Dear Reader BFD columnist Terry Dunleavy passed away this week. The article that he had planned to write for today was going to tell us “why Luxon’s speech was NOT ‘State of the Nation’ but was welcome as reaffirmation of the State of the National Party”. In the years
Ain’t coincidence wonderful! There I was on the morning of Monday 21 February, planning to devote last week’s column to questioning the wisdom of the government’s plans to up-end our current health system by introducing a separate veto-bearing Maori Health Authority. By the end of the day
My columns of the previous two weeks have been my personal quest to make 2022 the “Year of Reality” in the recounting of the history of New Zealand, especially in respect of the increasing efforts at deliberate misinterpretation/distortion of the intent and spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi. This
As has become more usual in the past 3 or 4 years, Waitangi Day 2022 has produced a regurgitation of claims that Te Tiriti must be honoured by the return to Maori of what was taken from them by later settlers branded as “colonialists”; and that the Treaty is a
Ian Hodgkinson has a written letter to PM Ardern, expressing sentiments with which I wholeheartedly agree: Dear Jacinda, When you became Labour Party leader, seven weeks before the 2017 election, you had been a little-known list MP. We now know that nine months before being elected to Parliament in 2008,
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who declared 2020 “The Year of Covid” and 2021 “The Year of the Vaccine”, has yet to christen the year 2022 on which we have just embarked. Let me suggest – nay implore – that 2022 should be “The Year of Reality”: the year when we shrug off
As this will be my last column for 2021, I want to end on a positive note for my much-preferred political party, National, under its new leadership of Chris Luxon. He’s started well, hasn’t he, and not before time, as our country drifts downward to new depths of
At first sight, the announcement last week of the cancellation next year of the ceremonies usually held at and around the Treaty grounds at Waitangi on 6 February could be shrugged off as just another casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the eternal optimist in me sees it as a
At the time of writing this week’s column, I don’t know the identity of the new Leader appointed by the Caucus of the National Party, but I DO know the most important challenge the party needs to face up to if it hopes to become the next government
Of all the deviations from common sense being committed by this apology for a government we’ve inflicted on ourselves, the latest has been the deliberate attempt to denigrate our long-established and widely respected international brand name, New Zealand, by prefixing it with the mythical Maori term, Aotearoa. What this
There is one sure way to ignite much needed debate on the Ardern cabal’s plot to divide New Zealand by transferring rights of co-governance to a minority of extremist Maori elites under the He Puapua plan. Pose this question: has the Waitangi Tribunal fulfilled the purposes for which it
This week, in my role as New Zealand Ambassador for Climate Intelligence, the international organisation established in the Netherlands, now numbering over 900 people around the world opposed to the hoax of “dangerous anthropogenic global warming” (DAGW), I am emailing to all members of our New Zealand Parliament this statement
This week, a blunt instrument assault on my beloved National Party: stop pussy-footing, get down and politically dirty while we still have a country worth saving. Three events in the past few days have led to this. First, when a mildly conservative, long-established and community-respected daily newspaper, such as Masterton’
This week’s column started out to be about the venality of most of what passes these days for New Zealand’s mainstream news media (MSM). Venality: noun – the condition or quality of being venal; openness to bribery or corruption. Bribery? Really? Well, take a look here. Is the Ardern
My column last week dealt with the integrity of oral tradition as compared with cold hard print. This week, I‘d like to focus on the common denominator that conveys meaning: words. As New Zealanders, we’ve come to be distinguished by many of the words in our common vernacular,
Of all these weekly Wednesday columns I began writing for The BFD many months ago, this is the hardest, because it contains a partial admission of unfairness on my part. Or possibly so: To PM Ardern and her Marxist He Puapua accomplices, and the two members of the Maori Party,
