Journalists especially should be wary of treating social media as a source of public opinion, given what a tiny echo-chamber it really is. With that caution in mind, it’s still telling that so many people on social media are echoing what is also being fretted about in the media and officialdom. That is, that New Zealand suddenly feels like a different place. Certainly not the same place so many New Zealanders have so long and fondly imagined it: cheery, bucolic and easy-going.
As an Australian, I can sympathise. We’re close cousins, after all. Likewise, the Australia I find myself in is not the Australia I thought I knew. The cheerful, larrikin independence has been crushed under a government boot heel and become bitter, distrusting and angry.
It’s got so bad in New Zealand that even its ludicrous, lickspittle Human Rights Commission has noticed. “People are really stressed and angry,” says Commissioner Paul Hunt.
What New Zealanders aren’t getting, though, is any acknowledgement from its ruling class that they may be to blame. That the behaviour of the media-political class, and the policies they’ve been pushing with callous disregard, may in any way give ordinary Kiwis something to be angry about. Whether its Siouxsie Wiles sunning and paddling at the beach with a friend, sans mask, at the same time she was finger-wagging everyone else, or a media that acts as a government megaphone and continually berates the rest of the country about just how awful they are.
As for the politicians, the punishment meted out to Labour MP Dr Gaurav Sharma, for going public on internal bullying, is just the sour cherry on the rancid cake.
That politicians are more than economical with the truth when it suits is no new discovery. However, our slippery Prime Minister, a mistress of evasion when it comes to answering direct questions, is in a class of her own. Interviewed recently about her government’s failure to deliver on its important promises – such as building 100,000 new houses in 10 years (it built just 1,366) – she rebuked the interviewer for not recognising her as ‘aspirational’. This from a government spending over $1 billion on emergency housing grants, including buying motel rooms. Her flagship policy of reducing childhood poverty has overseen its increase, with mental health outcomes worsening under her watch. Businesses are closing, desperate for workers. Our over-stretched hospitals lack nurses because of her government’s emphasis on wealthy immigrants.
A surge in violent crime accompanies increased gang activities, including drive-by shootings and ‘ram-raids’ – cars smashing into shopfronts to steal merchandise – the police seen as failing the public.
Beside all that, New Zealanders are seeing their country literally taken away from them. That they are berated as “racist” if they dare speak up only makes them angrier.
We are becoming an increasingly conflicted people with Labour’s plans for virtual control of our assets by today’s tribal corporations. We now have a separate Maori health authority with veto rights over our whole system. The Department of Conservation has recommended giving control and governance of the entire conservation estate to Maori.
When they talk of “Maori”, of course, they don’t mean Bro in South Auckland, or just about any of the minority of New Zealanders who claim Maori descent. Certainly not Brian Tamaki or David Seymour. What they really mean are tiny cliques of incredibly “big men”, and corporate “iwi”.
Land owned by wealthy iwi corporations worth several billion dollars is largely exempted from paying rates. $100 million of taxpayer funding was used to upgrade maraes – Maori meeting houses and adjoining property – a spectacular failure. The history syllabus of the school’s curriculum has been re-written, bowdlerising the lifestyles of pre- and post-European Maori.
The list goes on with the government abolishing local communities’ rights to hold a binding referendum on unelected Maori representatives being given voting rights on councils. At least five per cent of all government procurement contracts must now go to Maori businesses.
The creep of what is indistinguishable from apartheid is rubbing many New Zealanders, both Maori and Pakeha, very much the wrong way.
A Maori court system is to see Common Law replaced by tikanga; supposed customs, with people of Maori ancestry having greater legal rights. Maori jails will treat differently those claiming Maori ancestry. Maori are to have rights to all fresh water, and access to taxpayer funding for their legal costs to claim the seabed and foreshore, from mean high tide up to twelve nautical miles. We can thank former National party prime minister John Key, an admirer of China’s tyrannical Xi Jinping, and then minister Chris Finlayson, for making it possible for part-Maori litigants to claim ownership of all of our foreshore and seabed, right around the country.
It doesn’t stop. Maori language, most newly invented, is being forced into government departments, local authorities and mainstream media, the latter bribed with $55 million to acquiesce to the government’s fabrication that the Treaty of Waitangi was ‘a partnership’ between the Crown and scores of disparate, warring tribes scattered throughout the country. All this, while there is no accepted definition of what it is to be Maori. So part-Maori, many overwhelmingly European or Eurasian in descent, holding privileged, well-funded positions, blithely claim disadvantage.
Spectator Australia
All of this ought to be grist to any opposition worth the name. If only. Like Matthew Guy in Victoria, National’s Chris Luxon is rightly seen as just a wetter version of the government.
So New Zealand is rapidly ceasing to be a functional democracy and becoming more and more of a dysfunctional country.
And Paul Hunt wonders why you’re all so pissed off.