Rodney Hide: I support the protest 100 percent

Hi David,

I note the following from a RNZ report:

ACT leader David Seymour was similarly derisive of the approach.

"It's possible to have a peaceful protest but I think what they're doing is far too intense. I think what they need to do is respect the law, respect people's basic property rights and not believe that because they disagree they have the right to trample over a whole lot of other people.

"I mean, they're trespassed, they're breaking the law ... but look, I just think it's rude to set up your tents on someone's lawn - not everyone in New Zealand can do it, what makes them different?"

I support the protest 100 percent.

I know several who have travelled up from Arrowtown including a young mother with her toddler. Good people who work their business and have been destroyed by policies you have supported.

Point of Order: The nation that Jacinda aims to rebuild – and the economy that can’t return to business as normal

Will these words come back to haunt the Prime Minister?:

“When we look back on this period in our country’s history, I don’t want us just to reflect on how we weathered the storm of a pandemic, but what we built after”.

Furthermore, she told Parliament yesterday:

“Our economy cannot afford to return to business as usual, because the status quo is unsustainable”.

And she concluded her Prime Ministerial statement with this ringing commitment:

Kate Hawkesby: People aren't testing because we have Covid fatigue

 

As our Omicron daily case numbers started to trend down instead of the much promised up, I wondered if my theory last week is in fact more than just a theory.  

People aren’t testing. They’re not scanning in, they’ve turned off their Bluetooth on the app, they’re not reporting symptoms, or maybe they’re just asymptomatic. 

Either way, our Omicron surge that the doomsayers keep warning us about, that we are sitting in a red light because of, is still nowhere to be seen. And it may well be down to a variety of factors; some say it’s a slow burner, we haven’t ‘let it rip’ like other countries, so it’s just a slower start for us. 

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Does climate change really matter when push comes to shove?

 

I've been fascinated by a couple of examples over the last day of how much climate change really matters when push comes to shove. 

Remember how the UK government held the big climate change conference COP26 in Glasgow only three months ago?  

And remember how Boris Johnson urged that “It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now”? 

They look a lot like empty words now, because news broke yesterday that his government plans to fast track six new oil and gas wells in the North Sea.   

Graham Adams: Three Waters: A sorry tale of government deception and media inertia

Nanaia Mahuta’s plans to reshape water infrastructure have been so poorly scrutinised that voters still don’t know whether iwi will receive royalties — despite the legislation being scheduled for next month. Graham Adams reports…

Anyone who has travelled around New Zealand over the summer break will likely have seen signs saying “Stop Three Waters!” on fences along highways and rural roads.

It is also likely at least a third of those travellers who noticed the signs will have little — or no — idea of what Three Waters will mean in practice.

That was the dismal information offered by the latest 1News Kantar Public Poll. And, unfortunately, 1News’ coverage of its own poll gave some clue why such ignorance is widespread, even as the issue divides councils — and a big chunk of voters — throughout the country.

Net Zero Watch: Greens fear Boris Johnson's downfall could kill off his Net Zero plans

 

In this newsletter:

1) Greens fear Boris Johnson's downfall could kill off his Net Zero plans
Politico, 3 February 2022
  

2) Why the cost of Net Zero is too high for the country – and for Boris too
The Sunday Telegraph, 6 February 2022

Sir Bob Jones: Sanity dawns

On this site in March, 2020 when the coronavirus panic began, I predicted that when it’s all done and dusted, Sweden’s “live with it” approach will have proven the correct path to adopt. It’s not yet totally “done and dusted” globally but the developed world will reach that stage sometime this year.

Meanwhile, increasingly liberal societies have woken to the realities and are adopting the Swedish model, mindful that with widespread vaccinations, restraints are now irrational.

Of course, vaccinations regardless, there are still freakishly rare fatality exceptions, but closing down society at a massive social and economic cost, the consequences of which will be a huge economic upheaval ahead, to prevent “freakish” contingencies, is simply insanity.

Roger Childs: Waitangi Day – what we need to remember

All citizens of the country regardless of their ethnic origins are first and foremost New Zealanders.

A holiday with meaning?

It was called New Zealand Day for a number of years, but as it was the date of the signing of Te Tiriti in 1840, Waitangi Day is fine. However, the Treaty was not our founding document as is often claimed. It was not until 21 May that Governor Hobson officially declared British sovereignty over the whole country.

The British had been reluctant to take on New Zealand as a colony and were happy for the Governor of New South Wales to oversee what was going on across the Tasman. However, issues of law and order, as well as race relations became more complicated and fraught during the 1820s and 1830s.

Karl du Fresne: If we're going to talk about decolonisation, let's go the whole hog

Some of New Zealand’s most divisive mischief-makers are embedded in local government, where they appear free to pursue their ideological agendas unencumbered by any checks or restraints, generously subsidised by ratepayers who are given no chance to say whether or not they approve of their money being spent on extremist causes.

A perfect example is a forthcoming 3-day wananga (forum) organised by the Wellington City Council-funded Toi Poneke arts centre and entitled “Imagining Decolonisation”, for which the capital’s long-suffering ratepayers will pick up a big part – if not all – of the tab.

To convey the tone of this event, I can do no better than quote from an official council press statement:

Derek Mackie: Boris & Jacinda's imaginary tete-a-tete

J: Prime Minister! So nice to hear from you again. 

B: Indeed! Terrific, yes. I do love our little chats, Jacinda. And call me Boris, I insist. 

J: Thank you Boris and best wishes to Carrie and the children. She’s such an inspiration with her eco activism and progressive ideas. I love to see young women modelling themselves on me…and Greta, of course. 

J: And are you fully recovered now from Covid? 

B: My doctors tell me I’m tickety-boo physically. But some of my colleagues and a large proportion of the electorate are questioning my mental faculties. 

Carrie just tells me to ignore them and do what she says. 

J: There speaks a wise woman. 

I’m so impressed with your Net Zero agenda, even if COP26 was a terrible disappointment. 

B: Nothing to do with me. I blame it on Glasgow, personally. Why pick a cold and wet place, in winter no less, to hold a conference on global warming. It’s very hard to get into the swing of it. That’s why I flew back to London in my private jet after a day. 

J: But you chose Glasgow, didn’t you? 

B: Oh, so I did! Now I remember. I thought it would appease The Sturgeon and distract her from demanding Scottish independence for a while. Instead the bloody natives went on strike and refused to pick up the rubbish. 

It reminded me of my time at Eton, going on a school trip to Canterbury Cathedral and driving through Brixton on the way. 

Oh, how the unpleasant half live! 

Melanie Phillips: Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg has got herself into a terrible mess. She was suspended from her role as co-host of ABC’s The View talk show after saying that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. It was instead, she said, about “man’s inhumanity to man” involving “white people doing it to white people”.

She insisted: “It’s about how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, Jews … everybody eats each other”.

This was clearly idiotic. The signature characteristic of German Nazism was that it set out to exterminate Jews as a race, identifying them as targets for annihilation on the basis of even a tenuous ancestral connection with Judaism.

Attempting to apologise in the ensuing storm, Goldberg made things even worse. Saying she had now learned that “Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she then told Stephen Colbert on his late-night comedy show that the Nazis had lied and actually had issues not with race but with ethnicity — which caused further outrage and prompted another apology.

Breaking Views Update: Week of 30.1.22

Saturday February 5, 2022 

News:
Imagining Decolonisation Wānanga in Pōneke
A three-day wānanga planned for Pōneke this month will be the setting for a think-tank, a call to action, workshops and kōrero around decolonisation in Aotearoa, according to Wellington City Council.

The event at Toi Pōneke Arts Centre and Wharewaka Function Centre will bring together academics, students, artists, writers, treaty workers, activists, politicians and change makers to discuss and create steps towards what an equitable future in a decolonised Aotearoa could look like, Council said.

Kate Hawkesby: The Hermit Kingdom is over

 

Thoughts and prayers this morning to all the panickers who wanted the border shut forever and all the hermits who were loving Hermit Kingdom. It’s over. Thank goodness. 

Congrats to the Government for waking up to the fact that life actually does go on. That you can’t actually lock your citizens out forever, that you can’t keep Kiwis isolated from the rest of the world ad nauseum. 

There’ll be some displeasure from those with Stockholm Syndrome who bought so fiercely into the Government’s rhetoric and fear mongering, their wheels will be spinning now as they imagine the end of the world’s coming. And that’s the problem when you sign up for so much brainwashing over so much time, you lose the ability to think rationally, and to think for yourself. 

Net Zero Watch - Green lobby defeated: EU Commission unveils green label plan for gas and nuclear

 

In this newsletter:

1) Green lobby defeated: EU Commission unveils green label plan for gas and nuclear
Bloomberg, 2 February 2022
 
2) Boris Johnson scraps Brexit plan in favour of Net Zero agenda
The Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2022

David Seymour: The Kiwi Identity

The following is an extract from ACT leader David Seymour's State of the Nation speech.

At the centre of nearly every Labour policy, from the school curriculum to the management of three waters infrastructure is an obsession. The Labour Party is obsessed with the Partnership State, putting the Treaty at the heart of everything.

Interestingly, the Treaty is not at the heart of the Labour Party. Its 123-page constitution mentions the Treaty only three times, and in passing. There is no co-governance in the Labour Party; its first principle is that ‘All political authority comes from the people by democratic means, including universal suffrage, regular and free elections with a secret ballot.

Why might that be? Because the idea of co-governance is incompatible with democracy. Democracy means one person, one vote. It’s the basis of New Zealand’s one globally significant political achievement, realising the idea that every adult New Zealander should have the vote.

The opposite of that principle is being rolled out in healthcare, with two systems. It is being rolled out in infrastructure, with co-governance of Three Waters. It is being put into resource management law. The three bills replacing the Resource Management Act will be filled with co-governance provisions. The history curriculum is being designed to tell the next generation that everything in New Zealand is about colonisation and most of the students are guilty before they open their textbook.

Barrie Saunders: Democracy or partnership revisited

Last year I posted “democracy or partnership” and asked what do we want. Since then, the partnership and co-governance concepts, have gained legs with the Three Waters proposals and the twin health authorities. In addition, at local government level in the same vein, we have seen non-elected appointees given voting rights on council committees.

PM Ardern uses the partnership term frequently, and in a TVNZ interview with Jack Tame, National Leader Christopher also equated the Treaty with partnership.

When starting a journey, it is useful to know where it will end, otherwise one can end up in an uncomfortable zone, where retreat is difficult. Somehow, I suspect few political leaders, other than the Maori Party and ACT, have really thought through the partnership concept, and we are heading for a rough time, unless there is a course correction.

Karl du Fresne: How this revolution differs from the last one

We’re already more than a month into 2022, but I’m only now coming out of holiday mode and trying to rev myself up for the year ahead. As readers of this blog may have noted from my silence, this annual adjustment has taken longer than normal.

For this I blame the lingering sedative effect of a holiday in Nelson, where my wife and I spent 10 days in our caravan with two teenage grandsons.

Nelson has never been an ideal vantage point from which to assess the state of the world. It’s relatively isolated, barricaded as it is by sea and hills. My family and I spent four very happy years there during the 1980s and I know from experience that it’s easy to retreat behind those barriers and forget that the rest of the world exists.

Like Gisborne, another charming provincial city, Nelson isn’t a place you drive through to get somewhere else. Socially and culturally, it’s a cul-de-sac. Such towns tend to develop their own distinctive character, uncontaminated by outside influences (a point of difference magnified, in Gisborne’s case, by the fact that the population is 50 percent Maori).

When I lived in Nelson I likened it to living in a warm bath; so comfortably soothing that you don’t want to get out. There’s an insularity and sense of other-worldliness about the place that becomes even more accentuated if you head over the Takaka Hill into Golden Bay.

Mike Hosking: A lesson in life, the taxman is never far from your pocket

 

From our rock and a hard place file comes the revelations, if that’s not too strong a word, over the tax price you pay if you help your kid out buying a house.

National's Andrew Bayly has been making the headlines with this one and he is onto something many hadn't thought about or thought through. It doesn't help that the government already look greedy this week with the revelation, and that’s not too strong a word, over the number of people their new top tax rate grabs.

John Porter: Anocracy, How Civil Wars Start

News Headline: Circuses are struggling to fill vacancies for clowns. Suitable candidates have all taken up politics!

Humorous, but, sadly, containing a certain degree of fact.

Another adage is – We get the politicians we deserve. That is probably true, so how did we end up with this bunch of inept socialists’/communists’ hell bent on turning New Zealand’s democracy into a co-governance model with power-sharing and right of veto, based on ethnicity.

The answer is simple; Covid19!

Ardern won the 2020 election simply because there was a predominant belief that “Jacinda has saved us from Covid.” Couple that with so many voters believing whatever and everything that was articulated from the “Pulpit of Truth.” Scarily, the belief “Jacinda saved us” is still held by a large number of New Zealanders. This, “Jacinda saved us” belief will be an important factor, that will be exploited by Ardern’s spin doctors, in the lead up to the 2023 election.

Garrick Tremain: Ardern's Parliament

 Here is Garrick Tremain's cartoon commentary on the power-base in Parliament!