FRIDAY 25 JUNE will be remembered as the day the Sixth Labour Government declared war on New Zealanders’ freedoms. In the finest traditions of “Newspeak”, this attack was presented as a programme of “Social Cohesion”. Just as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the Ministry of Love was where you were sent to be tortured, and the Ministry of Truth was where the Ingsoc (English Socialist) regime manufactured its lies, the Labour Government’s “Social Cohesion Programme” will tear New Zealand apart.

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Known principally for his political commentaries in The Dominion Post, The ODT, The Press and the late, lamented Independent, and for "No Left Turn", his 2007 history of the Left/Right struggle in New...