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:

Guy Hatchard: The Pandemic Response Has Broken the Social Compact

The Social Compact is an evolution of theories attributed to enlightenment philosophers Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau.

In the modern context, a Social Compact is an implicit understanding between the government and the people and between individuals on the roles and responsibilities each plays. The aim is to ensure they can live successfully and safely together and shape the orderly and mutually fulfilling growth of society in both the present and the future.

Implicit in the social compact is the notion that differences of opinion, ideas, and styles of living can happily coexist. The belief that individuals and the government can rationally discuss and defend their ideas and proposals between each other without conflict and rancour. Except, that is, in the case of deliberate intention to cause harm.