Category: Social Issues

Renowned psychologist Steven Pinker marked the death of his former teacher New Zealander Michael Corballis with a laudatory tweet. NZ’s Royal Society still hasn’t hasn’t provided an obituary after putting him under investigation for his views on mātauranga Māori.

Under the traffic light system, Jacinda Ardern will take the ‘blame game’ to new heights by dividing New Zealand into two classes of citizens - the vaccinated with superior rights and freedoms, and unvaccinated, relegated to second-class status in their own country.

Tribalism is insidious and destructive. It divides families and communities, and it is dividing our nation. It’s also a class system that enriches the iwi elite, while leaving the most vulnerable mired in disadvantage.

The decision to abolish DHBs and replace them with a new centralised national bureaucracy in which decision-making will be further removed from health professionals and communities was both abrupt and drastic.

A free and independent press is a critically important foundation to any democracy. Without it, governments can go unchecked and the rule of law will suffer. One only has to see the events in Hong Kong over the last two years to see the impact on a society where the influence of the press has been extinguished.

It is now clear that the Government has staked its political future on the Pfizer vaccine strategy, which requires near universal vaccination and regular booster doses.

The apparent kindness of locking down to limit Covid-19 deaths will, instead, be killing more people by making us poorer - lockdowns are one of our greatest peacetime policy failures.

The Level 4 lockdown imposed on March 25 2020 in New Zealand was the world’s most restrictive set of closure and containment policies at the time.

Prime Minister Ardern has no mandate to assume the Crown is in an equal partnership with Maori that gives tribes a 50 percent interest in our resources and the decision-making powers.

Poor outcomes are given as concrete and conclusive evidence. This is simply not the case for most Māori. Their living standards have improved enormously, as has equality of opportunity.