TREATYGATE Part 2 — Maori Need Honest Ngatas, Not One-Eyed Duries

Fearless owner/editor of elocal, Mykeljon Winckel, has published a second Treatygate article from me, plus two pages of reader feedback from the first story.

Read the words of the story below, or double-click the pics, or check out elocal online.

TREATYGATE Part 2

Grievers Need Achievers As Leaders

Maori Need Honest Ngatas,
Not One-Eyed Duries

by John Ansell

The Treatygate snowball that your brave magazine elocal set in motion last month is already rattling the Griever and Appeaser elites as it builds into an unstoppable avalanche.

A week or so ago I was in the Maori Affairs Select Committee room at Parliament being interviewed by Maori TV.

Gazing down augustly from on high were four huge, hand-tinted portraits of Achiever Maori leaders Sir Apirana Ngata, Sir Maui Pomare, Sir James Carroll, and Sir Peter Buck.

In 1922, Sir Apirana had been honest enough to say this about land confiscations:

“Some have said that these confiscations were wrong, and that they contravened the Articles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Government placed in the hands of the Queen of England the sovereignty and the authority to make laws.

Some sections of the Maori people violated that authority. War arose from this, and blood was spilled.

The law came into operation, and land was taken in payment.

(This itself is a Maori custom – revenge, plunder to avenge a wrong.)

It was their own chiefs who ceded that right to the Queen.

The confiscations cannot therefore be objected to in the light of the Treaty.” [1]

Sir Apirana could have added that not only did the rebels breach the Treaty, but they did so knowing what they stood to lose.

Governor Grey to the chiefs of the Waikato:

“Those who wage war against Her Majesty  or remain in arms must take the consequences of their acts and must understand they will forfeit the right to possession of their lands guaranteed to them by the Treaty of Waitangi.

These lands will be occupied by a population capable of protecting for the future the quiet and unoffending from the violence with which they have been threatened.” [2]

Same story on the East Coast:

“At Turanganui Mr McLean sent messages by Hauhau chiefs to the rebel sections of Rongowhakaata and Aitanga-a-Mahaki, warning them that unless they came in and made submission to the government they would be attacked and deprived of their lands and homes.

This offer met with no response.” [3]

Faced with insurrection, the government then did exactly what it said it would do.

And for doing it, you and I have just paid over $22 million for wronging Rongowhakaata.

What exactly had Te Kooti’s
Pai Marire  (meaning ‘good and
peaceful’) Hauhaus done that was
so wrong? Just hacked, skewered,
clubbed, shot and burnt 70 innocent
men, women and children,  most
spectacularly the Lavin children,
who they threw in the air and
impaled on bayonets.

We, in the simpering form of Appeaser-General Chris Finlayson, have also issued a grovelling apology for sullying the good name of the tribe’s poster boy, Te Kooti.

What exactly had Te Kooti’s Pai Marire (meaning ‘good and peaceful’) Hauhaus done that was so wrong?

Just hacked, skewered, clubbed, shot and burnt 70 innocent men, women and children, from babies to the elderly – most spectacularly the Lavin children, who they threw in the air and impaled on bayonets. [4]

Sorry about that, chief.

Sadly, the achiever values of the Ngatas, Pomares, Carrolls and Bucks have given way to the griever values of the Harawiras, Turias, Mutus and Itis.

Supposedly one of the more honest of this motley gang of professional mourners is longtime Waitangi Tribunal chair, Justice Sir Eddie Durie.

In 1999, Durie was remarkably candid about dodgy iwi claimants:

“Some Treaty of Waitangi claimants have asked researchers to change findings that would be unhelpful to their cases, says the chairman of the Waitangi Tribunal.

Justice Durie said also that some tribes had even tried to make the payments of researchers conditional on findings being altered.” [5]

But it’s not just the tribes who’ve tried to doctor the evidence.

The Tribunal’s claim negotiator, the Crown Forest Rental Trust, has done the same.

And at least once, it didn’t just try, it succeeded.

The researcher who succumbed, then spilt the beans, was MIT Ph.D Dr John Robinson.

As a socialist, Dr Robinson may have been seen as a safe choice to ‘prove’ the Tribunal’s agenda that Maori nineteenth century population loss was caused by land loss.

Unfortunately, Dr Robinson preferred to study the evidence, and found the precise opposite.

His analysis showed that the overwhelming reason for Maori numbers dwindling in the second half of the century was the slaughter of tens of thousands of breeding-age males in the intertribal genocides of the first.

That plus the customary Maori practice of female infanticide. [6]

Dr Robinson regrets that he agreed to conceal his findings in order to be paid. But once safely retired he made good, telling all in The Corruption of New Zealand Democracy – A Treaty Overview.

Another insider to voice dismay at this uniquely Kiwi kangaroo court was that arbiter of journalistic ethics Brian Priestly, who in 1998 said:

“Years ago I attended several sessions [of the Waitangi Tribunal] while advising the Ngai Tahu on public relations for their claims.

It would be hard to imagine any public body less well organised to get at the truth.There was no cross examination. Witnesses were treating with sympathetic deference.The people putting the Crown’s side of things seemed equally anxious not to offend.

In three months I don’t think I was asked a single intelligent, awkward question. I should have been.I resigned because I am basically a puzzler after the truth and not a one-eyed supporter of causes.” [7]

And so to today, and Sir Eddie Durie’s latest confession, when tackled about his conflict of interest in claiming water rights for his tribe from the Tribunal he used to chair:

 “I believe we as Maori do not have the same luxury to observe the same ethics.” [8]

Since when was ethics a luxury – especially for a judge?

When reminded on TVNZ’s Q&A
programme that by law nobody owns
water, Durie shot back “That’s Pakeha
law. That’s a different law.”

Sir Eddie’s claim that water was more crucial to the Maori than to the British is insulting.

(How quickly the Griever focus has switched from the traditional obsession with land.) [9]

How does he think those landlubbers and their farm animals hydrated their squishy bodies?

With what substance did farmers irrigate their pastures?

What was that big wet wobbly thing that British warships and traders bobbed about on?

When reminded on TVNZ’s Q&A programme that by law nobody owns water, Durie shot back, “That’s Pakeha law. That’s a different law.” [10]

Yet he would know better than anyone that the Treaty says nothing about Pakeha law or “the Maori legal scheme” that he claimed existed, and everything about all New Zealanders having equal rights under one law.

With this outburst, Sir Eddie has become a one-man advertisement for a Colourblind State.

He and today’s other Griever Maori leaders dishonour the memory of Ngata, Pomare, Carroll and Buck.

___________________________________

[1] The Treaty of Waitangi – An Explanation, Sir A. Ngata, Maori Purposes Fund Board, 1922.

[2] Papers Relative to the Native Insurrection, Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1863 Session I, E-05.

[3] The New Zealand Wars, Vol. II, J. Cowan, p.125.

[4] Cowan, p.333.

[5] NZ Herald, November 17, 1999, p. A14.

[6] The Corruption of New Zealand Democracy – A Treaty Overview, J. Robinson, Tross Publishing, 2011, pp.11-20.

[7] Ngai Tahu claim: too little critical analysis, Evening Post, April 3, 1998.

[8] Dominion Post, August 11, 2012, p.C3.

[9] TVNZ Q&A, August 19, 2012, transcript of Sir Eddie Durie – Haami Piripi interview.

[10] Q&A as above.

___________________________________

PHOTO CAPTION: John Ansell calls himself a ‘conviction copywriter’, who hates selfish politicians, and is known for distilling political concepts into the plainest of English.

He created the ‘Iwi/Kiwi’ billboard series for National in 2005, two award-winning radio campaigns for Labour in 1987 and 1993, and in 2011 fell out with ACT over his proposed press ad headline ‘Fed up with the Maorification of Everything?’

He sees the racially-rigged National-Maori Constitutional Review as a major threat to our country and has founded Colourblind New Zealand to see if a referendum reinforced by a hard-hitting public education campaign can succeed where politicians have failed to halt the appeasement of Griever Maori.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last month’s Treatygate story in elocal launched John Ansell’s Colourblind State campaign to end racial favouritism. View Part 1 online at www.elocal.co.nz and comment on Part 2 on our blog.

Thanks for all the comments so far and for your donations.

Donors large and small have already chipped in nearly $100,000 towards John’s advertising fighting fund of $2 million.

To keep the total snowballing, email john@johnansell.co.nz and follow more of John’s articles at www.johnansell.wordpress.com.

___________________________________

Thanks to Mykeljon for the coverage, Brenda and Rachel for your design skills, to Mike, Ross, Martin, John, John, Jean, Colin, Bruce, David, Trina, Don, Hugh, Caroline, Garth, and Graham for sharing your knowledge, to Iris, Stephen, Jordan, Simon, ’Simon’, Helen, Mary, Tom, Robbie, Wendy, Basil, Karen, Lyn, Phil and Ian for your support and suggestions, and to all of you concerned citizens who’ve dipped into your own pockets to get this campaign going.

We’ve still got a long way to go, but we’ve made a promising start.

Please spread the word to click this button!

Brown Brother: the words

In response to your requests, here are the words of
Joshua Iosefo’s poetic speech from the previous post:

I

am

brown.

Brown like the bark

of the palm tree

which supports my heritage.

Brown like the table

at which my family

sits and eats upon.

Brown like the paper bag

containing burgers and fries

by which my people consume.

Brown like the mud

on a rugby field

by which my people play.

Brown like the coat

of the guitar

by which my people strum.

Brown like the sugar or the crust,

the grain or the nut,

whatever ingredient you want

to use to mix up

and around.

You see, my brother,

I

am

brown.

My demographic is

high school cleaning ladies,

fast food burger-making,

factory box-packing,

rubbish truck drivers,

bus drivers, taxi drivers, sober drivers

and living-off-the-pension joy riders.

I am a dropout.

I hate science, maths, English,

love PE, music, dance and drama.

I play rugby. No –

I’m pretty good at rugby.

And if I am lucky

my future in rugby

might be sealed,

not to reveal

my flaws in education

which are faulty

because hey,

who needs to be able

to quote Shakespeare

if you can play rugby?

I will probably never graduate,

and if I do I will be the first –

either by myself or with a baby

in, or beside, me –

victim of teen pregnancy

with a guy in high school

I thought was skux.

(Which really sucks.)

You see, when push came to shove

he just couldn’t pay the bucks.

While I was focusing

on this relationship

I was trying to get my

NCEA 1, 2 and 3

purely on luck.

Now I am stuck

in the muck

trying to scrub

my skin with Lux

soap, trying to scrub

away the fat

that I have added

to the brown statistic.

While my mother

is a gambler

and my father

is an alcoholic

I will always blame

the government

and everybody else around

me, but never myself.

Because

I

am

brown.

And whenever someone tries

to breach my comfort zone

or whenever I don’t

have anything else to say

in defence in an argument

I’m just gonna say

that “you’re a racist”;

that your words are a mockery

to my skin tone and my colour.

Oh, but brown brother

you were doing that

the day you performed Cinderella,

or Bro Town, Sione’s Wedding,

and do I have to mention… the GC?

Now I don’t mean to condescend –

I mean, these shows are great, don’t get me wrong –

but can anyone explain:

Will there ever be a time

when our representation goes deeper

than putting our own people to shame?

Will the stereotype

of an illiterate, misbehaved,

unintelligent Polynesian

still be the same?

Will it ever change?

Or are we still going to sell ourselves short

for a few seconds of fame?

Are we not capable

of an art form

that is thought-provoking

or seen as a form

of intelligence?

Or are we going to keep

to our low standards

of what we feel

is “culturally relevant”?

Instead of mocking our foreign traditions

we need to start being real

about the world that we live in,

like our fight against drugs,

or our fight against violence,

or our fight against what reasonable force is

with our kids,

or how statistically

Maori and Pacific Islanders

are low academic achievers,

brown brother.

Now I’m not saying

that we need to forget

our culture in order to gain,

for we are all the same.

I’m just saying

that I’m sick and tired

of my people feeling

that they belong

at the bottom of the food chain,

brown brother.

Are we not more

than an F.O.B. –

immigrants from the islands

in search of a J-O-B?

Are we not more

than the eye can see?

Can we not move

mountains from point A to point B?

Are we not more

than assets to the 1^st XV?

Are we not more

than gamblers at a pokie machine?

Are we not more

than [jandals and golden teeth?]?

Are we not more

than our gamblers at the T.A.B.?

Are we not capable

of attaining a bachelor’s,

a master’s, or a PhD?

Brown brother – look at me!

You can do all things through Christ –

Philippians 4:13 –

you are more than capable.

And I don’t say that

just to make you feel better,

I say that

because I know,

because your creator told

me to tell you so.

You will go places,

you will tell stories,

so do not feel alone –

for your God,

your family and your home

will forever be inside

the marrow of your bones.

So do not fret,

do not regret,

because wherever you go

you take us with you,

brown brother.

Do not be afraid to be the first –

the first to graduate,

the first to climb,

the first prime minister or

the first good [wife?],

brown brother.

Do not be afraid

to be the change –

not a change in skin tone

or colour,

but a change in mindset.

From one brown brother

to another.

Thanks to Michael for transcribing.
I’ve been chatting to Josh Iosefo on Facebook and
hope he’ll come here and fill in the gaps in my (ie his) script.

Ngai Tahu advisor resigned over one-eyed Waitangi Tribunal

Those of you who remember The Fourth Estate TV show from the 1980s will remember legendary media critic Brian Priestley MBE as a relentless seeker of truth and balance.

Mr Priestley had to say about the Waitangi Tribunal:

“Years ago I attended several sessions while advising the Ngai Tahu on public relations for their claims.

It would be hard to imagine any public body less well organised to get at the truth.

There was no cross examination.

Witnesses were treating with sympathetic deference.

The people putting the Crown’s side of things seemed equally anxious not to offend.

In three months I don’t think I was asked a single intelligent, awkward question.

I should have been.

I resigned because I am basically a puzzler after the truth and not a one-eyed supporter of causes.”

Thanks to Colin Rawle for this quote from a story headed Ngai Tahu claim: too little critical analysis in Wellington’s Evening Post of April 3, 1998.

To donate to my campaign to expose the Treatygate fraud and make New Zealand a Colourblind State free of all racial favouritism by 2014, click here.

NBR online: record response to Treatygate story

Rod Vaughan tells me his article on Treatygate has produced the most feedback of any story in the three year history of NBR online.

He will soon be doing a follow-up story that will reveal details of a Maori friend’s similar campaign against the Grievers, and my approach to a leading lawyer about mounting a court challenge to the legitimacy and shonky dealings of the Waitangi Tribunal.

TREATYGATE — Time to Expose the Con

This article is now running in elocal magazine, thanks to one of our country’s few courageous media owners, Mykeljon Winckel.

It explains the double-pronged campaign I’m planning to end the Treaty Grievance Industry.

Read it here, or double click the pic.

TREATYGATE

 Wake Up New Zealand, We’re Being Conned!

by John Ansell

Photo of yours truly in the church yard at Russell pointing to a headstone that neatly negates the latter day lie that Ngapuhi chiefs did not cede sovereignty in 1840:

IN MEMORY OF
TAMATI WAKA NENE
CHIEF OF NGAPUHI
THE FIRST TO WELCOME
THE QUEEN’S SOVEREIGNTY
IN NEW ZEALAND

A friend asked me recently, “Do you think truth still matters in New Zealand?”

I froze.

I couldn’t give him the answer he wanted.

Because for too many members of the New Zealand elite,  certainly including state Treaty historians, the answer is no.

Evidence-based critical thinking is out. Ideology-based wishful thinking is in.

We have become the Land of the Long White Lie.

Telling the truth in New Zealand can get a stroppy copywriter into a power of trouble.

Last year I fumed to a reporter, no doubt after yet another holocaustic exaggeration by a neotribal extortionist demanding my water or flora or sky, that Maori had gone from the Stone Age to the Space Age in 150 years and had yet to say thanks.

For pointing out this irrefutable fact, I was roasted by Rosemary McLeod, disowned by Don Brash, and honoured by an anonymous brown supremacist with my very own Facebook page ‘John Ansell is a Racist F***wit’.

However, I was also contacted by a Maori friend, who gleefully trumpeted how clever his people had been to make such stellar progress, and, in the absence of my forebears, thanked me most profusely.

These two opposite reactions caused me to divide Maori into two broad groups, which I call Achievers and Grievers.

The Achievers I admire very much, especially those who – sadly – feel they have to escape to Australia to live the lives of equal New Zealanders.

But the Grievers I can’t abide.

They clearly descend from the ethically-flexible rebel minority who breached the Treaty in the wars of the nineteenth century, and their inflated sense of entitlement has been costing the rest of us dearly.

It is a charming but potentially fatal flaw of New Zealanders that we want to be nice to people at all costs.

Unfortunately there is a fine line between niceness and cowardice.

Being nice to Griever Maori can be very costly indeed – especially when the iwi elite are aided and abetted in their extortion attempts by all the other elites– the political, bureaucratic, academic, judicial, legal, and media.

The approach of successive governments since the early seventies can be summed up by a word most commonly associated with the late thirties: appeasement.

Consider the Evidence

• We’ve had prime ministers inventing Treaty principles out of thin air, forging unnecessary alliances with Maori separatists, and surrendering our beaches so they can be handed to iwi in secret by their very own tame minister.
• We’ve had a corrupt Waitangi Tribunal refusing to pay researchers whose findings do not support their racist fantasy, and a Race Relations Commissioner who instructs councils to create special seats for one race only.
• We’ve had historians hushing up the 1989 discovery of the final English draft of the Treaty when they realised that Hobson included “all the people of New Zealand”, not just Maori.
• We’ve had activist judges pretending that this 1840 sovereignty-for-protection deal was an equal partnership between the world’s then-greatest empire and dozens of warring stone age tribes that the British had saved from cannibalism, slavery and extinction.
• We’ve had battalions of lawyers making fortunes from bogus claims, with one of those lawyers now the minister in charge of rubber stamping those claims. [This sentence was left out of the article for some reason - possibly legal.]
• And we’ve had an editor of a major daily who refused to run an entirely factual election ad asking if you’re fed up with pandering to Maori radicals, yet was happy to cite free speech in defending a cartoon that compared welfare minister Paula Bennett with Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele.

On second thoughts, appeasement is too wimpish a word for such a sustained and orchestrated con.

The only word that cuts the mustard is TREATYGATE.

The elite’s methodology is clear…

The Treatygate Con

1. Get state academics to rewrite New Zealand history as a fantasy novel, where the Maoris are the goodies and the British the baddies.
2. Get state schools and universities to indoctrinate New Zealanders with this fake history.
3. Get the bogus historians to slam past historians as unreliable (even those who witnessed the actual events or interviewed those who were there).
4. Get the state media to peddle the fake history to stoke Maori grievance and Pakeha guilt.
5. Get iwi to fake claims to right fake wrongs.
6. Set up a state tribunal to hear these fake Maori claims.
7. Pay senior lawyers to represent Maori, and junior lawyers to represent the Crown.
8. Give the tribunal sole  power to interpret the Treaty.
9. Let the tribunal approve claims based on pure hearsay.
10. Make all Treaty-related documents as hard to find, and hard to read, as possible.
11. Brand as ‘racist’ anyone who questions any Maori entitlement.
12. If enough people object, threaten a race war.
13. To continue the resource grab indefinitely, entrench a Treaty-based, Bolivian-style constitution where indigenous people are more equal than others.
14. Pretend that Maori are indigenous to New Zealand, when they sailed here just before the Europeans, and suppress the mounting evidence that other races got here first.
15. Pretend at all times that Maori remain a separate race, even though they’re all now part-Pakeha.

For the last year I’ve been studying Crown-Maori history intensively with the help of nine authors who have written more than thirty books on the subject.

The scale of the Treatygate fraud is massive and reaches into every agency of the New Zealand state.

But What Can We Do?

It will take money, but I believe the secret of success is a powerful public education campaign using the plainest of English, rolling out one fascinating fact, one ad or poster at a time.

The goal is to get sheepish Kiwis, ‘the Passionless People’, to understand what has been done to them, and to tell their politicians, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more!”

If we can make Treatygate a Top Three issue when the big parties do their polling, then our leaders will have no choice but to listen and act.

Here’s the plan…

How to Defeat the Con

1. Launch Colourblind New Zealand, and set a goal to lock in one law for all by December 2014.
2. Raise a $2 million fighting fund so the politicians know we’re able to embarrass them.
3. Petition for a referendum at the 2014 election. Question: “Do you want New Zealand to be a Colourblind State, with one law for all, and no racial favouritism of any kind?”
4. How to make the PM obey the referendum result? Run lots of bold Treatygate ads telling voters just who has been conning them, and how.
5. If media refuse to run these ads, use rival media to expose them as part of the con.
6. Bombard government MPs with instructions from their voters to obey their will.
7. Support local body campaigns on Maori wards (typically attracting an 80% NO vote).

With your support I hope to work full-time on this project until New Zealand is a Colourblind State.

The racially-rigged Constitutional Advisory Panel has already begun the process of changing the constitution by stealth, meeting mainly with Maori groups in contravention of its pledge to meet a wide range of New Zealanders.

So there’s not a moment to lose.

Because truth does matter.

If you’d like to help and/or donate to this campaign to free NewZealand from this perverse reverse apartheid, please email me at john@johnansell.co.nz.

This is not a religious or political party-driven campaign.

I simply want the government to give us the racial equality that the Treaty promised.

Photo caption:

John Ansell calls himself a ‘conviction copywriter’, who hates selfish politicians, and is known for distilling political concepts into the plainest of English.

He created the ‘Iwi/Kiwi’ billboard series for National in 2005, two award-winning radio campaigns for Labour in 1987 and 1993, and in 2011 fell out with ACT over his proposed press headline ‘Fed up with the Maorification of Everything?’

He sees the racially-rigged National-Maori Constitutional Review as a major threat to our country and has founded Colourblind New Zealand to see if a referendum, reinforced by a hard-hitting public education campaign, can succeed where politicians have failed to halt the appeasement of Griever Maori.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

The latest water rights issue where Maori are simply extorting ‘free’ shares from asset sales under the artificial privileged race umbrella is nothing short of racial abuse.

To quote Muriel Newman’s NZCPR:

“Another myth perpetrated by tribal leaders is that the first settlers ‘owned’ the whole country. This is totally illogical and a complete fabrication.

“New Zealand’s small population did not ‘own’ the whole country. In the days before private property rights were established by the rule of law, people ‘owned’ what they could defend.

“Common areas like mountains and wilderness areas, the foreshore and seabed, rivers and lakes, were not ‘owned’ by anyone but were used by all.

“The same goes for resources — minerals, the sea, the air, our water, wild animals and plants, and other common goods.”

When John Ansell approached elocal with Treatygate, I decided to run his story on the basis that Maori continue to have a privileged NZ media platform to expound their radical views and it’s time the NZ race have their say.

I invite our readers to have their comment. Blog on www.elocal.co.nz.

_____________________________________________

CLOSING GROVEL

My planned ad campaign will not happen unless a whole lot of Kiwis like you are prepared to dig deep to save your country.

If a lot of us give a little, and a few give a lot, we can stop the professional grievers and their ‘useful idiot’ appeasers in their tracks.

Please give whatever you can afford, and send this link to everyone you know.

My latest Close Up ambush

Incensed by the Popata brothers’ chillingly thuggish display on Monday night, I rang Close Up first thing Tuesday and offered to provide some push-back.

Next thing you know, I’m being flown to Auckland for a debate with Hone Harawira and the supposedly ‘moderate’ young Maori blogger Morgan Godfery.

Why is it that the state broadcaster always feels the need to outnumber me two-to-one with lefties — who inevitably and rather tiresomely then label me an extreme right-winger, racist or liar.

Last time it was Willie Jackson and Paul Spoonley, this time Hone and Morgan.

Morgan seemed a pleasant chap, who has done extraordinarily well to become a spokesman for the Maori moderati at the tender age of 20.

After the show, we chatted amicably for two hours, sharing a taxi, dinner and plane ride back to Wellington.

Then he wrote this.

(Note my various replies in the comments section.)

There was a time when being flayed alive by blog commenters used to upset me.

Now I just smile and think of all the intelligent readers they’re alienating by responding to facts with abuse.

Morgan will learn this lesson in due course. 

But back to Close Up.

Sadly, Hone couldn’t be with us in person, as he was hikoiing in Kaitaia.

I found his performance rather subdued compared with my experience last year with the foaming fool Jackson.

(Maybe Hone was knackered after a hard day’s hikoiing. Or maybe it was a deliberate strategy to differentiate himself from his bully boy proteges.)

My strategy was twofold:

1. To seed the phrase Colourblind State into the national conversation.
2. To alert the public to the upcoming Constitutional Review, and the Maori Party’s agenda to impose a Bolivian-style animist/communist/racist constitution.

The more the Lefties mock me for suggesting this wacky-sounding plan (the actual declared agenda of Marxists like Margaret Mutu and Nin Thomas), the less comfortable they’re going to feel promoting it.

I also wanted to confront Maori with their extraordinarily violent past, not for the sheer joy of causing offence (despite undoubtedly doing so), but to wake them up to the real source of their present violence.

Namely: their forefathers, not mine.

The sad truth is that Maori in 1840 were 42 warring, cannibal, communist, slave-owning dictatorships.

The British did not destroy them, as we’ve been led to believe.

In fact, they saved them from blasting and hacking themselves to extinction.

(Somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 Maori — up to half the race — were killed in the Musket Wars of the 1820s and 30s, compared with about 2,000 in the Sovereignty Wars of the 1860s.)

Today, thanks to inter-breeding, Christianity and British law, they’ve shed most of those violent tendencies, but (understandably) not all.

All peoples, perhaps bar the Moriori, have had to confront a brutal past, very much including Europeans.

Thanks to Christianity (once they’d got through their witch-burning phase), Europeans gave up the bloodlust, and Maori followed suit when they became equal members of the British Empire.

[A commenter has pointed out that my claim that Europeans have renounced violence is not entirely plausible, given the many wars that have been waged on that continent since 1840.

But I'm talking about daily life, which, I hope even he will agree, is less violent than it used to be.]

When Hone and Morgan claim that until Maori achieve the same health, wealth and homicide rates as Pakeha they’ll need more and more Pakeha money, they’re arguing from a position of greed, not logic.

After all, as all Maori radicals seem strangely happy to highlight, Maori are still at the bottom of every social statistic.

Still at rock bottom — after being showered with billions of dollars of benefits, and up to five full and final Treaty settlements.

Clearly, more money is not the answer.

Could that be, I wonder, because too much of it is going to feather the nests of their millionaire leaders?

Whatever, it’s time we turned off the tap and asked Maori to look inward for the answers, not outwards.

It’s time they followed their Achievers, not these Grievers.

I couldn’t get all of these messages across in the debate, but I hope I showed that not all New Zealanders are prepared to be cowed by the standover tactics of wide boys and thugs.

As I said on Close Up, our fathers and grandfathers (including those in the Maori Battalion) went to war for this country.

They paid for their patriotism with their blood.

Thousands more, Maori and Pakeha, paid with their lives.

Have we become so feeble that we’re prepared to surrender this vibrant nation that our forebears clawed from raw bush, with blood, brains, sweat, tears and guts, to a violent minority of a decent minority, for fear of being called a name?

Should we fence all rivers to protect toddlers from slack parents?

The Dominion Post devotes half this morning’s front page to the bleatings of a drowned toddler’s uncle that the council should have fenced the river in which his 2 year old nephew drowned.

A family hit by a drowning tragedy had repeatedly pleaded with the council to build a fence where a toddler died.

Sukhraj Singh, 2, died and his cousin Archilles Kaui, 3, remains in hospital in a critical condition after the pair wandered into Gisborne’s Taruheru River on Thursday.

“I’ve been asking myself all night, would this have happened if the fence was put up in our neighbourhood? And the answer is no. Because those toddlers would not have been able to get past the fence”, Sukhraj’s uncle Hemi Jahnke said.

And why were the toddlers able to get anywhere near the river? The Dom finally reveals all in paragraph 10:

Before the tragedy, Archilles’ mother, Diana McIntyre, had been visiting Sukhraj’s mother, Jamie Taewa, at her home in Atkinson St. It was thought about 10 to 15 minutes passed before the women noticed the two toddlers had wandered off.

Well sorry, but any mother who lets a toddler out of her sight for 10 or 15 minutes near a river has no one to blame but herself if the child drowns.

That’s a hard thing to write at this sad time, especially as the poor mother may well have arrived at the same conclusion and does not necessarily share the uncle’s view.

But for the uncle to blame the council (ie the rest of us) is outrageously unfair.

Members of the family were part of community group Kia Kaha Mangapapa, a charitable trust started to try to make a positive difference in the area. The idea of a fence at the reserve was brought up at several hui called with Gisborne District Council last year. Archilles’ parents, Ms McLean and Frank Kaui, attended one of the meetings.

Mr Jahnke said the council had agreed to put up the fence.

“They did have a plan for the fence but because the fence was going to cost too much it started getting smaller and smaller. Eventually it turned into just a fence around the culvert.”

He was angry with the council.

“How many lives have been lost in river accidents because the council says they haven’t got enough money?

“And them listening now is not going to bring back Sukhraj. It’s not going to bring back a baby boy. But someone needs to be held accountable.”

Damn right. And I think most of us have a fair idea who.

Gisborne District Council acting chief executive Nedine Thatcher-Swann said it was “inconclusive” whether fencing the reserve would have made a difference at this stage.

Fencing every waterway into which a poorly supervised toddler could wander would certainly make a huge difference to the amount of public money available for other services. Or to Gisborne residents’ rates bills.

In my view the Council did exactly the right thing in refusing to assume the role of parents.

“Around the country and the world it is very unusual to find our natural environments – rivers, lakes or ponds – fenced.”

And so it should be. Do we really want to turn our country into an unsightly baby-prison, just so we can protect our toddlers from slack parents?

I grew up in a house near the Waiwhetu Stream in Fairfield, Lower Hutt. The Stream got a bad press for being badly polluted down the industrial end, but the suburban reaches were and are a delightfully meandering waterway that greatly enhances the ambience of the area.

It remains unfenced, despite being bounded by houses for miles, and is dotted with reserves, also unfenced.

Presumably, parents who choose to live there, like mine did, also take responsibility for watching their children.

I hope the Dominion Post will reflect on the message their story sends, and provide some balance in the coming days.

Ad that Dom banned cleared by ASA

My ACT ad that contained 40 statements of fact has been cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority.

MAORI RADICALS ADVERT NOT IN BREACH – ASA

The Advertising Standards Authority has rejected a complaint about ACT’s controversial “Fed up with pandering to Maori radicals?” newspaper advertisement.

Twelve people argued the advert was “misleading, offensive, racist, in breach of the requirement for a due sense of social responsibility and likely to play on fear”.

The ASA said a political party advocating a robust view on matters of public interest allowed the public to see the party’s position. There was no breach of codes and no grounds for the complaints to proceed, it ruled.

Yet the Dominion Post refused to “allow the public to see the party’s position”. 

As a private company, they had the right to ban the ad. (Whether they had the right to charge ACT full price for the space is another matter.)

But the public also has the right to know that the capital’s daily newspaper is politically biased against ACT.

This is the ad that the Herald ran, and the Dom banned:

What sort of democracy do we live in when a monopoly newspaper can be so cravenly politically correct as to ban a question that most of its readers would answer Yes to, backed by 40 true statements?

The Evans Bay Turtle

What is it about Wellington and its circular landmarks with eccentric nicknames?

The under-50s won’t remember when the twin-domed Welsh Dragon Bar in the middle of Kent and Cambridge Terraces used to be a public toilet block, known by all as the Taj Mahal.

At the far end of the same dual-dragstrip is the Basin Reserve, so named after the 1855 earthquake turned Basin Lake into a swamp, which the council then turned into a sports reserve.

Over in Thorndon there’s the parliamentary Beehive, which Sir Basil Spence designed on the back of a serviette. And the Cake Tin, named by yours truly in response to a call for a nickname by the Evening Post’s Angus Morrison.

(Note: popular rumour has it that the Cake Tin was named by an Auckland talk show host, which is why it wasn’t popular for a long time with Wellingtonians. Still others say it was Andrew Mehrtens. Being a rather obvious name, it was probably all three of us.)

And now we have a new stadium to name: the Kilbirnie Indoor Sports Centre in Evans Bay. It’s not quite circular, but near enough.

The Dom Post’s Hank Schouten is calling for nicknames, so I sent in this letter:

Like the Cake Tin, the new Kilbirnie Indoor Sports Centre is a good example of smooth, single-minded design.

Now, what to call it?

I worry that the architects’ favourite, The Limpet, while anatomically accurate, might be a bit, well, limp to catch on.

So what about the Saucer (as in flying), the Clam, the Oyster, the Stingray, the Flounder, the Slater or the Frisbee?

(Had they built it where Councillor Andy Foster wanted, it could have been the Downtown Indoor Sports Centre — DISC.)

A friend of mine argues noisily for The Trilobite, a creature I had not heard of, but which it clearly resembles.

But the nickname with the best combination of stickability and seaside relevance would have to be the Turtle.

What do you think? Feel free to suggest a name of your own. I may run a poll of the best of them.

But to me, if I squint as I drive round the bays I see a beached, bleached white turtle shell whose occupant is wisely staying indoors.

(As well he might. When I drove past on Monday, there was thick snow just around the corner in Shelly Bay.)

How we make the news in Aussie these days

The Tasman wage gap, which John Key once pretended to want to close, is also a poverty gap.

Here’s how it’s being reported in Australia. 

Of course, setting the poverty line at 60% of median income is a typical lefty linguistic trick. 

Poverty is starvation. Being only 60% as rich as the averge person is envy.

Still, relative to 30 other First World nations, New Zealand’s performance is shameful:

20th for children living in poor households

21st for infant mortality

29th for measles immunisation rates

29th for child health and safety

3oth for teen suicides.

Thanks Ross for sending me this clipping.

NBR editorial on Maorification

I coined the word Maorification with the deliberate goal of getting it into the language.

When ACT declined to use it, I decided to use it myself.

To me, no word less blunt — no euphemism like the racialisation preferred by my friend Stephen Franks — can do justice to the process by which New Zealand is being taken over by radical Maori.

Every day, I wonder whether it was the right thing to do to use that word.

It goes without saying in this topsy-turvy land that it would get me branded a racist. Anyone who refuses to agree that Maori should own New Zealand out to the 200 mile limit is branded a racist.

And sadly, it was always bound to upset some very good Maori people. (Not to mention legions of cringing white ’wets’ eager to suck up to Maoridom and disown their Western inheritance at every opportunity.)

But I think it was the right decision. Like it or not, Maorification is the right word.

Because this reverse takeover of the silent (and silenced) majority by a noisy, intimidating minority is real. It’s affecting and infecting every institution in our society.

And it’s speeding up. 

And if we don’t jolt people into recognising the extent of it, it will soon be too late.

And so I was pleased to read this in today’s NBR editorial:

Beware sting in taniwha’s tail

A government plan to dovetail New Zealand into tail-wagging Maorification must be resisted.

If mishandled, the continued insidious encroachment into national affairs of the Treaty of Waitangi, its floating and fanciful “principles,” and craven kow-towing to a tax-draining minority, will impede – not enhance – economic development.

Foreign and onshore investors, as well as trading partners, may think twice when they see a country regarded as multiculturally stable embark on a path fraught with the prospect of racial privilege. Thanks to Maori and appeasing politicians, New Zealanders remain unnecessarily confused and at odds over a myriad of so-called “Maori issues,” including the true status of the foreshore and seabed, for example.

Confused largely and quite deliberately by Appeaser-General Chris Finlayson — champion (when he wants to be) of plain English law.

Conflict continues over ownership of natural resources.

The rabid property demands of Tuhoe – who want their own private fiefdom in the hills – are evidence of a brand of racial separatism that has no place in New Zealand.

This uncertainty for the majority has now spilled over into who may use national symbols such as the silver fern, who may perform a haka and who pays for clipping the lucrative koha ticket.

I prefer to use the true meaning of koha: ’bribe the tribe’. Let’s be honest, when a sum of koha can persuade a taniwha to return to its lair (as happened with the Waikato Expressway), we are dealing with an extortion racket.

Collectively, various Maori demands have been accommodated to such an extent that the pendulum has swung too far toward a minority at the risk of damaging the national good.

I use the pendulum analogy too. It’s about balance and fairness, and we cannot strike a fair balance when so much of the truth about the Treaty and its signatories remains unknown by the public.

Which is why greater scrutiny is needed over a recently announced 12-member constitutional advisory panel, whose dominant terms of reference are heavily skewed to favour the Maori minority. The ostensible purpose of the panel, which will cost the taxpayer $2 million in its first year, is to conduct a “wide-ranging review of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements.”

This includes the size of parliament, length of the electoral term, Maori representation, the role of the Treaty and whether a written constitution is needed.

While some objects are worthy of careful consideration on behalf of all New Zealanders, the blatant swing toward matters favouring Maori should give cause for concern.

Maori Affairs Minister and Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples, for one, sees consultation with Maori and the place of the Treaty in just about everything as a priority.

It is evidence of the strong pro-Maori slant that the panel will report to Dr Sharples and Deputy Prime Minister Bill English.

In the proud National tradition of allowing the Maori Affairs Select Committee to hear submissions into the Marine and Coastal Areas Bill!

While the panel’s musings and recommendations could simply be ignored, this is unlikely given its influential Maori imbalance.

With five “non-Maori New Zealanders,” five Maori, one Pacific Islander and one of “Asian ethnicity,” the panel is, on the surface, stacked against more than three-quarters of the population.

Figures produced in a 2010 Ministry of Social Development report on population ethnicity showed New Zealand’s population to be 77% European, 15% Maori, 10% Asian and 7% Pacific Island. (The same report projected the 2016 population would be 73% European, 16% Maori, 13% Asian and 8% Pacific Island.)

I see they had the same trouble I had with the MSD stats inflating the total to 109%.

The 77% actually includes ‘Other’ and ‘New Zealanders’, so I thought it safer to use the number 68%. But it makes no difference to the point they’re (and I was) making. 

While Vote Maori will contribute $500,000 and the Ministry of Justice $1.5 million to pay for this panel, Maori get a greater say than their representation in the general population.

Economic growth and investment confidence should not be threatened or undermined by the potentially nation-fracturing agenda of a minority.

It’s fair to say most New Zealanders believe the present constitutional structure works, based largely on the proven democratic Westminster system and backed by the rule of law.

And more of them need to say so. That’s why this issue needs to be front-footed. People need to learn not to be silenced by the threat of being called racist. That’s a trick, and it’s worked a treat, and it’s high time it stopped working.

While Maori continue to be over-represented in the unemployment, child abuse, drug using, anti-social and general criminal offending stakes, some hotheads have demanded farcical “rights” over land and citizenship.

These demands, while nothing more than thinly disguised racial separatism, if met would still require all other New Zealanders to pay for them.

While a constitutional advisory panel should act in the interests of all New Zealanders, the racial bogeyman already stalks the land.

Well said. 

And I do like this anonymous reader’s comment:

I dont believe it !
Finally an article with the spine and backbone to tell it like it is…
Is it possible that finally the little kiwi can face up to the reality that enough is enough.
Only last month a Muriel Newman blog article stated “What all of this means is that talk of Maori marginalisation is self-serving nonsense. A recent government report estimated the total value of Maori corporate assets at a whopping $37 billion. Thanks to the generosity of New Zealand taxpayers, the Maori aristocracy has become very rich, and is getting richer. Maori leaders could use their vast resources to lift the performance and aspirations of their people. They choose not to. “

Waiting for the usual chip on shoulder cringe pc set to do the usual in defense of their wallets….But maybe the taniwhas just a worm due for turning.

Thanks to reader Graham for alerting me to the NBR.

New London Olympics logo

    

Thanks Mike for sending me this. Wish I’d thought of it!

 

Well done, DomPost

After hammering the Dominion Post on Close Up for banning my ACT ‘Maori radicals ad’ that contained 40 statements of truth, I’m pleased to be able to congratulate the paper for yesterday making these two letters their lead and second letters of the day:

Where does that ‘science’ definition leave Al Gore, then?

Lorna Sutherland’s comments (Letters, August 8) highlight an interesting attitude to democracy and proper science. 

(That’s meant to say August 8. Of all the eccentric habits of WordPress, automatically turning the number eight followed by a close bracket into a smile takes the cake!) 

Does she agree that her denial that Lord Monckton should be permitted a platform to discuss climate change extends to former United States vice- president Al Gore, who is similarly lacking expertise and experience in science?

Is she aware that Dr John Abraham’s comments on Lord Monckton are subject to critical comments about misrepresentation and falsehoods ?

By what measure would we ever give the Greens, Niwa’s Dr James Renwick or anybody else the right to decide what may be presented by any person on any subject in public?

Real science is proven by sceptical trial and debate. False science has hidden data, insufficient record of proof, and protection from open query and dissenting opinion.

Real science isn’t proven by so-called consensus, authority or taking someone’s word for it.

Is Ms Sutherland aware no peer- reviewed scientific proof appears to exist that climate change, warming or whatever is driven by human-induced carbon-dioxide emissions, and the theory is supported by conjecture only?

I suggest she take tuition on what it means to live in a democracy.

GRAHAM CLAYTON
Taupo 

What have these people to fear?

Our climate change scientists and, maybe, politicians, seem to be running scared. They have refused to debate climate change with Lord Monckton because the matter is now agreed upon and settled among scientists. Really?

It was also said that to debate with him would give Lord Monckton and his unscientific ideas credibility. If our scientists’ views, which cost a lot of money, are so right, what have they to fear?

IRENE FAGAN
Island Bay

Well said, Graham and Irene.

Maorification of Constitution begins as Sharples stacks advisory panel

This really stinks.

If you thought the Marine and Coastal Areas Act was a hijack of democracy, it’s nothing compared to what’s coming.

Next on the Maori-National government’s Maorification agenda is an all-out assault on the New Zealand Constitution itself.

Once they’ve had their way with that, New Zealand as we know it will be gone.

The Maorification of the Constitution began on Thursday with the naming of a wildly disproportionate Constitutional Advisory Panel.

In a country where 68% of the people are European and 15% are Maori, the committee is stacked 50-50.

A 50-50 split may be even. But it’s hardly fair.

The only New Zealand population it remotely resembles is our prison population. 

Pakeha capture

What is the smiling tiger Pita-Peter Sharples up to? No doubt he’s planted a tame Pakeha or two in the panel to give him the crucial majority?

Well, looking down the list above, I see two interesting names.

First, Michael Cullen — my ’Wastemaster-General’ in the Taxathon TV ad of 2005.

This is the former finance minister  who so loved his country that he quite deliberately booby-trapped the economy with a decade of deficits — just to make life harder for the incoming government.

And how does the not-so-Honourable Michael make his living these days?

Why, partly as Principal Treaty Claims Negotiator for Tuwharetoa.

(The tribe to which,  as Treaty Negotiations Minister, he awarded over $100 million of your money in the 2008 ‘Treelords’ settlement.)

Doesn’t that smell a bit fishy to you?

If Cullen is not tame enough, one of the other Pakeha members is former National minister John Luxton.

The panel bio notes that Luxton has expertise in Crown-Maori relations, experience in co-management (as co-chair of the Waikato River Authority) and representing Maori interests.

But at least former ACT MP and investigative journalist Deborah Coddington ought to be a safe bet, right?

I don’t think so. See my UPDATE 3 below.

Hiding the agenda

The consitutional review is  a condition of John Key’s uniquely unnecessary coalition appeasement (sorry, agreement) with the Maori Party.

You know it’s going to be bad when Anthony Hubbard of the Socialist Star-Times tries to snow you that the newly-named panel is  “unlikely to be more than a Mad Hatter’s tea party of unanswerable riddles and pointless in-fighting”.

Yeah right.

The government’s  main agenda is obvious: to elevate the bogus version of the Treaty of Waitangi to the status of official sacred cash cow for their Maori con artist mates to plunder at will.

But look how this lefty journo does his best to keep that news from you.

(Actually you can’t look unless you’ve got the actual paper. His column’s not online.)

First Mr Hubbard diverts your attention to the republican issue.

He pretends that the real reason the committee won’t be looking at ditching the monarchy is that John Key doesn’t want to.

The real reason, of course, is that the Maori Party doesn’t want to. Replacing the Queen could kill the golden Treaty goose. And we can’t have that.

Then he tries to make you believe that the big issues for the panel will be the size of parliament, and the length of the parliamentary term.

And then, and only then – in column six of his six-column column — does he casually gloss over the real hidden agenda:

Some of the other subjects for the committee — the Treaty, Crown-Maori relationships and Maori representation — are contentious in theory but in practice many people find them boring most of the time. New Zealand voters tend to fall asleep when the word “constitution” is mentioned.

Yawn, yawn, nothing to see here, move on.

Boring you to sleep

No doubt the Star-Times, Sharples and Obfuscator-General Finlayson will be pumping out lots of big, boring words to try and keep you comatose for the duration of this constitutional stitch-up. 

But I plan to be doing the exact opposite — stripping their bloated word-carcasses of their fat, and distilling from the layers of putrid gobbledygook their true meaning and hitherto-hidden agenda.

You know where to come for the real truth.

Sharples apparently thinks his Constitutional Advisory Panel is a ‘good mix’.

 Course he does. He’s shamelessly stacked it with a quarter more Maori and a quarter fewer Europeans than their populations warrant.

Ngai Tahu leader Sir Tipene O’Regan and legal scholar John Burrows will lead a government appointed panel which is to lead public discussion on constitutional issues including the status of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Panellists like Sir Tipene (who a friend used to know as Steve “before he became a Maori”. and who told a friend of a friend that he is Tipene “only in certain circles”) will undoubtedly try to lead the public. 

And when he does, I hope by then the public will be savvy enough to push back.

80s Treaty tricks

I hope people like you will ask people like Sir Steve to show you proof that the Treaty is a ’partnership’ that contains ‘principles’.

Because they won’t be able to.

Unless they’re written in invisible ink, there’s nothing whatsoever in the Treaty about partnerships or principles.

Why not? Because they were conjured up in the 1980s out of thin air.

They were the figments of the activist imaginations of a judge, Robin Cooke, and a prime minister, Geoffrey Palmer (who later regretted it, and who some say resigned because of the damage he knew he’d cause).

Once Cooke and Palmer had cooked up this fake Treaty of Waitangi, it became much easier for guys like Tipene-Steve to extort money from you and me.

There is only one place this panel will try to lead you: away from the truth.

Do not go there.

The real deal

The truth is that the Treaty was a simple deal done mainly because the northern Maori had been begging the Brits for ten years to protect them from three very real threats:

• Vengeful Maori — tribes plotting utu for Ngapuhi’s musket massacres of the 1820s.

• Vengeful Froggies – French would-be colonisers bent on avenging the massacre of Marion du Fresne and his crew in 1772.

• Bad Brits — escaped convicts and other disreputables causing trouble in lawless Kororareka.

Without the Treaty, the tribal musketeer-slaver-cannibals would have slaughtered and eaten each other to extinction by 1860.

(I’m not making this up. Between 1825-40, Maori had already blasted, hacked, boiled and gnawed back their numbers from 120,000 to 50-60,000. That, Tariana Turia, was New Zealand’s true holocaust.)

The Treaty deal was that the British got the country, and the Maori got the same rights as the British.

That was pretty much it.

By any measure, it was an excellent deal for the times.  

I’m working on a series of posts that will spell out, point by crystal clear point, what happened before and after the signing of the Treaty — and how  various conmen have been distorting the truth ever since.

But back to this poisonous panel.

Who will speak for non-Maori?

 At least Dr Sharples, unlike Hubbard, is honest enough to admit the panel’s main purpose:

“An important part of the review process will be consultation with Maori, particularly on the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in our constitution,” Dr Sharples said. 

The most important part, I’m sure he meant to say.

“The members of this are well placed to seek out and understand the perspectives of Maori on these important issues.”

Indeed the five Maori members and one Maori employee certainly are.

My question is: who will speak for the 85% of New Zealanders who are not Maori?

And will their views count?

The panel will also consider electoral issues including the size of parliament, the length of the parliamentary term, and number and size of electorates and the status of Maori seats

And with the panel overloaded with Maori, guess what they’ll find?

It will also consider whether New Zealand should have a written constitution and Bill of Rights issues.
Dr Sharples said a Royal Commission was considered to carry out the work, “but just selecting people of mana and a range and setting them up under their own authority and giving a lengthy period would have the same effect”

Course it would. Rigging your own panel is much cleverer than expecting a judge to do your bidding.

(Mind you, our judges are biased enough, as we know from Lord Cooke, and the bench that overturned 160 years of settled law with the Ngati Apa decision on the foreshore and seabed in 2003.)

“These guys don’t actually set the kaupapa, it still comes back to parliament. A Royal Commission usually comes up with some golden recommendations and if you don’t take them people question you.”

Well, we can’t have people questioning us for ignoring expert recommendations (like the 2025 Taskforce), can we?

But with Prime Appeaser John Key and Activist-General/Obfuscator-General/Appeaser-General (you choose) Chris Finlayson driving the Maorification agenda, don’t expect critical  questions to be tolerated.

And if Finlayson’s arrogance over the Marine and Coastal Areas Act is any guide — not to mention chair Tau Henare’s rude put-downs of  submitters to the Maori Affairs Select Committee – don’t expect straight answers. 

UPDATES

UPDATE 1

One of my more abusive commenters has pointed out the difficulty of identifying by race, given that many of us are a mixture of two or more. Certainly, we know that all Maori are.

So here’s an idea: Since we’re such a multicultural lot, why don’t we drop this preoccupation with ethnicity, metaphorically rip off our skins and set up a colour-blind state — with one  law, and one electoral roll,  for us all.

Could work?

UPDATE 2

We now find that Sir Tipene/Steve O’Regan is being sued by the Financial Markets Authority for his role in the Hanover Finance collapse.

Is it OK for a man being sued by one government agency to preside over another government agency – especially one advising on matters at the very core of our national being?

No Prime Minister, it’s not OK.

UPDATE 3

I had puzzled at why the notoriously biased Sharples would include former ACT MP Deborah Coddington on his tame advisory panel.

Was it to give the appearance of balance? Or is Deborah really a wet in dry’s clothing?

(Or just a wet, full stop?)

This Herald article confirms that theory, where she happily parrots the views of tame Treaty industry historian Paul Moon:

“Yes, the English ripped off the Maori, too, when it came to getting them to sign the Treaty of Waitangi.
“Henry Williams deliberately mistranslated from Maori to English to protect his land holdings, and numerous other travesties were perpetrated.”

Then we have this ridiculously saccharine account of Deborah’s dinner with the Turias.

Note the priceless ending: “Leaving is like saying goodnight to kin, such is the warmth of Tariana and George Turia.”

And I’ve no doubt the Turias are very warm, hospitable and genuinely caring people, as are most Maori.

(And, for that matter, most humans.)

But Tariana is the leader of an openly racist political party. And Deborah is an investigative journalist. 

Does this totally uncritical restaurant review suggest to you that Ms Coddington can be trusted to fairly represent your wishes?

STATE MOUTHPIECE MUZZLES MONCKTON: Is TVNZ the new BBC?

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post about TVNZ banning climate sceptic Lord Monckton, it so happens that I myself have been invited to appear on Close-Up tonight to talk about race issues. Should this drive more visitors here, I’m promoting this post to the home page so it’s the first thing they see! I saw and met Monckton today in Wellington and his accounts of similar attempts by the Left to shut him down and smear him were chilling. I’ll be posting on the experience soon. Now on with this post of two days’ ago…

You may recall the recent Close-Up interview with global cooling-warming (take your pick — he does) proponent James Hansen.

And do you recall which sceptic our government TV channel brought in to debate with him to provide balance?

Me neither. 

That’s because they didn’t make him debate anyone.

(The science is settled, remember?)

Now fast forward to this week. Same programme. Same channel. Same issue.

Only this time, the visiting climateer is a sceptic — with a flair for political incorrectitude.

He’s none other than Margaret Thatcher’s former science advisor Lord Christopher Monckton, here for a few days after a rip-roaring tour of Australia.

Now whatever else Monckton may be, he’s not boring. He’s articulate, amusing and opinionated, in the great tradition of British celebs.

In other words, he’s great television. 

So why won’t TVNZ let him on?

Because they can’t find anyone to debate him.

Huh?

Seems at government TV, only the sceptics get challenged. Warmists — even confused ones who used to be coolists –  just get believed.

We’ll come back to TVNZ’s obvious bias later.

But isn’t there something fishy about not one of our loud, proud warm-mongers being prepared to defend their position on this supposed crisis?

After all, the government has just conspired to ratchet up the price of your food and petrol and most everything else.

Why? Because of the supposed desperate need to impose a carbon trading scheme on our already struggling economy.

So wouldn’t you think Nick Smith would be itching to get stuck into the guy who’s been telling him for years that the climate crisis is a hoax?

Or John Key, who used to agree it was a hoax — till he figured there were more votes in saying it wasn’t?

Or any number of Greens, those brave eco-warriors whose relentless pessimism and loathing for their species got us into this mess?

Or one of the eleven experts at the so-called Victoria University climate debate I went to and blogged about — all of them clustered courageously on the same side?

Why doesn’t even one of these ‘believers’ have the courage to defend their position against the man they like to dismiss as a ‘potty peer’ and a ’swivel-eyed loon’?

Seems Monckton is a man the warm-mongers love to hate, but hate to debate.

Why?

Seems that after all their huff and puff about the science being settled, Messrs Key, Smith, Norman, Trenberth and co. are decidedly unsettled by the thought of being found out.

(As, of course, was Al Gore.)

Of course, they’ll say tangling with Monckton is beneath them. He’s a nutter. Must be. Listen to that posh voice! Get a load of  those big bug eyes!

(The result of an hereditary condition, oddly enough unconnected with the ability to think.)

No mention of why Margaret Thatcher would choose him out of thousands to advise her on matters scientific.  They didn’t dub Maggie the Iron Lady for being soft in the head.

If these climate sages are so sure of their case, why not front up and use their superior logic to shut Monckton up once and for all?

Isn’t that what a real expert would do?

What does their mass no-show tell you about the honesty of our nation’s climate scientists and cabinet ministers?

And prime minister?

And anyway, why does TVNZ feel the need to have anyone at all debate Monckton? Why not apply the same standards to the sceptic as they applied to the scaremonger/warmist/coolist?

Is TVNZ trying to outdo the Biased BBC?

New evidence of eco-exaggeration

How ironic that Close-Up’s attempt to close down the climate debate should come in the same week as the Daily Mail ran this story:

Climate change far less serious than ‘alarmists’ predict says NASA scientist

This is, of course, another NASA scientist, not Hansen: 

Dr Roy Spencer, who works on the space agency’s temperature-monitoring satellites, claimed they showed ‘a huge discrepancy’ between the real levels of heating and forecasts by the United Nations and other groups.

After looking at the levels of radiation in the atmosphere over the past ten years, he believes the Earth releases a lot more heat into space than previously thought.

In other words, the computer models were wrong — just as thousands of sceptics (sorry, deniers; sorry, denialists) have been saying.

Now, come to think of it, this is not the first time I’ve heard about global heat escaping harmlessly into space. I first heard a leading sceptic bring it to light about two years ago.

And which sceptic would that have been?

You guessed it: the apparently not-so-mad Monckton.

I’ll be at his Wellington talk on Friday. I hope to see you there. (Whether you see him on state telly is another matter.)

For details of how to see Lord Monckton in Auckland on Thursday, Wellington on Friday and Whangarei on Saturday, hurry to the Climate Realists website.

Warm-mongers pressure PRINZ into pulling plug

Neil and Esther Henderson have been doing an excellent job bringing a dose of sanity to the climate debate — and Lord Monckton to New Zealand.

But one of Monckton’s scheduled events lost its original sponsor thanks to pressure from our brave eco-exaggerators.

Rest assured, though, Neil and Esther have saved the day.

Read this excerpt from their latest newsletter to see what they’ve been up against:

PRINZ, having volunteered to host two of the public events, has received an overwhelming barrage of negative publicity for their gall in allowing someone whose opinions are perceived as being ‘outside the politically correct mantra’ to speak in public.

PRINZ hunted far and wide to find someone to oppose Monckton in a debate and was unable to find anyone willing to front up.

Funny that.

PRINZ was prepared to continue and turn the debate into a ‘discussion’, but the vitriolic hatemail continued to such an extent that PRINZ has now made the decision to pull out of the Auckland event, and we, the CLIMATE REALISTS have taken over the arrangements.

Well done, that couple.

(And a brickbat to PRINZ for being cowed — but a bouquet for still going ahead with their Wellington event.)

The organisers of the business luncheon with Lord Monckton on Thursday have also received some very strongly worded correspondence questioning their integrity in hosting Lord Monckton and urging them (pressuring them!) to cancel.

Are business people are made of sterner stuff than communication people? Surely not!

Neil and Esther continue:

People, this is horrific!!!

What has happened to free speech in New Zealand?

We would like to urge every single one of you who is concerned about what is going on here, to contact Close Up closeup@tvnz.co.nz and challenge them about their decision not to interview Lord Monckton.

Do it now. I sent them this:

Your bias is showing

Mark and team,

 I was going to say I can’t believe your cowardice in canning your interview with Christopher Monckton.

 But then I guess I can.

If any of you at TVNZ still believe in free speech, I urge you to reconsider, stop being brainwashed by socialist liars, and let the man be heard.

Otherwise be prepared to incur the wrath of the blogosphere – a not-insignificant challenger to your supposed omnipotence.

John Ansell

Back to Esther and Neil:

Did Jim Salinger, Gareth Morgan, Rod Oram, Martin Manning, James Renwick, Kevin Trenberth, James Hansen….(think of anyone else you’ve heard prating the AGW mantra) need someone to present an alternative perspective before they were reported in the mainstream media?

We strongly believe Lord Monckton has a right to be heard. And we believe the public of New Zealand has a right to hear him and make up their own minds. There are an amazing number of accusations flying around the internet about Christopher Monckton. Here is a quote from one of our members who shall remain anonymous:

• “Until this week, I thought Christopher was a rather obscure eccentric Englishman, with a keen interest in mathematics and climate change and a talent for entertainment. “Now, after dredging through endless pages of biography by Greenpeace, Bickmere, Abraham, etc, I’ve discovered that he is an international celebrity of huge importance. “Whole libraries havebeen written about his exploits; newspapers and bloggers record his every move and mood; scholars minutely analyze his spoken word, correspondence, logo, status, etc; activist groups mobilise at his approach.“Seldom does little New Zealand have the opportunity to hear directly from an orator capable of generating such controversy and excitement on the world stage.” 

For my money, Monckton did more than any other single person to inform the world about the Climategate scandal and the shonkiness of Al Gore’s movie, and to neuter the Copenhagen talkfest.

I confess I believed Gore at first.

I was wowed by the slickness and clarity of his PowerPoint show.

I loved the way he got up in that cherrypicker to highlight the hockey stick graph.

And I had no reason at all to doubt his facts. (Like the fact that his hockey stick graph was bogus.)

It took brilliant communicators like Monckton — and Bob Carter and Ian Wishart and Jo Nova – to alerted me to the depth of my own gullibility.

Never again.

Neil and Esther:

We need to get out there and let people know that we have a right to doubt —  we have a right to be skeptical about everything we are spoonfed by the media, and having just witnessed what manipulation goes on behind the scenes, we need to call the media to account and demand balanced reporting and open debate.

Damn right we do.

The real deniers are the scientists and journalists who try to deny us our right to be sceptical about scientists and journalists.

I know from personal experience that the media are far more interested in entertaining than informing. And if the facts aren’t entertaining enough, they just make up facts that are.

They need to be exposed every time they do that. Which is almost certainly many times a day.

I am, of course, rather sensitive to press bias, given that less than a month ago the Dominion Post refused to run ACT’s 40 true statements on the race issue.

What has happened to free speech indeed.

On Close-Up with Willie Jackson

Just had a call from Mark Sainsbury wanting me on his show tonight to talk about the racist abuse on TradeMe over the listing of the personalised plate MAORI for $99,000.

Small-time internet trader Bruce Haliday listed the licence plate “Maori” four days ago for $99,000 and, by last night, the auction had almost 16,000 views and screeds of comments, many of them blatantly racist.

The mildest included: “Any maori that can afford this plate stole the monie” and “Maybe donate half the money to a charity to help prevent maoris throwing their babies into walls?”

Also on will be Willie Jackson and Professor Paul Spoonley.

Paul’s a sociologist from Massey Albany, whose research interests include ethnic policies and political extremism (especially neo-fascism).

So you can see how this is going to go: a two (if not three)-on-one setup to implicate me in the spread of racist abuse.

Suffice it to say, I’m not going to let them get away with that. This is my first time live on a major TV show, but I plan to give as good as I get.

In case Willie doesn’t let me get a word in edgeways, I deplore racial abuse — all the moreso when it’s dispensed anonymously, as tends to be the way on the net.

I once had the experience of seeing my Taiwanese brother-in-law being told to ‘go home’ by a passing carload of youths on his first day in Auckland. I felt ashamed to be a New Zealander.

But I’m not ashamed to tell the truth. Even an uncomfortable truth.

There’s a world of difference between racist abuse and truthful discussion of racial policies. (Or racist policies, as we have in New Zealand and need to abolish.)

No doubt the others will quote liberally from things I’ve written on this blog and in the ACT ad.

And some of those things — especially accounts of Maori cannibalism — are far from pretty.

Like the ghastly account of Te Rauparaha ripping apart a pregnant mother and roasting her embryo on a stick.

That’s sick, but it happened. It was straight from a ship’s diary.

And it’s relevant to ask why Chris Finlayson would want to compensate Ngati Toa $10 million for the loss of what he calls their ‘maritime empire’ that enabled Te Rauparaha to travel to Kaiapoi to slaughter, enslave and devour the local tribe.

(And why the Porirua City Council would want to name its indoor sports arena after such a thug.)

We need to know those things if we’re going to gain an honest understanding of our country’s past.

Otherwise we’re stuck with the dishonest, sanitised, state-sponsored myths we’ve been fed by politically-correct politicians, in league with the grieving, grasping iwi aristocracy.

New Zealand has become the Land of the Long White Lie. It’s time for a revolution of truth-telling about the 4 Big Cons that are being perpetrated upon us: the John Key Con, the Maorification Con, the Global Warming Con and the Teacher Unions Con.

I hope I’m able to make a start tonight. See you at 7pm on One.

 

ACT’s ex-ad man wants Judith Collins for prime minister

The above headed the Dom Post’s letter section today, where they published my reply to a reader’s letter (see both below).

Actually, I didn’t say that. I said Judith should lead National. And she surely will, once voters finally tumble to the full extent of the John Key Con.

(Today’s announcement of a 21-year inflation high is just the latest example of the PM’s Muldoonishly negligent economic management.)

With Crusher Collins in charge, the Nats will again be able to claim to be a true-blue party of the right, instead of the current reddy-browny-greeny-bluey slush perceived by the principled voter as deepest yellow.

(And I don’t mean ACT yellow. Despite my recent comments about ACT’s cowardice in not going hard enough on Maorification, they remain the only brave, honest party we’ve got.)

First the reader’s letter for context:

Some women do talk bluntly

John Ansell, former ad man for the ACT Party (July 11), is yet another public figure to have paid the price for having the courage to voice the views of many New Zealanders. Nice boys don’t win ball games. Mana Party leader Hone Harawira’s response that “New Zealanders would not stand for Maori bashing” is duplicitous in the face of his frequent Pakeha bashing.

I would challenge Mr Ansell, however, in his view that ACT should “target male voters because “women did not want to talk bluntly, and were ruled by their emotions”. I cite former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as one of many strong women with the courage of their convictions.”

VIPI GREGORY-MEREDITH
Otaki

My reply:

ACT’s ex-ad man wants Judith Collins for prime minister

I quite agree with Vipi Gregory-Meredith (Letters, July 14) that former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had the courage of her convictions. She was the role model for all conviction politicians (and conviction copywriters, for that matter).

But I don’t agree that she was a woman. Mrs Thatcher was, in fact, the greatest male politician of recent times and possibly the greatest politician, period. (Or should I say full stop, lest I suffer further odious comparisons with former Employers & Manufacturers Association (Northern) chief executive Alasdair Thompson.)

I hate the way newspapers insert their own words into readers’ letters. I did not write the words ‘former Employers & Manufacturers Association (Northern) chief executive’ — nor were they necessary, given the media witch-hunt of recent weeks.

And just as Maggie was a great bloke, Prime Minister John Key is undoubtedly one of the weakest of female politicians, with his readiness to put popularity before all those boring “economicky” things, such as catching up with Australia and slamming the anchors on New Zealand’s voyage to the bottom of the OECD.

A poor choice of metaphor by me, since submarines don’t need anchors.

As people can see, my gender definitions differ from many. I generalise for effect, and there are always exceptions.

On the same note, the strongest man in National’s caucus is undoubtedly Judith “Crusher” Collins. The sooner she takes over the leadership the better.

JOHN ANSELL
Te Aro

40 facts the DomPost would not let voters read – but charged ACT for anyway

 

These were the 40 facts that the Dominion Post editor refused to let her readers read when she censored the ACT ad headlined Fed up with pandering to Maori radicals?:

1. The National government has been trading New Zealand’s resources for Maori Party votes.
2. With enough party votes, ACT will be able to stop National doing this.
3. ACT supports the Treaty of Waitangi – including Article III.
4. Article III says all New Zealanders have the same rights.
5. ACT thinks Maori culture is a very important part of New Zealand culture.
6. Labour and National governments have betrayed Article III to give iwi a favoured position in many aspects of New Zealand life.
7. Maori’s favoured position does nothing for most Maori.
8. Maori remain among our poorest people.
9. Under a string of governments, New Zealand has been slowly morphing into a state where those who are Maori have more rights than those who are not.
10. Under this National Government, that morphing is speeding up.
11. National didn’t have to appease the Maori Party. They chose to do so.
12. National broke their promise to scrap the race-based Maori seats.
13. National replaced the Foreshore and Seabed Act with the Marine and Coastal Area Act.
14. The Marine and Coastal Area Act makes it much easier for the Maori Party’s mates to claim New Zealand’s coastal riches.
15. National ratified (we should have said ‘endorsed’) the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
16. The UNDRIP provides for separate development for Maori.
17. Helen Clark’s Labour Party refused to endorse the UNDRIP.
18. National foisted on Aucklanders a Maori Statutory Board.
19. That board was unelected.
20.  That board can hold the balance of power on council committees.
21. National forced the people of Wanganui to put up with their city’s name being spelled Whanganui.
22.  The people of Wanganui had by a large margin rejected the alternative spelling.
23. National lumbered the Environmental Protection Authority with a Maori Advisory Committee.
24. National kept the crippling RMA conditions that force many New Zealanders to ‘bribe the tribe’ to develop their own land.
25. National established ‘co-governance’ of the Waikato River.
26. National will soon establish co-governance of other rivers.
27. National proposes to ban New Zealanders from clearing native scrub on their own land.
28. The Waitangi Tribunal has recommended that tangata whenua be able to veto decisions about New Zealand’s plants and animals.
29. Wellington City Council has proposed to give Maori special status to manage the Town Belt.
30. The Maori Party proposes to force all teachers to learn Maori.
31. The Maori Party wants to see a new constitution that runs totally contrary to one law for all.
32. The Treaty of Waitangi granted the rights of British subjects to all New Zealanders, Maori and non-Maori.
33. Apirana Ngata urged Maori to help themselves.
34. He was not referring to other people’s money in the form of welfare cheques.
35. Only the ACT party embraces Apirana Ngata’s vision for Maori.
36. Don Brash so admired Apirana Ngata that he put his face on the New Zealand $50 note.
37. Only ACT’s policies will tackle the root causes of high Maori unemployment and crime.
38. Only ACT’s education and economic policies will give Maori trapped in poverty and illiteracy the means to raise themselves up and enjoy a better life.
39. ACT was founded in 1994 to solve these very problems.
40. Only a strong ACT can stop the Maori radicalisation of New Zealand.

Why did the editor of the newspaper of New Zealand’s capital city deny voters the chance to read these facts — yet still charged ACT full price for the space, which the party were forced to fill with a weaker ad more to the DomPost editor’s taste.

 

Why did the Dominion Post editor censor a headline which asked a question to which most of her readers were highly likely to have answered Yes?

 

UnfreeDom – PC paper denies Wellingtonian voters access to ACT policy

For Wellingtonians who never saw the banned ACT ad, this is what all the fuss was about:

The cowardly Dominion Post forced ACT to pay full price
for the space they’d booked, yet refused to accept the ad.

The more tolerant NZ Herald was happy to run
the ad as is, in the interests of free speech.

Cowardly ACT vetoed my original version, 
which someone (not me) leaked to the Herald.

I hope the DomPost pays a price for their cowardly decision to refuse the ‘radicals’ ad and deny ACT its freedom of speech.

In a week of the most vicious criticism I’ve known, not one of my critics — least of all the Dom — has been able to point to a single untrue statement in the ad.

I’ve just counted: the ad contains 30 statements of fact– all provably true.

Yet despite keeping these 30 facts from its readers, the Dom was happy to run a Rosemary McLeod column castigating and mocking the writer of those 30 truths, and his client.

And here’s the ultimate cheek: the paper also demanded full payment for the space the party had booked in good faith, thus leaving the party with little choice but to fill that space with a hastily arranged compromise ad.

If I’d known about the Dom’s decision, my substitute ad would have looked like this:

And what was the paper’s beef with the ad that the Herald was happy to run? That it promoted racial disharmony.

In other words, my crime was to tell certain truths with a force designed to make sure they were heard, when my critics and their media lackeys would rather they were not.

The relentless attacks on me have confirmed my view that the socialist-feminist-tribalist Wellington elite has so corrupted New Zealand that we’ve become a nation of liars.

State-sponsored lies about Maori issues and others are now so normal that any statement of the truth is taken as a cultural affront.

The smiling, well-bred, easy-going liars who run our country must not be allowed to hide behind the skirts of euphemism and gobbledygook. Let them speak the whole truth, unvarnished by the slippery language of political correctness. 

Tell it straight and tell it true. Plainly. Simply. Boldly. Clearly. That way lies understanding.

Surely we owe our people that.

JK — master sidestepper

I like John Key. He’s a nice guy, a great husband and father, and might just be the most astute politician any political party ever had.

He’s just not a good leader for our country.

You can tell this by the way he sidesteps and spins his way out of all the tough questions.

Now I happen to believe that when a citizen asks a question of his elected servant, that servant should do the citizen the honour of answering it.

And if he sidesteps the question, I think we should call him on it.

And if he keeps sidestepping, we should keep calling him on it until he learns to respect his employer. 

So that’s what I’m going to do in this post. 

In Sunday’s Star-Times, 50 New Zealanders, including me, were asked to put a question to John Key.

You can see my question below. 

And you can see how JK sidestepped it.

And not just my question. Also questions from Sir Colin Meads, Gareth Morgan, Don Nicholson, Oscar Kightley, Denis Dutton, Michael Laws, Peter Chin, Phil O’Reilly and others.

This PM, like the last one, has the sidestepping down pat.

So much so that it reminds me of that other famous JK, All Black John Kirwan. (For the culturally challenged, that’s him on the left.)

Here’s a selection of those questions and answers — punctuated by the interjections I wish I could have made.

1. Sir Colin Meads, former All Black: Do you think you are doing too much for the Maori people? Is it just to keep their votes?

We are putting our focus and energy into the settling of historic claims and the sense of grievance it conjures, so we can move on into the next phase of this country’s history. I think it would be a betrayal of Kiwis’ basic sense of decency to forget the past and the legitimate claims of iwi.

Sidestep. Everyone agrees about the legitimate claims. But what about the illegitimate ones? Like the recent half billion dollar payment to Tuwharetoa.

By all accounts, that iwi was so happy with their 19th century payout (for the then-barren Volcanic Plateau) that they dug up their late chief negotiator and propped him up against a tree for the celebration party.

But at the same time I am determined New Zealand will not become stuck in that past.

You mean like stuck with the temporary Maori seats you promised to abolish — a promise you broke to forge a totally unnecessary alliance with the Maori (sovereignty) Party?

 I am optimistic the next phase can be characterised by better race relations and an even more strongly united sense of our shared aspirations as New Zealanders.

Sounds idyllic. United? Sounds like One Law For All — a concept your predecessor promoted and you ditched to please your new mates.

7. Oscar Kightley, film-maker and comedian: Pacific heroes Michael Jones and Inga Tuigamala gave you their support, and that of their supporters, because they thought that, under National, Pacific people would be owning factories and not just working in them. When do you think that will happen?

Lifting New Zealand’s economic performance will help all New Zealanders, and I know that is also what Inga and Michael believe.

So why have you ruled out so many policies that would lift New Zealand’s economic performance?

Michael has said publicly it was my aspiration to bring all New Zealanders forward, including Pacific people, which convinced him to support us. I know our strong commitment to economic growth in the Pacific nations, including business mentoring, is important to New Zealand’s Pacific people.

Sidestep. Oscar asked “When?” 

10. Greg Fleming, chief executive of the Maxim Institute: Are there any issues you care enough about that you would be willing to lose all your political capital for them?

I have some bottom lines, and I care deeply about many issues, not least of which is education. I have said I would resign as PM if superannuation entitlements were ever cut. However, political capital is important because it is a measure of how well the public is receiving your policies. Democracy demands the involvement of voters in all the decisions you make,

You mean like with the anti-smacking referendum, where you ignored 85% of voters?

so it can be a balancing act.

Likewise, we have three support partners whose views must be balanced against our own.

I know we’re not meant to ask this, but: Why must the views of the Maori Party be taken into account? After all, their supporters gave their party votes to Labour.

Yet to feather your own political nest you:

a) broke the promise you made to the electorate to abolish the race-based seats

b) gave $500 million of our money to Tuwharetoa for land they’d already been paid for in the 19th century

c) bribed the tribes to get them to support the ETS (where you broke another promise not to lead the world)

d) secretly signed us up to a UN convention that opens a new track for the Treaty gravy train

e) gave away the foreshore and seabed to any iwi with a sense of grievance and a smart lawyer.

That is the nature of MMP government.

Maybe it’s time we got rid of it.

So you’re saying you’ve got one bottom line. You’d sacrifice everything else to keep superannuation payments from being cut.

Isn’t this just Winston Insurance — for when the Oracle returns and reminds his bewildered flock about National’s broken promise over the superannuation surcharge in 1990?

14. John Ansell, designer of the famous “Iwi-Kiwi” billboards for the National Party election campaign in 2005: If you’re genuine about closing the Tasman wage gap, why are you driving up New Zealanders’ power and petrol prices with an emissions trading scheme, when Australia and all other countries have deferred their climate taxes because so much of the science is fraudulent?

I believe human-induced climate change is happening.

Why? Why are you now a Climate Scientologist when you were one of the first to conclude it was a hoax? (A view now clearly shared by our biggest trading partners.)

Further, by refusing to implement the ETS proposed under the former Labour government, we have halved the fuel and electricity costs facing businesses and households.

Oh great. So we’ve progressed from Dumber all the way up to Dumb.

New Zealand, as a responsible international citizen, and as a country that values its clean, green environment, must act to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

Why, when…

a) there’s hardly any of them.

b) it won’t change the climate in the slightest.

c) it won’t help you achieve your goal of catching Australia — since even Aussie’s Labor government isn’t dumb enough to punish their people with a tax on the breath of life?

However, this must be in ways that result in the least cost to society and the economy.

Sidestep. You didn’t answer my question. So here’s another one for you…

Which has the least cost to society and the economy:

a) A 5-10% power price rise plus a 4-8c a litre petrol price rise?

b) A 0% power price rise plus a 0c a litre petrol price rise?

15. Peter Elliott, actor: How difficult is it to reconcile the recent success of New Zealand’s ideological stance on nuclear issues with President Barack Obama, when the National Party vilified and ridiculed the instigators of our anti-nuclear policy?

Just days after becoming leader of the National Party in November 2006, I announced my unswerving support for New Zealand’s anti-nuclear legislation. I said then that under my leadership the anti-nuclear legislation will not change, and it won’t. New Zealanders are proud of the anti-nuclear policy, and it is iconic. As I said in 2006, I believe in that position and see absolutely no reason for change.

Translation: “Where Helen stands, I stand.”

(Will you be going to the UN too, in return for promoting the opponent so many of us worked so hard to defeat?)

20. Roger Kerr, executive director, Business Roundtable: Unlike your predecessor who famously said, “The government’s role is whatever the government defines it to be”, you have endorsed the concept of limited government. What do you regard as the proper limited role of government?

A vital role of government is to improve the living standards of New Zealanders. Sometimes it can do that by funding or providing services itself; sometimes by keeping out of the way of private enterprise. I am not overly ideological about the role of government; I believe in what works.

We look forward to the next OECD GDP per capita rankings to see whether your policies are taking us up or down. Will you take us ahead of the hapless Greeks or be overhauled by the clever Koreans?

I note those same policies have already widened the Tasman Wage Gap.

25. Peter Chin, mayor of Dunedin: When will the government be required to meet the same levels of transparency it demands of local government – especially since the increasing costs of such central government imposed compliance (annual plans, consultation etc) become a further burden to be met by ratepayers?

Central and local government are not directly comparable, but the process of accountability and transparency seems to me to operate in a similar way. For example, both central and local government are subject to the Official Information Act. Through that, expenditure by government – no matter whether it is central or local – can be scrutinised publicly.

Sidestep. Peter was talking about annual plans. How come local governments have to submit annual plans and central government doesn’t?

And how come a prime minister can get away with saying he’s got a plan for achieving his stated goal, when he hasn’t?

26. Don Nicolson, president of Federated Farmers: Do you categorically know if our assumed “clean-green” and “sustainable” brand is a primary reason why consumers in the growing markets of Asia, the Middle East and Africa buy New Zealand food products and if not, why not?

As I said in a speech to Federated Farmers last November, we ignore environmental concerns of our overseas customers at our peril. I said then that environmentally aware consumers across Britain and Europe were increasingly demanding higher environmental standards for the food they buy.

America’s largest supermarket chain, Walmart, is introducing a Sustainability Index. It includes factors such as the impact on natural resources, energy and climate change in the manufacture of its products. I believe consumers in other markets like the ones you cite will increasingly become sensitive to environmental concerns. I do not believe we can differentiate between those types of markets.

Sidestep. The question is not whether Walmart has a Sustainability Index. It’s whether a large percentage of their customers base their buying decisions on it.

As I said to the conference last year, regardless of your view about the environment or climate change, the opinions of your consumers will ultimately decide how well your products sell.

Do you really think our exporters need to be told that? If our professional marketers don’t think it’s a problem, why should the government get involved?

27. Ruth Lim, Sunday Star-Times reader, Christchurch: You went through the public school system and seem to have fond memories of your time there, as evidenced by your recent visit to Burnside High. You have also done very well in the business and political world since. What are your reasons for sending your own children to private schools?

I believe all New Zealanders should have the freedom to make choices, especially when it comes to issues like education and healthcare. New Zealand has excellent schools and one of the reasons for that is different schools are able to cater for students’ various needs. My children enjoy their schools – they’re a good fit. As all parents know, if your children are happy at their school it makes a big impact on their all-round wellbeing.

Sidestep. John, you once said our private schools were no better than our state schools.

If so, why do you and every other senior politician I’m aware of (Labour’s former education minister Mallard included) send your children to private schools?

You know private schools tend to be better. You lead a private enterprise party. Why not be honest and say so — proudly?

30. Denis Dutton, professor of philosophy, University of Canterbury: We continue to lose our smartest, most imaginative and entrepreneurial young people to Australia, the UK, and the US. New Zealanders have a tiresome repertoire of self-delusional excuses for this (“They will come back to raise families”, “We can replace them with Zimbabwe-trained professionals”, “If they are so greedy, who needs them”, etc). Our loss of university-trained citizens is near the top of the OECD. What three initiatives would you put in place to staunch New Zealand’s haemorrhaging of its best young talent?

Ensuring New Zealand remains a lifestyle choice for returning New Zealanders and new migrants means developing a package of initiatives which will endure.

Sidestep. Staunching the haemorrhaging means convincing our  kids not to leave in the first place.

These include an attractive tax system, incentives for businesses, and world-class health and education. New Zealand will always see its young people doing an OE. While many come back home, there will always be those who settle into a new life overseas, and we can’t begrudge them seizing those opportunities. However, we can continue to develop a suite of policy initiatives to ensure we can compete with other countries to attract not only our own best and brightest, but the very best in the world.

The question asked for three initiatives. The answer provided none.

42. Michael Laws, mayor of Whanganui: One of the primary reasons Labour was voted out of office in 2008 was a perceived political correctness that dominated its political thinking. Is the National government not guilty of the same – with its decisions on parental smacking, the spelling of Whanganui, the repeal of the seabed legislation, its embrace of Whanau Ora and its relationship with the minority Maori Party?

One of the government’s priorities this year is to make significant reforms in social sectors like the welfare system, education, the justice system, health and state housing, to deliver better results. All New Zealanders deserve a future with less unemployment, welfare dependence, crime and all the social problems that go along these. To secure this brighter future, we have to get to grips with some of the big issues in these areas which have long been left unaddressed, and we need to tackle these issues as a nation. If National, with its confidence and supply partners, can make headway in these issues, then all New Zealand will benefit. But I don’t believe it’s something National should do alone – having the support of our political partners and New Zealanders across the spectrum is crucial. One thing I believe strongly is that there is no room in New Zealand for separatism. And, although there will be bumps along the way, we need to acknowledge that this is the only way forward.

Sidestep. 169 words and not one on-topic. Never mind Kirwan, that’s Bryan Williams territory.

43. Gareth Morgan, economist and investor: What is the single most important policy advance, to your mind, if NZ is going to have any chance of closing the income gap with Australia?

I have always maintained there is no one silver bullet. It will be a raft of policies that lift New Zealand’s economic performance. Reforming our tax system in a fair and equitable way is one. Reducing red tape, boosting infrastructure such as broadband, electric rail and road networks, driving better performance in the public sector, and encouraging innovation, particularly in science, are others. This will be an ongoing programme, year-on-year.

Sidestep. Gareth asked you for your signature dish, not the whole menu.

44. Phil O’Reilly, chief executive, Business New Zealand: We’re a nation of small businesses, but we really need to develop more global-sized firms like Fonterra to secure our economic future. What are the two most important policy levers you would pull to increase our chances of growing more global companies?

To grow more successful companies in New Zealand, we have to be a better place to run a business. And that doesn’t happen with just two policy levers – we actually have to do hundreds of things well as government, so businesses have the confidence to invest, grow and create higher-paying jobs.

That’s why we have been busy in a whole lot of policy areas from the RMA to trade agreements, to tax to transport, to science to electricity, to education to capital markets, to local government to broadband, and so on. With action in all those areas we increase our chances of growing more successful, internationally competitive, bigger businesses.

Sidestep. Phil didn’t say there should be only two policy levers. He asked for the two most important.

47. Selwyn Pellett, businessman: In business a CEO is hired who knows his craft, understands his chosen market and knows how to extract value from it in the interests of all his shareholders. The corporate goals are almost always achieved with a clear inspiring vision that all stakeholders buy into it. If this is the prescribed business wisdom for success (strong, strategic and inspiring leadership) and you are the head of our business party, do you think that New Zealanders should also demand this of our prime minister?

Running a business is one thing, running a country is another. There are obviously some similarities but it is the job of a prime minister to articulate a vision for where the country is heading, why we want to get there, and how. Voters demand that of political leaders, and that is what I am focusing on.

Wrong. The job of a prime minister is not to talk about getting there. It’s to get there.  

You articulate a vision of closing the Tasman Wage Gap. That’s good.

And you articulate why you want to close it. Also good.

Then you fail to articulate how you’re going to close it. Not so good.

And as a result you’re failing to close it. Bad.

In other words, John, your non-plan is not working.

Now people may think this post is mean. Part of me really doesn’t want to talk like this. I’ve got friends in the National Party, and I have no personal animosity towards John Key at all. Quite the reverse.

But there’s a bigger issue here. The future of our country.

For the last 10 years, under two dominant leaders, New Zealand has been a parliamentary dictatorship.

Now, thanks to his unparalleled political skills, what JK wants, JK gets.

And what JK wants is popularity.

And that’s the wrong motivation. It wasn’t Don Brash’s. It’s not Roger Douglas’s. Nor was it Winston Churchill’s or Margaret Thatcher’s or Ronald Reagan’s.

Real leaders get out of bed in the morning hell-bent on creating a better country. Not just building a bigger majority.

That’s why real leaders like Churchill and Thatcher (and in New Zealand, Douglas) will be remembered long after mere politicians like Clark and Key are forgotten.

Where is the New Zealand leader who can talk straight?

One who doesn’t need to sidestep?

Dom damns PPTA

I love the way those brash  Noo Yawk ad men go right to the heart of an issue in the bluntest of Anglo-Saxon.

(I try to do the same.)

Here’s their take on a common pestilence: unions that put bad teachers before good teachers and children.

I thought it would make a cute backdrop for a post in praise of this morning’s brilliant DomPost editorial about the PPTA’s latest extortion demand.

Teachers need to get real

There has long been a suspicion that reality stops at the door to the teachers’ staffroom.

Now is a time for restraint, not political game-playing. The PPTA is on the wrong side of public opinion. It should abandon its pay claim and focus on improving the quality of teaching.

There is no denying that good teachers are underpaid. But that will not change until teacher unions allow schools to remunerate their staff according to their abilities. No government could afford to bump up the salaries of good teachers by giving all teachers a pay rise.

In Switzerland, I’m told most teachers are paid around NZ$120,000 a year. And who hires them? The parents.

The Post Primary Teachers Association’s ludicrous claim for a 4 per cent pay rise for secondary school teachers lends credence to the theory.

The world is just emerging from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Government is effectively borrowing $200 million a week to maintain existing levels of services, tens of thousands of New Zealanders have lost their jobs, and hundreds of thousands have received little, if any, pay rise for the past two years.

The majority reluctantly accept that is the price they must pay for job security. At a time of crisis, everybody – employers and employees – has to tighten their belts.

For the PPTA to demand a big pay increase at such a time is to show gross insensitivity to those who pay teacher salaries through their taxes. For it to demand the increase after its members received 4 per cent pay increases in each of the past three years is to show secondary teachers, or their union at least, are completely out of touch with the real world.

Teachers perform a vital role. They shape the scientists, doctors, cleaners and electricians of the future. As every parent knows, some – those who inspire, engage and excite pupils – are worth their weight in gold. It would be almost impossible to overpay them. However, there are others who go through the motions for a weekly pay cheque and a third group who are simply not up to the job.

Yet the present pay structure does not allow schools to differentiate between the performance of good, indifferent and bad teachers. They are all paid on the basis of their years of service and the responsibilities they hold.

If teacher unions are as serious as they say they are about wanting to keep good teachers in schools, they should work with the Education Ministry to devise a formula that allows schools to pay great teachers what they are worth and send a message to poor teachers that they should review their career options.

Every child knows who their outstanding teachers are. Didn’t you?

Me too. I had about three. I still keep in touch with them 35-40 years later.

Certainly every principal knows who his star performers are. As does any parent who cares about their child’s progress.

I’ve always made a big fuss of great teachers. Anyone who can mesmerise over two dozen hormonal teenagers into mastering  quadratic equations or psychoanalysing Hamlet is one of society’s true heroes.

We had one a few years back who inspired our 12 year old to write a 150 page novel in three weeks.

Like any12 year old, the boy preferred zapping aliens online than pouring prose out of his keyboard.

But this magnificent teacher said “Jump!” And the kids said, “How high?”

As for the dullard teachers, they’re not hard to spot either.

They’re the ones with the long queues of parents snaking out the door and down the corridor on meet-the-teacher nights.

I had one of these for science at high school. More than one actually. Together, they’re the reason I know nothing about science except how to spell it. (Oh, and how to sing the Periodic Table – but that came decades later).

When this guy eventually retired, he apologised to all those he’d mistaught over the years. Which was a fat lot of use.

He should never have been allowed near a classroom. Instead, thanks to the PPTA, he ended up being paid more than his younger, smarter, more diligent colleagues.

For that union to suggest that teachers can’t be measured is exquisitely hypocritical. After all, their members have no trouble applying numerical grades to the children they teach!

But back to the editorial: 

Alternatively, the unions could work with the Government to identify other areas of saving in the education budget. The overstaffed ministry would be a good starting point.

Every 1 per cent increase in primary, secondary and early childhood education salaries costs $50m. Contrary to what the teacher unions and their members appear to believe, the Government is not sitting on a big pot of money. Every extra dollar paid to teachers or other public service employees has to be cut from other areas of government spending or borrowed from overseas.

Whoever wrote that, take a bow.

(Get in touch and I’ll buy you a beer.)

 

Scientific poll backs fern flag

A Herald-Digipoll of 600 today echoes last Friday’s less scientific Close Up poll of 12,000 New Zealanders who want to see us adopt a new flag with a silver fern.

Oddly, the greatest mood for change comes from 40-70 year olds and those outside Auckland, with Aucklanders and 18-29 year olds favouring the Union Jack.

That’s the exact opposite of what I would have expected – a campaign for change driven by middle-aged provincials.

(Seems we baby-boomers are an island of radicalism in a sea of conservatism.)

It would now be good to see another poll, independent of the newspaper that’s leading the campaign for change.

It will be too easy for conservatives to view this Herald poll as akin to a Greenpeace poll on global warming.

But this is a great day for those wanting change, as it means the issue will start to move on to the government’s radar.

All the moreso as it reinforces the prime minister’s own instincts about the silver fern being the right symbol.

Guardian reports IPCC admission it exaggerated glacier melt

Just kidding with the banner
- but is the media bias melting?

You know the end is nigh for any dishonest movement when its leading liars are forced to resort to truth-telling.

It was the same in the dying days of Soviet communism when Gorbachev confessed that his country had been living a lie.

The surprise with this story about exaggerated Himalayan glacier melting is not that the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change would present science fiction as fact.

That’s old news.

What’s new news is that Britain’s blinkered left-wing Guardian would do the honest thing and report it.

Is liars too strong a word to describe those who’ve deceived the world into believing they needed to divert $45 trillion to fix a non-problem?

Read this excerpt and see what you think:

Cousin Graham’s Samoan tsunami fund

I nearly fell of my chair when my cousin Graham Ansell’s face appeared in the One News review of the year’s events.

I knew Graham, Diann and family had a lucky escape from the Samoan tsunami, but I didn’t know his story had been filmed – or that he’d helped to raise $15,000 for the survivors.

(I even found his story on the BBC News site.) 

Let’s fly this fern

In the 21st century, the New Zealand flag should not be a British flag, or a Maori flag, or an Australasian flag. 

It should be a New Zealand flag – for all New Zealand, and only New Zealand.

The symbol that best unites us is surely the ponga or silver fern, first worn  by the NZ Native Rugby Team of 1888.

The silver fern says nature. It says Maori. It says New Zealand. 

It’s ‘us’.

But which silver fern is fit to grace our flag?

I believe the leaf must have a simple, timeless elegance. If I could draw, it wouldn’t have taken me 23 years to show you what I mean.

But only this year did I find a designer who could translate my vision of the perfect fern.

His name is Kenneth Wang, former ACT MP and owner of BrandWorks. 

Twenty  years ago, Kenneth designed the winning poster for the Auckland Commonwealth Games. He was a joy to work with.

I told him I needed a smooth, flowing, classical fern. A few emails later, he’d produced exactly the design I’d had in my mind for 23 years. 

Then, thanks to the miracle of PowerPoint, I set our fern against 141 different backgrounds.

I tried black and white, every shade of blue and green and teal and red - and every combination of stars, bars, panels and stripes I could think of. 

I tried silver ferns and gold ferns and black ferns and white ferns, before confirming  that white looked best. 

Among my six finalists below, I’ve tried to cater to every flag faction, from  sports buffs and nature lovers to traditionalists and Maori.

So now, please tell me which one you’d fly from your flag pole. Then vote in my flag poll.

 WHICH ANSELL/WANG FERN FLAG?

A. Classic black

B. Clean green

C. Stars on blue

D. Silver lining

E. Maori colours

F. Land and sea

Thanks to Anthony Hubbard from the Sunday Star-Times for sparking this post by asking if I had any views on the flag.

It’s fair to say he did not expect the reply, “I’ll send you 141 designs!”

Thanks also to David Farrar, who has said he’ll link to it. I’d assumed my right-of-centre mates would be hostile to this idea, and didn’t know David was a republican and big flag-change fan.