Robert MacCulloch
Robert MacCulloch is a native of New Zealand and worked at the Reserve Bank of NZ before he travelled to the UK to complete a PhD in Economics at Oxford University.
NZ’s parliament calls itself our “House of Representatives”. That’s an empty description, given we now have a sitting member who ran on the list for the Greens, but now has been kicked out of that party. So now the member does not represent a seat, nor a party. How can it be a House of Representatives when it has members who represent nothing?
Last week it got worse. It was revealed racial targeting to determine who has priority for health-care has been “directed” to be stopped. Cabinet issued a “circular directing all public services be delivered according to need rather than race”. This blog is not about the rights or wrongs of delivering services in these different ways, but instead observing how NZ has morphed into an unprincipled nation with an incoherent constitution. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the previous Labour government overtly, or tacitly, directed vast swathes of the bureaucracy to prioritize all manner of public services on the basis of race. It can be done without changing laws, neither by legislating nor through courts. Fundamental constitutional changes, at the institutional heart of NZ, can be done via “circulars”, nothing more than “announcements, adverts, or letters, sent to many people at the same time”.
Every New Zealander should now question whether our two main parties, both Labour and National, have any principles at all – certainly none transparently put into law. Instead both happily go about changing swathes of our reward and punishment (incentive system) by simply flinging out “circulars”. Does NZ no longer observe the rule of law? Is that why Kiwis flee and productivity collapses? We know in economics when the rules of the game change willy-nilly, prosperity is crushed. Should Labour win Election 2026, will Hipkins get his sticky fingers going and email a new directive to departments telling them to return to prioritizing based on race, since he’s the new sheriff in Wellington Town? It’s the Wild West. Will hugely important fundamental changes affecting how different races are treated in the nation flip flop whenever we have a change of government, as new emails are “circulated” reversing old emails?
One must ask – does NZ have a lawless, unprincipled bunch of members of parliament working in a lawless, unprincipled parliament? Was it revealed this past week?
Source:
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/09/hon-nicola-willis-need-and-value-at.html
This article was originally published by Down to Earth Kiwi.
