New Zealand’s Tragedy: The Ardern Government

Odds are that, given the unprecedented levels of internal strife it has created, Ardern’s Government simply cannot last another two years. Damage to race relations, the economic shambles incarnate and the never-before-imagined mountains of debt incurred in the space of a single year are the salient features.

It’s utterly condemnable that aside from booting Labour from office in an election and ditching its many proven incompetents, there are no legislative means by which we, the people, can hold the leaders of this pretence of an administration accountable for the economic and social devastation they’ve inflicted on our society.

In a just world, criminal charges follow executive deception and deceit. But as things stand, these departing scoundrels will be gratuitously farewelled with parliamentary motions of regret – their superannuation, entitlements and future perks – intact and unaffected. These, by any measure, they simply do not deserve.

The party holding the Treasury Benches is the highest board of directors in the land. While in the corporate sector, legal action can be mounted against recalcitrant and non-performing board members, when it comes to parliamentarians, citizens lack the rights of ordinary corporate shareholders.

MMP has wrought unbelievable damage to parliament and our society.  Instead of the implied “fairer” representation, the system abuses every notion of fairness and cripples virtually every facet of government with PC-irrelevances and nonsense.

Under FPP, every MP was the first choice of each electorate’s voters. MMP, on the other hand, has plagued us with party-anointed list MPs, many undeserving of even a whiff of electoral support.

Some Labour List MPs failed more than once to gain electorate seats. Others who’d never before stood ‘qualified’ by being slavish toadies of the party.  Historically, Labour MPs stemmed predominantly from union backgrounds where real world actualities are only vaguely grasped, and then only in terms of what can be screwed out of employers. While becoming an MP is the perk-ridden pinnacle of their worldly aspirations, their lack of appropriate background, relevant training or qualifications or even of suitable experience, weighs enormously to parliament’s disadvantage.

As Bob Jones so accurately observed, “Labour’s MPs are largely the dregs of a fading movement… totally out of their depth in handling an unprecedented crisis.”

Many will recall MMP’s televised promotions and how they were fronted so deceitfully by Rod Donald. Dressed as a reasonable young conservative – short-back-and-sides, jacket and tie, images to which he never again resorted – Donald peddled “fairness of representation” and due largely to his non-threatening, deceptive appearance the concept of MMP was swallowed by a fair-minded but unsuspecting (today we’d call it “woke”) electorate which, while well-meaning, never imagined MMP’s system-corroding potential. 

MMP increased parliament from 99 to 120 MP’s, enabling the inclusion of time-wasting inexperienced flakes like the Green Party, whose practicalities of rationale are so dubious and whose male/female perspectives are so abstruse, they require two leaders instead of one.  Effectively, a vehicle with two steering wheels. 

MMP also enabled the birth of nutcase irrelevances like the Internet Party (which thankfully never did win a seat), of self-interested, self-serving obstructionists like NZ First and, of course, the Maori Party, whose ever-demanding race-based philosophies are somehow perpetually overlooked, despite the posturing of its front-people.  

MMP was a considerably warped version of what was originally outlined and intended. The 1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System recommended that if MMP was adopted, the four Maori seats that had been introduced as a temporary constitutional measure in 1867 should be abolished. But abolished they were not. Incredibly, they’ve been increased. A fifth was added in 1996, a sixth in 2002 and a seventh in 2008 – despite the crystal-clear validity of submissions like these, made in 2018 to the Maori Affairs Select Committee re the Electoral (Entrenchment of Maori Seats) Amendment Bill:

1. The reason for the existence of the Maori seats has long since disappeared
2. The Maori seats breach Section 19(1) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights
3. The Maori seats are not suited to entrenchment
4. The Amendment Bill is in breach of Parliament’s rules
5. The Maori seats are no longer lawful.

The New Zealand in which I grew up took pride in us being “one people” with Maori present throughout our society. Their prowess was well recognised and respected on sporting fields and of course the legendary Maori Battalion on the battlefields of Europe.

We were all New Zealanders but in the 1980s, tampering academics like Labour’s Geoffrey Palmer sneakily sought to change the balance of the system we had. He promoted the nonsense of ‘Treaty principles’ which attributed never-existing and never-intended depths to the Treaty, and declared it “our founding document”. 

Had Palmer, formerly a university law professor ever properly reviewed our history, he would have instantly ascertained that the Treaty wasn’t remotely close to being any sort of founding document.

The actual founding document was Queen Victoria’s Charter and Letters Patent that established us as a nation and conferred full rights of British subjects upon Maori. The Treaty was nothing more than the Maori chiefs’ formal acceptance of British sovereignty – and significantly, their acknowledgement that they’d become subjects of the Crown.

Thus the most monstrous pro-Maori nonsense to stem from Palmer’s facile jiggery-pokery was the outright hogwash that the Treaty signified “partnership with the Crown”. As lies that are repeated a thousand times are said to become “truth”, past Labour and National governments have utterly betrayed the majority of New Zealanders by falling over themselves to gain “the Maori vote”. In perpetrating Palmer’s unsustainable roguery, they inflicted on New Zealand the unjustifiable piracy of the 3^rd Treaty settlement. 

Unjustifiable because:

1. In 1948 Sir Apirana Ngata stood in parliament and praised the then government’s generosity in awarding the 2^nd Treaty settlement – settlement, of course, meaning that as the terms of the matter had been unreservedly accepted, the matter was then, and for all time, done and dusted.

• Under the Treaty, the Maori chiefs agreed to become subjects of the Crown. Transparent and obvious to anyone with a dictionary. But conveniently overlooked by closed-minded MPs and gain-seeking Maori, is the fact that no “subject” could ever possibly be a “partner” of the Crown.

Notably bizarre is the fact that the non-Maori bulk of our population is itself positioned and described in terms of the race that forms only 16% of the population. We are either Maori or “non-Maori.” Even the word to describe us as being different and separate from Maori – pakeha – is a Maori word. 

We’re New Zealanders yes. But so are Maori. And it has been that separating distinction of “non-Maori” that Ardern’s Labour Government has damned 84% of the population to our present position of legislated disadvantage. 

In addition, it’s been the constant unwanted infliction of Maori phraseology on TV and other media, the Maori re-naming of government departments and all the other Maori-pushing issues we’ve had to endure that are serving to divide us as a people. Notwithstanding the absurdity of according Maori names to virtually every function of ‘government’ when their meaning isn’t understood by the bulk of the population, Ardern’s ‘Government’ has placed undeniable emphasis – unwarrantedly and without a trace of just procedure – on granting to Maori positions of authority solely by virtue of their race. Incontestably, superiority over non-Maori.

As a nation that so vehemently protested the practice of apartheid during the 1981 Springbok tour, it is inexplicable and contradictory that a New Zealand Government should attempt something as bafflingly bizarre as to attempt to effect the instatement of that system. 

Yet despite the unprecedented opposition signaled by many, many New Zealanders towards He Puapua, the Three Waters takeover of local body assets and the establishment of Pae Ora and Te Mana Hauora Maori to exclusively handle matters of Maori health, Ardern’s Government has constantly ignored and dismissed the wishes of the majority.  

The Maori TV station was established purely to enhance te Reo, the Maori language, among Maori. Despite annual taxpayer subsidies to the tune of $19-odd million and with an all-up annual budget of $34 million, its ratings have fallen and it now has minimal audiences. Why? Well, according to the ever-posturing and exploitative Willie Jackson, who demanded entitlement for the station in the first place, “It lacks good programming in English.” One has to ask if Maori don’t want to watch Maori TV, why should TV1, TV2, TV3 and radio feel they have to inflict unwelcome te Reo phrases on the country’s majority of viewers and listeners?

Not so many years ago, our museums and others around the world used to display tattooed Maori heads that had once been traded for muskets by some Maori tribes. In these present PC-driven times it suddenly became “culturally offensive” for institutions to hold or display such objects. Even though most of the heads were of slaves captured by Maori who’d been tattooed for the purpose and killed, Maoridom demanded those heads be returned from wherever they were held. As the heads came back from overseas museums, TV coverage showed scenes of emotional Maori welcoming their “ancestors”. Of course, no coverage whatsoever was accorded to the fact that Maori had once eagerly traded the heads – or that any of the traded muskets had been surrendered in return. The incidents seem to suggest Maoridom wanted to expunge some undesirable evidence of their history.

That Labour lacks even the most basic comprehension of “democracy” has become painfully evident. In 2017 the party was so certain it had no chance of being elected that it didn’t bother to draft any policies nor even outline what it actually stood for. When, as a result of Winston Peters’ self-serving treachery, it suddenly found itself the major coalition partner in government, we watched as night after night Ardern staved off media questions with “We’ve set up a working party to advise on that” – falsely gaining time to try and “work out” what Labour’s position was going to be. 

From there, without any prior announcement – let alone any sort of electoral mandate – suddenly a whole lot of little things on Labour’s hit list were manifested.  Insanely, for a country whose landmass is but 1/600^th of the world’s and whose total emissions are but a bare trace of total global emissions, oil exploration around New Zealand was banned. Equally bizarrely, charter schools, which the teacher unions strongly opposed because they operated separately from the Ministry of Education system and also had been initiated by National and ACT, were closed, despite their irrefutable successes, particularly with young Maori.

There was also the apparent irrationality of Ardern’s knee-jerk gun buy-back that followed the Christchurch mosque massacre. But was it really irrational? With Ardern’s long involvement in international socialism (she’d been prime minister of New Zealand for some 15 months before she even saw fit to resign as chairman of Socialist International) her action can’t easily be dismissed as anything other than the seizure of an opportunity to implement part of the communist agenda: “First, disarm the people.” But typically, while NZ’s ordinary bloke has lost ownership of many of his firearms, Ardern’s multi-million-dollar-funded and sponsored, drug-dealing, predominantly Maori gangs are still in illegal possession of them.

Ardern’s Government has effected so many economy-damaging acts it’s impossible to address them all. But three, in particular, are notable. 

1. Given our dependence on automotive fuel, the plan to shut down NZ’s only oil refinery at Marsden Point was transparently grotesque. Minister Megan Woods’s response to the 14-page consultant’s report on the fuel-security risks to NZ if the refinery was shut down was beyond belief – she declared the risks were “insignificant”.  Such a bafflingly, out-of-touch response compels one to wonder whether her PhD in History was remotely appropriate for a decision of such magnitude.

2. Equally, Labour’s decision to appease its Green Party coalition nutters and phase out coal mining on the West Coast was utterly preposterous. By any measure it was a mind-numbing bungle – given that last year New Zealand had to import a million tons of low-grade, high-emissions, dirty coal from Indonesia to meet our country’s needs. In comparison, our West Coast coal is high-grade, clean-burning stuff. Yet with Minister Woods again at the helm, could anything else have been expected?

3. For so many New Zealanders the most hard-hitting disaster of all has been that in the four years of Labour’s “administration” house prices have increased by an intolerable 75%. This under a party that actually boasted of the thousands of houses it was going build – the actuality is dismal, minuscule and abject. In earlier, more responsible times, such failures by honourable people would have resulted in self-inflicted blood all over the carpet – but Labour have no trace of a moral compass, so their elemental failings are excused by according blame elsewhere.

In my lifetime I’ve experienced six Labour governments, five in the time I’ve been politically aware.  Each one departed office leaving notable degrees of social and economic chaos – and each one later attacked National for the pain of the recovery measures necessitated.

It was Labour that effected the banning of corporal punishment in schools in 1990 – and Labour that upheld the Crimes Act 1961 amendment bill of the Green MP, Sue Bradford, that denied parents the right to smack their children. As one whacked at home, at primary school and college I am, from my adult perspective, most grateful to my parents and teachers for that ‘input’ because who knows how otherwise I might have turned out.

My generation warned of the societal breakdown that would occur after Labour effected its no-smacking Act twenty-one years ago because it’s in childhood that children have to be taught one of life’s most essential lessons: that there are consequences for all their actions. From their absorption of that lesson, children develop another essential: the virtue of respect – respect for authority, for parents, for teachers, respect for other people, for other people’s property; and from acquiring and developing that, they develop self-respect and regard for their own actions – critical guidance for their journey to worthwhile adulthood.  Sadly today, from the lack of teaching of those disciplines and from Labour’s abandonment of the teaching of moral standards, we have our present mess of a society in decline.

Aside from the consequences of COVID, the communistic measures Ardern’s Government has employed point, as David Seymour has indicated, to the complete destruction of our society and of everything we hold dear. Far too many decent, upright and, in respect of qualifications, very-much-needed-here New Zealanders, have already fled our shores. Worse, the impetus for further departures is growing steadily. 

For your future, for your family’s future and for the future of every New Zealander, LABOUR MUSTN’T EVER AGAIN GAIN NEW ZEALAND’S TREASURY BENCHES. After all the freedom-denying, communist acts it has wrought on our society, never again should New Zealanders trust Labour.