40 per cent of our kids are leaving school without the necessary literacy or numeracy skills to function in society. What is meant when we talk about “to function”? Education specialists will tell you that it means to be able to fill out a form.

 

Given this statistic is it any wonder that we are rapidly going from a democratic nation with a good standard of living, to one where the government is introducing race based policies which amount to apartheid.

 

When forty per cent of the school leavers have not got the numeracy and literacy skills to function in society, what chance do they have of being able to understand where our current government is leading them?

 

Our immigration stats are telling us there are more people leaving than arriving, and there are many other things going wrong in New Zealand right now which are exacerbating this problem.

 

Yet the Government focus is on something else. They are busy changing the social structure of the country to suit their leftist ideology and using the mythical partnership claimed under the Treaty of Waitangi, as justification for most of their changes.

 

Tertiary education has been centralised with consequences so far being, that after less than one year they are predicting operating losses of millions of dollars.

 

We’re short of skilled trades people across many industries yet the government has constrained immigration.

 

Why would the government spend $460 million to restructure the health system during a health crisis?

 

Why would they be planning to spend the equivalent of what it costs to build a regional hospital on the merger of two media outlets that they already own? The answer is that you do so if you want to control the information given to the general public; the same outcome as that realised by the implementation of the Public Interest Journalism Fund – publishing of government propaganda.

 

The mainstream media have almost universally failed to challenge the Government on its increasingly destructive record in relation to attacking democracy through the promotion of race based legislation.

 

The government has been pushing to implement many recommendations from the He Pua Pua report which was prepared for Te Puni Kokiri and kept hidden from both the government’s coalition partner and the voters, until after the last election. The main thrust of this report is a recommendation for Maori to achieve co-governance of NZ by 2040, again using the mythical partnership claimed under the Treaty of Waitangi, as justification.

 

There is no mention anywhere in the Treaty documents of a partnership yet this government and its so-called Maori caucus are claiming that this interpretation of the Treaty is correct and therefore justifies them implementing their apartheid policies.

 

As time has passed and some ministers have shown their inexperience/incompetence in different portfolios, we have seen a small number of ministers get promoted to respond on the Government’s behalf, in the critical portfolios and these ministers now carry multiple roles. Their appointments seem to definitely be based more on their ability in public relations and communications than their ability to get things done.

 

Examples of these ministers are Grant Robertson (Finance, Infrastructure and Sport as well as being the Deputy PM), Chris Hipkins (Police, Education and the ever expanding public service) and David Wood (Transport, Immigration and Workplace Relations) with multiple portfolios that are probably overworked and underperforming.

 

A quick glance at their respective employment profiles on social media sites, reveals that these three have spent less than five years in total – among them – working in jobs outside the political system. So that makes them career politicians.

 

And so we have people who are good at communicating and spinning a story when a microphone is pushed in their face. They’re very good at telling us how many more nurses, teachers or police they’ve recruited.

What they don’t tell us is how many have left. They can’t explain why we have the problems we have and don’t seem to be able to shed any believable light on their proposed solutions.

 

Most of the critical operational functions of this government are in pretty bad shape. Good government would see the existing problems get smaller as new ones emerge. Not here. The problems are just getting bigger and the attention of government and the ministers seem to be diverted away from the real Issues to following their leftist ideology whilst trying to change the democratic social structure of our country.

 

The recent emissions policy is a case to point. New Zealand doesn’t need to be a world leader. We don’t need to set world firsts. Even the Paris Accord under section 2b, states clearly that climate change policy should not come in a manner that threatens food production.

 

And the reality is that it doesn’t matter what this country does on climate change policy; we are not going to make a difference to the global outcomes for the planet. And yet here we are risking our biggest export industry, destroying farming families and threatening the security of our own food supply which has more to do with headline grabbing and virtue signalling than it does with any real beneficial change to the effects on the climate.

 

Our politicians want to be seen as leading the world so they can parade on the international stage and claim some type of moral victory in relation to the global climate change problem but all they will achieve is to destroy our agricultural export industries, threaten our food security and ensure that we can’t afford to pay our debts.

 

The damage wrought by this Government, through their own inaction on the things that really matter and their blind focus on the things that don’t, in just five short years, will already take a decade to turn around, or maybe even a generation. Their policies have taken us from democratic nation with a good standard of living into a nation of mediocrity likely to slide down further.