It pains me to say this, but someone has to: while it’s good that the National Party has unveiled a billboard campaign aimed at the public headed “DEMAND THE DEBATE”, this coming weekend I will be at our Annual Conference and General Meeting, where at the time of writing this column, there is no sign of the highlighted “debate” topics on the agenda for our membership to discuss.
The first of such billboard topics is the He Puapua report, under which, in a haze of mendacity, the Ardern Labour Government has begun a campaign to change by stealth the long accepted basis of our constitutional governance.
Launching the billboard campaign, and referring specifically to He Puapua, Opposition Leader, Hon Judith Collins said:
“New Zealanders are being left out of important decisions by the Labour Government and National is launching a series of campaigns for Kiwis to ‘Demand the debate’. The first campaign relates to the Government’s 2019 He Puapua report. Kiwis were never told about it at the time and it was never campaigned on by Labour. It has recently been considered by Cabinet and is being consulted on with a select few New Zealanders.”
The BFD
Prime Minister Ardern has tried to mislead Kiwi voters by saying that He Puapua is not government policy but, as Judith points out in the BFD piece above, the government is well on the way to implementing key elements of the co-governance separatism plot, such as:
- Maori wards in local government,
- taking control of water supply,
- establishing a separate Maori health system,
- attributing non-existent “partnership” to what was written in the Treaty of Waitangi,
- rewriting the history of our country as taught to schoolkids,
- enforcing controls of sections of privately owned rural lands,
- a not too surreptitious campaign to change the name of our country to Aotearoa.
And shame on them, but most of what passes these days as mainstream (now more lamestream) news media, cowed by the hush-money payola from Ardern & Co, are letting Labour get away with this imposed fog of mendacity without any attempt to challenge its immorality.
If there is any single group in this country with both opportunity and incentive to discuss at length the need to reject this brazen alienation of the values we have striven to consolidate in New Zealand since the signing of that historic Treaty document in 1840, it is the membership of the National Party at our annual conference and general meeting in Auckland next weekend. Especially as it includes also a pandemic-delayed discussion of changes needed in the party’s constitution and processes following the disastrous results of last year’s General Election.
As someone with notoriety within the party for being an inveterate stirrer, my constant beef has been the extent to which discussions of remits (policy suggestions emerging from a process of introduction by an individual member then adopted, amended or rejected at rising levels of branch, electorate, region and finally national levels), have been progressively reduced in number and importance over the years at regional and national conferences, in favour of speeches by Ministers when we are in government, or Shadow Portfolio holders when we’re in Opposition.
When I first attended such conferences back in the 1960s, delegates spoke and Ministers, real or Shadow listened; these days the pollies speak and delegates listen.
In those “good ol’ days” news media were interested in reporting what delegates said because much of it was often new. These days, what the pollies have to say has been heard so many times before by political commentators that they yawn and ignore it.
Worse, because our party has become such a slave to “process”, a remit begins life at branch or electorate level often months before the national conference it is aimed for, so that if it makes it that far up the chain, it has often been overtaken by later events and issues. That’s the case with the few remits listed for this year’s conference. I have been trying, so far without success, to have the following two remits that are current issues discussed:
That in its manifesto for the next General Election, the National Party pledges to review any decisions made to implement any part of the He Puapua Report.
And this one:
That the National Party includes in its election manifesto a pledge to institute a Royal Commission to study the Treaty of Waitangi to assess whether it may be necessary to re-interpret and re-define the principles of the Treaty to accommodate at all levels of governance the multi-cultural society that has developed from the bi-cultural state of New Zealand in 1840.
While I’m sure that both of these topics will be addressed by Judith Collins in her Leader’s Address that will wind up the AGM on Sunday, I can be equally certain that our lamestream views media will ignore whatever she might say that might upset their payola hush-money mistress Ardern. It would not be so easy for the media to ignore what a host of rank-and-file National Party members would say if they got the chance.
As an eternal optimist, I live in hope that even at this virtual 11th hour, our Party leadership will get the message and find a way to allow at least these two remits to be discussed by delegates.
I’ll let you know next week what happened.
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