Known principally for his political commentaries in The Dominion Post, The ODT, The Press and the late, lamented Independent, and for "No Left Turn", his 2007 history of the Left/Right struggle in NZ.
The collective memory of the average Kiwi voter warns them that although the promise of a good life for everybody sounds wonderful, the Greens would never entrust the ordinary people of New Zealand with the power to make it happen – and neither would their bosses.
Kings, dictators and populist presidents don’t look at the world that way.
This is Chris Hipkins’ toughest challenge: to persuade the voters that his left-wing leopards have, indeed, become conventionally gendered, non-woke pussy cats.
Donald Trump’s instinct is to relocate the inhabitants, flatten what’s left and build the sort of city that people from all around the world would want to inhabit.
The SUP would rather keep control of the losing side, than lose control of the winning side. Labour’s exactly the same.
Only a populist leader can be trusted to give them what they want – which is, usually, to blow the system up.
Only a rejuvenated and aggressive left, with the working class behind it, could secure the triumph of fascism in America – and no such left exists.
Such comments reveal just how frayed the bonds of constitutional loyalty have become and how little stock the opposition parties now put in the democratic norms of representative government.
Māori and their left-wing allies are both well aware that when the key institutions of the state are in your hands, guns are an unwelcome distraction.
Exposing the purposes of power. When people come to believe that the danger was exaggerated and measures to combat it are barely effective or even harmful, then the state’s power disintegrates and it can only be buttressed by ever-more-draconian controls.
We can have democracy or we can have indigenous sovereignty. We can’t have both.
The Republican Party can now become a truly ‘national’ political institution.
The disaffection with official America runs so deep that its condemnation of Trump was received by roughly half of the adult American population as a powerful recommendation.
Why then fire Prebble as the government’s only, lonely, warning shot? Why not clean out all 22 of the tribunal’s sitting members?
