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’s Wairarapa Times-Age, front pages with a statement like this, you know that something is badly (and sadly) amiss in what was once our united nation.
Dr Muriel Newman nails it here.
The second event was a message sent by a chat group colleague to Hon. Judith Collins, Leader of the Opposition, which he copied to me, and which said:
I believe you need to go further than this. Saying that a National government will repeal the Three Waters ‘reforms’ and return all seized assets back to your local councils will not stop this.
If it was me, I would issue a statement that what Labour is doing, and how they are doing it, is unconstitutional, unlawful and an abuse of process and the electoral process, and organised theft. Therefore, not only will National seize the assets, but they will ‘recover’ any and all public and Three Water money paid to businesses, individuals, firms and iwi in relation to the Three Waters establishment and operation from this date forth (with the full amount paid recovered, with no accounting for any GST or tax paid), and that all bureaucrats involved in the facilitating the establishment and operation of Three Waters will be fired.
You might also want to throw in that any professional engineers, consulting engineering firms or contractors who get involved in the establishment or operation of Three Waters will also be barred from any central and local government work for at least 10 years.
That should put a stop to it.
Hmmm…governments are not permitted to break the law or the Constitution (even our unwritten but generally accepted Constitution). If they don’t agree with any particular law, there is a place and a process to change it: Parliament and amendment legislation passed after debate and a vote in favour. Governments that wilfully break the law or breach the Constitution without undergoing the accepted parliamentary process surrender their right to govern.
And there’s a message for the non-political players, the officials, the consultants, the contractors and the iwi involved: you also are guilty as accomplices (if not, in some cases, prime movers) and likewise deserving of penalty. Time was when we were blessed with men and women dedicated to the efficient neutrality that earned them respect as “civil servants” rather than the toadies and game-players so many of them are today.
The third event (ongoing) is the seemingly unending discourse about how best New Zealand should deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tucked away in the post “The Blame Game” by Dr Muriel Newman is reference to Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy of the University of Newcastle’s School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy, a leading Australian clinical immunologist with an impressive record in the field of mucosal immunology, who instances evidence supporting early treatment with re-purposed medications to help prevent people from getting sick and needing to go to hospital:
“The first is a WHO study in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state (230 million people). Medical teams visited 98,000 villages, providing ‘kits’ containing ivermectin for the treatment of those with Covid-19. Within 5 weeks, new cases had dropped by 97%. Meanwhile, Kerala, another Indian state with 8% the population of Uttar Pradesh and not using ivermectin, recorded over 31,000 cases per day. Similar results are reported in areas of Peru, Mexico and many other regions.”
Currently in New Zealand we rely solely on the Pfizer vaccine as set out here: https://covid19.govt.nz/covid-19-vaccines/get-the-facts-about-covid-19-vaccination/covid-19-vaccination-your-questions-answered/
National’s Covid-spokesman, Chris Bishop has been mercilessly grilling the Labour Minister Chris (“Chippie”) Hipkins in Parliament’s Question Time, and has extracted some concessions to ease lockdowns apart from Auckland and some parts of Waikato. National Leader Collins has challenged Jacinda Ardern’s refusal to visit Auckland especially given there are rumours of an imminent prime ministerial jaunt overseas to an unknown country for an unknown purpose.
This Labour lot have lost their way over how to handle the pandemic, vaccinations (and now boosters?) lockdowns, MIQ (managed isolation and quarantine? Huh? Mismanaged more like it). I say this as someone double vaxed mid-year, with a subsequent negative Covid squab test, and now resigned to the inevitability of an early New Year booster, and probable annual boosters in the same way as my annual flu jab.
But National’s line apparently continues to rest on “Demand the Debate”. Nats have promised to undo the Three Waters plan, which aims not just to centralise current local body supervision of these essential community services into four regional entities, but also to involve Maori iwi in the management and control of them as part of the divisive co-governance plot known as He Puapua. We still await a similar National pledge to scrap the whole He Puapua nonsense (no ifs, no buts, no maybes) and to return New Zealand (note New Zealand, not Aotearoa) to being the united democratic society that we have developed since the signing of that treaty at Waitangi in 1840.
So Nats, time to forget about the “debate” and start demanding the resignation of this apology for a government that Winston Peters saddled us with in 2017, this Marxist gang so aptly described by the Wairarapa Council as “a deceitful, lying pack of bastards”.
And Judith, whose Papakura electorate committee kindly accepted me as a co-opted member and delegate after I had been disaffected from North Shore National by the uber-control of its former MP, Maggie Barry (now replaced by a good guy in Simon Watts): time to reassert your “Crusher” mojo, and start sounding like the Prime Minister you will become once we dump the current gang of Marxist no-hopers.
A good start would be to make peace with Winston, who would I am sure make the same success as your Minister of Foreign Affairs as he did in an earlier spell in that role, and whose acceptance of that prospect would probably be enough to see the return of NZ First to Parliament as a coalition partner for you and ACT.
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