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Saturday, September 14, 2024

Professor Robert MacCulloch: Is NZ's Unprincipled Parliament the True Reason why Productivity Growth has Collapsed?


NZ's Parliament calls itself our "House of Representatives". That's an empty description, given we now have a sitting Member who ran on the List for the Greens, but now has been kicked out of that party. So now the member does not represent a Seat, nor a Party. How can it be a House of Representatives when it has members who represent nothing? This week it got worse.

It was revealed racial targeting to determine who has priority for health-care has been "directed" to be stopped. Cabinet issued a "circular directing all public services be delivered according to need rather than race". This Blog is not about the rights or wrongs of delivering services in these different ways, but instead observing how NZ has morphed into an unprincipled nation with an incoherent constitution. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the previous Labour government overtly, or tacitly, directed vast swathes of the bureaucracy to prioritize all manner of public services on the basis of race. It can be done without changing laws, neither by legislating nor through courts. Fundamental constitutional changes, at the institutional heart of NZ, can be done via "circulars", nothing more than "announcements, adverts, or letters, sent to many people at the same time".

Every New Zealander should now question whether our two main parties, both Labour and National, have any principles at all - certainly none transparently put into law. Instead both happily go about changing swathes of our reward and punishment (incentive system) by simply flinging out "circulars". Does NZ no longer observe the rule of law? Is that why Kiwis flee & productivity collapses? We know in economics when the rules of the game change willy-nilly, prosperity is crushed. Should Labour win Election 2026, will Hipkins' get his sticky fingers going & email a new directive to departments telling them to return to prioritizing based on race, since he's the new Sheriff in Wellington Town? Its the Wild West. Will hugely important fundamental changes affecting how different races are treated in the nation flip flop whenever we have a change of government, as new emails are "circulated" reversing old emails? One must ask - does NZ have a lawless, unprincipled bunch of Members of Parliament working in a lawless, unprincipled Parliament? Was it revealed this past week?

Sources:
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/09/hon-nicola-willis-need-and-value-at.html


Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.

13 comments:

Hazel Modisett said...

How can we call ourselves a Democracy when the govt can arbitrarily pass laws that effect our health & welfare & hoover increasing amounts of our increasingly harder earned wealth without referendum or consent ?
That's not Democracy, its tyranny.

Anonymous said...


It’s been lawless since the secret NZ constitutional coup of 1986.
Our parliament has governed as supreme sovereign itself for 38 years and never sought ratification for that coup from the people.
This has given us an arguably illegal parliament and ever since 1986, ruling politicians have done whatever they liked.
Former Appeal Court President Sir Robin Cooke once famously opined that if Wellington ordered the deaths of all blue-eyed babies the courts would have to uphold it and the military enforce it.
The emperor has no clothes.

Peter said...

A few comments to the valid points raised:
1) The member who has no legitimate place in Parliament perhaps represents that cohort of other illegitimate scoundrels that suck off the public teat for no measurable benefit?
2) And, yes, it is too easy for our political parties to introduce significant changes and division without a mandate from their electors, least of all the public at large.
3) Interesting you mention Hipkins, who regularly smugly claims others of racist policies, yet he (and Labour) introduced the most racist policies in this Country's history.
4) And the 'flip flop' would have to stop if we elected to adopt Seymour's initial Principles Bill outline, where equality of the citizenry would be enshrined in law making the introduction of racist dictates much more difficult.
5) And, undoubtedly this uncertainty and division that is now rife is impacting our productivity. Bring on the discussion and a referendum.

Basil Walker said...

Was our law and interpretation of the TOW equality without racial overtones enshrined by Government anyway?. Is emailing or demanding Heads of Department to undertake prioritisation by need rather than ethnicity, just a polite nudge that you are acting outside of the law and therefore pull your head in .

Anonymous said...

Well said Prof MacCulloch. Your incisive commentaries are much appreciated. This easily hidden “rule by circular” that requires no mandate explains much about how the last govt betrayed NZ. They were busy implementing things all right - just nothing we voters could see, though many of us could sense some form of treachery at play. The most transparent govt ever? Yeah right! Perhaps we need to legislate for circulars to be published? This should not be allowed to happen again.

Anonymous said...

Re Robin Cooke - he is the Oracle that spoke of ToW as a partnership.

anonymous said...

Referendum ASAP - and just look at the massive efforts underway to avoid this at any cost. Why? Because the real agenda of tribal rule and links to the globalists would be impossible to implement.

Hazel Modisett said...

You only need to look at the UK, Canada & god forbid the US to see where we are headed if this isn't sorted. We need a codified Constitution & a ratified Bill of Rights that is drafted by ALL NZers that clearly sets out the rules under which all facets of the govt are permitted to operate & the penalties for over reaching their mandate. The Bill of Rights must clearly state what our rights are & provide right of recourse if our rights are violated. It's not just life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness when we have been increasingly stripped of our privacy & property rights & our most basic right to defend ourselves using reasonable force.
All part of the globalist agenda I guess where they want us all chipped & locked up in smart cities where every aspect of our lives can be regulated, controlled & taxed.
Whuck that !!!

Anonymous said...

Robin Cooke did not speak of the ToW as a partnership. He said "akin to a partnership" which means "similar to but not the same". For those who do not understand the English language well, it is a pity he did not clarify exactly what he meant in simple English. From that time, we have had those who claim to be the Maori "elite" pushing ToW as a "'partnership" when it clearly is not, and cannot possibly be, according to legal experts.

Joanne W said...

When having race as a criterion for medical treatment came under discussion last year, it emerged that it always had been. I haven't seen criticism by actual doctors about this. Meanwhile a Hawkes Bay service offering free treatment to Maori and PI adolescents was ordered to stop doing it. Given the demographic of the area, and recent weather events, this seemed to me gratuitous race-baiting. In which view I'll be in a minority of one on this site, sadly

Anonymous said...

Robin Cooke was the Oracle who raised the spectre of ToW as a partnership. So whether 'akin' had any meaning is debatable when used by Cooke. It may just have been a useful way of stating a judicial proposition indirectly or it may have been a device to promulgate a judicial belief. Whatever it was, it was a new concept counter to previous jurisprudence and intentionally provocative given the context. There was no need to mention 'partnership' except to cause disruption both for the purposes of the case and the wider social and political and jurisprudential community.

If the alternate argument is that Cooke did not mean anything by it then why say it. It challenges the intellectual acuity of a person in the senior role of Cooke to give this sort of brush off explanation.

For the record I have read the case and the judgment/s.

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile, in the West, nation states who proclaim “democracy”, “freedom” and “capitalism” are steadily moving towards authoritarian, centralised control mechanisms held and operated by a tightly selected political class allied with unelected, unrepresentative, corporate, global bodies such as the WHO (World Health Organisation), the European Union Commission, the UN, the WEF (the so-called “World Economic Forum” - a private organisation), the IMF, the World Bank, the International Court of Justice (the “World Court”) in The Hague and a number of globally dominant Corporations.

During the Covid fiasco, many Western governments became “the single source of truth”, tyrannical and dictatorial while simultaneously crushing many of the basic Human Rights which they so often avow and (supposedly) hold so dear.

This is a non-democratic, global, centralized authoritarian movement allied closely with the major Western corporations.

Anonymous said...

The comments above identify the problems we now face. Our Parliamentary system has all the flavour of a 10 day old carcass in the back paddock, rotten to the core. There will be no change until the source of the rot, today’s party political structures, are eliminated.