Quote of the Day: On the short-term vision of so-called poverty campaigners

"'Hone Harawira and Marama Fox say that the cost of their number one policies [respectively: feeding kids and no GST on primary produce] doesn’t matter, that it should just be done.'  
    "Enduring, entrenched poverty and the plight of our most needy? Look to the short term lack of vision of successive spokespeople on their behalf. Where’s the reality checking? What about the fact that vouchers, instant fish fingers and food bank handouts are not a patch on fishing lessons, rods, nets, the securing of a spot on the river, community vege gardens, fiscal, numerical, language upskilling? Where’s that mentioned, Hone and Marama?
    "The message has clearly changed since Tariana let Fox take over. Looks like on top of Weet-Bix, fruit and milk, Harawira wants lunch and dinner too."
~ commenter 'traveller' on The Nation's minor-party leaders debate 

  
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Alan Duff on the “bone-headed” Harawira

 

What do you call a "leader" with no idea to where me might lead his followers, or what he might lead them into? Answer, says Alan Duff of Hone Harawira: "bone-headed."

After a career of non-achievement, Harawira has just announced another "comeback," another effort in another election to lead “his people” who knows where. Another from “the bone-headed fighter? No thanks,” says Duff.

Duff, author of Once Were Warriors and co-founder of the tremendously successful Books in Schools programme, recognises Hone as just another blowhard who sees politics itself as the only game in town – a game where you seek out failure as a route to power without ever offering a solution of your own to bless it.

A man with a hero-complex is not what Maoridom needs. They - our people - do not need someone pandering to our lowest common denominator, telling them their failures are not their fault but the fault of rich white people, greedy capitalists, a stacked system, government, all on the assumption these people are incapable of helping themselves.
    Not once have we heard offered a solution to "poor" people's woes, to "poverty." He came up with no ideas on creating employment. Nor use of Northland Maori land.
    No ideas on instilling an education ethos in the outlook of the very culture of those he claims to be fighting for. His ideas were and still are zilch.
    He hasn't demonstrated by a single gesture that maybe he should take a less hardline stance. Oh, no. Not Hone. He's the self-described "fighter." Whoopee, that's gonna put a lot of Maori into their own homes and give them jobs, lift us up to the educated, aspiring middle class, a scrapper representing us.

Hone is not alone in seeking political power with no particular end or goal but the political power itself. Just the most obvious.

 Had Hone opened up by saying yes, he's making a comeback, now let's start with the awful fact that yet another Maori has murdered a child. Followed by ideas on what to do about it. A book on parenting skills, perhaps, Hone? Nah. Too hard. …
    He wants to lead. Not as in heading a large number of Maori into the Promised Land.
    He just wants to be a heroic figurehead yet don't dare subject him to scrutiny or criticism…

When you do scrtch that surface, you don’t find a warrior – you find only the crybaby underneath.

Maoridom doesn't need tough-guy rhetoric, or protest for its own sake, a ceaseless outpour of negativity and blame-laying…
    He could try sitting down with people who are reasonable and come up with solutions to end Maori poverty and all our other problems….

Yes, he could try. But he wouldn’t be interested. Too few headlines. Too little interest. Because those who pursue political power are not about solutions. That’s because if the problems they go on about go away, so too, they think, does their powerbase. They feed on misery like flies on dung.

Such sham redeemers love poverty—of course, poverty of others. They remind me of Ayn Rand’s ‘Fountainhead.’ In this novel, Rand has beautifully delineated the personality of the socialist art critic Elsworth Toohey, a key character in the novel:
“You’re a maggot, Elsie,” she [his aunt] told him once. “You feed on sores.” “Then I will never starve,” he answered.
Nor will the NGOs. They feed on sores, wounds, lacerations—the more the merrier. Wherever there are sores and wounds, they ensure that the wounds are not healed, so that they can, like maggots, feed on them.

Politicians feast on misery.

Hone is just another politician.

RELATED POSTS:

• “A news reporter later asked the local leaders of the indigenous peoples of South Africa how they came to select the new name given to Hone…”
  Hone Harawira , aka Walking Eagle
• “The Treaty of Waitangi, he said, didn’t just protect Maori; it ‘provided protection toall New Zealanders in respect of assets held by the Government on behalf of all citizens of Aotearoa.’ This is a quite astonishing claim…”
  Hone rewrites the Treaty

Sykes to Co-Lead the Menage of Convenience? [update 2]

UPDATE 1:

NBR is apparently reporting the leader is Laila Harre (right), formerly of New Labour, the Alliance, the CTU and the Greens – and one of the architects of Rodney Hide’s super-shitty Auckland mega-bureaucracy.

If this is true, it might suggest I’m just talking complete bollocks and the only thing DotCon wants out of this is getting Laila Harre and John Minto into parliament.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see …

Pigs Do Fly

Here is a picture of the world’s first flying pig, in 1909.

Pic of John Moore-Brabazon, from the Gloucester Transport History site.

Here’s the most recent.

Pic by www.sunlive.co.nz

MMP = More Marriages of Convenience?

I can’t think of a fancy-arsed acronym to describe it, but MMP obviously stands for More Marriages of Convenience. The InterMana Party sort-of agreement, should one ever be made and either party (or agreement) stay around long enough to make a difference, is exactly the sort of marriage of convenience the MMP laws, rules and environment not only makes possible, but positively encourages.

Why that should surprise media commentators says more about media commentators than it does about either Mr and Mrs Harawira or Mr DotCon.

Regardless of what the media commentators think, the rules as written do favour deals between small parties with either big policy differences,¹ or going for different votes².

A ManaNet Alliance fits both bills. The groups are different enough that they’re not competing over the same policy ground. And they have sufficiently similar aims (getting rid of National; promoting leaders’ egos) that they have something around which to coalesce.

The rule being exploited is that allowing a victory in a constituency to trigger MPs on the basis of party votes. While the arrangement being discussed by DotConAndHarawira may not have been contemplated by the rule’s writers, again, says more about the writers than it does the negotiators. 

That it would suit both Harawira and DotCon and  is obvious. For the former, he can trade his potential for electoral success in return for gobs of DotCon’s money (if by then the FBI haven’t got it) and maybe even an extra MP; for the latter, it allows him to parlay his ill-gotten money into MPs – and, thereafter, he hopes, negotiating power in a new Government that might deliver him immunity from extradition.

Both get what they want, they hope, courtesy of MMP.

It may not be what anyone ever contemplated when MMP was begun, but maybe when this jerry-built electoral system was set up, it should have been.

* * * *

1. Parties with very similar policies will obviously be fighting for the same voters, and might therefore find little  on which to agree organisationally, normally...
2. Whereas parties going for different votes, with one going for party votes and the other for electoral, may be able to accommodate each other to mutual benefit whatever their perceived differences, or similarities.

Internet Party

Well, if in launching a political party your aim is to get everyone to talk about you, then the launch of Kim DotCon’s Internet Party has worked a treat.

Although I imagine the publicity wasn’t supposed to be generated because Fartin’ Martyn Bradbury was stupid enough to leavea draft paper about the party’s plans and programme lying around for Cameron Slater to publish, or for it to be revealed therein that Martyn Bradbury was being paid to “consult” for Hone Harawira’s Mana Party while being paid $8000 to spruik  DotCon’s Party Party to his friends and associates while also being paid an undisclosed sum to talk trades union at the trade-union funded Daily Blog – and that the Scoop website is not as politically independent as it once was.

Which means no-one is talking much about DotCon’s putative policy platform, whatever it might be beyond standing up against the surveillance state (hopefully) and for legalised theft of intellectual property (hopefully not) beyond speculation that Bradbury would only be involved if he found the policies congenial – which means every member of the human race is likely to find the opposite – and that he is on record as finding “Kim Dotcom’s economic vision a genuine way forward.”

Which, based on Bolshie Bradbury leaping out of Hone’s boudoir to get into bed with DotCon, could only be a Great Leap Backwards.

Hone Harawira , aka Walking Eagle

On his taxpayer-funded junket to South Africa for Nelson Mandela's funeral, Maori Party M.P., Hone Harawira, aalso known as John Hadfield), was awarded yet a third name.

Hone was invited to address a major gathering of the indigenous peoples of the African continent.  The invitation was extended due to his recent examples of how to inflame the racial situation in New Zealand.

Hone spoke for almost an hour, talking at length about social justice, about his representation of NZ’s anti-apartheid movement, about being the living incarnation of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and Parliament’s only standard-bearer for the poor and downtrodden, about the money he makes off his popular flag design, and about how he has continued his racist mother's quest for unearned privilege and her doomed-to-fail rabid ideas to divide and conquer using race.

At the conclusion of his speech, the tribes presented Hone with a plaque inscribed with his new South African indigenous people's name - "Walking Eagle."  The proud Hone then departed with his entourage, waving to the crowd as he left.

A news reporter later asked the local leaders of the indigenous peoples of South Africa how they came to select the new name given to Hone.

They explained that "Walking Eagle" is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.

Child poverty is not rising but falling

John Boy Key is considering funding Hone Harawira’s “Food in Schools” bill, saying, "There is some merit, obviously, for food in schools - the Government has been supporting that in terms of a number of programmes."

But as Lindsay Mitchell points out, and as you’d expect with Hone Harawira (whose whole career is built on artifice), the very bill to which they’re considering lending their support starts with a lie :

From the bill’s Explanatory note:

"Growing levels of poverty in New Zealand have resulted in too many parents being unable to afford to provide their children with breakfast before school and/or lunch at school, or being unable to afford to provide their children with sufficiently nutritious meals before and during school."

The latest data available shows that levels of child poverty are declining:

The shaded area shows that the percentage of children living in households with income below 60 percent of the median … household income (referenced to 2007) has fallen from 37 percent in 2001 to 21 percent in 2011…

So even by the standard of “poverty” used by politically motivated “Child Advocates” (i.e., that “poverty” is a relative thing, measured as a percentage of others’ wealth or income), and despite the loud and repeated claims of these advocates, the number of children in impoverished homes is not rising but falling quite substantially. Fallen by nearly half.

In addition, as Lindsay shows, the hardship suffered by those families under this relative line has got no worse since the mid-1980s.

You’d think instead of talking up “rising child poverty” the so called advocates for impoverished children would be celebrating these results—and they would be, if ending child poverty were their real goal.

Hone rewrites the Treaty

I must say, it was fascinating to hear Hone Harawira rewriting the Treaty of Waitangi this morning [audio].

Yes, it’s been rewritten before and by better men than him—one of whom, Pita Sharples, was on air immediately afterwards rewriting it again. But this time it was on the spur of the moment, and just to make a political point.

Mana Party leader Hone Harawira says the Maori Party should resign over the sale of state assets, that “Section Nine of the existing SOE Act requires the Crown do nothing that breaches the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi,” in short “it is a sell-out of the Treaty of Waitangi because the treaty should be applied to all shareholders, not just the Crown.” [Emphasis mine.]

And then he just starting rewriting history. Right out of the side of his mouth.

The Treaty of Waitangi, he said, didn’t just protect Maori; it “provided protection to all New Zealanders in respect of assets held by the Government on behalf of all citizens of Aotearoa.”

This is a a quite astonishing claim.

In whatever language you want to read it, the Treaty document promises the protection of private property rights (or rangatiratanga in the looser Maori translation) in their property “for as long as they wished to retain them.” It says nothing at all “in respect of assets held by the Government on behalf of all citizens of Aotearoa”--a very different thing indeed.

(In fact, the Treaty goes on to provide that “asset sales” may only be effected through the Crown, nonsensically patronising even at the time, but more relevant to the situation today than Hone’s self-evident fiction.)

Another fascinating exchange occurred next. In discussing Hone’s response, Sharples was invited to respond to the charge that the “principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” have been left deliberately vague, allowing them to defined and redefined as protagonists wish—to mean everything to everybody.

Sharples denied they were deliberately vague, or even vague at at all, before heading down the now well-worn route of insisting they mean “partnership” and “consultation” and a pony for everyone—fictions all, apart from the pony—then declaring the Treaty binds only the Crown and Maori—a rewriting of the all-pervasive insistence nowadays that the principles apply everywhere from your workplace to the pub.

Yet even in denying the vagueness, Sharples himself was relying on it to assert the fictional Crown duties of “partnership” and “consultation. Fictional  duties keeping Sharples in a job based on the same vagueness Hone himself relies on in his own power-play.

It was once observed by Ayn Rand that

In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.

Both Hone and Pita live of the vagueness of so-called Treaty Principles that allows the principles to be endlessly rewritten. But the “moderate” Pita holds to the rewriting as it is today, whereas the more strident Harawira holds to the rewriting he wants to put in place tomorrow.

Whom do you think will win?

Hone’s ‘Hone Heke tax’

Hone Harawira proposes a transactions tax.  He calls it his ‘Hone Heke tax’—presumably because it’s intended to chop down tall poppies.

That’s certainly how it worked when it was first introduced.

It was first introduced by Genghis Khan. Yes, seriously. This is not satire. It was first introduced by Genghis Khan, when Buddhist adviser Yelü Chucai advised him to exploit conquered peoples instead of simply slaughtering them —with, of course, the threat of slaughter backing up the extraction of the tax.

Chop down tall poppies slowly instead of slaughtering them at will. That’s the secret of the Hone Heke tax.

Lovely, huh?

Brash v Harawira

Don Brash and Hone Harawira face off with the Walrus in the chair. Watch it here:

Part One.

Part Two.

Hone and Hide have a point

Hone Harawira and Rodney Hide may both have a point.

Both of them are at odds with law they’ve given their vote to. And both are blaming being in coalition for the problem.

Hone is complaining that what the Maori Party has got in return for going into coalition with National government isn’t worth what they’ve given away—and, specifically .  Now, Tariana herself responds that Hone “has no respect for this [MMP] environment. He doesn’t have any respect for the coalition agreement that we all signed up to and that we all agreed to.” And she points out that when the Maori Party has only two ministers around a cabinet table of 22, then they will always have to give something away—as they did with the parts of the Foreshore and Seabed (Replacement) Bill that has got so far up Hone’s nose.

And Rodney? Well, he’s right in the gun as Minister for Local Government for delivering to Auckland legislation that allows Len Brown’s Auckland Super-Council to hand power to a $3.4 million board of 38 unelected Maori. How does Hide respond? His law but not his fault, he says. Echoing Tariana he argues that with only two ministers around a cabinet table of 22, there was nothing he could do to stop his law being changed. (Echoing his excuses when he said he had no choice about siding with John Key when the PM attacked one of Rodney’s own MPs.)

Thus do minority ministers become lapdogs.

What Hone and Hide and Tariana are all describing is the process whereby minority coalition partners under MMP are buried when in Government—as virtually every coalition partner under MMP has been.

The Maori Party may escape the curse of the Alliance, NZ First, Mauri Pacific and Te Tawharau because even if they implode over the rumblings from Mt Harawira the Maori Party itself will always get deluded racists to vote for them in the racist seats in which they stand.  But for the ACT Party, oblivion now beckons as inevitably as it did for its predecessors who made lapdogs of themselves.

But is it inevitable that minority parties under MMP will always face oblivion?

Not if they don’t go into coalition it isn’t.

It’s argued by the uninformed and unthinking that coalition and “confidence and supply” are necessary to give “stability” to government. These agreements  work, these people say. Minor parties have to sign up to them.

What crawling, abject, self-serving nonsense.

If “confidence and supply” agreements have “worked,” then they have worked only for the larger party, which in every coalition formed to date has chewed up, swallowed then spat out its minor partners.

And they’ve hardly worked for New Zealand either, since some of the worst law we’ve seen in the last fifteen years has been either the product of a minor party (Sue Bradford’s tail wagging everyone’s anti-smacking dog, for just one example); been used to make  a beard of the minor party (as Hone recognises has happened  with Chris Finlayson’s Marin & Coastal Bill);  or has been foisted on a minor-party minister in the hope and expectation that if things do go wrong it will bury them and not the major party (Auckland’s super-sized bureaucracy, for example, in which Rodney Hide invested his party’s dwindling political capital—and which he’s now lost altogether).

We’ve ended up in short not with good law, but with law that often even the law’s authors won’t stand behind.

So in that respect, signing up to coalitions and “confidence and supply” agreements are bad for New Zealand, bad for New Zealand law, and disastrous for the minor coalition partners themselves. 

But still the dumbarses keep signing up to take the (short-term) baubles of office.

Is that they only thing a small political party can do?

No, it’s not. Instead, they could stand on their principles—if they had any.

Instead of signing up to either coalition or “confidence-and-supply” agreements,” they could make the cast-iron promise that as a party they would vote en bloc for any measure that moves in the direction of their principles without any new measures moving the other way.  In the case of the Libertarianz, for example, they could promise support for any measure that moves  towards more freedom (however small the move) just as long as there is no new coercion involved.

That would stability without the need for lapdogs,  and more stability than we’ve seen in the past 15 years.

Because that’s a cast-iron promise that any major party could take to the bank-or, at least, to the Treasury benches. It would work as a “ratchet,” moving the country towards the minor party’s principles more effectively than having two ministers enjoying the baubles (and blame) of office.

And it would have every politician and every political journalist in the country assiduously studying what the minor party’s principles actually mean, so they’d understand enough about what was being promised to at least sound knowledgeable.

It’s a win-win for everyone, especially for minority coalition parties for whom coalition is just a death warrant for .

If they have any principles, they should stand on those instead.

Rolling, rolling, rolling: The Treaty gravy train is still rolling

“As usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to; so tyranny is
the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to.”
            - John Locke

The Foreshore & Seabed deal is complicated enough already without Hone Harawira muddying its far from pellucid waters.  But bear in mind that when Hone complains the government has “pandered to rednecks” and he calls the agreement “bullshit” [audio] he’s just playing politics with you.  He just wants mainstream New Zealanders* to think his tribalists have been shafted so they won’t look too deeply into what’s just been given away.

Hone is obviously upset that the government has (quite properly) refused to make a gift to iwi of that which they were previously required to go to court to prove. From Lew at KiwiPolitico (who, it seems, agrees with Hone):

“‘[The government, says Hone] took the two things which would make Pākehā happy and refused to give the one thing which would make Māori happy.’
“The two things are guaranteed public access and inalienability [clarifies Lew]; the one thing is Māori title.”

I disagree.  I’d say the government got one thing right and several things wrong. But I’d go further. In opening the door for iwi to make a form of common law claim to property in specific tracts of foreshore or seabed, on that at least the government has done well. This would be using power to recognise right. So too would have been recognising the right to alienate (sell) that to which title had been proved. On that, the government has done poorly.  That too would have been using power to protect right.

What Hone wants “mainstream” New Zealand to overlook however is what has been given beyond right.

The devil seems to lie in what changed between yesterday and the government’s offer last month to allow this deal to happen. There appear to be two new things handed over:

1. A unjustified declaration in law that Maori have mana over the foreshore and seabed.
      The universal recognition or mana tukuiho--“recognition for all iwi with a coastal connection, whether or not they meet the test for customary title”—will “cite iwi and hapu with specific coastal areas,” says the Herald, spelling out out “to councils and other statutory organisations what rights the recognised iwi and hapu have on conservation issues in their area.”
   In other words, the door has been opened now to grant Maori leaders a “partnership” in law that the Treaty itself never promised, but which the myth-makers have been agitating for for at least two decades. 
   A form of partnership that will make a gift to iwi of unspecified political power over aquaculture operations, minerals claims, harbours, ports, airports and more.
   A gift that has just opened the door to a world of trouble.
2. “The Government also agreed [says the Herald] that iwi which have already had a Treaty of Waitangi settlement can make a new claim for customary title in the foreshore and seabed.”
   So much for all those “full and final” settlements too, eh?

And so much for one law for all.

So the scorecard to me on yesterday’s agreement looks like one step forward, and three back.  And in every direction, these are big steps.

The gravy train is still rolling.

* * * *

* Yes, Virginia, it’s now PC to use the “mainstream” word.  You now have Aunty Tariana’s permission.

UPDATE: Dim Post has a similar view of Hone’s politicking.

This is just cynical politics: Harawira’s censure is beneficial to National – it’s voters hate him and see his anger as an indication that their party has done the right thing. And it lets the Maori Party pretend it has at least one member who speaks for those who don’t like their coalition choices which is obviously not the case.”

Declaration of “rights” to subsidised separatism [update 3]

As you may have noticed, the Government you voted for has signed you up to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—something Helen Clark herself was opposed to, citing fears it would create “two classes of citizenship and … give indigenous people veto rights over laws made by Parliament.”

But we already have two legal classes of  citizen, don’t we—something confirmed by Doug Graham when, as Minister in Charge of Treaty Capitulations, he told taxpayers, “The sooner we realise there are laws for one and laws for another, the better."

So one law for all is officially dead. Pita Sharples grand-standing announcement merely throws another shovelful of dirt on that particular colour-blind aspiration.

Occupiers of private property must be told to clear off [updated]

Appeasing idiocy only rewards more of the same.  Here’s today’s lesson.

Last Waitangi day Wikitana and John Popata assaulted Prime Minister John Key as he was entering the Waitangi marae, for which they were convicted and (after glowing encomia from the likes of Hone Harawira) each sentenced to the hard labour of 100 hours' “community work” for their violence.

The lesson for the two thugs was that high-profile violence pays: a moment of violence against the Prime Minister bought them fame, headlines and mana amongst the braindead—at the price only of some risibly supervised “community work.”

Clearly emboldened by their fame and the “mana” bought at so cheap a price, less than a year later and short of a headline they’re doing that “work” in their community right now, occupying someone else’s private land in the Far North to protest . . . oh hell, who cares what they’re protesting: There they sit on someone else’s land (with the blessing of the local tribe, Ngati Kahu, and the iwi’s “negotiator” Margaret Mutu) chewing chicken bones, spitting venom and sending the rightful owner broke.  And here’s what these thugs “demand” for trying his patience:

"No land to be sold at Mahaetai [Taipa], so you property investors or house buyers don't buy land here, and we want our land returned to Ngati Kahu for nothing."

“Success,” say the thugs, “might be measured in buyers keeping away.”

Our success, the local police are never likely to say in response, will be measured by the extent to which we uphold the individual rights of rightful land owners.  That’s what the police should be saying, but never will.

They should have said that the very moment these thugs first trespassed.  Their “occupation” should never had hit the news: the police should have done the job they’re paid for at the precise time they were notified of the trespass. Instead the thugs have only become further emboldened by the ease with which they’ve discovered they can thumb their nose at the law, and they’re now hosting the country’s journalists on someone else’s lawn.

It’s time for Mr Key, the man who brought Hone Harawira’s party into coalition, to take a stand on one thing above all a civilised government is obliged to do: to protect the property rights of a citizen who’s been made a pawn in the power politics of a pair of idiots-a citizen who is, no doubt, losing big money every day that those vermin are out sitting on his lawn and he can’t sell off his subdivision as he planned to. (This selection of properties in the area will give you some idea of the money that is now hostage to these lunatics.)

For twelve months now John Key and his Government have tried to be all things to all people. He’s been given accolades for bringing the Maori Party “inside the tent”: flying their flag; doling out ministries; giving Maori Party leaders billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to spend.

And in return . . .  taxpayers, have got nothing. In return, Hone Harawira offers the country the Maori Party Salute. In return, they demand a a swathe of the Conservation Estate to buy their votes for a $100 billion cap-and-tax scheme.  In return, they give their imprimatur to any rag-tag Gog & Magog able to mutter “post-colonial traumatic stress disorder.”

Time for Mr Key to realise what he’s bought with his appeasement and our involuntary largesse. Time he tells Hone to bring his thugs into line.  Time he tells Margaret bloody Mutu that any “negotiations” she’s engaged in will be extinguished if she doesn’t get her thugs off someone else’s land.  Time to tell them all that’s not negotiable. And time he tells the police to do the job they’re supposed to do, instead of wasting it harassing noisy but harmless bloggers.

Time, in other words, he does the bloody job he’s supposed to do.

UPDATE: “Shades of Caledonia,” says Eric Crampton.

That’s a “responsible” $100 billion burden, thank you [update 3]

The Not Evil Just Wrong blog awards New Zealand’s Environment Minister Nick Smith the Oxymoron Promise of the Day prize today for talking “responsibility” while imposing a $100 billion burden on taxpayers by 2050.

Not sure if that’s a prize-winning Oxymoron or award-winning chutzpah. Either way it’s par for the course for the topsy-turvy world of global warming politics, where facts are less important than faith.

So as world leaders quietly accept that signing a global warming deal at Copenhagen is a bust, which rather removes the so-called reason fr urgency in passing Smith’s Emissions Trading Scam, it’s time to ask two questions:

1. 'Who Are The Deniers Now? since “All evidence rejects hypothesis that human CO2 is causing warming.”
2. Why are NZ taxpayers taking on the $100 billion responsibility of fixing a non-problem?

UPDATE: That’s $100 billion plus a swathe of the Conservation Estate to Establishment Maori to shut them up, and to by the votes of the Maori Party.

UPDATE 2: Speculation abounds that the non-inclusion of the Harawiras’ Ngapuhi iwi in the bribe deal  is the real reason for all the talk behind Hone’s disgruntlement with the Maori Party.

UPDATE 3: Spotted by Gooner:

“’Look, who knows what the price of carbon will be tomorrow, next week or in twenty years time. We just don't know.’

“John Key, on Newstalk ZB yesterday morning, whose party is introducing a price cap on carbon.”

And from the same interview, talking about Treasury’s estimates:

"They are wrong. They can't tell what the deficit will be in December so how do they know what carbon prices will be in 2030 or 2040?"

Stealing – It’s in the Blood [updated]

Suzuki Samurai thinks about theft . . .
Let’s talk about politics – a word coming from the Greek word “Poly” (meaning “many), and “ticks” (meaning small “blood-sucking objects”).
I couldn’t help but laugh when I heard Hone Harawira on the radio yesterday. The “she’ll be right bro” audacity made me laugh only because that it reminded me how far this country has come in terms of expecting political abuse of power & waste.
Apparently it’s now funny to spend money that isn’t yours. In Hone’s case, a jaunt to Paris and a walk on the beach in Hawaii. Come to think of it, the whole press conference reminded me of the late great Billy T James’ skit parodying the “Lands For Bags” TV ad, Billy says, “Where did I get my bag? – I pinched it”! (Insert Maori giggle here)

Hone isn’t as funny as Billy, but. Hone the Maori really did “pinch it.” Sure it was legal –  he wuz entitled, bro!  -- but it’s still theft of other people’s money for what he called “a choice trip.”
Now I’ll give Hone some credit. He admitted that he took what he could, he made no apology for putting his hand in your pocket; he even made a prescient remark that said that most New Zealanders would have said, “good on you” – and sadly he’s probably right on that count.
Leaving aside Hone for a moment…
Even less funny are Rodney Hide, Roger Douglas, Chris Carter, & Bill English. (And various others I’ll leave out because that would take at least a week) These entities all been on the take too. Chris Carter is a member of the collectivist, socialist Labour Party, so we’d expect that kind of ‘damn the working man’ attitude from him anyway. Bill English, has asked us all to tighten our belts during the recession…but Sir Double Dipton doesn’t think he should – does anyone seriously think that he wanted to pay the money back because it was blatantly wrong, or did Mr Twenty-One Percent just do it to save his own hide?
Speaking of Hide, and his “I’m entitled” squealing mate Roger Douglas: These two have campaigned…excuse me…have made a career out of peddling the line that they are “Perk Busters,” “Waste Eliminators,” “Tax-payer Protectors” … Now both these gits are caught with their pants down, becoming the very same bludging, snouts-in the-trough, principle-bereft thieves they always claimed to be fighting against (ha, on our behalf)
For goodness’ sake, Rodney was the guy who helped Dave Henderson fight off the IRD; does anyone see the irony? Rodney is the guy you’d expect to be speaking up to slag off Hone; can anyone hear him bark?
The barking at Hone hasn’t come from his parliamentary colleagues.  It’s come from you lot – as it has to.
Dear reader, if you happen to see Hone in the street, ask him how choice his trip was at the expense of some poor, working, tax-paying Maori who is struggling to feed his whanau; ask him how choice it is that same poor Maori’s EFTPOS card just got declined at the supermarket; ask him how choice it is to say “I don’t give a shit” about the people who have to pick up his tab.
And if you happen to see Bill (and you can refrain from bruising your knuckles on his face), ask him how his belt tightening is going; ask him how his “entitlements” are looking, and think about how much money he’s taken of yours over the years when you are forced to tighten your belt and forgo a Christmas ham or holiday this year.
Ask Roger, if you stumble upon him, whether his “entitlements” should come out of your pocket; if you should be paying for books that you won’t read; and for holidays in London that you don’t get to enjoy.
And finally when you happen upon Rodney Hide, ask him how he can sleep at night knowing that good men like small business owner Ian Mutton killed himself because of being bullied by the IRD, the same IRD that collect tax so Rodney can go to weddings in London with his girlfriend. Ask him if he can face Ian’s poor surviving wife, who knows what it’s like to live without her husband, and their son – their son, who at 13 killed himself six months after his dad did due to the despair at losing his dad. Just bloody ask him what kind of twisted logic makes him the self-appointed doyenne of the working, taxpaying people of New Zealand.
Message for Rodney: you are the worst of the bunch I’ve just mentioned.  The baubles of office and the arrogance of political power have done you in. You have no claim, ever again, to be anything but another political parasite on the back of all of us!
Just another bloody politician – for whom stealing is in the blood.

* * * *

UPDATE: Who would have thought it.  Scratch a Racist Party MP, and what do you find?  A racist.  Says Hone HaHa in an email reply to someone involuntarily picking up the tab for his tip:

    “Gee Buddy, do you believe that white man bullshit too do you?
    "White motherfuckers have been raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries and all of a sudden you want me to play along with their puritanical bullshit."

Story, and more eimailery here.  And John Boy’s response?

    “Mr Key said Mr Harawira's language was not ‘appropriate.’ But he was sent a ‘very provocative email and that's what he responded to but I don't think that makes it right.’
    “He will leave the Maori Party to deal with him.”

Now that’s what I call cabinet discipline.

LIBERTARIAN SUS: There's none so blind . . .

Susan contemplates a colour-blind Auckland.

Regardless of any misgivings over last week’s announcement of the planned One Council to Rule Them All in Auckland, there was one move that could genuinely be described as bold. That was the abolition of special race-based Maori representation.

It didn’t take long for the predictable outrage from the usual suspects. Leading the charge was Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples, calling the move “institutionalised racism.” Yes, Virginia, doing away with separatist, race-based seats is racist.

But hang on. The English translation of the former South African system of “apartheid” is “separate development.” So by definition, Sharples is saying that South Africa’s abolition of separate, race-based policies was “institutionalised racism”? Lord knows what Nelson Mandela would make of that. George Orwell, on the other hand, would recognise Newspeak in a trice.

Hot on Pita’s heels was an urbane young Maori man railing in the same vein. I missed his name, but he screamed local government/academia/public servant – and I have no doubt that he was well versed in the ‘principles o Te Tiriti’ – who said that “this has put Maori back some 50 or 60 years.” And Maori Party MP Hone Harawira has since added his 2c worth, stating his opposition to the plan, like the collectivist he is.

Because collectivism is the essence of their argument; that insidious practice of categorising people for political convenience, as if all think and behave as one. By inference, these men shamefully believe that DNA determines individual success. By inference, they have the temerity to suggest that it is impossible for individuals of Maori descent to gain representation on their own merit.

On the contrary, gentlemen. In fact, it is that sort of toxic rhetoric that is guaranteed to keep people subjugated by the deliberate stifling of individual thought and action, as the last 30 odd years of failed social(ist) policies have demonstrated beyond argument.

Paul Holmes has several times stated that the (red) left hasn’t yet grasped the sense of change in the public wind since losing power last year. Justin du Fresne has made similar comments in Wellington. I’m not getting too excited; eg, the justice system is still looking very sick to me; but putting aside the obvious libertarian ambivalence towards the blue collectivists, they might have a point. The abolition of race-based government representation, albeit at local level, is exactly the sort of issue that would never have even been broached prior to last November.

Now it has. And it’s rocking the once rock-solid left. When the winds of change blow, they can do so rapidly and from seemingly nowhere, a la the fall of the Berlin Wall and Eastern European communism. Whether this small step is an indication of what is to come, only time will tell.

In the meantime the brown collectivists are angry, sensing perhaps that the racist gravy train might be starting to lose a bit of steam. And losing steam means losing power. Winston Peters -- another avowed racist -- knows all about that …

For too long this issue has been in the “too hard” basket. If anybody dared raise it, (remember Orewa?) they were shot down by a coalition of apologists for daring to challenge the Sanctified. Well, not this little black duck. I certainly won’t mourn its passing and I believe that many New Zealanders think similarly. Racism is poisonous. It is collectivism at its worst and as such, the end of race-based representation at any level is a good thing.

In this respect, colour-blindness is a virtue.

* * Susan Ryder writes every Tuesday for NOT PC * *

Greens’s boot camp ‘racist’ jibe: could do better [updated]

The Green Party’s hippies have their sandals in a twist over the idea of 'boot camps' for youth offenders -- not because they don’t work or because there are more important lessons for youngsters to learn -- but because the idea, says the Greens’s Kevin Hague, “unfairly discriminates against Maori.”

Oh please. If you could just put your macrame down and listen for a moment, Kevin: the boot camps won’t be taking people because of their race, but because they’ve committed crimes. Understand? If a disproportionate number of young Maoris are locked up, or placed in boot camps, then that’s because a disproportionate number of young Maoris choose to habitually commit crimes.

There are many reasons to object to boot camps, but this is not one of them. 

And there are probably many ways to fix the problem of the disproportionate number of Maori committing crimes, but wringing your hands and throwing around bogus claims in the media would not be one of them.

It appears even Hone Harawira is beginning to understand that much, since his own knee-jerk “racism” button hasn’t yet gone off.  If Hone and the Maori Party can see through the bogus notion that boot camps are racist, then maybe the hippies should try a little harder to understand why.

Now, having said all that, if the Greens really do want to get worked up about something that really is discriminatory on the basis of race, then they should object to the minimum wage law. Now that really does discriminate against Maori.

UPDATE: To be fair to the Greens, Green MP Catherine Delahunty (who plumbed new parliamentary depths with her maiden speech) replies to the charge above in a private email to a reader, saying there are other reasons as well for their opposition:

    Hi Xxxxxx, the Green party is opposed to boot camps because the experienced
youth justice judge Justice Andrew Becroft and many other leaders in the
field of youth justice are categorical that boot camps do not work! The
Maori Party may support National's proposal but the Maori Party do not speak
for all Maori on this issue…
  If you google "Finland and youth crime strategies" you will find some very
interesting articles on more constructive intervention strategies. We agree
that intervention is needed but also a need to get tough on the causes of
crime.
    I did not hear the speech about the camps being discriminatory against young
Maori but statistically Maori youth are targeted far more often by police
and have higher convictions rates than any other culture for crimes also
committed by other young people. If you accept the prejudices in the system
work against Maori youth it is easy to see the connection…

"Me too" and mendacity on Nats' Maori policy

Despite talk that National has formed an understanding with the Maori Party that will allow them to do a deal after the election should both have the votes (a deal putting National into government and Pita Sharples into the Maori Affairs ministry), National has just released a Maori Affairs policy suggesting either a few problems for the talked-about deal -- or a few problems with the honesty of National's policy commitments.

As Liberty Scott accurately characterises it, it is "me-too" all over again:

• "Me too" on continuing to support (read - use your taxes to spend money on) Maori broadcasting, Kohanga Reo, racially-based housing, racially-based "professional development," racially-based health provision and the like," despite this "support" having led to what Scott describes as "appalling violence, abuse and intergenerational criminal underachievement of the underclass of predominantly Maori families, failing again and again, and worst of all breeding children in a climate of fear, abuse and neglect." National is for more of the same.
• "Me too" on "recognising the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document of New Zealand," despite it being too hastily written and lacking too much to bear the weight of such an accolade.
• "Me too" on "more support" i.e., taxpayers money, for the kangaroo court that is the Waitangi Tribunal. (National's David Farrar says "I especially like the commitment to speeding up the Treaty settlements by shifting the office to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, having independent facilitators and greater resourcing for the Waitangi Tribunal."
• "Me too" on their backsliding on the deadline by which the Waitangi Gravy Train will be brought to a halt, and nothing at all about the fullness or finality of settlements. Scott has more on both these points.
• "Me too" on establishing "post-settlement governance entities that best meet [Maori's] multi-dimensional roles and responsibilities," which presumably includes even more veto powers for iwi under the Resource Management Act.
• "Me too" on the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

Yes, they do promise to "reform the Resource Management Act to facilitate growth and development in the aquaculture industry" -- and the prospect of giving some weight to property rights to achieve this is dangled -- and they do promise to abolish the Maori seats, but it's this last and their position on the Foreshore and Seabed Act that will, at least on paper, pose the greatest problem for any coalition with Hone and Pita and Tariana.

And a deal with National is on the cards. Since the notion of reducing state spending on racially based policies is alien to National's policy document, one has to wonder if, like the Treaty Settlement policy, it's primarily about keeping the Maori Party happy?

But what about the policies on the Maori Seats and the Foreshore & Seabed Act? Opposition to Labour's Foreshore and Seabed Act, which removed from Maori the right to go to court and prove in common law their ownership rights over foreshore and seabed, led directly to the formation of the Maori Party. As Hone Harawira said recently, why would they give support to the party that introduced what is the worst violation of Maori rights for one-hundred and fifty years? (On which he's correct, incidentally.)

Pita Sharples said after National's policy release that abolition of the Maori seats is for Maori to determine (not as long as it represents a racial gerrymander it isn't) and National's stated policy on foreshore and seabed is "problematic" for any coalition deal ... "but they expect to see changes."

Now, John Key refuses to either confirm or deny whether or not those specific, high-profile marquee policies, either of them, are negotiable, but yesterday morning on National Radio he explicitly refused to rule it out -- and we all know what that means in politics, don't we.

So this looks like talking out of both sides of the mouth, doesn't it. Promising something in public to the electorate that the electorate wants to hear, while in private promising the Maori Party precisely the opposite in order to keep them on side.

Which all suggests that National intends either to break their promise to the electorate by backtracking on one or both of these big ticket policy commitments, or to break an understanding with the Maori Party -- that they will go easy on abolishing the Maori seats, and work towards abolishing the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

Which do you think is most likely? And what does this say about National's honesty?

UPDATE:  Pita Sharples confirms the analysis in an interview to air tonight on Alt TV.