Category: politics

Is The New Zealand Government About to See A Repeat of The 1990s?

The 1990s began with the chaos of a disintegrating Labour Government and ended with the chaos of a disintegrating National one

In the leadup to the 1990 General Election, the New Zealand Labour Party appeared to be falling to pieces. They had gone through three leaders in 15 months, with Mike Moore the most recent to wrest control of the jinxed idol, having convinced the hapless Labour Party caucus that he was a better bet for staving off what was looming as an electoral disaster.

The move turned a disaster into a catastrophe – the National Party won 67 seats in the election compared to Labour’s 29, as the Italy-style rapid changes in leadership gave the wider public the impression that Labour had lost the plot entirely.

This majority was enough for the National Party to force on the nation what the people called “Ruthanasia” – a Budget so callously tight-fisted that it appeared that National were trying to cull the poor through starvation.

The Budget was so unnecessarily cruel – in many cases leaving solo mothers unable to feed their own children at the end of the week – that even New Zealanders were appalled by it, and only by demoting the clearly psychopathic Ruth Richardson to the back benches did the National majority survive the 1993 General Election.

By the next election in 1996, the National Party had eroded most of the trust that Jim Bolger had earned in opposition, and they were only able to govern thanks to a rickety alliance with the New Zealand First Party.

When Jenny Shipley rolled Bolger in 1997, New Zealand had another psychopath in an influential position, and this made the alliance with Winston Peters untenable. Being neither a psychopath nor willing to submit to one, Peters was unable to work with Shipley and was duly sacked.

New Zealand First then disintegrated under the gravitational pull of the National Party as it tried to withdraw from its influence, and the New Zealand electorate responded to the wheels falling off the alliance by chucking the whole thing on the scrapyard.

The National Party was duly destroyed by Helen Clark’s Labour in 1999.

Since Helen Clark took the reins at the end of the 90s there has been nothing but orderly Government, but “History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page…”

Our current situation in the winter of 2017 is fairly precarious, with Bill English having taken the leadership at the resignation of John Key last year. Any development that brought the stability of Bill English’s leadership into question could well lead to a comprehensive National Party loss this September.

The most likely way this would happen is by some scandal being followed by a poll that hinted suggestively at a National Party loss, at which point the National Caucus panics, then Paula Bennett does a Jenny Shipley and convinces the Caucus to support her leadership instead (ironically it was English himself who replaced Shipley as leader of the National Party in 2001).

In other words, Paula Bennett may seize upon any weakness shown by the blundering incumbent PM in order to achieve her own Prime Ministerial ambitions, despite being grossly unfit for the role.

Judith Collins might also play the role of Shipley, depending on who moves first and with what support.

Either would be suicide for the National Party, because there’s nothing less orderly than an involuntary change of leader.

What the public wants, more than anything, is that the Government maintains good order, and what the public needs, more than anything, is that the Government maintains good order.

We don’t actually need it to do much else. If it can simply keep the peace, the rest of us can get on with our lives of commerce and trade. We can make ourselves rich and happy without their help – all we need is for them to not interfere.

From 1840 to the early 1900s New Zealanders developed our country from the Stone Age to first place among all the living standards of the world, and this was achieved without any of the National, Labour, Green or New Zealand First parties existing.

All we need is for the megalomaniacs at the top of the national dominance hierarchy to maintain good order, and we can do the rest.

This is why many political commentators miss the mark when they decry Andrew Little for his lack of charisma.

It’s true that Little has the charisma of a brick, but so what? He’s not going to be personally leading a company of men into battle. He’s going to be inheriting the reins of a civil machine that has been fine-tuned for almost two decades.

His job, as mentioned above, is to maintain order. To that end, being boring is a qualification. He hasn’t said a word about either of the two hot issues stirring up the left at the moment (cannabis law reform and increasing the refugee quota), and this is no doubt a carefully calculated tactic to make him appear suitable as the man to steady the ship.

After all, it’s a heavy increase to the refugee quota that is more likely than anything else to bring a massive amount of chaos to these shores, as both the Green and Opportunity Parties are gagging for it.

Some say that the National Party are the natural ruling party of New Zealand. If there’s any truth to this it’s because the National Party are the best at maintaining good order.

If Little really wants to become Prime Minister this year, all he has to do is what Helen Clark did two decades before him – simply maintain good order in his own party, and wait for the ambition and greed of the National MPs to cause them to devour each other.

Latest Frontiers in the War on Free Speech in the West

Free speech is the foundation of civilisation. Without it, it’s not possible for a person to express their discontent with the way things are, and without an outlet for discontent it will inevitably turn into violence. As John F Kennedy told us, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

There are powerful political movements in the world today who have calculated that criminalising free speech benefits their agenda, despite this risk. These movements usually have a kind of feminine logic at their core, in that they consider themselves to be righteously resisting masculine excesses like discrimination.

Most are predicated on the moral assumption that, in any conflict between two forces, the weakest force must automatically be the morally correct one, on the grounds that the weaker side would not start a conflict that they would lose.

After some decades of percolating away in sick heads disconnected from reality, this assumption has led the social justice warriors to now believe in the moral imperative of destroying all hierarchy on the grounds that it is necessarily masculine and therefore inherently evil.

No consideration is given to the concept of correct hierarchy that leads to good order – such a thing is simply axiomatically defined as impossible. All order is bad, therefore all must be destroyed.

Such a morality naturally leads to the idea that all weakness is inherently good – hence the resurgence of what Nietzsche would have called “slave morality” in the West.

This explains why so many are bleating the catchphrase of the modern moron: “Hate speech is not free speech” – where hate speech is defined as the promulgation of facts that, despite being true, are politically inconvenient to those who are anti-hierarchy.

In particular, any fact which suggests that a particular hierarchy might be natural and inevitable has to be the most strenuously opposed. As Nietzsche pointed out, the reason for this is the resentment that these weaklings have towards those strong enough to impose good order upon themselves, for it is good order imposed upon oneself that leads to rising in worldly hierarchies.

For instance, the proposition that the text of the Koran will lead inevitably to violence is vociferously opposed by those who want to propagate the impression that the wars in the Middle East are caused primarily by Western interference.

Likewise, the proposition that Islamic terrorism in Europe is a natural consequence of the text of the Koran is opposed by those who want to propagate the impression that the terrorism is blowback for Western interference.

Unsurprisingly, such propositions – entirely independent of any historical or logical validity they might have – are increasingly lumped under the general rubric of “Islamophobia.”

They join propositions such as statements about racial differences in intelligence, or about gender differences in propensity towards certain patterns of behaviour, as politically incorrect ones.

The latest frontier in the war on free speech is attempts to criminalise the free expression of such propositions.

Already there is a concerted movement that means to make it illegal to point out the obvious connection between Koranic verses calling for violence and Islamic expressions of violence, or the obvious connection between the belief that a paedophile was the perfect man and culturally lax attitudes to paedophilia.

The tragedy is, the only reason why the West is no longer an oppressive shithole like the Islamic World is that we have spent the last four centuries using our freedom of speech and expression to destroy the evil of Abrahamism in its manifestation of Christianity.

And, in much the same way that the West was an oppressive, miserable shithole when it was illegal to criticise Christianity, so too will it be an oppressive, miserable shithole when it is illegal to criticise Islam.

What has to happen is a cultural shift where screaming “Racist!” or “Bigot!” at someone is no longer socially sanctioned as legitimate discourse. There needs to be a mass awakening to the fact that this strategy of political manipulation has the overall effect of suppressing honest discussion, and therefore is detrimental to everyone in society, and to society as a whole.

This will require sane people uniting around the spirit of genuine inquiry into the nature of reality, and in opposition to the egomaniacs who are trying to remake the world in their image by force.

And that means uniting around a shared appreciation that free speech keeps us safe from all kinds of excesses, even politically correct ones.

After all, it’s not a coincidence that the Anglosphere, with the strongest cultural appreciation of the value of free speech, has kept itself safe from totalitarianism for the longest time.

The Only Reason to Still Oppose Medicinal Cannabis is Sadism

The New Zealand Parliament will soon get another chance to bring our cannabis laws into the 21st century, with Julie Anne Genter’s Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis and Other Matters) Amendment Bill drawn from the Member’s Bill Ballot this week. This ought to herald the long-awaited national conversation on the subject.

The Bill allows for any Kiwi suffering from “any debilitating condition” to use cannabis or a cannabis product if they have approval from a doctor. It also allows for such patients to cultivate cannabis themselves or to nominate someone to do it for them.

This latter point is extremely important and often underappreciated. One of Peter Dunne’s strategies to keep cannabis illegal by boondoggle has been to restrict supply to extremely expensive overseas sources, such as Sativex (which costs over $1,000 per month), instead of simply allowing people who need it to cultivate it themselves. This Bill would remove this deliberately-placed hurdle.

As Genter points out, the decision to make cannabis illegal was not based on evidence in the first place. Doctors in the 1930s were prescribing medicinal cannabis to patients in New Zealand, as they were all across the world.

The decision to stop doctors from prescribing cannabis was pushed on us by moronic do-gooders forcing their Puritan ideology on the rest of the world.

There was never any science involved, nor any common sense, foresight, empathy, compassion or concern for good order.

From the beginning, cannabis prohibition was based on nothing but a sadistic need to control the masses through causing them suffering, and on the gullibility of legions of morons willing to bleat whatever they heard from an authority figure as if it was the Word of God.

For a person to still not know that cannabis is medicinal they have to be willfully stupid.

The Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party first stood in a General Election in 1996. Already in 1996 the party platform had the need for medicinal cannabis as one of its core tenets.

In 1996 it got 1.66% of the vote, so even twenty years ago it was true that one in sixty Kiwis considered cannabis law reform a major issue. After all, California legalised medicinal cannabis that year, so the medicinal properties of cannabis were already known and accepted by experts even then.

Since then, twenty-eight US states have made medicinal cannabis legal and eight have made recreational cannabis legal – and none of them have gone back to prohibition after making the change.

So to deny that cannabis law reform is inevitable is like denying that a heavyweight boxer who has won forty consecutive knockout victories is a title contender.

For a person to continue to believe that the prohibition of medicinal cannabis helps New Zealanders, they have to possess a willful ignorance that borders on malice.

They would have to continue to ignore all the stories from hundreds of medicinal cannabis users, over twenty years, in which they detailed the reduction in suffering that cannabis gave them.

They would have to think nothing of the fact that supporters of medicinal cannabis are winning a victory every month either in New Zealand or in another Western jurisdiction.

They would have to believe that it was fair that any of Martin Crowe, Paul Holmes and Helen Kelly could have been prosecuted and sent to prison for using medicinal cannabis to alleviate pain caused from dying of cancer.

And a person cannot think like that unless they purposefully deny reality for the sake of bringing cruelty into the world.

When the debate about medicinal cannabis does, finally, after over twenty years of campaigning, happen in Parliament, the MPs who oppose it will mark themselves out as particularly sadistic old dinosaurs who need getting rid of.