Insights From Social Media: The Last Stagecoach is leaving?

Gravedodger writes > With no Grandchildren and time has declared it will not happen now, it will have no effect on me, selfish as that will appear.

Geoff Parker a sometime contributor to the Basset Brash and Hide Blog has painted a gloomy portrait for the future of this once bright beacon of a peaceful multicultural democracy that could well have been an inspiration for any and all inhabitants of the known world

Peter Dunne: RMA reform

It was ironic that the very week former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer lambasted Parliament and recent governments for too much rushed legislation and excessive use of Urgency, the government announced the repeal of his flagship Resource Management Act and then took Urgency to pass the first stage of its reforms through Parliament.

Karl du Fresne: Echoes of Citizens for Rowling

Who remembers the Citizens for Rowling campaign? It was a concerted attempt by the Great and the Good to derail National Party leader Robert Muldoon’s election campaign in 1975.

The campaign’s backers didn’t like Muldoon’s combative, divisive brand of politics and argued that Labour’s gentlemanly Bill Rowling, who had assumed the prime ministership after Norman Kirk’s death in 1974, offered a far more desirable style of leadership.

John McLean: Woe betide us when parliament's words no longer matter

As a child, I believed my grandmother simply started knitting, without an end in mind, and on each occasion an unforeseen woolen item would magically take shape.

I felt much the same when I began reading tracts of Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s screeds of words. He seemed to me to be aimlessly banging away at his keyboard, invested with nothing but inchoate hope for a useful result.

But what’s Sir Geoffrey really been up to?

Natasha Hamilton-Hart: Design principles for constitutional hijack......

Design principles for constitutional hijack – or how we got those Treaty principles in the first place

The ‘principles of the Treaty of Waitangi/te Tiriti o Waitangi’ have arrived on the political stage. A smallish political party has got a bill before parliament in an attempt to define the principles. Opponents pushed back with street protests, mostly hostile media coverage and parliamentary theatre. The message from opponents is loud and clear: the Treaty principles are untouchable by ordinary citizens.

Ananish Chaudhuri: Is New Zealand in danger of lurching towards constitutional impropriety?

Lately, I am seeing a lot of articles that accuse the current government of imperiling New Zealand’s democracy. One of the more recent entries is by former Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer arguing in Newsroom that “New Zealand is in danger of lurching towards constitutional impropriety.” He also writes that he is “concerned that our democracy is being weakened by the methods this Government is using to achieve its goals.”

Elizabeth Rata: The Road to He Puapua – Is there really a Treaty partnership?

The He Puapua Report proposes revolutionary change for New Zealand. The question of how we have arrived at a crossroads where New Zealanders will have to choose between an ethno-nationalist state — which He Puapua leads to — or a democratic-nationalist one has its origins in three events in 1985, 1986 and 1987.

It was in these years that the concept of a Treaty of Waitangi “partnership” was created. It is the foundational pillar for the Report’s goal of “transformative restructuring of governance to recognise rangatiratanga Māori”. Iwi self-determination includes the co-governance arrangements laid out in He Puapua. There is also the likelihood of claims for the ownership of up to 50 per cent of public assets such as water, sea territories, flora and fauna, and airwaves. Is this path to ethnic nationalism inevitable?

The first key partnership event is the 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act. While the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act was about the settlement of historical grievances, the 1985 Amendment Act was a very different matter. The recognition of iwi-Māori rather than pan-Māori as the inheritors of Treaty settlements established the reviving tribe as both political player and economic corporation.

Chris Trotter: The Choice

“INSULATION from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.” The words are those of former Labour Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer. The “settlements” he refers to are the Treaty settlements negotiated between the Crown and Iwi.

It is to Iwi, New Zealand’s officially recognised tribal entities, that the responsibility for reinvigorating Māori society has been entrusted. Palmer’s confidence that the process has been walled-off from the “ravages” of democratic interference is important. The critical political choice made by leading Pakeha politicians, jurists and bureaucrats in the 1980s and 90s was to halt the momentum of left-wing Māori nationalism by inserting a layer of elite Māori business-people between the Crown and the economically and culturally impoverished Māori working-class.

Only by fostering the rapid growth of a Māori middle-class could the Pakeha state avoid being compelled to negotiate with social, cultural and political forces with precious little to lose. Forces, moreover, whose lack of a meaningful stake in the capitalist system might encourage its leaders to contemplate sponsoring an entirely different set of economic arrangements.