There is a very old saying about making decisions in haste and repenting at leisure, and this old saying could have actually been written specifically for the current labour government.
This government seems to have a penchant for making decisions in haste, passing legislative change under urgency to enact those decisions and then rapidly realizing that they have got it wrong.
But it is us the taxpayers of New Zealand that will be left to repent their decisions at our leisure.
The number of bad decisions this government has made and is still making, seems to rise with every sitting of the house.
When Jacinda Ardern first ran for Prime Minister, she declared climate change was her ‘generation’s nuclear free moment’ and she cited child poverty as her reason for entering politics.
Yet when you look at the government’s statistics since their first election victory in 2017, on practically every single metric the administration has failed.
Child poverty levels have risen under Jacinda Ardern’s leadership, as have carbon emissions. The gun buy-back scheme implemented after the Christchurch mosque attack was nothing short of an expensive PR disaster that actually achieved very little in real results.
The child poverty statistics are the same or worse and her climate change commitments are a sad joke. She has basically shut down the coal mining industry in New Zealand (supposedly to eliminate the use of fossil fuelled energy) and then sat and watched as we have imported millions of tonnes of dirty coal from Indonesia, so that we have been able to keep the lights on without saying a word.
We are sitting on huge coal reserves yet we are importing dirty coal and her government says nothing because it may show how stupid her decision was to try to claim the high ground in the name of reaction to the effects of climate change.
I cannot think of a major policy from her election manifestos that has not been a failure. She told us she would make houses more affordable; yet their costs have risen so high that first home owners cannot even hope to buy let alone actually be able to “afford” to buy in the current market.
She promised us 100,000 Kiwi-build homes, but actually only succeeded in sacking her Minister after his failing so spectacularly.
She promised Auckland would get a light rail system from the city centre to the airport and has failed to lay even a single centimetre of track.
She promised a $685 million Cycle Bridge across the Auckland Harbour (Skypath) which was rapidly shown to be totally impractical and thankfully cancelled, but not before they had wasted over $50 million on design and enabling works.
Outside of the global Covid 19 pandemic, housing costs and first home ownership are one of the top agenda items in the eyes of the electorate. Yet the government in 2020 pushed tax changes for family trusts through Parliament under urgency and this change has resulted in some perverse outcomes which are preventing young families from receiving assistance from their families to enter the home ownership market.
The rushed changes to the tax legislation meant there wasn’t time for proper scrutiny, and now one of the unintended tax consequences is that parents who help their children get a house deposit have found themselves triggering the Government’s ‘bright line’ test, meaning they’re liable for tax on the capital gain. Just another disincentive for parents to support their children into home ownership.
Revenue Minister David Parker has admitted the rules are more over-the-top than was intended and that he may make a retrospective amendment to the law.
The government under urgency made changes to the regulations controlling intensive winter grazing in relation to water quality issues and then found that the regulations were actually unworkable as written and needed to be further changed, even before the new regulations had been enacted.
Another example of rushed legislation (leaving no time for proper scrutiny of the consequences) resulting in unintended perverse outcomes.
Since again taking power after the last election, with an absolute majority, the government has assumed unprecedented additional powers, most under the pretext of protecting our health.
The government has introduced a bill under which they have proposed a separate Health system for Maori managed by Maori and with the power of veto over all health board funding throughout New Zealand.
As New Zealanders we have always prided ourselves on being an inclusive multi-racial society. Yet under the present Labour Government we are heading down a path of separatism with our society divided by race, based on a factually incorrect interpretation of Treaty of Waitangi documentation.
They have many times stated that we have a partnership requirement with Iwi, under the Treaty of Waitangi but in actual fact this is just another lie from this government, which is damaging our democracy and racial harmony through their championing of race based policies.
The government has set up the “Public Interest Journalism Fund” under the pretext of supporting the media to manage the effects of the global Covid 19 pandemic but what was not well publicized was the requirement that all media organisations applying for subsidies through that fund were required under the rules of the fund, to publicly support the government position that Maori are in “partnership” with the Crown – a fundamental premise of “He Puapua”.
“He Puapua” Report of the Working Group on a Plan to Realise the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand which was commissioned by Cabinet in 2019, produced by Te Puni Kōkiri, and sets out a 20-year plan to bring the UN declaration into effect. The report had been completed almost a year before the highly redacted version was released.
It envisages that by 2040 – the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi – the nation will be ruled under an equal power-sharing arrangement between Māori and non-Māori leaders.
The head of journalism for NZ on Air, the agency which administers the Fund has reported that of the 34 applications approved in the first funding round, 40 percent of the money will go to Maori journalism projects.
There is much criticism of the Fund with predictions that most of the money will end up being spent on advocacy journalism. As with the $3.5 million Three Waters propaganda campaign and taxpayers will be paying for their own indoctrination.
The line that once separated journalism from activism is being erased, and we are witnessing the slow death of neutral, independent and credible journalism.
The Public Interest Journalism Fund and its requirements to support the government’s position that Maori are in “partnership” with the Crown, effectively makes the media nothing more than a government propaganda organisation.
This is very evident when looking at the Three Waters proposal. The government has used the media to support their proposals to seize control of all Three Waters assets across the whole of New Zealand and place them into four new water entities.
The government initially stated that the proposal would be voluntary for councils and they would have a choice on whether they wished to participate or not and when the councils around New Zealand in the majority (63 of the 67 councils around the country) decided they did not want to accept this proposal either in its entirety or in part, the government decided to make it mandatory.
Jacinda Ardern not only kept He Puapua hidden from her then coalition partner New Zealand First, she also deliberately concealed it from voters during the 2020 election campaign.
So, while the government is pressing ahead with a secret separatist agenda that undermines democracy, they are failing to deliver on their manifesto policies, including improvements to their management of Covid-19.
Democracy is also being eroded and personal freedom undermined through the dictatorial manner in which the government implements controversial policies.
The extent to which the He Puapua agenda is undermining the pillars of our democracy is only now starting to become obvious and this may be why there has been such a push for urgency in making these decisions so that they are done before the electorate realises that Democracy is being destroyed.
There is an increasing urgency for the public to be able to gain information in relation to the really quite radical decisions that the government is taking at the present time in regard to both He Puapua and the Three Waters Project.
These two issues have the potential to bring about the extinction of democracy in New Zealand and replace it with a race based system of socialism and the majority of decisions around both issues have been taken behind closed doors and deliberately kept from the public of New Zealand. In fact most were also kept from the government’s coalition partner in the previous government.
They were not mentioned in any way throughout the last election campaign yet now that the government has been returned with an absolute majority they have become the subject of urgency within government, with many of the decisions being forced through the house under urgency.
Many of the decisions around the Three Waters Project (which follows the blueprint set out in the He Puapua Report) have not been publicly consulted or have had very short time frames for consultation that have precluded the public from indulging in meaningful consultation.
So while this Labour government is making hasty decisions based on their ideological outlook, we the taxpayers of New Zealand are being left to repent their decisions at our leisure with no chance of stopping them until the next election in 2023.
Andy Loader