Category: new zealand

Understanding New Zealand: Voting Patterns of Education

To some extent, a person will become educated to the degree that they are a part of society. Engagement with society in one regard generally predicts engagement with society in another.

This can help explain why there is a significant negative correlation between turnout rate in 2014 and having no qualifications (-0.28) and a significant positive correlation between turnout rate in 2014 and having an Honours degree (0.25) and having a doctorate (0.27).

Some might be surprised that this correlation is not even stronger, and in truth it probably should be. This is discussed at length in the article ‘Understanding New Zealand: Demographics of Education’.

One might make the assumption that, because having a higher education is correlated with a high turnout rate, and because voting National is correlated with having a high turnout rate, that having a higher education must also be correlated with voting National.

This is not an accurate assumption. There is a positive correlation between having a Bachelor’s degree and voting National in 2014, although this is a barely significant 0.25. Holding none of the three higher degrees had a positive correlation with voting National in 2014.

The weak positive correlation between being highly educated and voting National in 2014 was mirrored in the weak negative correlation between being highly educated and voting Labour in 2014. This was only significant for having an Honour’s degree and voting Labour in 2014, which was -0.28. For the other degrees it was negative but not statistically significant.

The university educated especially love to vote for the Green Party. The correlation between voting Green in 2014 and having a degree was 0.57 for a Bachelor’s, 0.75 for a Honours, 0.64 for a Master’s and 0.67 for a doctorate. These were easily the strongest positive correlations for any party.

The only party even vaguely comparable on this front was ACT. Voting ACT in 2014 had a correlation of 0.65 with having a Bachelor’s degree, which was even higher than the correlation between voting Green and having a Bachelor’s. The correlations with having one of the three higher degrees were, however, lower with voting ACT in 2014 than voting Green in 2014: 0.40 for an Honours, 0.57 for a Master’s and 0.30 for a doctorate.

These two parties were balanced by New Zealand First, voting for which had easily the strongest negative correlations with having a degree. Voting for New Zealand First in 2014 had a correlation of -0.76 with having a Bachelor’s degree, -0.72 with having an Honours degree, -0.76 with having a Master’s degree and 0.63 with having a doctorate.

The reason for this is that New Zealand First draws much of its support from pensioners and Maoris, the former having few higher degrees because of limited educational opportunity when they were young and the latter having few degrees on account of various socioeconomic disadvantages and cultural disincentives.

Voting Conservative in 2014 was not significantly correlated with having any of the degrees. In fact, all four correlations were bordering on significantly negative. This suggests that the Conservative Party targets the same kind of poorly educated, paranoid and aggressive religious fanatic that the American Republican Party does.

Although voting for the Maori Party in 2014 was significantly negatively correlated with having any degree, voting for Internet MANA was only significantly negatively correlated with having an Honours degree, whereas the correlations for the other three were, although negative, not significant.

This probably reflects the fact that Internet MANA appealed to a slightly broader cross-section of New Zealanders than the Maori Party, and hence to several demographics that are better educated than the Maori one.

This was also true of the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, voting for which in 2014 also had significant negative correlations with holding any of the four degrees. With having a Bachelor’s it was -0.46, with having an Honours degree it was -0.42, with having a Master’s degree it was -0.46, and with having a doctorate it was -0.38.

Predictably, these figures were all, for the most part, mirrored in the other direction. Namely, all the voting patterns of people with very low qualifications or none at all were the opposites of the patterns of people with high qualifications.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

The Police Will Kill to Enforce Any Law, No Matter How Trivial

There are many power-worshippers in the world today who think it would be just great if their area politicians passed a law banning this or that – some minor irritation that probably does not affect the quality of their life in any meaningful way but which they believe ought to be stamped out for the sake of maintaining good order at the very least.

These people are as dangerous as any fanatic that put a dictator into power.

The reason for this is that the Police, who are tasked by politicians with enforcing laws, will go as far as killing any citizen to enforce any law that they have broken, no matter how trivial.

A lot of people balk at this assertion, usually because they have neither encountered Police officers in operation nor thought the whole process through as a thought experiment.

But if you think it through as a thought experiment, the meathook clarity of it cannot be denied.

Take the case of a medicinal cannabis user. If you have a psychological condition such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or if you have pain related to terminal cancer and do not want to take opiates, you might end up as another of New Zealand’s hundreds of thousands of cannabis users.

Now let’s say that the Police come to your house with a search warrant, on the grounds that they have reason to believe that you have cannabis in your possession or a cannabis operation in your house. They are going to arrest you, and you know that you face up to seven years in prison for the offence.

You might well protest that you are fully within your rights to use cannabis as it is a medicine which legitimately alleviates human suffering, whether physical or psychological. And so the search warrant is not valid, because it was granted on the grounds that a crime had been committed, and none has.

This is perfectly reasonable – after all, you have harmed no-one. But what will happen at that stage is violence. The Police will escalate to violence at this point, probably by forcing their way into your home.

Let’s say that they are unsuccessful at doing so, either because you manage to lock the door in time or because you brandish a weapon in an effort to show them that you are willing to respond to their violence with violence of your own in order to defend yourself and your home.

In that case, you can probably assume that the Police officers will withdraw – and come back with the Armed Offenders Squad. They will call the AOS on the grounds that you threatened a Police officer with a weapon – the fact that you were only doing so to defend yourself against an immoral attack will not help you at all.

The AOS will then lay siege to your house, as they did to Jan Molenaar. This may even involve, as it did in Molenaar’s case, the Special Tactics Group – formerly known as the Anti-Terrorist Squad.

Jan Molenaar ended up shot dead at his own hand, probably in full awareness that escape was impossible.

Note here that this pattern of escalation of violence all the way to your death will happen if you don’t submit to the Police for any reason, no matter what it is.

It doesn’t matter what the crime is. It could be a hundred counts of serial murder, or it could be a parking fine. The inescapable rule is that you must submit to any state-allocated legal punishment for any offence you have been deemed to have committed, no matter how vindictive and cruel the punishment or how petty and victimless the offence, or the Police will kill you in the enforcement of it.

This is why there is cause to think very deeply before deciding that something should be illegal. Constable Len Snee would not have been shot dead if cannabis had not been legally prohibited, as Jan Molenaar would have been left in peace to treat his mental condition in the way that he knew best.

Anyone who supports a law also supports the consequences of enforcing that law. Those consequences might involve the Police shooting up a house with no-one in it, as happened in Napier last year.

In the case of cannabis prohibition, this means also supporting the expense of $400,000,000 per year and the occasional death of a Police officer – is it worth it?

Peter Dunne Just Made it Legal to Violate the Bill of Rights Act

The Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill received Royal Assent this week, now making it legal for any New Zealander to violate Section 11 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, as long as the victim uses a psychoactive substance.

This column has already reported on human rights abuses of psychiatric patients in New Zealand, and it seems Peter Dunne, in his decades-long, multibillion war on the poor and vulnerable, has laid the legal foundations for more.

Like the Psychoactive Substances Act – another invention of the psychopathic Dunne – the Substance Addiction Act is worded so vaguely as to almost be meaningless. Almost anyone can be involuntarily interred for almost anything, raising the possibility that the barbaric New Zealand mental health system is about to get even worse.

Section 7 of the Act lays out the criteria for compulsory treatment. These are vague enough that use of almost any psychoactive substance, legal or otherwise, is enough to force compulsory treatment on someone.

Section 8 lays out the criteria for severe substance addiction. They are broad enough that most of the New Zealand population would have qualified at one point in their lives. For example, anyone who has tried to give up cigarettes but has found it hard could have “treatment” forced on them.

Why is the New Zealand mainstream media so obsessed with whether or not Donald Trump is a fascist, when our own Government is passing laws giving itself the right to force mental health treatment on any Kiwi expressing their right to cognitive liberty?

Having a “very serious addiction” that “seriously diminishes the person’s ability to care for himself or herself” is one thing – but the problem is that the people defining what a serious drug addiction is don’t have an accurate idea of what the drugs they are legalising compulsory treatment for actually do.

New Zealand has, after all, fallen behind Arkansas, Uruguay and South Africa in social progress on the medical cannabis issue. Many New Zealand mental health patients have had the experience of trying to explain their medicinal cannabis use to a doctor who, by some crude calculus, simply decides that the regular use is a sign of addiction.

Section 9 states “A person’s capacity to make informed decisions about treatment for a severe substance addiction is severely impaired if the person is unable to…(a) understand the information relevant to the decisions.”

Potentially this means that if you disagree with a doctor that your medicinal cannabis use causes reefer madness, creates holes in your brain or makes you psychotic/schizophrenic/depressed/anxious/insomniac/narcoleptic (or whatever stupid shit the Govt. says that cannabis does), then you can be said to not understand the relevant information.

Given the rubbish our authority figures already believe about drugs, how can we trust them for one moment to make accurate decisions about who is so addicted that they need to be forced into treatment?

It’s already clearly not in the interest of medicinal cannabis users to be forced into prison, yet they are, at the cost of $400,000,000 per year – so how can we trust that the same Govt. doing that won’t also use this new law to aggress against medicinal cannabis users?

Section 12 of the Act states “the interests of patients should remain at the centre of any decision making.” But the Government is already supposed to be making decisions on the basis that the interests of the governed are at the centre – and they have utterly failed, because they have made it a law that medicinal cannabis users are to be brutalised by the Police and by the Health and Justice Systems.

In the Hansard record of the third reading of the Bill, Ruth Dyson said “We are putting a significant number of new patients into the system under this compulsory treatment regime.”

So we can expect that these new powers to detain the mentally ill will be used against them, and especially against those who have found relief for their mental illness in medicines that they do not have Parliamentary approval for.

It’s worth noting that the New Zealand Police can and will go as far as killing any Kiwi who resists treatment under this law.

If a patient will not go voluntarily, even if they have a good reason – like being one of the five New Zealanders who had electroshock therapy forced on them after they had explicitly withdrawn their consent last year – the Police will use force to get them to comply.

And if the patient resists that, the Police will kill them. We know this because the Police will go to that extent to enforce any law, no matter how trivial.

For the Catholic Dunne, this latest persecution of the mentally ill is a continuation of the brutal religious tradition he embodies; a tradition of abuse stretching even further back than the Inquisition.

The Psychoactive Substances Act made it illegal for anyone to have anything to do with any psychoactive substances that were not on a Government-approved list, and this Substances Addiction Act makes it possible for the Govt. to go as far as violating the Bill of Rights Act in enforcing compliance with that.

The mainstream media, of course, is too busy copy-and-pasting the latest social media gossip about Donald Trump to report on any of this. Other channels will keep you informed.

Understanding New Zealand: Demographics of Age


Some might be surprised by how much those aged from 30 to 49 dominate the bulk of the income earning in New Zealand. The correlation between being in this age group and median personal income was 0.73.

The correlation between being in the 50 to 64 age group and median personal income was almost, but not quite, significant, at 0.18. Some might find this surprising given that people in this age bracket tend to comprise the bulk of the senior positions in industry and government.

The reason for it is that there are very few such people, and the majority of the people in this age bracket reflect the educational standards of half a century ago, which were considerably lower.

The main reason why the bulk of the wealth is in the 30 to 49 age bracket is that this is also where the bulk of the education is. Being in this age bracket has a correlation of 0.60 with having a Master’s degree.

Most people are well aware that the bulk of old Kiwis are of European descent. And so, the correlation between being of European descent and being in the 65+ age bracket is 0.67, and with being in the 50-64 age bracket it is 0.71.

There are still many people of European descent in the younger age brackets, but the proportion of Maoris in these brackets is relatively much higher. The correlation between being Maori and being in the 0-4 age bracket is a very strong 0.82. For being in the 5-14 age bracket it is even stronger, at 0.85.

Pacific Islander Kiwis have positive correlations with all of the young age brackets, but they are only significant with the youngest two. Being a Pacific Islander and being aged 0-4 had a correlation of 0.44, and with being aged 5-14 it was 0.27.

The age of Asians reflect the strong correlation between being Asian and being foreign born, which was an extremely strong 0.91. Because so many Asian New Zealanders are foreign born, they will have had to have gone through the immigration system, which puts a high priority on young people who can work and pay taxes for a long time.

And so, there is a correlation of 0.49 between being aged 20-29 and being Asian, as well as a correlation of 0.57 between being aged 30-49 and being Asian.

One could surmise from the above that there is a significant correlation between being born overseas and being in the 20-29 age bracket (0.38) and being in the 30-49 age bracket (0.61). This reflects the fact that our points-based immigration system prioritises letting in those who have a large number of productive years ahead of them.

Some industries are well-known for being filled with people of a certain age group. Few readers will be surprised that there is a correlation of 0.51 with being aged 20-29 and working in the hospitality industry. There is also a predictable correlation of 0.37 between being aged 20-29 and working as a sales worker.

Some might be surprised at some of the correlations between age and income. There is a correlation of 0.25 with having an income of $150K+ and being aged in the 20-29 age bracket, and a a correlation of 0.24 with having an income of $100-150K and being in that age bracket.

The reason for this may be clear to anyone who has read the education chapter already. Young adults are often very well educated because of the liberalisation of access to higher education, and correspondingly there is a correlation of 0.53 with being aged 20-29 and being a professional. This is only marginally lower that the correlation of 0.55 with being aged 30-49 and being a professional, despite the much larger number of people in the latter group.

Those in the 30-49 age bracket, however, make up the vast bulk of Kiwi economic activity. This age bracket has a significant positive correlation for every income band above $50K. The most notable was a correlation of 0.60 between this age bracket and the $100-150K income band.

On the subject of the 20-29 age bracket, there was also a significant correlation between this and being in the two lowest income bands. Being aged 20-29 had a correlation of 0.57 with having an income between $0-5K, and a correlation of 0.47 with having an income between $5-10K.

The 30-49 age bracket, by contrast, has a significiant negative correlation with being in both of those income bands. Here it is -0.27 with being in the $0-5K income band and -0.42 with being in the $5-10K band.

As Kiwis get older than this, there are fewer who have extremely high incomes and fewer who have extremely low incomes. The bulk are in the comfortable middle zone. This may be because previous generations were more egalitarian in their outlook

It can be seen when our culture generally started to go off the idea of smoking cigarettes – it was in the mid 1980s. We know this because the 30-49 age bracket has a correlation of 0.58 with having never smoked, which stands in stark contrast with the figure for the 50-64 age bracket, which was -0.02.

People don’t seem to mind walking to work in their twenties. The correlation between walking to work and being aged 20-29 was 0.68. The next age bracket – people between 30 and 49 – had a correlation with walking to work of -0.02, which was much, much lower. This will reflect both increasing physical difficulty, naturally increasing laziness, an increase in the means to maintain a private vehicle and an increase in the desire to keep up the appearance of a certain social status.

Older people were significantly more likely to be South Islanders. Being in the 50-64 age bracket had a correlation of 0.33 with being in the South Island, and the 65+ age bracket had one of 0.27 with living there.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.