Category: Politics
The Rule of Law embodies the notion that freedoms are protected not by the dicktat of any person or collection of people, but by the Law to which all, high or low born, are subject. This notion is so central to the way we order our society that it is now little discussed, and one suspects no longer widely understood. It is a safeguard of great antiquity.
A country’s constitution belongs to the people. It’s the charter that sets out the basic rules by which a nation is governed: the rights and safeguards of citizens; how state power is exercised; the type of voting system; the number of Members of Parliament; whether representatives are elected freely or through some form of quota system.
The reality is that a sophisticated political campaign is being run by public health, safety and environmental groups to persuade the government that a compulsory Warrant of Fitness scheme is needed on private sector rental housing. But given that many poor outcomes are behavioural, there is no guarantee that costly home interventions on half a million houses will work.
Two pilot warrant of fitness trials for rental properties are presently under way. One is a government initiative involving 500 Housing New Zealand properties and the other involves a “consortium” of interests involving the Auckland, Tauranga, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin councils, ACC, NZ Green Building Council, and the University of Otago.
If Labour and the Greens - and all of the other advocacy groups that are rallying behind the child poverty cause - really cared about those children who are living in poverty, their primary target would be families on welfare, rather than working families, since all of the evidence points to children living in single parent families that are reliant on welfare in the long term, as being at the greater risk of deprivation and poor outcomes.
Something about the way the Left is presenting the ‘child poverty’ problem doesn't stack up. When interviewed, Green co-Leader Metiria Turei repeatedly stresses that 2 in 5 of officially poor children come from working homes. But for Turei and other anti-poverty advocates to continually highlight this group when attempting to influence voters implies there is something less laudable about being benefit-dependent. Not a sentiment normally associated with the Left.
The owner of the popular Ponsonby Chapel Bar and Bistro got into trouble recently for publishing an on-line ad for staff that said, “We need female bar & floor staff … drop us an email if you or a friend needs a job.” His sin was to mention that they needed female staff. According to the law, that is gender discrimination!
Last year Peter and Diana Standen of Otaki decided to trim rotten trees in a patch of bush on their new property. As a result of their actions, the Standens, and their arborist separately, have been charged with contravening the District Plan and face up to two years in prison or a fine of $300,000 for breaches of the Resource Management Act!
Equality, more than anything else, has always been our country’s ruling principle. But there was no more to the Treaty than that. No equality of Maori and the Crown in governing our country was envisaged. Partnership is an obvious absurdity. The Queen’s subjects cannot be her partners.
The Labour Party’s grabbing of headlines over the alleged poor treatment of suppliers by Australian-owned supermarket chains is an early reminder that the 2014 general election campaign has already started. Labour Party MP Shane Jones used Parliamentary privilege to make such alarming claims that a Commerce Commission Inquiry has been launched.
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