New Zealand: A leader in race-based policies. By Graham Adams.

Not the place you want your country to be.

In New Zealand, the general election on October 14 will be, to some extent, a judgment on the extensive co-governance policies implemented by the Ardern-Hipkins administration across a broad array of policy including water management, planning standards, health, and education.

In an odd coincidence, it looks likely that October 14 will also be the day Australians vote in a referendum on the proposed Voice to Parliament …

In both nations, race-based policies are polarising and fraught. A significant difference, however, is that Australians are being offered a democratic choice in advance of legislation whereas New Zealand’s Labour Party never campaigned explicitly before the 2020 election on giving widespread effect to an interpretation of the Treaty as a ‘partnership’.

After gaining an outright majority in what Jacinda Ardern dubbed ‘the Covid election’, Labour has proceeded to stealthily insert such policies into law over nearly three years. In fact, Ardern’s government went out of its way before that election to hide the inflammatory He Puapua report — which charts a path to co-governance between the Crown and Māori by 2040...

 

New left

 

Co-governance in Three Waters [the organization of drinking water, wastewater and stormwater] is changing, in particular, has been a thorn in the side of the government but it has nevertheless forged on with its plans to give iwi more say in how water is managed than that granted to the other 84 per cent of the population. …

Although co-governance is not showing up reliably as a pressing issue in polls of voters’ concerns, David Seymour has reported that, on his nationwide speaking tour, it is an issue he has ‘heard about time and again’. And it’s clear from Chris Luxon’s public meetings that co-governance is a persistent concern for those attending.

Sir Bob Jones wrote a column last week in which he described the public as ‘seething’ over the government’s race-based policies, which he predicted would be a major factor in the government losing October’s election.

He reckoned most people stay quiet in public for fear of being called racist but he predicted that voters, in the privacy of the ballot box, would express their displeasure not only at the government’s ‘gross mismanagement’ but also its ‘outrageously undemocratic racism’

 

Old left

 

In both New Zealand and Australia, the smouldering question is whether voters endorse or reject the sentiment expressed on Australia Day 1988 by Labour Prime Minister Bob Hawke that in this country, there is ‘no hierarchy of descent; there must be no privilege of origin’.

There’s morally right, and there’s morally wrong.

hat-tip Stephen Harper