Daily Telegraph NZ: Ditching Paul Hunt a good start, but not enough to fix the HRC – Act

“The Justice Minister’s decision not to reappoint Paul Hunt is a good start, but doesn’t go far enough to acknowledge the Human Rights Commission’s rot,” says Act MP Todd Stephenson.

Mike Butler: Two Governments under tribal control

For those interested, here is a letter that was sent to the Hawkes Bay Today newspaper - which has not yet been published.

Had Neill Gordon listened during the disrupted Julian Batchelor seminar in Hastings in July, he would have learned about the current government’s co-governance plan, how it is set up to work, and that there is no reference to partnership in the Treaty of Waitangi.

NZCPR Newsletter: False Narratives

Thomas Sowell, the renowned American author, economist, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, could have been describing New Zealand when he wrote, “Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination”.

While he was Education Minister, our new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was responsible for a radical overhaul of the education system to “honour” the Treaty of Waitangi. Introducing New Zealand History into the school curriculum was a key initiative. As the only compulsory subject, Chris Hipkins obviously considers it more important than English, Maths or Science.

Chris Trotter: Imagining Away The Opposition.

How quickly things change. Three years ago Chile was racked by massive protest demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor, Chileans served notice on their government that the moment had arrived for their country to execute a decisive break with its recent past. Politically, economically, and culturally, they said, Chile was ready to ditch the debilitating legacy of General Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year-long dictatorship. Most particularly, “Pinochet’s Straightjacket” – the 1980 constitution he imposed upon Chile as the price it must pay for even a limited restoration of democracy – must go.

Chris Trotter: Nanaia Mahuta’s Super-Narrative.

Whether Nanaia Mahuta followed the conflict-of-interest rules set out in The Cabinet Manual hardly matters. A dangerous political narrative is forming around the appointment of, and awarding of contracts to, Mahuta’s whanau in circumstances that, at the very least, raise serious questions about this Government’s political judgement. Enlarging this narrative is the growing public perception that the mainstream news media is refusing to cover a story that would, in other circumstances, have attracted intense journalistic interest. The conflation of these two, highly damaging narratives with a third – the even more negative narrative of “co-governance” – has left the Labour Government in an extremely exposed and vulnerable position.

The Government’s failure to adequately prepare the New Zealand public for what Labour clearly regards as the inevitability of co-governance hasn’t helped. The party did not campaign on the issue, and kept He Puapua, the controversial “road-map” to full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – i.e. co-governance – by 2040, under wraps. Similarly unheralded was the Government’s determination to establish a separate Māori Health Authority. And the application of co-governance principles to Mahuta’s deeply unpopular “Three Waters” project has done nothing to allay public fears that the country is being changed, in fundamental ways, without the electorate’s consent.