Mike Butler: Merger mayor and Agenda 21

Hastings merger mayor Lawrence Yule’s speech to the Commonwealth Local Government Conference in Botswana last week showed the link between local government reorganization in New Zealand and the United Nations Agenda 21 policy.

Yule is the only mayor in Hawke’s Bay to back a five-council amalgamation of the sort that was stingingly dumped in Wellington earlier this month and slowly evaporated in Northland. A final proposal for a merger in Hawke’s Bay will be voted on in September.

Mike Butler: The UN and the new totalitarians

If you ever wondered about a link between climate change propaganda and the growing influence of the United Nations, Totalitaria by Ian Wishart links government surveillance, Agenda 21, the Earth Charter, national education standards, and church corruption with Satanism in high places.

Wishart is a New Zealand journalist, author and publisher, and the editor of Investigate magazine. He established his credentials as a leading investigative reporter when he uncovered the two key fraudulent transactions in the so-called Winebox affair of the early 1990s.

Matt Ridley: Technology leads people to live more lightly on the land

Part of the preamble to Agenda 21, the action plan that came out of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, reads: "We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being."

In the 20 years since, something embarrassing has happened: a sharp decrease in poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy and a marked reduction in these global disparities. The conference that begins next week in Rio de Janeiro, on the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Summit, will nonetheless remain resolutely pessimistic about the planet's ecosystems and their capacity to support human beings indefinitely if economic growth continues. The reasoning has changed over time, however.