The NY Post editorial:

As his followers stormed the Capitol, calling for his vice president to be hanged, President Donald Trump sat in his private dining room, watching TV, doing nothing.

For three hours, seven minutes.

There has been much debate over whether Trump’s rally speech on Jan. 6, 2021, constituted “incitement.” That’s somewhat of a red herring. What matters more — and has become crystal clear in recent days — is that Trump didn’t lift a finger to stop the violence that followed.

And he was the only person who could stop what was happening. He was the only one the crowd was listening to. It was incitement by silence.

Trump only wanted one thing during that infamous afternoon: to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to decertify the election of Joe Biden.

He thought the violence of his loyal followers would make Pence crack, or delay the vote altogether. 

To his eternal shame, as appalled aides implored him to publicly call on his followers to go home, he instead further fanned the flames by tweeting: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

His only focus was to find any means — damn the consequences — to block the peaceful transfer of power.

There is no other explanation, just as there is no defense, for his refusal to stop the violence.

It’s up to the Justice Department to decide if this is a crime. But as a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again.

It is no surprise that I agree. The NY Post is probably the most conservative leaning newspaper in the US, so their editorial is significant.

Trump is still obsessed with the 2020 election as his ego won’t allow him to accept he lost to Biden. And hence he has endorsed primary candidates who share his stance. And that has created a huge problem for the Republican Party.

A couple of months ago they were looking highly likely to get a landslide in the House and gain control of the Senate. But 538 now has them down to only 42% likely to hold the Senate, because so many of Trump’s candidates are proving unelectable in a general election.

The same goes for 2024. It should be easy for the Republicans to beat Biden or Harris in 2024, but not if the candidate is someone whose main issue is trying to prove he didn’t actually lose last time.

Just one statistic says so much. In Term 1 of this year only 22% of students at decile 1 schools in New Zealand were fully attending.

Simply appalling.

Hamilton West MP Gaurav Sharma writes an extraordinary column:

For those who need an example, Louisa Wall talked in her valedictory speech about how she was bullied by a senior Labour Party MP early in her career and despite being one of our most outspoken MPs she found out that she had no agency in the halls of Parliament when it came to her own wellbeing. If any of my more recent colleagues could speak freely, I am sure the list of similar stories with no support for MPs being bullied and no consequences for MPs bullying their colleagues would easily fill a book or two.

So a Labour MP says his colleagues are being bullied by their colleagues and get no support.

The above Member-to-Member and Party-to-Member bullying rampant in Parliament is – I believe – promoted and facilitated by this very organisation by working behind the scenes with the Whips Office, the Offices of the Leaders of various Parties, along with the Office of the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister’s Office.

So he says the bullying is facilitated by Parliamentary Services, the whips office and the PMs Office. Incredible that he write this in a column he sent to a newspaper.

With the way the current Parliamentary Service is run, you can go weeks and months before getting a reply to urgent issues and when they do have an answer it is seldom in writing and often from behind the desk of the party whips who – in my opinion, and based on what I have seen in my time in Parliament – use the Parliamentary Service to bully and harass their MPs “to keep them in line”.

This is strong language – bully and harass. And he is not referring to a 16 year old teenager, but the leadership of parties.

Where concerns have been raised with Parliamentary Service about staff or MP colleagues showing unacceptable behaviours in some cases there does not appear to have ever been any investigation or an intent to investigate. If anything, in my experience, when an MP raises serious concerns the Parliamentary Service steps back, stonewalls the conversation, ghosts the MP and throws them to the Whip’s Office to be gaslighted and victimised further so that the party can use the information to threaten you about your long-term career prospects.

Again strong language – victimised, ghosted and gaslighted – the language people use to describe abusers.

Politicians especially at top of our current system and from parties across the political spectrum often talk about “changing the system” and “kindness,” but as the saying goes “charity must start at home”.

That is a very obvious reference to Jacinda Ardern.

How bad must things be for an MP, that he feels the only way he can stop the bullying is to write a newspaper column that will inevitably end his career with Labour.

An excellent editorial by Dom Post Editor Anna Fifield on Taiwan. Fifield was the bureay chief for the Washington Post in Beijing for many years:

It’s a threading of a diplomatic needle that has allowed countries like ours to have diplomatic and economic relations with China, while also having strong if unofficial relations with the vibrant and robust democracy that is Taiwan.

But it’s a needle that’s becoming increasingly difficult to thread as the Chinese Communist Party under leader Xi Jinping has laid bare its true aims.

It has stripped Hong Kong, a key financial hub for New Zealand businesses, of almost all its democratic freedoms; it has committed cultural genocide in Xinjiang; has militarised islands across the South China Sea with impunity; and is now seeking to extend its reach into the Pacific, our neighbourhood.

All those actions together point to China strongly becoming more authoritarian after decades of gradual liberalising.

There is now almost no freedom of speech or assembly or religion in China. Lawyers, independent academics, human rights activists, religious leaders, journalists – they are all unwelcome as Xi pursues his “China Dream” to restore China to what he sees as its rightful place at the top of the global order. That’s one of the key reasons I chose to leave China at the end of 2020.

Taiwan, on the other hand, is a pluralistic democracy with a robust opposition – so robust there are still occasionally fist-fights in the parliament – and a dynamic civil society.

The 25 million people who live in Taiwan deserve to be able to determine their own future, not have it dictated to by force of arms.

But we should have no qualms about where our values lie. In the last two weeks alone, European, Japanese and Australian delegations have visited Taiwan. Pelosi is there now, and a British parliamentary mission is planned.

Where are we? Ardern has sidestepped questions about Taiwan. Our foreign minister – nominally at least – Nanaia Mahuta hasn’t uttered a peep since the tensions brought about by the Pelosi visit.

Weird to have a Foreign Minister who doesn’t seem to like to travel.

We do not exist in the world only as a trading nation. Our outsized standing on the global stage is connected to our steadfast commitment to multilateralism and human rights and democracy. We must stand up, loud and clear, for that.

Strong agree.

Chris Bishop released:

Labour’s housing policy failures have led to a huge increase in the number of Kiwis living in their cars, National’s Housing Spokesperson Chris Bishop says.

“Despite claiming they would fix New Zealand’s housing crisis, the number of people forced to live in cars under Labour has more than quadrupled to 480 in June 2022, from 108 in December 2017.

“While in Opposition in 2017, Jacinda Ardern tweeted that ‘kids living in cars and motels is not a sign of care’.

“Yet under her watch, there are now over 370 more people sleeping in their cars every night and 4100 kids are waking up each morning in motel rooms.

In 2017 I recall numerous stories about the relatively small number of people living in cars. Five years later and that number has quadrupled under Labour, yet it is somehow no longer newsworthy!’

UPDATE:

MSD has clarified that the numbers quoted are for people who were living in cars when they applied for public housing. Some of them will have been placed in emergency housing since they applied. To quote:

480 is the number of people on the Public Housing Register who had previously told us they were living in a car, when they first applied for public housing.

It is a cumulative figure as at at 30 June 2022.

They may have applied in the previous month, or they may have applied many years earlier.  

Similarly, the 108 figure is a cumulative figure as at 31 December 2017.

It’s also important to note the 480 figure is not a measure of who is currently living in a car.

When someone in urgent housing distress comes to us for help, we work with them to find somewhere to stay. We may provide an emergency housing special needs grant, or other assistance so they can avoid homelessness. While it can sometimes be challenging to identify suitable housing for people with complex needs, there is no wait list for emergency housing and people who need it are regularly housed the same day they ask us for help.

d

Labour has now passed a law massively reducing prison times for repeat serious violent and sexual offenders.

The criminals affected by this law have on average 42 convictions (for second strikers) and 74 convictions for third strikers.

91% of the affected criminals have been assessed by the Department of Corrections as being at a high risk of reoffending – and they are the ones Labour has legislated to get shorter stays in prison in future. The majority (56%) of them already offend while on bail or parole so giving them more parole will mean more victims.

The three strikes law saw actually saw a drop in the reoffending rate. Labour’s law change will see more reoffending and more victims.

Voters will be reminded on this next year.

This chart shows the Preferred PM ratings for John Key and Jacinda Ardern at the same stage of the terms as Prime Minister (Month 1 is Jan of the year after they were elected). In their fourth year of office they were polling quite similar but in this fifth year Ardern has dropped month after month and is now 10% below where Key was. And in fact Key remaining in the 40s or very high 30s right up until the end of his eighth year in office when he retired. He never ever polled as low as Ardern now is.

So maybe it is time for some media to stop referring to Ardern as being supremely popular!

Radio NZ reports:

National MP Sam Uffindell has been stood down from the party’s caucus while an investigation is carried out into further allegations of bullying raised by RNZ.

The development comes after earlier revelations that the new Tauranga MP, as a teenager, beat up a younger boy at boarding school.

In a statement, National’s leader Christopher Luxon said he had been made aware of very concerning accusations about Mr Uffindell’s behaviour toward a female flatmate in 2003 while at university.

He said Mr Uffindell disputes the claims – and so an independent inquiry will now be carried out by Maria Dew QC over the next two weeks.

In a separate statement, Uffindell admitted engaging in a “student lifestyle” while at university – including drinking and smoking cannabis – and said a number of his flatmates fell out during his second year.

However, he rejected any accusation he engaged in behaviour that was intimidatory or bullying.

Rather messy, to say the least. Having a QC investigate seems a very sensible course of action. Hopefully it can be resolved quickly – for the benefit of all parties.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the UK Telegraph writes:

Wind and solar provided almost 60pc of the UK’s power for substantial stretches last weekend, briefly peaking at 66pc. This is not to make a propaganda point about green energy, although this home-made power is self-evidently displacing liquefied natural gas (LNG) imported right now at nosebleed prices. 

It is a point about the mathematical implications of the UK’s gargantuan push for renewables. Offshore wind capacity is going to increase from 11 to 50 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 under the Government’s latest fast-track plans.

RenewableUK says this country currently has a total of 86GW in the project pipeline. This the most ambitious rollout of offshore wind in the world, ahead of China at 78GW, and the US at 48GW. The giant hi-tech turbines to be erected on the Dogger Bank, where wind conditions are superb, bear no resemblance to the low-tech, low-yield dwarves of yesteryear. The “capacity factor” is approaching 60pc, which entirely changes the energy equation.

There will be a further rise in onshore wind and solar as well, leaving aside nuclear expansion. The scale is breathtaking. So what will be done at night or at weekends when renewable power generation is 200pc or more of UK demand? Much can be exported to the Continent through interconnectors for a fat revenue stream, helping to plug the UK’s trade deficit, and helping to rescue Germany from the double folly of nuclear closures and the Putin pact.

So the UK is doing so well with renewable energy it will soon be able to export surplus to Europe. Superb.

But what of the rest of the surplus:

Much of the power will have to be stored for days or weeks at a time. Lithium batteries cannot do the job: their sweet spot is two hours, and they are expensive. You need “long duration” storage at a cost that must ultimately fall below $100 (£82) per megawatt hour (MWh), the global benchmark of commercial viability.

That is now in sight, and one of the world leaders is a British start-up. Highview Power has refined a beautifully simple technology using liquid air stored in insulated steel towers at low pressure. 

This cryogenic process cools air to minus 196 degrees using the standard kit for LNG. It compresses the volume 700-fold. The liquid re-expands with a blast of force when heated and drives a turbine, providing dispatchable power with the help of a flywheel. Fresh tanks can be added to cover several days or even weeks of energy storage. The efficiency loss or “boil off” rate from storage vats is 0.1pc each day, and much of this is recaptured by the closed system.

Amazing technology.

It is irrelevant where you stand on the hypothesis of man-made global warming. It is free market capitalism that is solving the energy problem, though neither Extinction Rebels nor denialists seem to have noticed. In that respect they are twins. It does require political support and the right signals from governments. The UK has managed this mix surprisingly well. It has done better than most in resisting capture by vested interests.

A good lesson for us.

The submission by the Auditor-General on the Government’s proposed “reform” of Three Waters is a must read. It gets to the heart of the problems with what the Government is doing, which is a loss of accountability. Some extracts:

WSEs cannot be held to account by ratepayers like local authorities are, nor can they be held accountable by Parliament because they are not Crown entities

So they won’t be accountable to ratepayers or taxpayers.

I consider this to be a serious diminution in accountability to the public for a critical service.

A serious diminution in accountability!

Overall, I am concerned that, as currently drafted in the Bill, the accountability arrangements and potential governance weaknesses, combined with the diminution in independent assurance noted earlier, could have an adverse effect on public accountability, transparency, and organisational performance.

So the Auditor-General thinks the reforms will result in weak governance, diminished independent assurance and adversely impact accountability and transparency.

Of course from the Government’s point of view, diminished accountability and transparency might be a feature, not a bug!

The full results are here.

Party Vote

• National 37% (-2% from last poll)
• Labour 33% (-2%)
• ACT 11% (+4%)
• Greens 9% (-1%)
• Maori Party 2% (nc)
• NZ First 3% (+2%)
• TOP 2% (nc)
• New Conservatives 1% (nc)
• Vision NZ 1%
• Social Credit 1%

Seats

• Labour 44 (-21 from election)
• National 48 (+15)
• ACT 14 (+4)
• Greens 11 (+1)
• Maori 3 (+1)

Government

• National/ACT 62/120
• Labour/Greens 55/120

Preferred PM (unprompted)

• Jacinda Ardern 30% (-3%)
• Christopher Luxon 22% (-3%)
• David Seymour 5% (+2%)
• Chloe Swarbrick 1% (-1%)
• Winston Peters 2% (+1%)
• Nicola Willis 1%

On my patreon page, I have written on the Sam Uffindell story which broke today. I explain what I would have done if I was on the pre-selection committee which vetted Uffindell.

I currently live in Cambridge and have had two occasions recently to drive to Auckland. What a dream the new expressway is (although there a few surfacing repairs to do).

Both occasions have taken me little over 70mins – sticking to the 110km speed limit of course – on a wide and safe road. You can then park where you want to park – clearly as close to the venue that you want to be at – and/or tiki tour in your own private vehicle – e.g. driving back on the beautiful coast road via Kawakawa Bay.

There is an alternative of course – as recommended by Michael Wood. I could have taken Te Huia. It would have taken a lot longer – please see below. I would have been highly limited as to the times I travelled. On both occasions the nearest station point was 30km from my destination.

“Te Huia runs return services from Frankton (Hamilton) to the Strand (Auckland) twice a day during the week, and once on Saturdays.

The service has an estimated running time of:

• 2 hours, 25 minutes from Frankton to the Strand (98 minutes to Papakura)
• 2 hours, 17 minutes from Rotokauri to the Strand (90 minutes to Papakura)
• 1 hour, 56 minutes from Raahui Pookeka | Huntly to the Strand (68 minutes to Papakura)

The total journey from Rotokauri to Britomart in Auckland will take an estimated 2 hours 35 mins (subject to the transfer time at Papakura or Puhinui if you are transferring trains).”

I do get that some people do not have private transport – but surely a daily bus would save plenty in and of itself. Even if you made it free to those in need.

Virtual signaling and not being prepared to acknowledge a screw up is so expensive … for the taxpayer.

The Herald reports:

The owner of an Auckland watch shop that was targeted in an attempted daylight smash and grab says the men who fought off the thieves are heroes.

A group of men, one armed with an axe, started “attacking” the window of About Time in Remuera around 4.20pm on Monday.

The owner of the store, Rebecca Alexander, said she was at home at the time of the incident but was on the phone to her husband who was at the store.

“I heard our office manager screaming, then I heard the breaking glass and I thought ‘oh dear we’ve been done again’,” she said.

Incredible footage of other store owners and locals who took on the offenders in an effort to thwart their escape has emerged.

“We had a couple of heroes, the man from the kebab shop happened to be cutting up carrots with quite a substantial machete-type knife – he rushed out and started attacking them or the car,” said Alexander.

Co-owner of Pro Consult Stuart Hobbs also ran down and picked up a sign to defend himself, he can be seen in the footage bailing the group up behind some stairs before following them to their car where he rammed them from the passenger side.

Good on them – they are heroes.

Another man can also be seen hitting the car.

“That was the only thing I could defend myself with because these three hoods were armed with hammers and axes, so I charged them and I think they got the fright of their life actually and they started to run and I just kept running after them,” said Hobbs.

“I think you know I’ve got the right to protect my community, I think I should do that and I think that if people can get together and not put up with this sort of thing, we’re going to be a better society for it.”

If the Government can’t protect you, then your community needs to. Absolutely.

The Herald reports:

Former Otago Polytechnic chief executive Phil Ker has called for an apology from Education Minister Chris Hipkins for turning the country’s polytechnic education system into “a national disgrace”.

It comes in the wake of last week’s apology from Te Pūkenga’s acting chief executive over its beleaguered financial situation and its delays in transitioning the country’s polytechnics into a single entity.

The Government said a combined $50 million deficit was unacceptable, so they merged them all into one centralised entity and the deficit has blown out to $100 million!

“Those hundreds of millions have just gone into structural stuff.

“Not a single dollar has been put into improving outcomes for learners, not a single dollar to strengthening the regional providers, and so the issues that we had before Hipkins started this misguided venture, are not only still there, they’re worse.”

Sounds like the health reforms!

The initial goal was to build a system that delivered more education to more people — particularly Māori, Pasifika and people with disabilities — and to do it better.

“I would challenge you to find a single, solitary, additional initiative in the last two years that has delivered more or better. It just hasn’t happened.

“I think it’s a national disgrace.”

He said colleagues still working in the system felt Te Pūkenga was trying to drive a compliance model, obsessed with rules, standardisation and people obeying the rules.

Command and control!

Christopher Luxon announced a significant policy yesterday in his conference speech:

There are 50,000 more people on the jobseeker benefit than when Labour took office. And for those aged under 25 it has gone from 23,000 to 34,000. Also of concern is the number who have been on the benefit for greater than 12 months is up 84%

So National’s announced a policy to get young people off welfare and into work. Key elements are:

• Community providers contracted to provide 18–24-year-old Jobseekers with a dedicated Job Coach to help get them into work
• Funding linked to keeping young people off welfare.
• Jobseekers will get a proper assessment of their barriers to finding work, and an individual job plan to address them.
• Those who fail to follow their plan will face sanctions, such as money management or benefit reductions
• long-term under 25 Jobseekers who get into work and stay off benefit for 12 months will recieve a $1,000 bonus.

This is a home run for me. It hits all the key elements of good policy:

• A well defined problem
• A partnership between government and community
• Funding tied to actual results or outcomes
• Resourcing to solve the problem
• A mixture of both carrot and stick

The policy is costed at around $120 million over four years, with 20,000 young people to be assisted. I am very happy to pay $6,000 per person to get them away from being a long-term welfare recipient. If it works for even 20% of them, it will be a great (social) investment.

There is absolutely no good reason welfare numbers should have increased so much, as official unemployment levels are so low. Having a work capable 18 year old spent a decade on welfare is not kind – it is cruel.

The Free Speech Union reported:

The craziness of woke censorship seems to break new records every week, as their fight to control others’ speech grows. But I don’t think we’ve ever taken on a case this mad.

A member of the Free Speech Union reached out last week saying that they were worried about their job security after an incident at work when they were challenged for misgendering a patient… the peculiar thing about this case was that the client was already deceased.

While doing their work as a mortician, they referred to a client (who biologically was a certain sex) by that gender. The mortician was promptly told that while the individual had been living, they had identified as a different gender and that it was offensive and ‘harmful’ to not respect their wishes.

How would the mortician even know? You can generally tell a body’s biological sex by looking at a cadaver, but how would you know their gender identity?

Matthew Lesh in the UK Telegraph writes:

Jacinda Ardern oozes self-satisfaction, whether swanning about at Davos or lecturing the world on climate change and the importance of “wellbeing”. At first this young PM became the darling of the progressive world – many admired the feminist credentials, sensitive handling of the Christchurch mosque attack and zero-Covid strategy.

But the carefully constructed façade is wearing thin. No amount of positive global press coverage can disguise the lacklustre economic situation in New Zealand, the growing list of broken promises and mounting unpopularity at home. Ardern is on track to lose the next election, with the latest opinion polls indicating a 10 percentage point drop over the last six months. The centre-right National Party, reinvigorated under Christopher Luxon, and the libertarian ACT Party, are both wooing voters.

This has been a dramatic fall from grace. Ardern’s Covid strategy was widely celebrated. Taking advantage of the island nation’s isolation, she introduced short lockdowns and border closures, and managed, at least initially, to eliminate the virus. In October 2020, she won a historic majority in the general election. But things began turning sour within months. The failure to vaccinate left the country isolated for much longer than elsewhere. By mid-2021, as the rest of the world was reopening, New Zealand embraced harsh lockdowns yet again. The borders will not fully reopen until the end of this month. Until recently, even many citizens were not allowed back into the country, a policy which tore families apart and left Kiwis destitute overseas. In one shocking case, a New Zealand journalist was forced to turn to the Taliban for sanctuary to deliver her baby after struggling to get home. For all that pain, the Covid reckoning has now arrived. An upsurge in cases has led to one of the highest daily death rates in the world and the reintroduction of restrictions, including a mask mandate and isolation requirements. It’s a gloomy turn of events for a country that is still unprepared to live with the virus.

I was in Australia a few weeks ago. I wore a mask to check in to my hotel. After a few minutes I noticed that I was the only person in the hotel wearing a mask. I took it off. For the next two days I’d say mask wearing was around 1%.

The loss of people has contributed to an acute skills shortage, with the health system struggling to handle the influx of Covid cases and other ailments. School children are frequently being sent home due to a lack of teachers. Inflation has reached 7.3 per cent, a 32-year high, driven by rising food, fuel and rent prices that make life more difficult.

Meanwhile, a surge in violent crime in hollowed-out cities, including gang activities, shootings and “ram-raids,” in which thieves drive cars into shop fronts to steal merchandise, have made the public fearful. This has, at least in part, been driven by troubled children and teenagers, who fell off the radar when Covid-19 shut schools and haven’t been seen in class for two years. The broader economic situation has combined with a sense that Ardern has over-promised and under-delivered. In 2017, Ardern’s flagship promise was to build 100,000 affordable homes within ten years – just 1,366 have been built. The same week that Ardern was featured on the front cover of British Vogue, in the edition guest edited by Meghan Markle, her government abandoned the housebuilding commitment. Since then, the government has spent over NZ$1 billion on emergency housing grants, including buying up motel rooms.

A long list of failures.

From a speech by Professor Rata to the ACT conference:

‘Partial loyalty’ can explain what it is about the modern individual who has contradictory loyalties simultaneously – identifying as a family member, a member of an ancestral group, a cultural group, a tribe, a religion, an identity group defined by leisure interests, sexuality, and so on.

This is civil society. From different, even conflicting interests how do we decide where our loyalty lies – is it to New Zealand? To an identity group? An ancestral group? To those ‘who look like us’?

The idea of ‘partial loyalty’ is a way into thinking about this question.

It is a question that someone in a tribal society, an autocratic society, a religious society would not have to ask, or be permitted to ask, because the answer is already provided.

Most societies demand total loyalty.

Traditional tribal societies allowed one identity – fixed by birth status and and kinship ties – not open to individual choice.  Loyalty was non-negotiable because total loyalty ensured the group’s survival.

Autocratic regimes, both past and present, impose total loyalty – not for the survival of all, but for the elite – imposed by might and by ideological indoctrination.

Democracies are different in a fundamental way. They not only allow partial loyalty but require it.

In a democracy we hold many loyalties simultaneously – family and social groups where the loyalty is personal – creating a deeply held sense of identity and belonging  – perhaps to a tribe, culture, religion, sport or other type of association.

And at the same time we are loyal to a diverse society and to its governing system that is not personal. Indeed loyalty to the democratic nation is loyalty to a vision – the idea of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

It is a nice way to think about things – democracies are about partial loyalty.

Retribalism has attackedthe three pillars of democracy through the covert use of ideology. I want to talk specifically about how this is occurring in language, education, and the media.

Retribalist ideology and language

Ideologies control not just speech but thought itself. The most successful have a manifesto, a ‘sacred text’ or covenant[10]. Mao’s Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, the sacred texts of religions, the US Constitution’s Second Amendment – these are used to symbolise a spiritual, ‘beyond this world’ authority,  disguising the real-life ambitions of those controlling the ideology. 

Since the 1980s the Treaty of Waitangi has been developed as such a manifesto – using two highly effective tactics.

I call the first the transubstantiation tactic.

Here the treaty is transformed from an historical document to a sacred text. This mystical transubstantiation takes the treaty into the realm of the spiritual from where it acquires a doctrinal authority – one to be interpreted for we common folk by a new priesthood – treatyist intellectuals.

Once the treaty’s unchallengable spiritual authority is established the second tactic comes into play. It is the diversion tactic. This ‘how many angels on a pinhead’ tactic operates by diverting us into echo-chamber squabbles – about the 1840 meaning of this word, that word, this intention, that intention. This is all interesting and important material for historians but our concern should be, not what the treaty said in 1840 – those days are gone – it served the purpose of the time – but what it is being used to say today – and for what purpose.

What about retribalist ideology and education?

Our  education system is indoctrinating children into retribalism. The so-called ‘decolonisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ of the curriculum is the method. This is a disaster. Decolonisation will destroy the very means by which each generation acquires reasoned knowledge, and in so doing, the ability to reason. 

I have described how this ability creates the disposition of partial loyalty that is required to be a citizen. Reasoning provides the rationalism to counter the irrationalism of total loyalty.  By undermining the secular academic curriculum – that which creates the reasoning mind – we are destroying the partially loyal individual. Our fate – to be left with those capable only of mindless total loyalty.

Dissent will not be tolerated!

Politics arises from civil society – from the various conflicting interests of people. That political-civil interaction is what democracy looks like.  But, and this is the crux of my argument,  no interest group  has the right of governance unless the people agree. Elections are that act of agreement – always temporary with the winner always on trial. 

New Zealanders, both Maori and non-Maori, have not been asked to agree to tribalist governance.  If we had been asked would we have agreed?

Tribalism and democracy are incompatible. We can’t have both.  If we wish to keep New Zealand as a liberal democratic nation then, as we derive our citizen rights from the nation-state, so we have a duty to ensure that the nation-state which awards those rights, remains democratic and able to do so.

For our country to remain a liberal democracy, we need to know what democracy is, its true value, and what we must do to restore it.

The agenda is clear – we saw it with the Rotorua bill, with the ECan bill and more.