Labour dreams Little & make-work

 

Given that modern Labour seems resolved to fix every social and economic problem they see with a new tax, I was astonished to hear that news from their weekend conference that the Labour leadership are proposing a policy to remove a tax – or at least a tax burden.

No joke this: leader Andrew Little has recognised that many NZers work several jobs to either make ends meet, or make life liveable, and he says Labour policy will be to remove the iniquitous secondary tax that penalises these hard workers. These are my words, not his.

Business NZ agrees with him. And so do I.

Unfortunately the sensible comes packaged with the nonsensical in the form of a make-work scheme and at least one more new tax (see, they really are true to form).  Called a “levy” that will apply “to companies in sectors with skills shortages which were therefore reliant on migrant labour,” it is in effect a tax on businesses who struggle to find skilled labour. Bizarre, but true. Instead of

This new tax – a favourite of Little’s runtish deputy Grant Robertson, is already being called the Robertson Tax. It should never fly.

It does however at least seek to solve a real problem: that we live in a small country in which youth unemployment is much higher than it should be, while the number of skilled employees who want to work is much lower. There is an obvious gap there which makes one wonder if the two problems shouldn’t be fixing each othet.

Instead of the obvious approach of seeking answers in the minimum-wage laws that both Red and Blue parties uphold (which all around the world leads to higher levels of youth unemployment) and the frequent and misguided changes by both parties in how apprentices are trained that have decimated the number of skilled workers, these Labour Party rocket surgeons instead propose to pay these young folk who are being priced out of the market by minimum wage laws to be welfare serfs in somebody else’s charity army.

The jobs policy would be for those on the Jobseeker benefit for more than six months, and would not be compulsory. “We will give these young Kiwis the kick-start they need to get back on the right track,” said leader Andrew Little. “This job experience will help them develop strong work ethics and make them more attractive to employers. We will get them ready for work.

So just to be clear: this make-work scheme will “get these young Kiwis back on track” by teaching them that the state will always be there to hold their hand once it has priced them out of the market  And it “will not be compulsory” but “there will be an expectation they take part – and possible sanctions if they don’t.”  Which if it isn’t exactly compulsion just yet then it is surely ust one arse-kicking away from it.

Which is at least a few dozen short of what these dickheads deserve for dreaming this shit up.

.

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…

90 days to take a chance on some talent [updated]

There’s outrage around the union- and compulsion-dominated traps that the new government is about to allow employers and employees to test each other out for ninety days before the full, costly, restrictive panoply of labour law descends to intrude upon the relationship.

Council of Trade Unions President Helen Kelly says

    it will bring about bad practice in small businesses, instead of businesses being very careful when employing people and checking their references. She says people should have dignity at work and be treated fairly.
    Ms Kelly says unjustified dismissal and unjustified disadvantaged are being removed from the law. She says under the bill people can be sacked for attending their grandmother's funeral or being sick, which have nothing to do with incompetency.

Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Ian Powell says

    the practical effect of the law change will be to increase the vulnerability of new employees at precisely the point when they are most vulnerable. He says denying rights of protection against unfair dismissal is dangerous in the hand of bad or inexperienced employers

Neil Jones at The Standard says the decision to introduce the legislation under urgency

is frankly an astonishing abuse of our democracy. A piece of legislation that will remove basic work rights from hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders in any one year is being rammed through Parliament without any discussion or debate.

And summing it all up Sue Bradford calls it “a disgraceful attack on both workers' rights and on democracy.”

They appear to think that it is only the intrusion of government that keeps wages and conditions up, rather than the productive profit-seeking of entrepreneurs and businessmen, and that in the absence of intrusion – even for ninety days – the conditions of workers will go to the wall. 

They seem to consider that employers hire employees only to dismiss them, instead of to put them to work.

They seem unaware that as the world’s economic crisis hits home here in New Zealand job-seekers are going to need every bit of help they can to find new employment, and this is a small step towards that.

They seem to have forgotten in their “anger” over urgency that a substantively similar bill was presented and much debated just two years ago -- and in the case of The Standard they seem to have forgotten all their arguments in favour of ramming through under urgency the Electoral Finance Act and the Emissions Trading Act, two of the biggest assaults on democracy, free speech and prosperity seen in recent years, and both of which saw the bills being written as the earlier clauses were being passed.

And they seem blithely unaware that there are many people who want desperately to become a worker, but who are locked about because present employment law discourages employers from taking a risk on them – that a ninety-day trial is just what many would-be workers need in order to prove themselves. 

This is not an attack on workers.  It’s a leg up for those who want to work, but who are presently locked out.  The facts are these:

It could only be a bad or inexperienced employee advocate who was unaware that to invest ninety days in a  new employee is a considerable investment – since the new employee who hits the ground running on day one is rare – a “sunk cost” that no reasonable employer would throw away on a whim in the manner Ms Kelly and Mr Powell and Ms Bradford think they will.

It could only be an incompetent employee advocate who was unaware of the risk every employer takes when they hire every new employee, and the risk is often highest with those who need employment the most -- the young, the old, the inexperienced, the under-qualified, those who’ve been out of work or their profession for a while – and who an entrepreneurial employer might consider for their position  if they have to chance to “try before they buy.”

And it could only be a politician who could call this an attack on “workers’ rights” when what it is in fact is a step, a small step, towards helping the unemployed become workers.

The fact is that every business and every entrepreneur survives by taking a risk; by seeing a new vision or a new idea, assessing it, and then backing their judgement.  That’s where wealth (and jobs) comes from.  But while they live by risk, present employment law does not encourage them to take risks when they choose who to hire because, as too many Employment Court decisions have shown, letting an unsuitable employee go is a about as easy as getting David Cunliffe to express humility: which means the downside of hiring someone who turns out to be unsuitable is high.

The fact is that in in the present legal environment when an employer has to choose between John who’s well-qualified but dull and Hone who is less-qualified and less-experienced but perhaps a little sharper, the employer is more likely to offer nice-but-dull John their job, and to show Hone the door.  Too risky, you see.  Too expensive a process if your personnel department gets it wrong. Much easier to play it safe and select the employee who just ticks all the boxes, and let the “riskier” candidate go.

You see, present law favours nice-but-dull, while it lowers the boom on those candidates who need someone to take a risk on them. Those “riskier” candidates are finding it hard to get a toe on the employment ladder, and the fact is that present employment law is helping to making that happen.

We all suffer by that – employers and manufacturers who miss out on good talent at good prices; would-be employees who keep finding the door shut in their face; and consumers, who don’t get to take enjoy the products of what this pool of untapped talent can do.  In a time of rising unemployment, every barrier to productive employment that can be removed is worthwhile. Every job-hunter should welcome this move. 

But there is one group who suffers disproportionately more than any other from the way restrictive employment law forces employers to ‘play it safe,’ and despite the great boon this bill would offer them they are unlikely to be listening to any of the arguments, or contacting Ms Kelly or Mr Powell or Ms Bradford to tell them to pull their heads in.

That group is the seemingly unemployable and unemployed Maori youth.

Whatever you believe about the present unemployment figures (a rate of just under 4%, with every chance of that increasing) there are nearly 300,000 people are either on a benefit or otherwise seemingly unemployable.  Included in those figures are a whopping 27% of young Maori who are unemployed – young talent that is under-skilled, under-experienced, under-qualified (and in too many cases criminally-qualified). These are the very people who most need somebody to take a risk on them – who need employers to be free to take a chance on them.

But they aren't listening to this debate.  They won’t be ringing Ms Kelly and Mr Powell and Ms Bradford to tell them to sit down and shit up. 

There's someone who could ring them on their behalf though.   Someone who could make a tangible difference.  With some justice, the Maori Party could point out to them that present employment law locks out “their” people.  They could call this present employment law racist -- and in this case they might actually be right.  It's targeted against the very group the Maori Party claim to represent. It makes life worse for them.  This one bill could do more to open doors for under-skilled and under-qualified young Maori than any hundred government programmes aimed at closing their gaps -- it would give them the chance at real employment, and the chance for many of them to turn their lives around.

Maybe the ones who should be fronting this debate with Kate Wilkinson are those two who could most easily silence the likes of Kelly, Powell and Bradford.  But are Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples  really aware of the issues at stake?  We might find out sooner than we think.

UPDATE: “The Maori Party failed their first test of common sense.” – Cactus Kate, in her post ‘Maori Party – FAIL.’

Urgency! Urgency! Urgency! [update 2]

Wow! Isn’t this new National/ACT/Maori/Peter Dunne-Nothin Government hitting the ground running.  John Key has flown around the world in a plane.  He’s spoken to world leaders.  New ministers have got their heads down and their sleeves rolled up – they’ve been diving into their portfolios to get down to business.  And in its first out-of-the-blue “crisis,” new Foreign Minister Murray McCully took action to get those poor helpless travellers out of Thailand (well, you know, he would have taken action if we had an air force.) 

And now, parliament starts sitting again today!  Under urgency!

Shit, this a government that has things to do.  Things to do urgently.  They have an an action plan.  They’ve promised a first-hundred days of action that started back on November 19.  (Or today, depending on who you listen to.)

“Action Plan!”  “First Hundred Days of Action!”  “Urgency!” Sheesh, it almost leaves a feller breathless, don’t it?

  When you hear the words “action plan” and “first hundred days” you surely know you’re listening to spin.  At least, you would if you weren’t a press gallery buffoon like John Boy Armstrong.  What’s in this “27-point action plan” that requires so much urgency and comes accompanied with so much bluster? 

Anything about getting government off the necks of producers when it’s never been more urgent to do so?  Anything about slashing the fat from bloated government departments (hell, even slashing whole goddamn departments) so the dead weight of their unproductive carcasses can be taken off producers’ shoulders?  Anything at all about ceasing to pay no-hopers to breed, which would stop in its tracks the headlines of no-hopers killing those they’ve been paid to produce?

Of course not.  For the most part, they’re neither urgently necessary nor at all productive – just a politically-fuelled mixture of banal and batshit crazy that the sycophantic commentariat are lapping up like a little boy laps up his mother’s warm milk and oaties.  Let’s look at this “action plan” and see whether either urgency is justified, or “action” is a fair description (my comments are in italics).

On the economy :
• The introduction and passage of National's tax package into law before Christmas, with tax cuts beginning on 1 April 2009. 
    Derisory tax cuts that will be fully wiped out by hikes in ACC levies, and without any concomitant cuts in spending: which means taxpayers will have an extra borrowing bill to suck up, and producers will have to compete in the capital markets for the same credit as this government.
• Updating and publishing the economic and fiscal forecasts to gauge the true state of the government's books and determine the on-going effects of the international economic crisis.
    They’re going to urgently publish some more forecasts?  Gee.  Can’t wait.
• Appointing a Minister of Infrastructure and begin implementing National's infrastructure plan.
    They’re going to spend $7 billion more of your money.  While cutting taxes.  Which means they’re going to borrow money to bid up the prices of contractors and building materials at the very time these need to contract from their inflated heights in order to assist real recovery. Only to a politician (or to an economist in thrall to politicians) can this make sense. Another spending binge, just like the last spending binge – and we get to pick up the tab. Again.
• The introduction of an RMA reform bill to reduce the costs, delays, and uncertainties in the Act.
    Window dressing.  It’s just a few revisions to exempt the government from the RMA so it can get on with its multi-billon dollar ThingBig 2.0 public works programme, and a few others to allow “companies to win the right to take private land.”  Nothing to see here, nothing at all.
• The introduction and passage of National's transitional relief package into law to offer extra assistance to Kiwis who are worst hit by redundancy.
    More spending.  More welfare.  No change.
• Calling in public service chief executives and instruct them to undertake a line-by-line review of their department's spending.
    And this will save how much?

It’s pathetic isn’t it.  In the face of the world’s biggest economic calamity for decades, that was National’s “urgent” economic plan to address it: basically the same menu they had a year ago with extra spending to go.   More spending, more welfare, and some tax cuts that aren’t worth a damn.   Nothing to see here at all.  So what about the next seven points on the “action plan,” those promised to “fix” Laura N’Order:

• On Law and Order, that nice Mr Key says National will:
  • Introduce legislation to remove the right of the worst repeat violent offenders to be released on parole. 
      One point that’s worth a damn.
  • Introduce legislation to clamp down on criminal gangs and their drug trade.
      Populist tosh that, to the extent that it’s successful, should help to raise profits for the criminals who remain in the drug trade – and make lessening freedom of association for the rest of us all the easier whenever the government wants to.
  • Introduce legislation to toughen the bail laws to make it harder for criminals awaiting trial to get bail.
      Another point that’s worth a damn iff at the same time court waiting times are brought down so people whom the courts must still consider innocent don’t have to rot in jail while they wait for their docket to come up.
  • Introduce legislation to tackle increasing violent youth crime by bolstering the Youth Court with a range of new interventions and sentences.
      John Key's 'Plan Blue' is for the state to either coddle kids or shackle them -- or have them sent to boot camp.  None of which, I submit, requires urgency or will seriously address increasing violent youth crime.  But it will attract headlines, which is all this exercise is really about, eh.
  • Introduce legislation to require DNA testing for every person arrested for an imprisonable offence.
     This is abuse.  It’s as simple as that. Remember that an arrest is not a conviction.  An arrest used to mean you were still presumed to be innocent, remember?  Not any more.  As from now you will retain (for the moment) the right not to give evidence against yourself, but even before being convicted you will lose your right not to give the state bits of your body.  The National Party has had the presumption of innocence doctrine in its sights for some time. Such a long-held cornerstone of liberty against state power should not be overturned so easily, or at all.
  • Introduce legislation to give police the power to issue on-the-spot protection orders to help them protect victims of domestic violence.
      Window dressing that will empower unproven accusations to have the force of law.
  • Introduce legislation to compensate victims by levying criminals and putting the money into a Victims’ Compensation Scheme.
     More window dressing.  The amount proposed, just $50 per crime, will cost more to collect than it will ever amount to.  The principle with victim restitution should be that criminals should never be able to gain a value from their crimes, and should to the fullest extent possible be forced to make restitution for their crimes to their victim(s).  This is not even a first step towards establishing that principle.

So some good, some bad and a whole  lot of window dressing.  And nothing really that could justify the phrase “action plan.”  So what about the third component: education. Will they fix what’s being taught to young New Zealanders that means one-in-five leaves schools functionally illiterate and innumerate (just as they were when National was last in power)?  That has left some 800,000 NZ workers unable even to transfer printed information to an order form?  Will they begin to wean young NZers off the cradle-to-grave welfare expectations they imbibe in Nanny’s indoctrination centres?  Will they work towards taking power away from the Ministry and the teacher unions? Will they hell.  We’re looking at more testing, even more paperwork, and ever more bossyboots governance of successful educators by those who are provably unsuccessful.

In education, Nation will (“under urgency”!:
• Amend the Education Act 1989 so the Minister of Education can set agreed National Standards in literacy and numeracy.
   Like King Canute commanding the tides, National intends to command literacy and numeracy to rise without any plan to abandon the teaching methods that have so demonstrably caused the problem.
• Publish requirements for primary and intermediate schools to report to parents in plain English about how their child is doing compared to the set National Standards, and compared to other children their age.
   More paperwork for teachers over-burdened by the stuff.
• Begin work on allocating the additional $500 million capital investment in schools in preparation for our first Budget to start future-proofing our schools.
    More window dressing.  As Phil Rennie demonstrated, the Clark Government blew an extra $3.1 billion on education, a 26% real increase, with exactly nothing at all to show for it, showing convincingly that if throwing money at the factory schools could fix the problems of the factory schools, that would have already happened.  Clearly, National has learned nothing from the news.
• Introduce a "voluntary bonding" scheme which offers student loan debt write-offs to graduate teachers who agree to work in hard-to-staff communities or subjects.
    The payoff for National’s student election bribe.  Forcing the impecunious to pay for the education of those who will one day be wealthy.
• Amend the Education Act 1989 to increase the current fines for parents of truant children from $150 and $400 for first time and repeat offenders respectively, and allow the Ministry of Education to take prosecutions.
    Frankly, I’d be giving parents whose children don’t attend the factory schools a medal, not a fine.

So nothing there worth a damn either.  How about the next “sector”?  I bet you’re just champing at the bit to find out, aren’t you?  What “changes” will we see here that requires so much urgency.  Will we see a change to the attitude that places ideology above patient care?  To the  die-while-you-wait health system that perpetuates this attitude?  To a cut in the number of bureaucratic parasites that infest the government’s creaking hospital “system”?  Of course not.

In health, National will:
• Instruct the Ministry of Health and DHBs to halt the growth in health bureaucracy.
    Clearly the story of King Canute is required reading for National’s ministers.  “Instructing” bureaucrats to stop doing what bureaucrats without setting up a mechanism to do that  is like passing laws to stop the tides flooding the land without building flood walls to do the job.  Which means this is more window dressing.
• Open the books on the true state of hospital waiting lists and the crisis in services.
    The old political ploy: Point the finger for failure at the last government so you can buy time for your own stuff-ups to take hold.
• Fast-track funding for 24-hour Plunketline.
    Keeping their promise on populist vote-buying – hardly a matter requiring urgency.
• Instruct that a full 12-month course of Herceptin be publicly available.
    Keeping another promise on populist vote-buying.
• Begin implementing National's Tackling Waiting Lists plan.
   Another plan without detail that, like Tony Ryall’s command to emergency rooms, shows the effect of studying King Canute is having a resounding effect on National’s policy writers.  Look to see the same sort of command-and-fudge approach to waiting lists that the Clark Government used.
• Establish a "voluntary bonding scheme" offering student loan debt write-off to graduate doctors, nurses, and midwives agreeing to work in hard-to-staff communities or specialties.
    As above, this is the necessary payoff for National’s student election bribe.  Forcing the impecunious to pay for the education of those who will one day be wealthy – the result of abject timidity to remove the price controls that have made communities and specialities hard to staff.

John Key said at the release of this “action plan,” "Our commitment to move immediately to tackle the issues that matter demonstrates our determination to build a brighter future for all New Zealanders."

I invite you to consider how many of these 27 points genuinely tackle the issues that matter, whether there is really any need to move urgently on any of them (beyond the urgent need to look like “action men”), and what this shows about any genuine determination about “building a brighter future” for anyone but themselves and their cabinet colleagues.

The truth is that given the scale of the world's economic problems very few of those "points" could really be called "action" in the full meaning of that word, and those that appear so are either window dressing at best, or at worst they make Cullen’s tax-and-spend proclivities look conservative – at least he was up front about making you pay through the nose, instead of extracting the readies by stealth.

We are about to see two weeks of “urgency” – two weeks of much sound and fury that will signify nothing at all beyond the sound and the fury, and end in nothing much more than we had before.

Plus ca change.

UPDATE 1: The odour of capitulation in the National caucus must be all-enveloping.  Annie Fox points out that following the stabbing and killing of a Christchurch taxi driver former entrepreneur Stephen Joyce has now joined the ranks of the knee-jerk Nanny populists :

    "Transport Minister Steven Joyce will review the use of distress buttons, video cameras and safety screens to separate drivers and passengers."
    Does the government have rules on the use of buttons, cameras and screens? If they do have these rules then the only thing Joyce needs to do is get rid of them.
    But let's presume that they rules don't exist - why is the government wasting time and resources on this matter - surely it is the responsibility of the taxi driver what security he would like. Just like they decide if they are going to have a Navman or CD player or air freshener.

Absolutely right.  As she says, it didn’t take long for Joyce to become just another politician.

UPDATE 2:  Bob Jones has a brilliant idea for the National Party to keep the Maori Party on side and help solve the economic crisis:

- free breakfast in bed for Maoris - also solve looming unemployment problem with breakfast makers and deliverers. Maori Party now in bag for sure.

Don't ban force

It became obvious over the last few years to anyone with a brain that a vast number of people in positions of political power were absolutely unable to discriminate between smacking and beating

For the likes of Sue Bradford and Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro, a firm open-handed smack on a child's bottom is no different than a beating delivered with a vacuum cleaner pipe or a piece of 4"x2".

So much for Ms Bradford's and Ms Kiro's ability to discriminate.

They provided further evidence of this mote in both eyes over the weekend, showing themselves utterly unable to determine any difference between a child initiating force against another child, and a teacher using force in defence of of that child -- ie., between violence, which is never justified, and retaliatory force, which is our right. [For more on the difference, see my 'Cue Card' on Force.]

When "top youth aid cop" Inspector Chris Graveson quite properly -- and in the current cultural climate, courageously -- pointed out that  "Teachers should not be afraid to 'man-handle' violent children if they pose immediate risks [to others], even if it means leaving bruising,"  Bradford and her confreres were ready to pounce.

    "You hear people saying, `You can't touch children. You can't do this, you can't do that'.  (But) if a child's being attacked, you're duty-bound to intervene," Graveson said at a New Zealand Educational Institute seminar in Wellington on Friday...

To which Bradford responded: "Teachers can use force to stop a child from causing harm to themselves and others [and I'm sure they're grateful for the Bradford/Key/Clark Act limiting that force] ... But what concerns me with the comments from the police officer is you can use force up to the level of bruising the child.  That might lead to some teachers using what I would consider unreasonable force."

And education minister Chris Carter responded: "There are policies to deal with disruptive and violent children... The problem with what the officer has said is he's taken a broad-brush approach to what is actually very specific and rare cases."

And the Office of the Children's Commissioner  responded that "it was never appropriate to bruise a child."

Never?  As the Timaru Herald asks, are they in the real world, these people? How will a "policy" help Hemi when Hone's beating him over the head with a chair?  How can it be "never appropriate" to drag Johnny off Jemima with peremptory force when he's beating her to a pulp (and as Graveson points out, "Serious sexual offenders as young as 12, who would be labelled paedophiles if they were adults, [for] preying on young victims")? 

How could one ever think it "unreasonable" to protect young victims from the classroom bullies and thugs who would take them over if the "sense" that Kiro and Carter and Bradford exhibit ever became too common.

The point is this: it's not just desirable to discriminate between force and defensive force -- between coercion and self-defence -- it's essential. Indeed, as Ayn Rand points out, it's the very basis of a rational politics:

Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.

Don't ban force, ban the initiation of force -- because by making retaliatory force illegal, all you do is increase the violence.

See the history of pacifism for countless examples -- like this one.

Political correctness is destroying New Zealand - Lochore

The only man to have coached the All Blacks to victory in the Rugby World Cup says that political correctness is destroying New Zealand.  "We are living in a PC world which is destroying us," he told a breakfast meeting hosted by educators Parents Inc. yesterday. 

"We are living in a PC world which is destroying us, where you actually can't put the hard word on people when they have digressed and committed bad blunders," he said.

Story here in the Herald. 

His story could be that of any decent parent in the country who sends his children or grandchildren away to one of the state's factory schools as decent human beings in the making, only to see them gradually captured by today's dripping wet orthodoxy. 

The country's teachers colleges have a lot to answer for.

UPDATE: Just to show it's not just New Zealand being destroyed by the dripping wet tide comes the story of a nine-year old pitcher who's too good for the Youth Baseball League of New Haven, Connecticut.  See Nine-Year Old Told He's Too Good.

Curing South Auckland

I said yesterday I'd offer some solutions to the mire that is South Auckland, some simple, some not so simple.  Here they are, in summary:

1. A police force that protects the innocent.  One that has the tools to do the job, but more importantly has the knowledge and training and backup and will to use them.
2. A justice system that takes the guilty off the streets. Rudy Guiliani's successful 'Broken Windows' policy is a guide: start with the small crimes, where failure to punish leads offenders into bigger crimes, and put these right first.  (And remember that justice isn't about retribution, it's about protecting the rest of us.)
3. Hold parents accountable in law for the offences of their children.  You have them, you take responsibility for what and whom they destroy.
4. Stop paying no-hopers to breed. We are forced by government to pay people to have children they don't want. The result of all those unwanted children appears on the front page of our newspapers nearly every day.
5. Have an education system that gives youngsters the tools for life -- that teaches each of them, not how fit in and how to follow (which is all the present factory schools teach them), but how to use the brain they are born with, and how to use it to give themselves wings instead of shackles.
6. Perhaps most important of all is this, which is much, much harder: work towards the abandonment of the 'church-on-Sundays' thinking that infests South Auckland more than any other part of the country -- which imparts a superstitious hope that someone else will come along and can solve all one's problems -- and towards the destruction of what tennis ace Chris Lewis calls 'the crab-bucket mentality,' the hatred of achievement with which young South Aucklanders shackle themselves and damn their more successful brothers, and instead of the 'warrior values' of dependency and conflict and renunciation that are all many young South Aucklanders see, promote a philosophy of individualism that offers genuinely life-affirming value to which to aspire --

What I mean by this last is real values for living life on this earth.  In one way it's the most difficult of the six points to achieve (and in another it's the easiest: all we have to do is encourage youngsters to think), yet it is by far the most important.  The first four or five points are necessary, but not sufficient.  The only real antidote to the bad ideas that so many young South Aucklanders have imbibed with their welfare-mother's milk --ideas that are killing them and their neighbours -- is the better ideas that will show them their true potential.  Chris Lewis explains what I mean in his conclusion to his article on the 'crab-bucket mentality' that holds so many youngsters back:

    ....in a world where the predominant trend is toward anti-achievement & anti-success, motivational fuel is something that we all need from time to time to propel us toward our goals. Which is why I would like to commend to your attention a book that provided me with a tremendous amount of motivational fuel very early on in my tennis career.
    The book is entitled The Fountainhead, by the Russian/American novelist Ayn Rand. In the introduction to her book, she tells us, "Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees & lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it ... Yet a few hold on & move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose & reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature & of life's potential. There are very few guideposts to find. The Fountainhead is one of them."
    At a time when, as a seventeen-year-old, I was just setting out to conquer the tennis courts around the world, an attempt that demanded excellence & achievement every step of the way, it was The Fountainhead that helped to inspire me in the face of discouragement from the "crab bucket mentalities" who told me I was wasting my time.
    For anyone who believes in the importance of achieving his or her values & goals, who believes that happiness is the end result of such achievement, & that happiness is the norm when independence, in thought & action is promoted, encouraged & pursued, The Fountainhead comes with my highest recommendation.

Lindsay Perigo expands on the theme in a piece he wrote six ears ao in response to a particularly egregious article in Craccum on suicide.  Called Affirming Life, I post it here in its entirety.

    Yesterday's furore about the 'Craccum' "How to commit suicide" article & your comments on this programme about it set me to thinking about the time I appeared on 'The Ralston Group' when we panellists were asked our explanations for the high rate of youth suicide.
    I stated my own suspicion that the problem came down to a failure of philosophy. Youngsters were taking their own lives at precisely the time one asks life's big questions & searches for ideals to guide one's conduct. Religion, to which one traditionally repaired for answers, was discredited & had not been replaced with a viable secular alternative - leaving a values vacuum, leading to despair. What youngster would be inspired by the jaded cynicism so manifest in so many once-thoughtful adults?
    But is a viable, secular alternative to religion possible? Can life have meaning without an after-life? If there is no god to inspire ideals & prescribe values, can there be any other source? Can man discover it? Theologians & philosophers alike have answered these questions with a resounding, No! Many professional philosophers revel in proclaiming their discipline irrelevant to the conduct of everyday life. The moral status of benevolence, they say, is no different from that of malevolence, creativity from destructiveness, honesty from deception, etc., and a belief in any of these values over their opposites is merely an arbitrary preference, with no objective validity. Ethically, it's deuces wild.
    The current subjectivist/relativist/nihilist morass may seem unappetising, they concede, but that too is an arbitrary judgement. There are no grounds for seeking anything better - there *is* no "better."
    The Russian/American novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand begged to differ. It is reality itself, she argued, that confronts man with the need for morality - a code of values designed to facilitate the process of living - because it confronts him with alternatives amongst which he must choose (he has no choice about choice). At the most fundamental level the choice is: life or death. If one chooses death, there is nothing more to be said; if one chooses life, the book of morality opens, & one must fill in the pages oneself, making one's choices in the presence of alternatives to the ultimate value of: life.
    To the nihilist's gleeful 'coup de grace,' 'Ah! But why should one value life in the first place?' Rand replied: The question is improper. The value of life need not & cannot be justified by a value beyond life itself; without the fact of life, the concept of value would not be possible in the first place. Value presupposes life; life necessitates value.
    To the existentialists' lament that without something beyond life, life itself has no meaning, she responded similarly - the very concept of meaning can have meaning *only* in the context of life. Ultimately, the meaning of life, if one wants to use that terminology, is ... *life* - one's own life, since one cannot live anyone else's - & what other or better meaning could one conceive?
    A creature endowed with immortality, denied the alternative of life or death (& their barometers, pleasure & pain) would have no need of values & could discover no meaning in anything since nothing would be of any consequence to it. It is man's nature as a living, mortal entity, unprogrammed to survive, constantly facing alternatives, endowed with a conceptual/volitional consciousness, that simultaneously makes the need for morality inescapable and the fulfilment of that need possible.
    For a human being, "is" is fraught with "ought"; "ought" is an irresistible aspect of "is" - the traditional dichotomy between them is false. The task of ethical philosophy is to prevent their being artificially sundered. A successful outcome - a morality derived from and consistent with the facts of reality - is, by virtue of those very characteristics, *not* arbitrary (disconnected from reality) but objective (consonant with reality).
    Rand went on to argue that a reality-based, life-affirming morality would concern itself not merely with survival, but survival proper to the life of the sentient, conceptual being that man is. While life might be the *standard* of morality, *happiness*, she argued, was its *purpose*. "The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
    In Rand's novel The Fountainhead, a young man fresh out of college, looking for spiritual fuel for the journey ahead of him, is wheeling his bicycle through a forest, when he encounters the architect Howard Roark, contemplating some breath-taking new structures - his own - in a nearby clearing. "Who built this?" he asks. "I did," Roark replies. The boy thanks Roark & walks away. "Roark looked after him. He had never seen him before & he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime."
    To all this country's young people, happy & unhappy alike, I would repeat what I said on 'Ralston': Read this book - & the philosophy that produced it. You have nothing to lose but your doubts; you have your dreams to win. I repeat that advice today.

For those who agree with the prescription I've outlined here and who do wish to help the youngsters of South Auckland, I can suggest at least these three things that flow directly from my suggestions above:

1. Join the only political party that is committed to points one to five above, and help us promote those ideas this election year.  If not us, then who?
2. Contact one of the three Montessori schools in South Auckland and tell them you'd like to sponsor a child to attend -- or better yet, sponsor the training of a Montessori teacher for one of these schools.  This is precisely the sort of education that does give them wings, what Dr Montessori called education for the human potential.
3. Help out those of us who want to reintroduce the Fountainhead Essay Contest next year to encourage youngsters to read The Fountainhead -- that is, to offer to a new generation the inspiration to face a lifetime that reading The Fountainhead has given some of us.  (Here's what one participant in the ARI's American competition has to say, and here's the winning 2002 New Zealand essay.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff Read more about this book...

To Educate the Human Potential (The Clio Montessori Series) by Maria Montessori Read more about this book...

READ THE EARLIER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:
South Auckland, again - NOT PC (June 17, 2008)
The warrior culture of South Auckland, Part 1 - NOT PC (October, 2005)
The 'warrior culture' of South Auckland, Part 2 - NOT PC (October, 2005)
More social workers, more violence - NOT PC (November, 2005)
The great con that is social welfare - Peter Osborne, Libertarianz, Scoop, (January, 2007)

Party (pills) on Campus

Highly amusing to read Jim Banderton's apoplectic response to ACT on Campus's Auckland Uni branch selling party pills to encourage students to sign up.  My own reaction when I heard the plan was just the opposite -- I was pissed off that Libz on Campus hadn't thought of it first.  Damn!

Perhaps there's hope for young ACToids after all, just as long as they don't go as soft as their seniors.  As Duncan says over at Kiwiblog, "Maybe ACT does have a chance, if only they’d roll Hide & Douglas in favour of some young blood with balls."

I was amused too to see this exchange in the comments at Kiwiblog:

JAMES W.: “Does Jim have a youth wing?”
MIKE COLLINS: "Yes. It involves Matt Robson, Botox and a hippy wig."

Brilliant!

Another apology we'd like to hear

Seeing as it's Sorry Week, here's an apology some honest education department apparatchik might like to deliver.

Today I'd like to honour the New Zealand children who were delivered by government force into our care, and whom we rewarded by abusing their parents' trust and depriving them of the human potential with which they were born.

We reflect on your past mistreatment, and we have to say: we were responsible.

We reflect in particular on those New Zealanders who due to decades of our mismanagement have emerged from our factory schools functionally illiterate and wholly unemployable -- unable either to read or write or count, and who as a consequence now fill our prisons and the wastelands of our welfare facilities.  On behalf of all my colleagues with whom I share the responsibility of putting you  there, to you all we  say sorry.

To the nearly one-million New Zealanders who have emerged blinking into the modern world -- unable to function in it due to the failure of our teaching methods and good for nothing beyond stuffing a ballot box -- we say sorry.

I say to you that the time has now come to turn a new page in history by recognising the wrongs of the past, and by ensuring with the end of our dominion over this country's children that they never, ever happen again.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive governments and curricula and educational regimes that have inflicted a profound emptiness, suffering and loss on you our young New Zealanders.  The public school system stole you away from your parents and turned your minds to mush.  From the very springtime of your youth We took your bright, eager young minds -- we took them, your normal minds, and replaced them with mental retardation.  To all of those whom we made unconscious for life by means of your own brain, we say sorry.

We apologise for teaching you that you do not belong to yourself, but that you are public property; that you must be taught not to amass wealth, but to seek instead your duty.  To you all who were taught that contributing to the wants and demands of the state is superior to learning the virtues of rationality, independence and productivity -- for enlisting you into the great organic vitality of society, whether you like it or not, for the greater good -- we say sorry.

For substituting "group discussions" for delivering knowledge and "class projects for genuine understanding, we say sorry.  For placing group hugs and socialisation over conceptual development and the acquiring of real skills, we say sorry.

For delivering you into the world as adults barely able to function, we really are desperately sorry.

And finally to parents who were forced to delivered up to us your children and your tax dollars and to whom we repaid by returning you burnt-out hulks coddled with therapy -- with dangerously inflated self-esteem and and an "appetite for destruction" -- we say sorry.

As you can see, we have a lot to apologise for.

We the former educational apparatchiks of New Zealand respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered.

For the future of those of you whose minds we have mangled we have no hope, but for the rest of you we take heart in knowing that we are now removing ourselves from the ability to do any more harm; resolving that this new page in the history of this great country can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all New Zealanders still able to function.

A future where our parliament resolves that the children of New Zealand be kept free from our malign influence so that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again .

A future where you can embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where our old approaches have clearly failed.

We are really a very, very sorry lot, and we resolve hereby to never darken your lifetimes again.

Shortage, thy name is socialism

Water's running short, electricity's on the blink, hospitals are crumbling, schools aren't working, and -- as school students head back next week --- roads are once again getting gridlocked.  Can you see the common factor in all of the above listed shortages?  (For those too dim to turn the lights on, the government 'owns' them all.)

Meanwhile those who endorse government ownership of the means of production continue to denounce the rampant consumerism, overflowing shelves and abundant prosperity produced by the engines of capitalism, however much the forces of capitalism remain shackled by their lacklustre heroes.

S'funny, isn't it.  'Privatisation' is too horrifying a word for the Blue Team to even contemplate, yet failure is the leading result of the unfortunately leading alternative.

It's a funny old world.  It's like prosperity and abundance are bad things.

The only abundance that rampant government meddling ever seems to produce is rising interest rates consequent on government's grip on banking, exploding house prices consequent on the grip of government planners over house building, exploding compliance costs for every business consequent on rapidly rising regulations and impositions, and steadily rising  youth crime consequent on several generations of failed government programmes (one in particular),  ... yet the only unshackling from government proposed by any of the mainstream political parties is, when the tax burden upon us is at another historic high, very timid, almost derisory cuts in the amount governments plan to steal from us.

Meanwhile, you lot just sit back and vote for more of the same, and nod sagely as you say "that's all one can really do, you know."  You make me sick.

Paying no-hopers to breed produces ....

Here's another government disaster we're now all paying for:  The tremendous rise in youth crime.  The explosion in youth crime since the early eighties is largely due to people being paid by the government to have children they don't want.

Paying people to have children they didn't want started in the early seventies.  By the early eighties those children were old enough to make other people's lives a nightmare, and the violent crime statistics much larger.

Think about it.  What sense is it being forced to pay no-hopers to breed, and then wondering why their progeny go wrong?

Illiterates still sadly surging forth. Ambulances positioned firmly at cliff base.

First, a quote from earlier in the week: “Education in the government's factory schools is pumping out an ever-increasing number of functionally illiterate and unemployable youths - good for nothing beyond stuffing a ballot box." - Peter Osborne

And a cartoon (from The Free Radical):

              

And now, some good news.  The Government appears to have accepted the bad news that "the literacy level of about 800,000 workers is such that they might struggle to transfer printed information to an order form - a deficiency cited as a factor stifling the country's economic growth" -- and, not incidentally, blighting the lives and futures of  at least 800,00 New Zealanders.  Story here. Puff piece here.

The bad news is, first, that according to Pete Hodgson, it is businesses who will be expected to teach their own workers reading, writing and maths "under a complex new plan to raise the skills of the workforce." 

Business New Zealand chief executive Phil O'Reilly - who, with Government and New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, is part of the new Skill New Zealand Forum developing the plan - [said he] didn't want a "bureaucratic nightmare" for business [but] "We've got a problem in terms of functional illiteracy and innumeracy in our workplaces. We are poor by world standards," said Mr O'Reilly.

At least it means the schools responsible for this disaster won't be getting their hands back on the evidence of their resounding failure.   But the further bad news however, completely un-addressed by this "complex new plan," is that the factory schools that churned out this horde of functional illiterates continue to sail on regardless.  One in five of the New Zealanders who attended those schools for ten years or more failed to attain the most basic of life skills, yet nothing about that revelation will cause any sort of re-examination by those responsible. 

That is outrageous.  It would happen in no other line of endeavour except one monopolised by the state.

Those who continue to insist that the state simply must take charge of primary and secondary education might pause to consider what this figure shows about the efficacy and content of what those factory schools have been and are continuing to delivering -- in recent years it's been mostly bullshit, mush and toxic swill.   If you thought they were primarily teaching literacy and numeracy, you were obviously very much mistaken -- it's mostly about the seven-lesson inculcation of servitude.

If you ever thought that appalling figures such as these would get the planners behind the factory schools asking themselves serious questions about their plans and their success rate (or lack thereof), then you've been  hoodwinked.  And if you ever wondered whether a private organisation with failure of this magnitude would be able to get away with it, then I have a bridge I can sell you.

The tragedy of wholesale illiteracy and innumeracy must be laid firmly at the door of the mandarins responsible for the method of teaching and the content of what is taught at the state's indoctrination centres.  It is not enough to pick up the lives of those blighted by those mandarins years later.  It is essential that those responsible are urgently removed from the responsibility of filling up further young minds, and be placed where they are never in such a position again.

As every year a new horde of young New Zealanders surges forth into the world, one in five of whom  after ten years of factory schooling are unable to function in the modern world, the situation becomes ever more urgent.  Don't just wring your hands in impotent despair at the tragedy.  Don't just bewail the youngsters' sorry futures.  Don't just join me in hammering the factory schools.   Join me in going in there and taking them all back. 

         

Plan Red for youngsters

This year's early political football is shaping up to be sixteen to eighteen year olds.   Problems with literacy, numeracy and youth crime have become so obvious even the politicians can't ignore them.  They labour, however, under the delusion they can fix them.  Both red team and blue team have a plan, one they hope will cement their place on the treasury benches, whatever its effect on the young people they're purporting to help.

Weaning young NZers off their cradle-to-grave welfare expectations is far more important than any other 'lesson' dreamed up just to capture election-year headlines. And what headlines.  At a time in youngsters' lives when the most important lesson they can learn is independence, John Key's 'Plan Blue' is for the state to either coddle them or shackle them -- or have them sent to boot camp.  Helen Clark has just announced her own response this morning, which in all respects is even worse.  Plan Red is this: no-one under voting age should be allowed out to work. 

It beggars belief.  Each election is an advanced auction of stolen goods.  This election, they're coming for your children.

Cue Card Libertarianism: Education

Each 'Cue Card Libertarianism' entry forms part of a series intended to introduce newbies to the terms used (or as used) by local libertarians. The series so far can be found archived here, and here, and the Introduction here.

“A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.”

– Isabel Paterson, 'The God of the Machine.'

EDUCATION: The system of compulsory, taxpayer-funded education is another prime example of the state performing the opposite role to its proper one, i.e. initiating force against its citizens, rather than protecting them from it.

It forces children from their parents; it forces a curriculum on children with or without the parents’ approval; it treats the child’s mind as the property of the state; it forces people to pay for the education of other people’s children.

New Zealand’s public education has followed in the path of the United States: beginning with educating children to submit to the collective feelings of the group, rather than to develop their own minds ands use their own independent judgement – i.e. it teaches them to value 'consensus' before truth, and 'fitting in' above facts.

Peer pressure and politics are now important than good pedagogy. “Humanities” subjects have been hi-jacked by the purveyors of fashionable political viewpoints, and even the sciences have been infected with irrational nature-worship and notions like "Maori Science," ie., myth. A recent Minister of Education even claimed that science is not even concerned with the discovery of truth.

The travesty of education being perpetrated by the state currently is nothing short of criminal. Taxpayers paying more and more to get less and less -- more money spent, to fill the heads of more and more young New Zealanders with mush.

Despite governments doling out increasing election bribes on the state's factory schools, Labour Department figures estimate there are more than half-a-million New Zealanders who are functionally illiterate. It's clear what we have is neither free, nor a system of education.

We're left to deduce (as we must with all government spending binges) that education isn't a function of the money that's thrown at it; what matters more is what that money is spent on.

What it's been spent on in recent years is bullshit, mush and toxic swill -- and the seven-lesson inculcation of servitude.

“Education in the government's factory schools is pumping out an ever-increasing number of functionally illiterate and unemployable youths - good for nothing beyond stuffing a ballot box."

- Peter Osborne

The 'liberal' view is that all that is wrong with state education can be fixed with more money, better staff-student ratios, greater control of curriculum, more qualified teachers and more paperwork. But as more and more money spent on education has shown that more of the same just produces more and more failure. The view of conservatives is generally that public education needs to be made more efficient. With more efficiency, they say, 'delivery' of education will be better.

Libertarians however maintain that public education is all too efficient: it has been ruthlessly efficient at delivering the government’s chosen values. After generations of indoctrination at the knee of the state we now have several generations who are 'culturally safe' and politically correct -- ‘good citizens’ unable to use the brains they were born with, unthinkingly compliant in every respect with the values in which they've been totally immersed; braindead automatons to whom group-think is good and for forty-two percent of whom the reading of a bus timetable or the operation of a simple appliance is beyond them.

In previous decades the government's chosen values included banning the speaking of Maori in schools; speaking Maori in schools is fast becoming compulsory, along with the teaching of the ordained versions of Te Tiriti and the inculcation of the ideas of multiculturalism and the inferiority of western culture. Governments and their values change, but their use of their factory schools for indoctination doesn't.

The government's recently chosen values are "fairness, opportunity and security." We know that because Helen Clark said so. Orwell would have recognised these words, as he might the rigid orthodoxies of what passes for teacher training. "What happens in our schools is a very big part of shaping the future of New Zealand," says Ms Clark in the same speech, acknowledging that this is the way to make subjects out of citizens. Libertarians agree with Ms Clark's statement, which is precisely why we want governments away from the schools and away from control of curricula. Both Liberals and conservatives endorse state control of schools and of curricula, and they both seek to be the state. Libertarians don't.

Rather than delivering new generations of New Zealand's children to be indoctrinated into servitude and their heads filled with mush, it's time for a radical rethink and a wholesale rejection of NZ's educational establishment -- of those who've sucked up the money, and produced only failure. It's time for a permanent and constituional separation of school and state, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of church and state.

Even the critics of state education, however, cannot imagine life without it, simply because they’ve never known anything else. They would have the same difficulty grasping the possibility of removing the state from the production of clothing if, all their lives, the state had exercised a coercive monopoly in that field.

Libertarianism holds that the removal of the state from education is a reform needed more urgently than most; and that all education should be private, non-compulsory, and paid for by the parents whose children are receiving it.

This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by New Zealand libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here.

Stopping youth employment

From the I file labelled, 'See, I Told You' comes this news:  "Supermarket employers have been advised not to hire junior staff ahead of minimum wage legislation coming into force next April," says a Picton supermarket owner.

Picton Supervalue owner Casy Smits [said] that at a meeting Christchurch Progressive Enterprises had advised its supermarkets to stop employing junior staff because of increased pay rates.  The Minimum Wage (New Entrants) Amendment Bill allows a qualifying period of three months or 200 hours work for 16 and 17-year-olds who will then move on to the adult minimum wage.  Smits said they were talking about pay rates of $13.60 an hour. "A 16-year-old is going to get nearly $14 an hour -- my checkout staff at the moment get about $12 an hour," Smits said.

Nothing like ensuring youngsters are kept off the ladder to employment altogether, is there.

The really sad thing is that there is nothing prescient in predicting this stuff.  It's just basic common sense.  Shame introducing and agitating for it wasn't.  Take a bow Laila Harre, Matt McCarten, Sue Bradford and their various paid apologists around the traps*.  I hope you feel proud.

*One of these paid apologists, Tane Wilton of the EPMU, told me back in August, "Peter, I'm amazed you lot keep trotting out the tired old line that increasing minimum wage rates necessarily leads to unemployment. If done sensibly, this is demonstrably false..."  Not just false, but demonstrably false.  Well done, Tane.  You get an 'F.'

More pics of anti-EFB march

More pics here of Saturday's march for democracy and free speech, including a surveillance photo of the plotting beginning at the aftermatch...







UPDATE 1: Whether or not you made it on Saturday, if you want your voice heard -- if you want to speak up in protest at this clampdown on free speech while it's still legal to do so -- then the single best thing you can do is write to every MP who's considering voting for this Bill. This week! That means every MP from United, NZ First, the Greens and Hard Labour. Here's a list of their email addresses, and here their mailing addresses [pdf].

Tell them that free speech is too important to gag one year in three. Tell them that this is not what our soldiers died for. Tell them, if you voted for them, that you did not vote them in to dismantle free speech. Tell them that, as Bernard Darnton says, that just because "Labour seems to have concluded that political speech is so important that no one else should be allowed to have any," that doesn't mean we should all roll over and accept being muzzled. Darnton explains how important this is:

If it became illegal to criticise the government during an election campaign, for this is clearly the aim, surely we could no longer consider New Zealand a free country.

The Clark government is not nibbling at the edges of free speech; they are not proposing legislation with other goals that has an incidental impact on free speech; they are engaged in both direct frontal assault and deliberate flanking attacks on free speech. All governments have a natural tendency to regulate and to censor. To maintain an open society the rules need to be deliberately tilted in favour of free expression. Political speech must be especially protected because it is in the political arena that all other freedoms must be protected. The Clark government’s assaults on free political expression must be resisted because if we fail to withstand these assaults it may be illegal to resist the next.

UPDATE 2: Labour brown-nose James Sleep says he is sickened - "sickened"! -- at the number of kids "that were pulled into [the] anti-EFB protest... To put it into perspective," he says reflectively, "making all those kids march reminds me of Hitler Youth!" Master Sleep is fifteen, by the way, and still too young to vote. Or to think.

Libz welcome reshuffle

Now that the role of Minister for Auckland Issues has been dropped and Judith Tizard's only remaining portfolio is that of Minister for the Prime Minister's Handbag, Bernard Darnton has some congratulations and some advice:

Libz Leader Congratulates Clark for Dropping Auckland Portfolio
"Congratulations are due to Helen Clark today for getting rid of the Auckland Issues portfolio," Libertarianz leader Bernard Darnton said today.

"I have no doubt that Aucklanders are perfectly capable of getting on with their own lives without interference from Wellington, and it's great to see the Prime Minister recognise that."

Ever willing to help, Darnton also offered advice on other portfolios that could be abandoned: "With the recognition that Aucklanders can look after themselves we should also let others off the leash too. We could get rid of the portfolios for the Community and Voluntary Sector, Consumer Affairs, Disability Issues, Ethnic Affairs, Maori Affairs, Pacific Island Affairs, Rural Affairs, Veterans' Affairs, Women's Affairs, and Youth Affairs. I look forward to all of these groups being allowed to breath the fresh air of freedom that's been granted to Auckland."

And Libz deputy Dr Richard McGrath welcomes David 'Silent T' to his new post in the health ministry:

New Health Minister: "Socialist Who Can Count"
Libertarianz spokesman Richard McGrath sees little hope for those dependent on the state for their health care, following the appointment of David Cunliffe as Health Minister.

"In his maiden speech to parliament, David Cunliffe described himself as a 'socialist who can count'. Can he count the number of New Zealanders shoved back to their GPs from public hospitals because they have failed to even get an appointment with a specialist? Can he count the number who, taxed into poverty, have died on public hospital surgical waiting lists?"

"This is the man who champions the political system that consigned untold millions of Eastern Europeans to poverty, misery and environmental devastation," said Dr McGrath. "David Cunliffe believes politicians can - and should - control and plan the lives of New Zealanders. When he spoke of the 'dumb hand' of the market in that dripping wet, politically correct tirade, he insulted all New Zealanders. For what is the market but the sum total of the economic decisions of individual people?"

"The Libertarianz Party believes that the less well-off should not be taxed at all, and that people should be left free to plan their health care without having to use the embarrassingly run-down public health system that Labour has been trying to 'fix' for the last eight years."

"It's enough to make you vote Libertarianz!"

And there's even a welcome to the new environment minister ...

Libz call for RMA uppercut from new environment minister
"I look forward to new environment minister Trevor Mallard defending property rights with the same vigour with which he defends his mistress's honour," says Libertarianz environment deregulation spokesman Peter Cresswell, who has now seen twelve years of environment ministers come and go, and property rights protection savaged by each passing minister.

"Speaking of affairs," says Cresswell, "I look forward to a swift and long overdue short-arm uppercut to the Resource Management Act so that New Zealanders can get on with their own affairs without the encumbrance of bureaucratic bullshit and ministerial bullying it empowers.

"Given the crucial importance of property rights in human affairs and to the freedom and prosperity we would all like to enjoy if we could -- and the all-encompassing role of fourteen years of so called environmental legislation in trampling on New Zealanders' property rights -- I'd recommend he begin his new job by committing violence on the RMA instead of other New Zealanders.

"Instead of inserting Heineken bottles in the nether regions of IRB officials, he should drive a stake right through through the heart of the RMA and the bureaucracies it supports, and free up common law methods of environmental and property rights protection to do their job properly."

"If Mallard himself is doing his job properly," concludes Cresswell, "he should get his head around the affront to human affairs that is the Resource Management Act, and deal to with the same aggression he applies to those issues which affront him. If he does, I'll be happy to shout him a bottle of Heineken myself."

Look forward to more congratulations later ...

The 'October' Revolution that wasn't

I missed my regular commemoration of the Bolshevik's 'October Revolution' last week, so let me remind you now that the Bolsheviks were pissweak, murdering liars, and invite you to read last year's explanation of why I say that, and Liberty Scott's recent revival of the commemoration tradition: Ninety Years On - Repent, Apologise and Be Wary.

UPDATE: Some former Octoberists need to apologise, says one former 'Cambridge Bolshevik' in The Times -- and many of course, still embracing the authoritarian urge, are are now warmists ...

"Bolshevism and the Russian revolution may have disintegrated in ruins but the generation that raised its toast in the direction of the Kremlin 40 years ago has triumphed. Leninism has been defeated almost everywhere in the world, but the postwar generation of baby boomers who went so far left in the 1960s now control this country’s leading institutions. Their taste for totalitarian simplicities and weakness for millenarian terrors has been digested into modern feminism, environmentalism and global warming. Many remain absolutely unrepentant about their past because they have been so successful in the present...

Much that I did in my youth can now make me shout aloud with shame; but not much is more mortifying than to think I once toasted mass murderers, torturers and totalitarian despots. How to explain it?

Read on. [Hat tip Marcus]