Chris Sellars
One of the many aims I have in writing is to document and preserve New Zealand colloquial idioms like ‘she’ll be right’, ‘Bob’s your uncle’ and the slightly pejorative. “What are ya?’ I do this because language, like all culture changes and some things can be lost.
I am a New Zealander. I was born and bred in these ’Shaky Isles’ once known as ‘God’s-own’, as was my father, my grandfather, my grandfather’s grandfather and my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. I am Maori and Pakeha. New Zealand, Aoteoroa, Land of the Long White Cloud call it what you will this is my land and this is my home.
My childhood was filled with bush and beach. Oysters and mussels on the rocks. Rock pools with periwinkles and anemones that closed up when you stuck your finger in em. One giant middle-class suburbia of weatherboards, iron roofs and corner dairies with gobstoppers and aniseed balls. School was warm milk delivered free and Bullrush at playtime.
In all my wanderings since I have yet to see, hear of, or read about a better place to grow up in. But whatever New Zealand was then it is no more. I tend to think this is due to too many people imagining that they can improve things and too few just minding their own business and getting on with it.
It is only with the passing of years that I have begun to wonder what were we then and what are we now?
It was, and probably still is, generally thought that New Zealand is a democracy. I am not sure if this was ever true. Indeed our colonial legacy as a member of the ‘British Commonwealth’ has us named as a Constitutional Monarchy. We still retain a Governor-General who in theory, if not in practice, can dissolve parliament if a government goes rogue. However several have and nothing was ever done by these nominal ‘Crown Representatives’.
When Maori chiefs signed ’Te Tariti’, a covenant was made not with a democracy nor a republic but with the Crown. Those charged with crimes are prosecuted by Crown Prosecutors who belong to the BAR, (British Accredited Registry)
Chosen Barrister elite are conferred with the title ’Queens Counsellor’ (QC)
The official Govt website says.
‘Our Government is formed from a democratically elected House of Representatives. The Government advises the Sovereign (our head of State). By convention, the Sovereign, the source of all executive legal authority in New Zealand, acts on the advice of the Government in all but the most exceptional circumstances. This system is known as a constitutional monarchy.
Our system is based on the principle that power is distributed across three branches of government —Parliament, the Executive, and the Judiciary. Parliament makes the law. The Executive (Ministers of the Crown also known as the Government) administers the law. The Judiciary interprets the law through the courts’.
(I copied and pasted this. You can tell it is from the Government by the bad sentence construction and poor punctuation)
Sounds great in theory. The three branches mentioned are three of the four estates required for a democracy. For a functional democracy though the judiciary must be free and independent of any political or corporate influence as must the fourth estate which is the media. It also requires an informed public. Not one of our four estates currently fulfils the criteria for democracy.
We are told we are a constitutional monarchy but we have no written constitution.
As we have seen with the illegal lockdown (Borrowdale vs AG) and the illegal vaccine roll-out. (Sue Grey**) our constitution now appears to be anything the prime minister and her caucus says it is.
Interestingly the treason laws which might have been invoked to reign in and punish a rogue government were repealed during ‘the great corporatisation’ by the Clark Government. Our anything but free and independent mainstream media let that one slip by their one blind eye.
Another piece of vitally important news that went almost entirely unreported occurred at the peak of the privatisation (read theft) of our publicly owned assets. In 1988 the final insult of actually corporatising the country itself occurred. This was the year that the New Zealand Government was listed as a corporation with the New York Securities & Exchange Commission. When many and various refer to ‘New Zealand Inc’ it is no Joke.
Now we are facing hate speech laws that will add Government censorship to corporate censorship and the self-censorship of political correctness.
The antidote to hate speech is love speech not censorship. The antidote to falsehood is truth not silence. The desire to cancel competing views is an admission of no confidence in the validity of that view.
I think we can, with some certainty, conclude that we never were a democracy or a constitutional monarchy but we have certainly become a corporation *.
Those not completely in the dark or whose memories haven’t been turned to mush by Facebook and Netflix will recall that prior to our election Billy T K was unfairly maligned as a conspiracy theorist for drawing attention to these facts. Why has hardly anyone else ever mentioned them? Are you happy about it? Are you okay that all of this was done ‘on the quiet’?
Remember the seventy billion raised by the sale of Government bonds to the reserve bank in 2020? Guess who the ‘bondsmen’ are. Yes, you and your children were sold further into bondage without your knowledge and without your informed consent. I know it’s probably too little too late but I just thought you might like to know.
* HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN IN RIGHT OF NEW ZEALAND New Zealand’s Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) Central Index Key (CIK) is #0000216105
** BETWEEN NGA KAITIAKI TUKU IHO MEDICAL ACTION SOCIETY INCORPORATED Plaintiff AND THE MINISTER OF HEALTH First Defendant THE DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF HEALTH Second Defendant CHRISTOPHER JAMES Third Defendant THE PRIME MINISTER OF NEW ZEALAND Fourth Defendant THE MINISTER FOR COVID-19 RESPONSE Fifth Defendant THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL Sixth Defendant PFIZER NEW ZEALAND LIMITED Seventh Defendant
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