What Is Happening to New Zealand?

Bruce Logan

By the grace of God I’m 83. I still have eyes to drive sans glasses and ears that hear unaided. I retain a nose that smells the despot and the discerning perfume of freedom. I enjoy its taste. I feel pity without collapsing into hypocritical sentimentalism. I know the difference between bathos and pathos.

Yes, I still believe in the sovereignty of God. Gratitude is my heart’s default.

That’s why I value democracy. I’ve lived in seven while visiting several dictatorships for quite lengthy periods. I know the difference. So I ask: what is happening to New Zealand? Where is the outrage? Has almost every New Zealander become servile? Is the state the one source of truth?

Not too many years ago the overreaching behaviour of the present government would have been condemned by nearly everyone, its grasp for power obvious.

One example. Exchanging “social justice” for justice, Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta has confirmed that the Government will force its “voluntary” Three Waters Reforms on councils because it is “fair”. Freedom, the consequence of “fairness” will be determined by the state’s utopian obsession and its totalitarian faux largesse.

Even if there were some economic sense to the “reforms”, and there isn’t, they would still be outrageous. Taking $54 billion of assets from the councils without adequate compensation is theft. It might be hard for New Zealanders to grasp but the “reforms”, in that soft politically correct way, echo Stalin’s theft of peasant property in order to create collective farms. Both are exercises in the presumed “righteousness” of centralising power.

The government doesn’t understand the meaning of its own ad nauseam but superficial preoccupation with Te Tiriti o Waitangi which gives every New Zealander, before it does anything else, equality under the law. The missionaries who talked to the Maori chiefs about the meaning and purpose of the Treaty understood that. The chiefs knew “there was one sun in the sky”.

The government has actually rejected the rule of law implicit in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, accepting the fallacy of “living document” it can mine for principles that have no foundation other than in their own Promethean imagination.

No matter how you spin it we are moving towards the imposition of two cultural and legal administrative systems. Biculturalism will no longer be an agreeable and organic order on the street or in the home. It will be an ideology imposed by the state, inspired more by critical race theory and an ideologically truncated understanding of colonialism, rather than the need to right past wrongs.

Utopian totalitarianism always justifies its overreach on the basis that it knows what human beings are and what’s good for them.

The rule of law underpinning our democracy was supposed to stop that happening: stop the government shaping citizens in its own image.

This is what it’s doing in its Select Committee report declaring birth certificates are not about biology. “Sex, self-identification is an administrative process, rather than a health-related process or medical procedure.” “People should be allowed to amend their registered sex more than once.”

Science and history are rejected by the self-identifiers and any theory of either consigned to the rubbish bin. In the Select Committee’s imagination, the psychologising of human identity overwhelms both academic disciplines.

That aggressive ideology is an attack on established cultural norms designed to undo the deeper moral structure of society. The select committee is not so much making arguments against the old order as it is actually subverting it. It is undermining the old truths on which society is based.

We actually have a new religion of the human creature designed to destroy the old. Christianity, with its emphasis on human dignity created by God, is anathema. All residual and embarrassing reminders, like Parliamentary prayer for example, must be buried by bureaucratic and legal prevarication. That Te Tiriti o Waitangi rests on the belief that human dignity is God-given must be wiped from our memory.

The consequence is that history is about villainous victimisers and heroic victims. With the most revealing of ironies one must learn to be “on the right side of history”; a believer, without God, in the new religion of self-affirming government-sustained identity.

Government ministers will be secularised versions of mediaeval priests and priestesses. Truth will not sustain law; law is the truth.