Point of Order: Govt eases the way through Customs and to buying building materials.....

.....but illegal timber imports are barred

The Government has made a prohibition pronouncement under a headline that makes a dubious claim about the snuffing of illegality. The headline says Government shuts door on illegally harvested timber.

Good-oh. With the door shut, there can be no way of getting our hands on illegally harvested timber because there is no way of it getting into the country – right?

Point of Order: Empowerment and partnership.....

........both concepts come into the considerations of Ardern’s Treaty-sensitive government

“Empowerment” is a bit like “Treaty partnership”. Just a decade or so ago you would rarely have heard of it.

Since then, its use has burgeoned and its meaning – like the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi’s three simple clauses – has evolved to be applied to whatever the government wants to validate.

In a book titled Empowerment: The History of a Key Concept in Contemporary Development Discourse, Anne-Emmanuelle Calvès writes: