?

Fortunately, people like Richard Prebble, Jason Smith, Graham Adams, and Elizabeth Rata are calling out the transformational change Jacinda Ardern promised for what it is – a coup against democracy.

Tribalism and democracy are incompatible. We can’t have both. If we wish to keep New Zealand as a liberal democratic nation then, as we derive our citizen rights from the nation-state, so we have a duty to ensure that the nation-state which awards those rights, remains democratic and able to do so.