Australian MP Puts Gerry Brownlee ‘Back in his Lane’

Andrew Hastie, the Australian opposition spokesman on Defence, does not hold back from Gerry Brownlee’s clueless assessment of the AUKUS plan:

The analysis of AUKUS in NZ has been sadly terrible – our politicians and mainstream media making only the most shallow remarks on it. But the NZ Opposition Spokesman on Foreign Affairs (and former Defence Minister) might be expected to understand the nuance or the need to counter China’s huge build up of its blue water navy, especially submarines (many of which will be nuclear powered AND nuclear armed).

Andrew Hastie has never held back on China:

Hastie said he has no intention of scaling back his criticism of Chinese attempts to exert influence in Australia and human rights abuses against Uighurs in Xinjiang province

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/17/china-calls-on-liberal-mps-to-repent-after-beijing-study-tour-ban

New Zealand could do with a man of his gumption and clarity. National do not appear to be offering anyone with similar values, preferring instead to be in bed with China as much as possible. It’s sickening:

Former Prime Minister Sir John Key has dolloped praise on China in comments to Chinese state media published as Xi Jinping’s Communist Party holds a historic national congress.

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/10/sir-john-key-dollops-praise-on-china-in-chinese-state-media.html

It’s sickening.

Andrew Hastie, a former SAS officer, veteran of Afghanistan and very highly regarded centre-right conviction politician, can see China for what it is. Why can’t any NZ politician?

Could we go Dutch?

[Luxon said] Climate Change Minister and Green Party co-leader James Shaw is “someone I really respect and have spent a lot of time with’’. He wants his climate change spokesperson Scott Simpson to have a close working relationship with Shaw and to work hard on a bipartisan approach. “The background is that I was very much about embracing net carbon zero.’’

That’s from a December 2021 article but aside from the names changing I don’t think anything will have changed in Luxon and National’s approach.

Which means that farmers are going to get screwed in the same ways – just more slowly than under a Labour-Green government.

Which leads me to wonder if this might be on the cards:

Dutch Farmers Fed Up With Climate Rules Win Shock Victory Against Establishment

The Farmer-citizen movement (BBB) in the Netherlands appeared set to win 15 of the 75 Senate seats in the nation on Wednesday, celebrating a victory over climate activists who are seeking to buy out farms and cut down on livestock numbers of Dutch farmers.

The BBB or BoerBurgerBeweging, as the party is called in Dutch, started in 2019 and won one single Lower House seat in 2021. After the recent election, the BBB is now the third-largest political party in the Netherlands. 

“Nobody can ignore us any longer,” BBB leader Caroline van der Plas told broadcaster Radio 1, Reuters reported. “Voters have spoken out very clearly against this government’s policies.”

Tribal politics has its limits, and a provincial-farmer based political party would have a wider and wealthier base to start from than most small parties in New Zealand to date. Depending on how badly farmers get crushed by a future National “Blue-Green” party would determine how well organised they might be also.

How Much are You Willing to Sacrifice to the Climate Gods

Our politicians and bureaucrats are hell-bent on taking us down the path of human sacrifice to the Climate Gods. New Zealand is developing a modern Maori version – an extremely convenient way to obfuscate how we are following and not leading the same insanity as the rest of the Western world. Many people will die if we do not reverse course.

No more mincing words to be gentle on the stupid fools who believe in the Net Zero nonsense. Net-Zero is anti-carbon; except we are carbon life-forms and rely on eating carbon life forms, both plant and animal. To support Net Zero is to support the sacrifice of human life to this suicide pact run by useful idiots. Monsters have never been concerned with the deaths of human beings while trying to create their utopia, and all of us need to understand what is happening – because most of this cannot be done without our help and compliance.

Here’s Jordan Peterson’s take:

The environmentalists offer us a story to live by:

And it’s a pseudo-religious story

And it essentially elevate the earth, biosphere, the earth, Gaia the earth goddess, let’s say, to the status of primary deity

And characterises her as sort of a waif-like innocent victim, easily taken advantage of and fragile

It casts the entire human endeavour on the social front as a raping and pillaging patriarchal monster only interested in power

And it casts the individual as like a devouring mouth riding on the back of that giant, essentially.

Jordan Peterson: This is an appalling situation and it will get worse | Tucker Carlson, Fox News

Meanwhile, the idiocy continues. The National MP sees the danger, yet is blind to National’s contribution to taking us into the trap.

McKelvie, the MP for Rangitikei, said the sector did not want to go backwards in regard to climate change, but the issue was that He Waka Eke Noa was confusing and poorly understood.

“We want to move in a manner that keeps us in the game and keeps us in the game internationally,” he said.

“The big problem with He Waka Eke Noa is that farmers don’t understand it and still don’t.”

He raised the broader point that New Zeal[a]nd was seeking to cut its food production while the world’s population was growing at a high rate.

Expect more disruption due to climate change, rural sector warned by minister | Stuff, 18 March 2023

Onto the canary – the Dutch farming disaster unfolding as we speak:

Empty Circuses and no bread

The following is connected to the post I did the other day, Switching Political Party Partners, and it’s also related to the one I did yesterday, Being mean, rude and uncivil, in the sense of the need for Centre-Right parties to change their political strategies of dumping their ideologies and even their principles to chase The Precious Midpoint – and all because they’re frightened of being labeled as “extremist”:

Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy said Reagan’s candidacy was “foolhardy” and would lead to a “crushing defeat” for the Republican Party. “It could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.”

Back in 2010 a Republican Party that had been on the ropes for two years – after losing the House and Senate in 2006, then losing even more seats during the Obama wave of 2008 – miraculously found itself beating the snot out of the Democrats in the 2010 Mid-Terms.

They grabbed an incredible 63 seats to win the House and came within a whisker of getting the Senate as well. For the Democrats it came as a hell of a shock after two years of taunting the GOP as “The Party of Old, White, Southern Men” who needed to get onboard and vote for all the fabulous Democrat policies or face extinction.

The key piece of such legislation was “Obamacare” (otherwise known as the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act), and the GOP continued on for another six years claiming that if only voters would give them the power of House, Senate and President they’d get ‘er done and repeal the damned thing. They demonstrated their commitment by passing meaningless one-page one-sentence repeal bills.

And then, on January 20th, 2017, the GOP was stunned to find its wishes granted. Yet nothing happened until, nearly two years later, on the cusp of losing control of the House they finally concocted a watered down, pseudo-symbolic repeal – which McCain turned his thumbs down on anyway. As this guy notes:

The bitter truth is they never wanted to repeal it. Seven years worth of one-pagers with the simple statement “The Patient Protection Care Act of 2010 is hereby repealed” and all they had to do was hand it over to President Trump and that would have been that. Two things: once a government program and bureaucracy is created, especially one that devours fully one-sixth of our economy and the power to control over 330 million people, there’s no way it will ever be abolished. Second, and perhaps more crucially, with Donald Trump as their president, they for sure didn’t want to get it done. They hated him (still do) and they hate us (ditto), perhaps even more because we forced their hand by electing him. Which means, rejecting them. QED.

And now here we go again on another Day One, with the McCarthy-led GOP in the house voting a bill to abolish the IRS which they know will go nowhere in the face of a Democrat President and Senate. But it’ll keep the GOP voters excited, amirite?

But perhaps this is less a case of cynical GOP politicians teasing their voters than the stupid bastards actually believing this themselves, as evidenced by this message sent out on December 29:

On Twitter they got ratioed to death, with the following response from The Hodgett Twins being the best summary:

What they’re referring to is the $1.7 trillion “Omnibus” bill, crafted by the losing Democrats in the House but supported by eighteen GOP Senators to be passed in the lame duck session, a first for such a spending bill. The uniparty strikes again:

This is what responsible, moderate, bi-partisan government looks like in America, the sort of legislating stuff approved of by Moderate Politicians^TM everywhere – as opposed to all that annoying “performative” stuff like investigations of corruption.

The ones who did oppose this monstrosity are notable though:

“Tell that to the Republican politicians who voted for the Omnibus,” – DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw.
…
“We have completely and totally abdicated the power of the purse. Republicans are emasculated. They have no power, and they are unwilling to gain that power back,” – Senator Rand Paul.

That article goes on to point out the brutal truth about the GOP:

At this time, the Republican Party is under the leadership of people who spend more time self-serving and making sure they maintain their own influence and power than actually doing the work of the people. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s behavior during the midterms alone should disqualify him from consideration.

And this is at the heart of why Republicans and the GOP now find themselves sneering at each other. Republicans have no leadership on the national stage. While Republican governors are doing great work, D.C. elitists either aren’t putting it together that voters really do want conservative values and merciless opposition to the radicalized Democrat Party…or they simply don’t care.

Nothing will change until Republican leadership does.

The following takes are even more harsh. First with the fantastic sums of Ukraine spending:

The only countries that should be funding the Ukrainian armed forces are the European ones that are (possibly) threatened by the Russians. That they are reluctantly kicking in a tiny portion speaks volumes about the reality of the threat. They see the catastrophe that is the Russian military, so they are in no rush to fund Ukraine because their assessment is that Russia will, at best, eke out some measly long-term gains, and at worst fail and be humbled.

McConnell’s laughable and insulting comment that Ukraine is the most important issue among Republicans is functionally identical to him pissing in our faces, and not even bothering to claim it is raining.

Second on the outright betrayal this Omnibus spending represents, Republican Senators Betray Conservatives for Last Time:

#Rexit. Or a #Conexit from the GOP.

There is no other way. They will not listen to us, they will not compromise with us.

We have to break with the GOP and simply leave the party to form a third one.

They have left us literally no other choice.
….
The current Republican Party is making it really hard to care whether they win or lose. When it’s election time, we all rally around them, doing our best to pull them across the finish line. Yet, when push comes to shove, they can’t even be counted on to oppose massive omnibus packages full of leftwing priorities. They beg for power and then refuse to exercise it to protect the very people who elected them.

I can’t agree with Ace’s take on this regarding a Third Party – yet! Most Third Parties just don’t make it in most Democracies and although it does happen, the ones that do take decades to achieve mainstream success. The slow failure of the Whigs in Britain and the USA in the 19th century; the rise of the Democrat Party and then the Republicans in the US; the slow failure of the Liberal Parties in Britain and New Zealand in the early 20th century, followed by the rise of the Labour Parties.

But the time is not yet. At a minimum the leadership – and more pointedly the attitudes of the leadership – have to change. Only if that also fails will we see the abandonment of the GOP, as happened to the Liberals and Whigs.

But if cynical “moderates” in the Western democracies think they can forever get away with claims of “You Have No Alternative” – because the other side is worse – they are mistaken in the long run. If the constant churn of “good management” and producing ever-more legislation fails to fix our failing institutions then the voters may well reach Lenin’s point of “The Worse, The Better”, and vote (or perhaps not vote) in order to pass through the worse, destroying mainstream political parties like the GOP in the process and getting something better.

James Polk

From Ace of Spades comes this story from his other career as a financial advisor.

CEO’s eh.

About a decade ago I was hired by a struggling start-up to provide it some adult financial oversight and assistance. Its struggles were due in large part to its CEO’s megalomania. He embraced every idiotic motivational/management gimmick, believing he was changing us not only as individuals, but that in being disciples of his leadership, we would then change society. His gimmicks and craving for adulation didn’t leave many hours in the day to get any actual work done.

Believing his employees were worshipful of him, he thought I was simply slow in understanding and appreciating the concepts he was using to inspire us. As for me, I was amused at how slow he was to understand I was mocking him.

It was Presidents Day and we were having our Monday morning management meeting. We had to go around the conference room table, with everyone giving a “two-word check in.” With this gimmick, each person would say something banal using only two words, such as “Total commitment” or “Absolute focus.”

When it came to me, I said “James Polk.” The CEO looked at me with puzzlement, so I explained that today was Presidents Day, and I wanted to remember a significant US President who tends to get overlooked.

This generated a look of further puzzlement from him, to which I explained that James Polk went to war with Mexico, secured the southern border of Texas, and by adding half-a-million square miles of formerly Mexican land to the US, he completed the manifest destiny that finally extended this great country from the Atlantic to the Pacific…all in one term!

The company’s President gave a nervous laugh, afraid that I was mocking our CEO (which I was), but also unsure if I was simply an idiot who didn’t understand the concept of the two-word check-in, or understand that America’s manifest destiny might not play well in this crowd.

He also writes of the woeful “Who Moved My Cheese” business management fad of the 1990’s and early 00’s. Thankfully the US Consulting firm I worked for was led at the Partnership level by jaded, cynical men and women who very much enjoyed destroying such fads, even though as consultants you’d have expected us to embrace them.

Fuck that crap. That was and is McKinsey world, a production line of people like the current US Secretary of Transportation (and former Mayor of Indiana’s 4th largest town), Pete Buttigieg, who has been absent during so many recent transport problems in the USA that people now actually know who the Transport Sec is.

BTW:

There are 74,532 pages of regulations in the Federal Register, all enacted by unelected bureaucrats yet carry the force of civil and criminal penalties. You can bet your balls to a barn door that railroads and how they handle cargo, especially toxic cargo, comprise more than just a handful of those pages. Not just railroads but as the author notes, the construction of the tank cars down to every last nut, bolt, washer and cotter pin.
…
“it is a supreme irony that substantial shareholders in the railway involved, Norfolk Southern, include two of the biggest promoters of ESG investing: BlackRock and Vanguard.”

A Vote for National is a Vote for NET ZERO 2050

Christopher Luxon has been making it very clear what the National Party in 2023 stands for, and it’s not for New Zealand. I’m not sure when National changed its reason for being, and I doubt many of it’s supporters realise it yet, but National stands for NZ the way Labour stands for the working man – not in the slightest.

There was something extremely chilling in today’s about-face declaration of loyalty to Net Zero 2050 and man-made climate from Maureen Pugh. She was a woman with her own opinion at the start of the day and merely a drone by the end. Whatever her opinion had been, it was subsumed into the collective adherence to the quasi-religious cult of climate change, a cult of which the National Party is now an overly enthusiastic participant, and likely has been for some time.

What happened today reminded me of a Bill Maher video : Bill Maher has an OMINOUS warning for America. Though, he could have been talking about any nation of earth that is infected with the woke mind virus. Some excerpts below:

If you are part of today’s Woke Revolution, then you need to study the part of revolutions where they spin out of control because the revolutionaries get so drunk on their own purifying elixer, that they imagine they can reinvent the very nature of human beings.

Bill Maher

Mao ordered his citizens to throw off the “Four Olds”.

Old Thinking

Old Culture

Old Customs

and Old Habits

So, um your whole life would have been garbage overnight, no biggie.

Bill Maher

And those who resisted were attacked by an army of purifiers called the “Red Guard”, who went around the country putting dunce caps on people. Yeah, who didn’t take to being a new type of mortal being.

Bill Maher

A lot of pointing and shaming went on… oh and about a million dead.

And the only way to survive was to plead insanity for the crime of being insufficiently radical

Then apologise and thank the state for the chance to see what a piece of shit you are.

Bill Maher

And, of course, submit to re-education.

Bill Maher

National MP Maureen Pugh regrets her ‘unclear’ comments on man-made climate change

Luxon told media he had met with Pugh and she will be reading a series of books on climate change.

“If you’re still a climate denier or a climate minimalist…

… you’ve got to give that up. There’s just no doubt about it that its real and its happening. I believed that from my previous life in business. I believe that in the world I see now through political life”

That’s National Party leader, Chris Luxon, speaking on Radio New Zealand this morning. He also endorsed Parliament being closed for the week so that Government Ministers can really focus on doing their jobs

The one saving grace is that he talked almost entirely of adapting to Climate Change, mitigating its impacts – which actually is the smartest thing that we can do in the face of this:

In other words Luxon is at least vaguely aware of the damage that could be caused to this country by going all the way down the “Climate Change Crisis” rabbit hole. Unfortunately when pinned on that by the interviewer, Luxon doubled back to the statement quoted, as well as reinforcing National’s commitment to Carbon Zero, reduced agricultural emissions, more investment in renewable energy, etc, etc. In other words, not facing the reality of energy production, which is why we should not be bagging China because they are facing up to that reality – unlike RNZ interviewers and the Greens in their ever-growing hysteria.

The other saving grace is that Labour are much the same on this issue: much hot air, little or no real improvement, or even going backwards (as shown by the huge increase in coal imports to keep Huntly going) – as their angry, angry, Lefty critics point out, Climate Change: Labour’s dismal record:

If we want any hope of limiting the damage in the decades to come, we need to move beyond Labour’s pathetic Augustinianism – “we will act, but not yet!” – and actually start acting now. We clearly won’t get that from Labour. We certainly won’t get it from National. If we want a future, we need a Green government.

So this nasty little cartoon of Luxon is mere partisanship.

Sure it’s insulting but it’s no different to this view from 1972 of a famous NZ politician reaching for the Prime Ministerial ring.

Which is why, understanding the naked political need of the National Party to do this, I shall be voting for ACT this year.

Why quote the dead and the losers?

National, despite having recovered from the depths of its 2020 catastrophe, is failing to open up a gap against the most useless, incompetent NZ government in my life. Perhaps this will change over the course of 2023 but given the increasingly tough choices facing New Zealand voters it seems to me that fear will allow Labour to keep 30-35% of the vote despite all their failures.

Perhaps this is what has driven DPF over at Kiwiblog to produce a series of posts on crime in New Zealand – both the rate of it and the specific instances of brutality, the poor state of education and healthcare, economics and the minimum wage and, most of all, Iwi “co-governance” seeping into legislation far beyond Treaty of Waitangi settlements – things like the Maori Health Authority, Three Waters, and the RMA reforms.

Today brings us, Lange on the Treaty, in which he and other various worthies in the political firmament – Brash, Peters, Sir Apirana Ngata – are quoted in their rejection of Maori sovereignty arising from the ToW. The post itself merely arises from one written by Brash – New Zealand is reaching a crisis point.

All of these are no doubt what DPF believes and good on him. But the reality is that it may lead his Kiwiblog commentariat, or even National and ACT voters to believe that this revolution is going to be slowed or stopped or perhaps even reversed by a National/ACT government.

That is not going to happen and another political commentator and blogger, Chris Trotter, while often more florid and hysterical in his thoughts and writings than DPF, actually has a much better handle on what is happening in his post A Real Revolution:

“I think the general public is not aware that we are going through huge revolutionary changes in the country and, in fact, we have taken that such a long way, there is no going back.” – Dame Claudia Orange

That is the authentic, arrogant voice of a winner who knows what has happened throughout New Zealand politics, bureaucracy, the legal system, school, academia and increasingly our business world. Add to her voice that of people like Mahuta, Rawiri Waititi, the Harawira’s, Kiri Allan, Willie Jackson, Joanne Mihingarangi Forbes and countless other lessor known activists.

It’s notable that one of his Far Left commentators appropriately quotes the communist Antonio Gramsci, who saw how better to destroy Western societies than Marx’s primitive class warfare:

One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality.

Gramsci’s successors are much closer to achieving their objective than the direct heirs of Marx ever were, through their focus on a cultural revolution. However, Gramsci likely never foresaw allies such as National’s Chris Finlayson:

“I simply say to people, one, there’s a new regime, get with it folks; two, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

While he says there’s room for robust debate about the co-governance model between the Crown and iwi and hapū, Finlayson’s advice for dealing with the “sour right” behind the racist, resentful rhetoric: “We’ve just got to leave those losers behind and move on. They don’t like tangata whenua. They dream of a world that never was and never could be,” he says.

And there are plenty more where he came from:

My prediction, there will be a substantial empowering of iwi in education, heath, housing supply and social policy in the next few years. National will go along with most of this once they are back in government, just as they have done so since 1990.

In that sense Don Brash was a bit of an aberration, one that National is not keen on repeating.

Lange, Brash, Ngata and others are the voices of the dead and – as Finlayson describes – the losers of this debate, The only thing that can stop it now will be its own excesses; the revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children – but Gramsci never cared about that anymore than other communists.

But how many years or decades will that take, and what destruction will it leave in its wake? Judging from this quote from another of Trotter’s commentators the destruction is already gathering pace:

We run business servicing the Wellington PTB, every time we contract for work we are required to extend Te Tiriti type requirements even further.

So far to win business, we have had to partner with a Māori organisation (so ‘cut them in’ on everything) and have run cultural sensitivity training for all senior staff. Recently for a big contract, they asked the Māori partner if she spoke Te Reo (she does) and what she was going to do to ensure all the staff were reflecting treaty issues in their work so had to give a commitment on wider cultural training and monitoring of Tiriti aims.

All this in 2+ years. On top of this, every govt institution has Te Tiriti and cultural norms embedded in every policy and procedure. Meng and Paul have got their hands down into many, many organisations and State Services is in it up to their necks as well.

After 3 years of pushing out experienced people on the basis of age, race, gender or wokeness level (dinosaurism) and selecting on identity, many departments are in a shambles. The horse has bolted and was last seen North of Kaihohe.

We have been calling it a quiet coup for a while. And the problem is where to from here? It will be almost impossible to remove without an Act of Parliament overruling all references to race, gender etc and preferential treatment and I doubt anyone has the guts to do this.

New Zealand writ small

I finished off my previous post on the broken city of Auckland with a quote from architect-blogger Peter Creswell that I think is worth highlighting on its own.

He wrote this in 2015 but was looking back further into the past, to 2005 in the wake of the Super City amalgamation and then 1985:

Let’s go back to 1985, before Michael Bassett amalgamated borough councils, and you want to add a carport to your house.You go to your local borough council office, talk to a chap or chappess who knows your street and can virtually tell you then and there what you need to do, and what council’s decision will be.  If you’re not already talking to the chap who will be making that decision, that person is probably only one office away – and you can talk to them if you want.

Fast forward to 2005, and the chap or chappess you’re talking to barely knows your street, and the person making the decision is on the next floor – and you can talk to them, maybe if you make an appointment. See, that person is suddenly “important.” And they do a lot of meetings.

And now, in 2015, and you want to add a carport to your house … you talk to someone with no knowledge of your area, little knowledge of your issue, no ability to make a decision – and the person actually making the decision is on the top floor. They’re “very important.” They write policy. They have meetings. They attend conferences – many of them. And they’re a whole new layer of parasites on top 0f the layer that began emerging after Bassett’s blunder.

These are people with egos. Real egos, with salaries and well-appointed corner offices to match.

Haha. Perfect timing from Kiwiblog on this post, Why the RMA replacements bills should also be added to the bonfire:

So I was excited that the Government was going to not just amend it, but replace it entirely with entirely new legislation. I thought nothing could be as bad as the RMA.

I was wrong.

What Labour is pushing through Parliament is so deeply flawed that it is unfixable. It would be not just worse than the RMA, but worse by an order of magnitude. Why?

Were any of you excited? I sure as shit was not and judging from DPF’s list I was right to be so cynical and skeptical about the whole thing. And while this is just more useless incompetence and bureaucracy empowerment from the worst NZ government of my lifetime I suspect they’ll smash through on the very sound principle that National will do nothing major to it – especially on the Iwi decision-making component – as has so often been the case in the past:

And while National had said it would scrap them anyway, it is harder to scrap something already implemented – and takes up time and energy which is better spent on implementing your own policies.

Auckland is broken…

 …The super city is anything but super and has proved that bigger isn’t necessarily better.

Says Ele at Homepaddock in the wake of the flooding and the resulting chaos caused by the “weather bomb” that struck the city two weeks ago on a Friday afternoon.

She identifies a number of specific failures that we’re all familiar with now – none more so than those of us who live in the benighted place.

Transport, Emergency Management and Civil Defence all failed in different ways:

Auckland’s Emergency Management and Auckland Transport both failed the city on Friday…Those of us watching news from a distance could only wonder at what transport authorities were thinking when they told people to drive to the Elton John concert because trains had been cancelled, then said buses would run at 10 minute intervals. You don’t have to be good at numbers to work out that 40,000 people need more than 750 parks and it would take hundreds of buses hours to take them to and fro even if the weather was fine.

But not just local government institutions failed:

And two organisations under central government control failed on Friday. The civil defence mobile phone message warning system didn’t work either and Waka Kotahi staff signed off at about 7:15 leaving people with no idea which roads were safe and which weren’t.

Two key problems here:

• The massive single bureacracy of Auckland “management created by Rodney Hide, ACT and National a decade ago.
• The “power of general competence” provided for by Sandra Lee’s Local Government bill twenty years ago