Heather du Plessis-Allan: This is the problem with Māori co-governance

I was slightly surprised to read an article in the Herald today [23/2/22] in which Maori Development Minister Willie Jackson says Kiwis have “nothing to be scared of” when it comes to Māori co-governance of our assets.

But if you’ve been following the story of Te Urewera National Park, you’ll know that's not strictly true.

Karl du Fresne: Guest post - Why I have left the Labour Party

By Perce Harpham

(As founder of the Progeni software company, Perce Harpham, now 91, was a pioneer of the New Zealand computer industry. He is also a former Green Party candidate.)

After some 16 years of loyal support I have left the Labour Party because it has left me. I am so ashamed at how “my” party is destroying our legal system and democracy that I wish to be completely dissociated from it.

Tim Dower: Rumoured changes to Three Waters mean nothing

There’s a good piece in BusinessDesk on where we're going now with Three Waters.

For clarity, I've been against Three Waters from the start.

Where I live, we saw it as a straight-out asset grab.

Dr David Lillis: Reactions to the Proposed New Zealand Curriculum Refresh

Design of the New Curriculum

Recently, I wrote about the proposed refreshing of the New Zealand Curriculum, expressing concerns about the heavily Treaty-centric nature of the proposed national curriculum and embedding of traditional knowledge across the curriculum (Lillis, 2022a). The refresh involves a staged process, scheduled for completion by 2026.

 

 "Te Mātaiaho" is the proposed working name for the Curriculum Framework and means “to observe and examine the strands of learning.” It is critical to understand that the new curriculum will be imposed on all students and not only Māori. 

John Porter: The Absolute Power of Veto

“We have always owned the water!” So said the Maori king back in September 2012. He went further by stating, “the ultimate goal for iwi is to retain management and control of water…” Well, he wasn’t too far wrong those 10 years ago!

Today, he would probably say, “We own it and if you want it, you’ll have to pay!”

Oh, and by the way, the Maori king is Mahuta’s cousin.

The Three Waters Reform Bill is being pushed through parliament despite huge opposition. So the longer this Government refuses to budge on the co-governance aspect of Three Waters, the more it looks like this reform isn’t really about cleaning up our water, is it?

It’s actually about embedding a race-based way of running things in New Zealand.

Hilary Calvert: Government must come clean about its goals

Democracy fails when a government is not honest about what it believes are the issues, why they want change and what they propose to do.

Honesty in the issues is a vital first step.

Instead, the Government leapfrogs this and moves straight into expensive and incoherent advertising spending.

Without a clear idea of what the Government wants to say, the ads vary from childish through unbelievable to what a load of rubbish.

Heather Du Plessis-Allan: The longer it goes on, the more it looks like it isn't really about cleaning up water

The Government is officially pushing on with its Maori co-governance plan for water.

Grant Robertson and Nanaia Mahuta today announced that they’re making some changes to the plan reform but they’re refusing to ditch their sacred cow of co-governance.

Iwi, under the plan as it stands, will still have 50 percent control in appointing water governance boards.

The longer this goes on, the more the Government refuses to budge on the co-governance aspect, the more it looks like this reform isn’t really about cleaning up your water at all, is it?

Karl du Fresne: New Zealand’s cultural upheaval

My wife and I recently spent two weeks on a road trip around New Zealand’s South Island. It’s a spectacularly beautiful corner of the world that was recently exposed to an international audience via Oscar-winning director Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog, in which the Central Otago region stands in for the wilds of Montana.

It was a good time to be touring the island because the roads were virtually free of traffic, a state of affairs likely to come to an abrupt end now that New Zealand is reopening its doors to international tourists after two years of economically crippling isolation.

But the trip was also a therapeutic experience because in the South Island – or to give it its more poetic Maori name, Te Wai Pounamu – you’re geographically removed from Wellington and Auckland, the epicentres of the culture wars. For those two weeks it was almost possible to delude ourselves that we were back in the familiar New Zealand we knew.

Alas, it wasn’t so. Tuning in even briefly to the TV and radio news was a reminder that the country is in the grip of a cultural revolution reminiscent in tone, if not in scale, of the one that convulsed Mao’s China in the Sixties and early Seventies.

There are days when I barely recognise New Zealand as the country I was born in and where my family has lived for generations. The transformation since the re-election of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government in 2020 has been breathtaking in both its speed and its reach.

Reynold Macpherson: Argument Against Co-Governance Replacing Democracy

I refute some claims made in an article based on a Rotorua Lakes Council press release and published on the Rotorua Daily Post Weekend on 5 March in regard to council representation.

The Council decided its position on November 19, 2021. The fifth and crucial decision was, it was asserted, to meet the purposes of the Local Electoral Act with an interim representation model that falls short of the council’s preferred position, however, preserves the principles of voter parity. The decision was made with the slimmest possible majority, which, in my opinion, suggests marginal legitimacy.

Graham Adams: Next stop for co-governance - science and universities

Graham Adams: The inevitable conclusion to such a makeover, especially if the Green Paper is read alongside Te Pūtahitangi, would be co-governance with iwi of universities & Crown Research Institutes.

Eminent professors Elizabeth Rata and Brian Boyd have weighed into the mātauranga Māori debate over plans for a radical remake of the nation’s science and research sector. They argue that a ‘Tiriti-led’ system is as nonsensical as ‘Christian-led’ or ‘Xi Jinping thought-led’ science.

One of the most significant examples of chicanery by Jacinda Ardern’s administration is that, even as New Zealanders have been enjoined to “follow the science” over vaccination and Covid management generally, it has been simultaneously engaged in a stealthy project that will undermine the integrity of science and the nation’s scientific institutions.

Karl du Fresne: Pssst ... don't mention the iwi

From disgrace to sham to travesty and back again – that pretty much sums up the Three Waters project so far. (I won’t use the government’s preferred term “reform”, because reform means a change for the better.)

When it became clear last year that Nanaia Mahuta’s pet ideological project faced concerted opposition across a broad front, the government sought to defuse it by setting up an “independent working group” to review the proposed governance arrangements.

The working group’s report is now in, and it has justifiably been slammed for merely tinkering at the edges – hardly surprising, given that the group was stacked with iwi representatives and people broadly sympathetic to the government. (One example is my own mayor, Lyn Patterson, a reliable friend of Labour who told the Wairarapa Times-Age that the report addresses local government’s concerns. Yet her own council recently joined 29 others in opposing Three Waters and looking at alternative proposals.)

Heather du Plessis-Allan: This is the problem with Māori co-governance

I was slightly surprised to read an article in the Herald today in which Maori Development Minister Willie Jackson says Kiwis have “nothing to be scared of” when it comes to Māori co-governance of our assets.

But if you’ve been following the story of Te Urewera National Park, you’ll know that's not strictly true.

Te Urewera National Park – as in Lake Waikaremoana, one of NZ's great walks – has been closed since August and only reopened again 9 days ago.

Why? Because it’s no longer run by DOC only.

For the last eight years, it’s also been run by the local iwi tuhoe under a co-governance model.

The problem is that most of the huts and many of the swing bridges were in dire need of repair but the iwi wouldn’t allow the repairs.

Derek Stubbs: The co-governance agenda visits the Hauraki Gulf

With the Government pushing ahead with its plan to introduce greater co-governance, the Hauraki Gulf Forum is jumping on the bandwagon.

For the fourth time in seven years, the Forum is considering a recommendation to seek legislative changes to the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park Act as outlined in the report ‘Updating and strengthening the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park Act’.

This report recommends several significant changes.

Reynold Macpherson: Rotorua’s Manipulated Representation Decision

The evidence is that Council’s decision-making at the November 19 meeting over representation structures was manipulated towards ends predetermined by the Mayor; 50/ 50 co-governance.

How? Council’s agenda for 19 November proposed a “final representation model” of 1 Māori seat, 1 General seat and 8 At Large seats for councillors (1M:1G:8AL). It also sought to empower the Chief Executive to campaign for a law change to achieve the 3M:3G:4AL model that the Mayor and her supporters preferred, even though it had already been deemed to be unlawful by the Local Government Commission because it failed to meet the formula in law that guarantees proportional representation.

Graham Adams: Judith Collins: The lady’s not for turning

Despite a largely hostile media and poor poll results, the Leader of the Opposition is not backing away from her campaign to expose government plans for Maori co-governance. Graham Adams assesses her strategy.

Amid the chorus of media voices crowing that the latest Newshub / Reid Research poll heralds the demise of Judith Collins, most have overlooked one significant result within it. When asked by pollsters if Labour was being “separatist”, 38.7 per cent of respondents said “yes”.

Collins first described the Maori Health Authority as “separatist” in late April, and on May 1 she brought the report He Puapua and its radical constitutional implications to national attention, alleging the government was engaged in a stealthy race-based agenda. The Newshub poll was conducted from May 7-13.

This means that, in a matter of weeks, the Leader of the Opposition succeeded in convincing nearly 40 per cent of respondents that Jacinda Ardern is advocating some system of Maori separatism in the nation’s governance.