Geoff Parker: The Gore Precedent

How a District Plan in Southland Could Change Land-Use Rules Across New Zealand

A planning dispute in the small Southland district of Gore may look like a local argument about farming rules.

In reality, it may represent something much bigger: a quiet shift in how land-use decisions are made across New Zealand.

Elizabeth Rata: Ngai Tahu Ambitions for the South Island

History and the Treaty

The discussion surrounding the Treaty Principles Bill reveals two very different ways of understanding history.

An ahistorical understanding gives a sacred quality to human events, imbuing them with a spirit of timeless authority beyond human intervention. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and the post-1986 partnership principle are given this spiritual authority. It's seen in such phrases as the Treaty speaks to us today and in the fruitless search for a definitive Treaty meaning.

NZCPR Newsletter: Tribal Takeover

Probably the most important court case of recent times was held in Wellington last month, yet it  attracted no mention in the media.

It was a Court of Appeal hearing seeking to overturn a High Court decision to grant multiple customary marine titles over a 40 km stretch of coastline near Opotiki. If the Edwards Marine and Coastal Area Act ruling stands, it will set a precedent for almost 600 yet to be determined claims, with the likely result that the ownership of virtually the entire New Zealand coastline – right out to the 12 nautical mile edge of the Territorial Sea – will pass to Maori.

Dave Witherow: Confederacy of Dunces

Just when you think we have reached peak lunacy, it gets worse. The other day, for example, we had Prof Michael Baker, Otago University’s pre-eminent Doomster, advising us yet again that things are looking grim. The virus is not done yet, he thinks, and until Big Pharma comes up with new gene-bending elixirs we are still seriously in the cactus. There is too much complacency abroad, says the Prof, and the rules need tightening again. We must be forced to become “mask-wearing society”.

Yes Michael, yes. We heard it all the first time. We believed the images of catastrophe in Wuhan. People falling over in the streets and being welded into their apartments. We believed you and Bloomfield and Hipkins. We swallowed everything you told us. We were flattening the curve and leading the world. We were the doughty team of five million who, by “following the Science”, would eliminate the virus. Except, of course, that we didn’t. The virus is back, spreading everywhere and infecting everyone.

The Science – or your version of it anyway - turned out to be a crock.

Graham Adams: Follow the money - matauranga Maori and the millions at stake

There is a lot of funding and influence riding on successfully casting indigenous knowledge as equal to science. Graham Adams says the debate over the NCEA science syllabus is only the tip of an iceberg.

Anyone trying to get a grip on the mātauranga Māori debate over the past several months is likely to be completely puzzled by now.

The incendiary stoush was sparked last July by seven eminent professors stating in a letter to the Listener that indigenous knowledge is not science and therefore does not warrant inclusion in the NCEA syllabus as being equal to science.

Yet in the five months since the letter was published, virtually no one among those opposing the professors has argued convincingly that mātauranga Māori is scientific (even if some small elements of it could be called proto-science or pre-science).

Michael Bassett: Another Maori Power Grab

Recently we saw how the government’s proposed health structural reforms have little to do with improving health care for all New Zealanders. They are essentially a power grab by Maori who will control their own health authority and effectively be given veto rights over the health structure for everyone else. 

Seventeen percent of the population will ultimately control the health of the other 83% of us. 

The recent interim report into the Future of Local Government: Arewa ake te Kaupapa comes out of the same mould. Fifty-nine pages of flatulent phrases, portentous utterances, and false assertions about the Treaty, lead the reader eventually to the real purpose of the report: more power for Maori. This time local government is to be restructured to “create conditions for shared prosperity and wellbeing” for Maori. Once more it is Nanaia Mahuta, Jacinda Ardern’s in-house Rasputin, who is driving the power grab.