The Slippery Slope of Maori Sovereignty

Outstanding interviewing from Kate Hawkesby last night with self-proclaimed Maori Goverment leader Sue Nikora over her group's attempts to extort money from law-abiding motel owners in Gisborne. There was much bluster from Ms Nikora, but Hawkesby stuck to her guns and sat back while the silly old bag buried herself in mindless blabber.

More peculiar were the bizarre claims from one of her supporters that "William the Fourth", who according to the spokesman, was "Elizabeth's father", granted Maori sovereignty in "1907". Morons like him should be jailed for stupidity, more than anything else.

Haven't yet heard boo on the subject from local MP and Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia either denouncing or endorsing these hooligans' actions.

Die, John Campbell, DIE!

John Campbell is a pinko commie bastard. That on its own is normally more than sufficient for me to curse their existence and pray that God will send down His mighty finger and fry them down to Hell.

But I actually like John Campbell most of the time. Well, some of the time.
But not at the moment.

Campbell's performance last night, jumping on the PC-bullshit "Let's Save Africa" bandwagon is the last straw. Never again, John, will you be invited to dinner. Unless the dogs are particularly hungry.

Campbell's theme, in case you didn't witness it, dear reader, was to fall in for Bob Geldof's limp-wristed propaganda that the West is responsible for all Africa's ills. Starvation, AIDS, and war in Africa is due wholly to America's apathy, Japan's economic success, and Europe's materialism. That patronising speciousness has more to do with Africa's place in the world today: that the West has gained at the expense of Africa is bad economics and bad social analysis. Africa will not improve its standing in the world while it refuses to take responsibility for its own destiny.

The reality is that continental Africa is no worse off in the twenty-first century than it has been throughout history. It remains a primitive, brutal place, many parts of which are locked in the stone age. Urban sub-Saharan Africa is particularly miserable, by world standards. But that is only because world standards have advanced, in medicine, economics, and human rights, whereas Africa has steadfastly stuck to primitivity.

Campbell takes the easy line on Africa: that the world stood by while Rwanda tore itself apart; that it is ignoring the plight of Zimbabweans under Mugabe rule; that we stood by while Ethiopia starved; that we're even willing Darfour to create more human catastrophe. Oh, and that somehow it's rich people to blame for Africans spreading AIDS among themselves.

No, Mr Campbell. No, no, and NO again. I am not personally to blame for the fact that throughout the last sixty years of decolonised rule, Africans have engaged in the worst possible atrocities against each other, have mortgaged their economies to buy guns instead of rice, and have supported dictators and despots of the worst kind and claimed that it is their right to rule themselves the African Way.

The African Way has resulted in Jean-Bedel Bokassa, one of the most horrific characters in human history. For fourteen years in the mid-late twentieth century, he terrorised a continent as Emperor of the Central African Republic. Feeding children to alligators in his private swimming pool for entertainment, he took pride in his seventeen wives, and sixty children. He died of old age, after spending just four years in prison for crimes that made Mugabe look positively gentlemanly.

Idi Amin of Uganda massacred 400,000 people. He too fathered over forty children. Eight years as self-appointed dictator, he died of old age after being granted asylum for twenty-five years in Saudi Arabia.

Likewise, Angola, the Congo, the Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, Nigeria and the Sierra Leone remain in states of constant civil war. Diamonds are only part of the motive: competition for pasture lands, and basic tribalism are at the heart of ethnic and political conflict in the region. Hard to point the finger at the United States over that.

And then there's AIDS. Old gags aside about it reaching the US by coming up the Hudson, it is predominantly an African epidemic. And it will remain so as long as African men consider it their male duty to procreate with seven hundred women, and as long as they believe that the cure for the disease is to rape a baby. And, of course, as long as supposedly "advanced" leaders such as South Africa's Thabo Mbeki refuse to acknowledge it as anything other than a homosexual problem.

AIDS started in Africa. It spread through Africa because of primitive sexual practises. It rages throughout the continent because African societies are ignorant of basic tenets of modern medicine. Even moves, by the West, in relatively safe parts of Africa to distribute AIDS drugs have not worked, because African societies have not been able to cope with the strict disciplinary regimes of following multiple drug programmes.

But back to the blame issue, because John Campbell needs somebody white to harangue for Africa's ills. Supposedly the West are standing back from bringing Mugabe to his knees. Yet that is factually incorrect: it is African power-states such as South Africa and Nigeria that have endorsed Mugabe's rule. Hard for the West to take responsibility for an African regional problem while Africa itself legitimises that problem.

Yes, Mugabe's a detestable creature, and should be lined up and shot. It says a lot about the leftist tendency of the world media that Zimbabwe is attracting so much public attention, as if Mugabe's fate is in the hands of the West. Zimbabwe of 2005 is a hell-hole. Yet is is relatively peaceful, in African terms. And there is no desire whatsoever by either the South African or Nigerian governments--the most stable and powerful--to get rid of Mugabe.

And the solution? Well, reality is, there isn't one. No point in sending more food into war-torn regions if militants are going to hold it hostage to their own legitimacy. So therein lies the issue. Pinko liberals can jump up and down all they like about how the West does nothing to intervene--curiously, as they oppose intervention in Iraq, they advocate moves into regional African affairs that are not even supported by supposedly democratic and legitimate African leaders.

Give yourself an uppercut, John Campbell. As long as tribal African rulers legitimise each other's despotic tactics and engage in counter-war after counter-war and hold their own peoples to the fires of Hell, there is nothing the West, let alone a bunch of hand-wringing self-appointed "intellectuals" from the music industry, can do.

No surprises, really. . .

Apparently, this is the leader I most resemble:

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Which is bollocks, of course. No chance of me going all wowser-like and hiding in a cave.

How Irrelevant Is Rodney Hide?

It seems to me that whenever I write something, I manage to lose a friend.

It isn't my habit to kick a sturdy right-winger when he's down, but in this case, I come not to praise Rodney, but to bury him. And there my Mark Anthony performance finishes, because firstly, I can't be fucked, and secondly, Rodney's survival is beyond even Shakespeare's rhetoric.

There was a time, at the peak of Jim Bolger's centrism, when Act served a useful purpose. Made up of mainly former Labour Party faithful who did more to improve New Zealand's economic landscape than any of their Muldoonist National counterparts, Act was a party to be admired. They were the backbone. The conscience of the Right. Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas were iconic. Heroes for all those who believed in minimum state intervention and maximum individual economic liberty.

But times have changed. Roger and Richard went quietly into the night. Rodney is raging against the dying of the political light, but it is Rodney himself who has blown out the candle. Whereas Douglas and Prebble will be remembered for their economic reforms, for restructuring the public sector, and for changing the way New Zealanders understand the role of the state in their daily lives. Rodney will be remembered for exposing Jonathan Hunt's taxi chits.

Which, admittedly, is more than most MPs achieve in their political lifetime. Certainly, Rodney has had a far greater impact on the New Zealand Parliament in the last nine years than has Richard Worth in the last six in Epsom. But that isn't the point.

To lead a minority back-bone party, Rodney has to be associated with a brand that is distinct from National. Rodney has to prove to New Zealand that without him keeping National honest in government, there would be no distinction between National and Labour. He has to establish that Parliament, and Government, is outstandingly better for National voters to break away and support him, rather than their own party. And most of all, he has to get voters to take him seriously.

Sadly, Rodney has squandered that opportunity. He has occupied himself with trivia, while National has successively recruited genuine heavyweights who have had a major impact on New Zealand economics and business outside of their political careers: Don Brash, Tim Groser, and John Key. Together they bring experience and integrity to their arguments that the economy is better managed by National, rather than Labour.

And in the economic policy debate, crucially, Rodney doesn't even make it to the top of the table, let alone show any interest in being anything other than a sideshow. National voters know that for the first time in more than a generation, National possesses an economic "dream team" that cannot be matched by either Labour, or Act's ginger group.

This election is about fundamental policy differences between National and Labour. The electorate doesn't need Act to accentuate those differences.

So farewell, Rodney. It's been a fun ride. But like all roller coasters, this one is coming to an end.

Steve Maharey is a Small-Dicked Weasel

See the Government's spin machine has gone into overdrive for tonight's TVNZ tax debate: Michael Cullen has run for the hills of Hokitika to have tea and biscuits with some Labour Party hangers-on on the West Coast, rather than front up against National's John Key.

But this post isn't specifically about Michael Cullen's cowardice.

Rather, it's about the smarmy, slimey way that Steve Maharey will present the government's welfare hand-out package as a "targeted tax cut". No, Mr Maharey. Creative you might be with spinning and twisting the presentation of your pinko commie ideas, but truthful you are not. Hard-working New Zealanders know that the budget did nothing to ease the tax burden on middle New Zealand, and taxing all New Zealanders at exhorbitant levels, only to launder it back through the bureaucracy in the guise of welfare assistance to Labour-voting low-income people is a bribe, for which the electorate will not be thankful.

Maharey's attempt to shift the debate is obvious: he cannot stand up on the issues, because he's onto an absolute barracking. Weaselly words from a master of slime.

TVNZ's Richard Harman suggests in the Herald that he felt that Maharey was making an appearance to "accentuate the spending consequences of tax cuts". But that's not what the debate is about. The debate is not about Government spending: it's about Government Revenue. It isn't The Great Welfare Debate. It isn't even The Great Economy Debate. It's The GREAT TAX DEBATE!

The Government's arrogance in this matter is clear. If they were honest about wanting to participate in a discussion about taxation, and if the Earl Grey and Tim Tams in Hokitika was REALLY that important to Michael Cullen, then the logical replacement for him at the Great Tax Debate would have been his own associate minister of Revenue, David Cunliffe.

To insist, as the Government does, that the country cannot afford lower taxes while it is sitting on a $7.5 billion surplus is ideology gone mad.

Government doesn't raise taxes because it wants to fund silly initiatives like the Wananga, hip-hop tours, and a health system that costs more but delivers the same. Rather, it funds those initiatives because it has spare money lying around, and needs to find places to hide it because it wouldn't matter how affordable tax cuts actually are: they quite simply do not want New Zealand workers to receive the profits of their endeavours.

And that is the essence of the Great Tax Debate. Labour thinks that our wealth-creating workers should be the last resort. Taxpayers should get in the hand whatever is left after the Government has decided what to do with their incomes. Parties of the right, on the other hand, believe that the Government should only tax people what is absolutely necessary in order to fund basic services.

So face facts and tell New Zealanders the truth, Mr Maharey. No matter how much was in the government coffers, no matter how much waste in the public sector, no matter how strong the economic and fiscal outlook over the next five years, Labour would never, under any circumstance, reduce taxes on hard-working New Zealanders.

Even Michael Cullen would have been given a degree of respect if he'd fronted up and said that. At least it's honest.

Blame Brian Rudman.

Yes, yes. The guy's a frigging nobody, who doesn't deserve even an nth of the credit he gets already, but he is a symptom of the plague affecting New Zealand political journalism.

Put aside that he's a suspect GINGA, because for a moment, I'm going to be serious.

In a nutshell, they're mostly a bunch of pinko, commie, liberal cocksuckers. While this blog is by no means dedicated to them, it is inspired by them. I don't consider myself to be an open-minded guy at the best of times, but even if I were, I figure I'd still think that they should be lynched. Or put on a deserted island where they had to fend for themselves with no taxpayer or editorial subsidies, and had to actually do something for a living.

Case in point: Rudman's claim that Don Brash was excluding a whole lotta minorities during his "mainstream New Zealanders" speech. Typical Bolshevist propaganda. Yes, it's true. Auckland does a large percentage of non-English speaking people (Rudman neglects to mention that many of them are driving taxis). Yes, there are people of Middle Eastern origin in this town. Yes, there's a large homo population swanking it up Ponsonby Road on a Saturday night.

But that's not the point. Brash's speech proposed that government should focus on the interests of the majority of society: hard-working, middle New Zealand families who believe in doing their best for themselves and their communities, only to see the Government frittering their taxes away on hip hop tours, excessive bureaucracy, Kyoto-credits-for-Russians, and the Maori elite, to name just a few. In fact, in reading the speech, it's hard to see how any normal person could come to the view that Rudman had even read it. For example, Brash said:

"Mainstream New Zealanders have some fairly basic, but
non-negotiable, expectations of their government. And none of those expectations is unreasonable. They expect to send their kids to school, to have them taught to read and write, and to have their performance measured by an assessment system that is fair and meaningful. And now they know Helen Clark's Government demonstrably can't deliver that."

So get off your knees, Mr Rudman, and explain to your readers how that view of mainstream New Zealanders is wrong! Or how about this?

"If they are in personal danger, they expect to be able to dial 111 and have a police car arrive to protect them [...] When they are sick or injured, they expect to be able to go to hospital to get the operation that a 50% increase in taxpayer funding in the past five years should be able to buy them [...] When they or their family need something from an agency of the government, they expect they will be dealt with fairly, and not be asked about their ethnicity in order to determine their entitlement."

As a definition for mainstream New Zealand, it's hard to argue against the picture that Brash has painted. Unless, of course, you happen to be a pinko commie journalist with little concern for the facts, or are too lazy to actually read anything other than the Prime Minister's press release on her opponent's speech.

So in the spirit of even-handed commentary as we go into election mode, I'm doing my bit to take an extreme view from the right. And because I'm not affiliated to any political group, I don't care about getting personal. For example, while I don't know if Rudman is technically a cocksucker, in literary terms, I stand by the claim that he most definitely is. I'll further assert, without the slightest degree of malice, that it is my honestly-held belief that he wasn't born with a penis. And while I'm at it, I will also claim that Brian Rudman is philosophically influenced--and I use the term 'philosophically' in the loosest possible way--by Josef Stalin, Engels, and Pol Pot.

And until the pinko spin machine, of which Rudman is a symptom, can stand up and honestly publicly defend the PC bullshit that panders to minority interests at the expense of mainstream New Zealand, then in the words of one of the great anonymous literary greats, they can all go and get fucked.

Give New Zealand Cricket a break!

Interesting pointer on the direction of New Zealand Cricket on the upcoming tour to Zimbabwe in both the Dom-Post and the Herald. The Herald has finally drawn the crucial link between the National Bank, headed by Sir John Anderson, and key sponsor to New Zealand cricket, which is in turn headed by--wait for it--Sir John Anderson.

National/ANZ Bank PR woman Cythia Brophy has hinted that the National Bank is not entirely happy with the idea of New Zealand Cricket touring Zimbabwe. And with good cause. The Bank has much greater exposure to negative public opinion than a mere sports body: the Bank associated itself with New Zealand cricket in order to garner positive public opinion. It sponsors the team to gain customers, rather than lose them. And keeping public face is the challenge that the National Bank is facing.

But back to Sir John. It's hard to see how he would allow his own corporate affairs guru to spout off against the Zimbabwe tour at the bank if he wasn't pushing for New Zealand cricket to bow out of the tour.

And it makes sense. Cricket is a professional sport. It relies on corporate sponsors. Corporate sponsors fund the game because they want to be associated with the good vibes that the sport brings to their association. No sporting body is going to arrogantly ignore the opinions of its sponsors, if the sponsors feel they will lose money from their sponsorship.

Yes, Sir John was a classy club cricketer. He could hit the ball hard for Karori. Very hard. He even broke Wellington club cricket records for the ninth wicket. But he is Chairman of New Zealand cricket principally because he is Chief Executive of New Zealand cricket's principal sponsor.

Yet again, New Zealand media fail to draw the link. Instead they launch into a tirade of intrigue, claiming that New Zealand cricket is unresponsive to the public and is doing nothing to stop the tour to Zimbabwe. In reality, they are far more in touch with public sentiment, by virtue of their sponsorship arrangements, than the very journalists who write their mindless shit.

So give New Zealand cricket a break. They're clearly doing all they can to get out of the tour.

Okay, so this is terribly immature.

I mean, really. What's the frigging point in setting up a blog if nobody's going to frigging read it?

In my feeble attempts to actually make it in the blogosphere, I've gone to the extraordinary lengths of emailing David Farrar. I've suggested, in the not-too-vaguest terms, that he should link me to his site. But stop that thought. Before you think it. Unlike some other anonymous musings, Mr Farrar does not take any responsibility for this blog. David doesn't even feign responsibility. Well, that's not necessarily true. He might do. Yes, the author has met him before. But that, by no means, suggests that David is liable for any of the utterings on this site. One day, perhaps, the NBR might make vague claims that David is cool enough to write this random shit. But that won't happen anytime soon.

So that's it. I'm planning on becoming pseudo-famous by being anonymous. It's the new Black. After all, David owns New Zealand's most-visited blog. So in a vain attempt to associate myself with his undeniable coolness, I've made the not-too-subtle suggestion that he should link me from his site.

After all, I'm right-wing. My opinions are as valid as anybody else's. If I wasn't hungover every Saturday, I might even get off my arse and vote for Don Brash.

Hell, my ideas are more valid than the pinko commie losers who can't get a root on a Saturday night at Provedore's. I pay my taxes. More than most of the commie pinko wankers who have nothing better to do with their lives than read this shit. And David even extends himself to the bizarre ignominy of linking himself to genuine pinko commies under the guise of journalistic fairness.

So if you don't read David's site, then fuck you. And David, if you don't link yourself to my site, then fuck you, too.

And in a true Forrest Gump fashion, that's all I have to say about that.