Steven Gaskell: A Court Case Over Who Gets to Run the Thermometer

Next week the High Court in Wellington will host the latest round of political theatre: a group of Māori health providers are suing the Government for daring to shut down Te Aka Whai Ora the Māori Health Authority.

The Authority, remember, was created in 2022 to give Māori their own separate bureaucracy inside the health system. Labour sold it as revolutionary, though most patients simply noticed longer waiting lists, more managers, and more money disappearing into the great Wellington filing cabinet.

Tony Vaughn: Racial Romanticism Is Not Policy - The Cost of Coddling a Myth

David Seymour committed the cardinal sin of contemporary politics - he told the truth! Race-based funding is racist. A statement so obviously true that it ought to be stitched onto the curtains of the Beehive and should be self-evident to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. Yet, predictably, Tama Potaka emerged, starch-shirted and squinting in moral indignation, to denounce Seymour's comments as “unhelpful.” No, Mr Potaka. What is truly unhelpful is the systematic diversion of public funds into a racial fantasy built on grievance economics and revisionist nostalgia.

Barrie Davis: MHA Disestablished! Yeah … Nah

Maori health authority has not been abolished. All the roles and functions of the disestablished MHA have been transferred to Health New Zealand except for a few going to the Ministry of Health. Although ‘co-governance’ has been reduced to ‘engaging’, the Iwi Māori Partnership Boards and the Hauora Maori Advisory Committee that were established with the MHA in 2022 will remain along with their funding. Of the Hauora Maori Advisory Committee, present Minister of Health, Dr Shane Reti said “I'll be powering them up to do even more.”

All the Maori Party need do is wait for the pendulum to swing in 3 to 9 years time and reinstate the co-governance provision. They could leave the transferred roles and functions within Health New Zealand, out of public perception, or maybe set up another MHA when it suits them.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 28/2/24

Puff! And before you can get through a packet of 20, Parliament will have stubbed out parts of Labour’s smoke-free law

Health dominated the government’s announcements over the past 24 hour or so, at the same time as Parliament was debating legislation to abolish the Maori Health Authority and repeal parts of the previous government’s planned changes to regulate smoked tobacco.

Ele Ludemann: Bureaucracy or services?

The government is replacing an expensive bureaucracy with better services:

Legislation that will disestablish the Māori Health Authority will be introduced in Parliament today, heralding the start of a new vision for Māori health says Minister of Health Dr Shane Reti.

 

“We have said we will bring healthcare for all New Zealanders closer to the home and closer to the community. This will serve Māori and non-Māori well,” Dr Reti says. . .

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 27-2-24

No, it isn’t a surprise – the government is disestablishing the Māori Health Authority (just as it pledged before the election)

The mainstream news media have been grimly auguring this news for the past few days under headings such as…

• Axing Māori Health Authority before hearing ‘disrespectful’ — expert (One News);
• Coalition Government to forge ahead with repeal of smokefree laws, Māori Health Authority this week (NZ Herald); and
• The Waitangi Tribunal’s losing battle (RNZ).

This afternoon the government’s official website affirmed it.

Eliora: Who Will Own the Coastline?

In 2009 the John Key National-led Government stripped away Crown ownership of the coastline to make it easier for Maori to make claims.

The tribal ownership of New Zealand by 2040, indicated in the He Puapua document, was a concerning issue leading into the election. The economy, education, crime, health, and business had been decimated by an inept and Marxist Labour Government. New Zealand’s depressing statistics in these areas can be turned around with a lot of work, good policies, and sound leadership. The deliberate division being engineered along racial lines, however, will be much, much harder if not impossible to reverse.

David Farrar: Hysterical bullsh*t

Radio NZ reports:

Te pāti Māori's co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer has accused the new government of “deliberate .. systemic genocide” over its policies to roll back the smokefree policy and the Māori Health Authority.

The left love hysterical language. If you oppose racial quotas in laws, you are a racist. And now if you sack 400 bureaucrats you are genocidal.

Kerre Woodham: How can Te Whatu Ora justify that spending?

The talk is over, the ink is dry on the contracts, let the governance begin.

Prime Minister-in-waiting, Christopher Luxon, is due to speak this morning [24/11/23], giving us the broad shape of what the 54th New Zealand government will look like. And let's hope that once they start the governing proper, we see the last of these sorts of headlines: “Te Whatu Ora’s more than $100m consultant bill”.

A $100 million on consultants. $70 million went to the big four firms. Deloittes, they were paid $43.6 million by Te Whatu Ora in the past year alone. Previous to that, they’d got $34 million a year, before that $19 million.

Graham Adams: Wakey, wakey, mainstream media!

The rise of independent media challenges journalism’s staid bastions.

Last week Newsroom’s political editor, Jo Moir, seemed surprised to discover that co-governance and its various policy manifestations aren’t popular.

On X — the social media site still known to everyone as Twitter — she wrote: "Exclusive poll! Okay, Newsroom hasn’t entered the poll race, but we do have fascinating new data from Talbot Mills showing more people surveyed opposed Māori wards, co-governance and the Māori Health Authority than supported them.”

Graham Adams: Will co-governance drive a counter-revolution?

Seymour is not for turning on a Treaty referendum.

Despite the well-documented failures of the Ardern-Hipkins government — whether in health, law and order, education or homelessness — it has been extraordinarily successful in one particular area. That is, the stealthy insertion of an interpretation of the Treaty as a “partnership” — manifested as co-governance — into a broad swathe of New Zealand law and policy.

JC: Labour Continues to Spend Our Money Hand over Fist

David Seymour has another Ministry to blow up, or to put it more kindly, dispense with. Oh, wait, no he hasn’t, it’s the same one he targeted last time. The Ministry of Pacific Islands Peoples. I have to admit it’s not needed, along with a number of other PC ministries who are nothing more than a drain on the long-suffering taxpayer. These ethnic ministries come under the heading of wasteful spending. We have no idea what our hard-earned money is spent on. We’ve never heard of any useful plans or outcomes.

Peter Williams: Maori health improving faster than non-Maori

Stats NZ data suggests no need for Te Aka Whai Ora

Supporters of the Maori Health Authority or Te Aka Whai Ora say that we must have a separate agency to ensure Maori have equitable health outcomes and because the previous public health system was systematically racist.

There is actually no evidence of “systematic racism” although the statistic regularly quoted to support it involves life expectancy.

David Farrar: 400 staff for the Maori Health Authority

That's a staggering amount of staff.

I'm sceptical of the effectiveness of the Maori Health Authority, but willing to be persuaded. If they genuinely can improve health outcomes for Maori, that would be great.

But I just can't imagine what 400 staff are going to do. That is nearly three times as many as Pharmac.

Roger Childs: Jacinda, read the documents

The Māori Health Authority, Three Waters and Māori seats on councils were achievements Ardern said the Government was proud of. Ardern said she was “comfortable” the government was doing its best to fulfil obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi. –Will Trafford, New Zealand Herald, 10 January 2023

Honesty is the best policy

The prime minister needs to look carefully at the documents we have signed up to and need to honour, before she pats herself on the back for her divisive, dishonest and undemocratic policies. In 1840 the Crown agreed to Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) and in 1948 the then Labour Government signed The United Nations International Declaration of Human Rights. A few years ago a journalist asked Ardern if could recite a particular Article of the Treaty. She couldn’t.

Damien Grant: Like it or not, we've got a new democracy

The Minister of Māori Development, Willie Jackson, recently declared that “Democracy has changed... This is not a majority democracy.”

He is right. Aotearoa has changed its understanding of democratic norms, and we are establishing different political and economic rights based on a person’s whakapapa.

Some of the more excitable elements on the fringes of our fractured community have latched onto the He Puapua report as evidence of an accelerated time-frame for this constitutional restructuring, but these changes have been underway for a generation and, as Jackson noted, have arrived.

Mike Butler: How to regain our nation

There is a new madness afoot. A determined race-based minority within the Maori community is seizing control of the country while most others remain ill-informed unaware and uncaring. Such are the words of John Robinson in his new book Regaining a Nation – Equality and Democracy.

Robinson, who has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and wrote Unrestrained Slaughter: The Maori Musket Wars 1800-1840, The Kingite Rebellion, Dividing a Nation: the return to tikanga, and He Puapua – Blueprint for breaking up New Zealand, gives insight as a scientist who did research for New Zealand government entities.

Don Brash: One of the worlds most successful democracies at risk

On the night before the 2002 election, when I was a list candidate for the National Party, I was attending a black-tie event in Napier. Before we sat down to eat, the host asked the local vicar to give thanks.

The vicar gave thanks for the food and the drink which we were about to consume, and then said that we should give thanks also for the fact that, in just 24 hours’ time, we would have elected the members of the next Parliament “and nobody will have been shot, nobody will have been beaten to death, and the Army will still be in its barracks”. Let’s give thanks, he said, that we can say that with absolute confidence – “and we are one of only a tiny handful of countries in the entire world where this can be said with confidence”.

He was right, and we should all be profoundly grateful that what the vicar gave thanks for that night is still true. Recent polls suggest that a majority of New Zealanders are opposed to the present Government. And it is clear that a great many New Zealanders abhor the Government with an intensity that I haven’t previously witnessed. But nobody seriously suggests overthrowing it by armed rebellion. And nobody imagines that if, as I hope, the Government loses the next election in a landslide, it would attempt a New Zealand equivalent of the January 6 attempt by former President Trump to overturn that election result.

Bryce Wilkinson: Health “Reform” – this week’s step towards a more racially-divisive future

A race-neutral approach to government health (and welfare) spending would give the same treatment to people in the same circumstances. It would ignore irrelevant matters such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or creed. Horizontal equity requires no less.

The government seeks instead to discriminate between people by assigning them to groups and treating some groups as a ‘priority’ population.

Don Brash: Neither Te Tiriti nor the Treaty implies co-governance

On 13 May Newsroom carried a column by four writers at Victoria University under the heading “Commitments to equality in Te Tiriti mean co-governance”. In attacking those who disagree with that proposition, they particularly cited Hobson’s Pledge, for which I am one of two spokespeople.

But in arguing that Te Tiriti requires a radical departure from democratic principles in favour of co-governance what they fail to explain is why their arguments differ so fundamentally from what nearly every authority on the Treaty has believed since 1840.

They fail to note that Governor Hobson said, as each chief signed the Treaty, “now we are one” – he certainly didn’t say “Now we are two and shall remain ever thus”.