Helen Houghton
Co-leader New Conservative
nc.org.nz
No to Co-governance, No to ethnic privilege. Yes to democracy and power by the people. New Conservative rejects separatist policies.
Labour and Te Pati Maori have been pushing separatist policies which would deny New Zealanders their democratic rights. New Conservative firmly opposes such policies.
During the last two terms of this Labour Government nobody can have failed to observe the incessant effort to force Maori language and names into our daily lives: in media greetings, renaming our cities and towns, and replacing the names of government departments.
New Conservative believe that this renaming is simply a taste of what the Maori ‘elite’ in caucus and in the Maori Party want: not just in nomenclature, but in governmental control.
New Conservative believes we must oppose the push for Co-governance and Maori sovereignty if we are to ensure our country remains a democracy run on the principle of one person, one vote.
We oppose state-sanctioned apartheid where one ethnic group has more than one vote per person.
Recently Willie Jackson stated, “Te Pati Maori want to own everything, they want to own the water and they want their own government.”
The Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti) has been interpreted in many ways since it was signed. In the first article of its Maori text the Chiefs gave the Queen “te Kawanatanga katoa”, the governance or government over the land. In the English text, the chiefs gave the Queen “all the rights and powers of sovereignty” over the land and all the people in it. How did we go from there to where we are today?
Sir Apirana Ngata, in his (the) Treaty of Waitangi, An Explanation, stated that there were many divisions among the sub-tribes; each having their own chief. Because there was no united authority or government and all tribes, as at present, had different ways of governance and tikanga, it would be impossible for any Maori Government to be able to govern all the various Maori territories as one. He stated that we are all, Maori and non-Maori, one people as New Zealanders. And his final comment to those who questioned the treaty: “If you think these things are wrong and bad then blame our ancestors who gave away their rights in the days when they were powerful.”
New Conservative believe that Labour has used Three Waters as a Trojan horse. It has sneakily tried to endorse its policies of Co-governance on the back of Three Waters. Not everyone in this country has seen through this ruse.
National says no one owns water, Labour says everyone owns water, I say no one owns water but we all have individual rights to water. No one has the right to own it. Control is another matter.
It is clear that New Zealand has problems with its water infrastructure. Some councils have managed their use of water well, but others have done so very poorly. Nobody would argue that we need to spend money updating and managing our water infrastructure. However, centralising our water management structure into a massive bureaucracy dominated by a small number of Maori elitists is the antithesis of the localism central to New Conservative policies. One only needs to look at the fiasco that the amalgamation of our Polytechnics has become to realise the dangers inherent in communistic type centralisation of public assets and infrastructure.
Chris Hipkins was told very clearly by Phil Ker, the former CEO of the Otago Polytechnic, that his Te Pukenga concept was a solution to a problem that simply did not exist. Millions have now been wasted on this education behemoth which is now floundering without real direction and is beset with problems.
New Conservative oppose Labour’s Three Waters for the same reasons. We believe that, as far as is possible, control of our local water infrastructure should be kept in local hands. That is not to say that there should not be some oversight and guidance from the government, but amalgamating the resources of over one hundred and twenty New Zealand councils into four iwi controlled water authorities is not going to solve the problem. Rather it will engender a burgeoning bureaucracy dominated by ethnic self-interest, far removed from the real on-the-ground problems and local communities.
New Conservative recognise that we need to update our water infrastructure but this does not mean the problem can or should be solved by handing it over to bureaucrats whose only credentials are ethnic.
