New Zealand Sinking in Globalist Mire. By Oliver Hartwich.
Faced with a serious problem, the government sets an ambitious long-term goal. It then launches massive public relations campaigns. Following that, it blows up the bureaucracy but fails on deliverables. …
The … NZTA review is a good example. With a depressingly high road toll, the government has embarked on a “Road to Zero” campaign. Its ambitious goal: no more deaths or serious injuries by 2050. The promotional awareness campaign will cost $15 million over three years. Yet … since 2018 NZTA has installed less than a fifth of the road-safety barriers due by 2024. … The transport bureaucracy has mushroomed in recent years. As of June 2021, NZTA employed about 2,081 staff. That figure was 1,372 only four years earlier. …
It is the same story in practically every major policy area. …
Reading and literacy have dropped dramatically in the OECD’s PISA rankings. The mathematics skills of New Zealand’s 15-year-olds are only as good as those of 13.5-year-olds 20 years ago. Despite an increase in education spending per student, more than 40 per cent of school leavers are functionally illiterate or innumerate. …
There are GPs reportedly seeing more than 60 patients per day. Patients are treated in corridors at some hospitals’ A & E departments, where waiting times now often exceed ten hours. …
As gang numbers have grown, gun crime has also become a regular feature in news headlines. Ram raids, where youths steal cars and crash them into small shops, have become common. …
Practically every industry can tell its own stories about new complex regulations, usually rushed through with minimal consultation, if any.
Then there’s the rush to racism. James Allan explains:
Let me give readers just one example out of many possibilities on the extent to which the forces of wokery, corporate and bureaucratic virtue-signalling, identity politics and a radical Ardern government have begun to run rampant in New Zealand.
I had finished my Auckland leg and the think-tank hosts were taking me down to Wellington for the next stop. We boarded our Air New Zealand plane and on came the safety video. Now having flown on a modicum of Qantas flights I have a pretty strong stomach for your usual sort of virtue-signalling preening. But nothing prepared me for the Air NZ video that came on.
The whole safety video was presented through the lens of the Maori creation myth — you know, the purported beginning of the earth and all that. So with a bit of ‘how to fasten your seat belt’ instructions intermingled throughout we learnt about how Xenu sought out the volcanoes and how the immortal spirits ‘thetans’ helped bring humans into existence. Wait. Sorry. That’s Scientology. My mistake. No, it was all the Maori creationist mythology. But really, would anyone sit through the Scientology bumpf? Would a modern corporation push, say, even Christian creation beliefs on paying customers? To ask is to answer. And yet this Maori mythology is what was rammed down our passenger throats, or ears. …
Things got no better. Next on the plane’s screens came some pub quiz type questions about such things as ‘the people, places and culture of Aotearoa’ (no New Zealand mentioned). Then you got the answers. Always the answers were given in the Maori language as well as in English (and this despite a miniscule proportion of Kiwis actually speaking, let alone being fluent in, Maori). Some of the translations were idiotic and completely unnecessary, surely only desired by zealots. The American Revolution was translated; it was now the ‘Marikena’ one. Nepal became ‘Nepora’ with some sort of mark over the ‘o’. I could go on but you’d begin to think this was just a parody or satire. …
And if you happened to glance at the map at the back of the airline magazine you could see in bold letters such places as Otepoti (‘Dunedin’ below in non-bold type), Ahuriri (‘Napier’, ditto) and Tamaki-makau-rau (‘Auckland’, yep ditto).
That government-commissioned report I was asked to critique and flown across the Tasman to speak about wants Aotearoa (what else?) to move away from procedural democracy to a ‘co-governance’ or partnership model — one where about 15 per cent of the population are put into one group and everyone else into the other and the former counted as equal to the latter, with an implicit veto on decision-making.
That’s identity politics writ large, though in my view no 15-can-veto-85 setup is stable or sustainable …
Observe and learn Australians!
