THE MORE THE VOTERS DISCOVER about Labour’s Three Waters, the less they like it. No matter, this Government has clearly decided that, if it is to be destroyed, then Three Waters is the hill upon which it will die. That being the case – and the still-unfolding Entrenchment Crisis leaves little room for doubt – then the only real question to be answered is: Why? What is it about the Three Waters project that renders it impervious to rational reconsideration?
When a group of people refuse to accept they have made a poor choice – even as it threatens to destroy them – then it is a reasonably safe bet that they are in the grip of dangerously delusional thinking. Cult-like thinking, some might even suggest. But is it credible to suggest that a mainstream political party could fall victim to delusional thinking on such a scale? Is Labour really crazy enough to put its long-term survival at risk?
It is certainly possible. And those in need of convincing have only to consider the destructive impact of Brexit upon the British Conservative Party, and Donald Trump’s malign influence over the United States’ Republican Party. If a majority of Tory MPs could be persuaded that leaving the EU was a good idea; and House Republicans that the 2020 Presidential Election was actually won by the incumbent; then the idea that Labour is hellbent on trashing New Zealand’s unwritten constitution suddenly doesn’t sound crazy at all.
The British Tories were tortured by the fear that remaining in the EU was tantamount to conceding that the days of global hegemony and imperial splendour were finally beyond recall. For the Americans, the fear was remarkably similar: that their fate would be the same as the Brits’; being edged off the world stage by larger emerging powers. Brexit offered the opportunity to “Take Back Control”. Trump promised to “Make America Great Again”. Big ideas. Crazy lies.
What idea is big enough to derange the Labour Party into courting electoral suicide? The answer would appear to involve a radical revision of New Zealand history. Something along the lines of the colonisation of Aotearoa being a heinous historical crime. In this narrative, the colonial state is identified as the institution most responsible for the criminal dispossession of Aotearoa’s indigenous Māori population. Labour’s big idea is to facilitate a revolutionary reconstitution of the New Zealand state.
Now, where would Labour get an idea like that? Putting to one side Labour’s Māori caucus, whose interest in such an historical project is entirely understandable, how could Labour’s Pakeha MPs have picked up such a self-destructive notion? Well, the university graduates in Labour’s caucus (which is to say nearly all of them) are highly likely to have come across arguments for “decolonisation” at some point in their studies. The lawyers among them would certainly have encountered and absorbed “the principles of the Treaty”. So, too, would those coming to the Labour Party from the state sector.
It would be interesting to know exactly how many members of Labour’s caucus have, at some point in their past, attended a “Treaty Workshop”. Over the course of the past 40 years these have become virtually compulsory for members of the professional and managerial middle-class. The version of New Zealand history conveyed to those attending these workshops is remarkably consistent: colonisers = baddies; the heroic Māori who resisted the colonisers’ ruthless predations = goodies. Only by giving full effect to te Tiriti o Waitangi can the wrongs of the past be righted: only then will equity and justice prevail.
Many of those attending Treaty workshops will have been invited to “check their privilege” and “confront their racism”. This can be a harrowing experience for many Pakeha, leaving them with a strong inclination to keep silent and step aside whenever those on the receiving end of “white privilege” are encouraged to step forward and speak out. In the most extreme cases, Pakeha are actively discouraged from sharing their opinions, lest their higher education and facility with the English language overawe and “silence” those denied such privileges.
When Labour’s Māori caucus (the largest ever after the 2020 general election) sought to take full advantage of the party’s absolute parliamentary majority to advance their Treaty-centric agenda, it is entirely possible they found themselves pushing on an open door.
It is even possible that, formally or informally, the Labour caucus arrived at its own version of co-governance. What the Māori caucus decided upon as its priorities were not to be overridden or gainsaid by the broader Labour caucus’s Pakeha majority. An arrangement of this sort would certainly explain how the Māori Health Authority and Three Waters became such immoveable items on Labour’s legislative agenda, and why the rising unpopularity of Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters project has, so far, proved unable to shift the Prime Minister and her Cabinet from their position of unwavering support.
Labour’s been here before. In the 1980s, the “big idea” that seized the imagination of most of the Labour caucus was what was then called “free-market economics”. By the end of the Fourth Labour Government’s second term it was clear that the consequences of the Rogernomics “revolution” were going to be electorally fatal. Desperate to negotiate an economic policy U-turn, the Labour Party discovered that the Labour Government was, like Margaret Thatcher, “not for turning”. Indeed, many MPs proudly declared that they would rather lose their seats than repudiate the economic reforms they had helped to introduce.
In 1990, Rogernomics was the hill Labour decided to die on. And die it did – at least as a recognisably social-democratic party. The party’s left-wing departed with Jim Anderton to form NewLabour and the Alliance, leaving behind a curious mixture of neo- and social-liberals. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Labour’s Māori caucus has found the party’s Pakeha majority so easy to cajole into backing what, from its perspective, is an entirely legitimate constitutional agenda. Led by Nanaia Mahuta and Willie Jackson, the Māori caucus has taken full advantage of the fact that their Pakeha colleagues’ lack of constitutional conviction has never been a match for their own passionate intensity.
Three Waters may be the hill Labour dies on, but when the victors survey the field of battle, the only corpses they’ll find will be Pakeha. Each one clutching the “Big Idea” for which their party has paid the ultimate price.
In simple terms colonization bad and indigenous people good is entirely true. Here in Taranki not only was most of the land taken by force but 90% of land “reserved” for Maori has ended up in district council hands. My sister in laws iwi had vast tract of inland Taranaki stolen and after more than a 100 years received $30m and a sorry. This is compensation of a few cents in the dollar of the value lost. By comparison on Saturday a random person in Bell Block has been given $24m in a lotto win.
In simple terms Peter, the Treaty settlement was likely full and final. If Maori in Taranaki are unhappy with the settelment they accepted, they need to find a way of coming to terms with that.
I agree with what Ben has said. The Musket Wars perpetrated by Maori against Maori (armed with guns bought off the Europeans through prostituting Maori women) saw far more Maori casualties and resulted in slavery and canabilism. Through out history it is what has happened. It is happening today in the Ukraine. Of course it doesn’t make it right. But it is what happens.
The vast majority of Maori in NZ have Pakeha ancestry.
Bang on Peter. Chris has fallen for the revisionist settler narrative that somehow colonisation can be peacefully negotiated politely in parliament between the 16% defrauded by the colonial state the mouthpiece of the settler gentry, while the stolen wealth of today’s gentry who extort rent from all of us keeps piling up on the heads of Maaori.
Welcome to the class war.
Water is the new land grab.
The gentry got its water rights with the stolen land, the dispossessed lost both the land and and attendant water rights.
Co-governance, is a token UN policy of redress sponsored by the UN.
The UN is a vehicle for the ruling classes in the most powerful states.
The the UN is inseparable from the US. Do you see them giving up their power and wealth without a nuclear war – witness Ukraine the end of the world in motion.
We have a bi-polar world in which the Eastern and Western blocs are now going to war in the Great Game to carve up the wealth of Eurasia.
What room to maneuver is left for the tiny, footnote in history, NZ state but to beg indulgences from these great powers?
What possible power do Maaori have to shift this global balance of power to its own advantage.
Clearly no more than negotiating the power brokerage within the Labour Party, itself stuck negotiating power within the dictates of the neo-liberal template imposed by the real state power the Reserve Banks, not in Wellington, but in New York.
And as if this was not enough China has earmarked its share of water walking over the Treaty.
So co-governance is a pathetically token gesture to Maaori at the bottom of this historical heap of shit. Tino rangatiratanga will be sold off cheap.
So why the hysteria? Well the gentry are dependent on nature, and nature is on its death bed being burned up by the capitalocene, and is choking off their bounty with inflammable pine trees.
Water in the age of global warming has become the new gold.
Just as the big powers are battening down the hatches to hoard gold ahead of the big bang of climate crash, economic slump and the threat of nuclear war, the prospects for the gentry surviving by extracting monopoly rent from the land are dwindling.
And as for the peasants who scrape a miserable existence off the crumbs from this pillage, the only alternative is to squeeze out of the neoliberal Labourites, a token toke on the smell of the dying earth.
NZ apologists for neo-colonialism are running around in a panic while their Eurocentric, Anglo-American world collapses.
I am with the wretched of the Earth, the dispossessed whose time has come.
We have to wake and fight if we want to inherit a livable Earth.
I mostly agree with you, Dave.
Except Labour had already lost. It didn’t need a hill, it just needed a pseudo-virtuous rationale that didn’t involve the truth of betraying those it purported to most support – and on a terrible scale.
It’s strange to see these gestures of ‘caring’ in the face of catastrophic treachery. To the poor which includes a tragic number of Maaori; to the almost needy, people living in a desperate non-stop struggle to avoid the fate they can see, like a freight train heading towards them; to New Zealand’s sovereignty and autonomy, and to the most basic tenets of democracy.
They want to blame racism for our anger at them. They want to at least imply that we were all Nazis, far-right extremists in dumping them.
As we, Maaori, Pakeha and every other ethnicity together struggle hard and see nothing but surviving becoming harder and harder.
While they cocoon themselves in luxury far from the hardships. While they continue to entrench their entitlement to the high-quality health care, housing, pampering, travel ,clothing, environmentally-friendly toys, and financial excess, the ‘good life’ for them and theirs.
And from here they self-righteously jeer at us. Lecture us, complain at our stupidity for not being grateful for the crumbs that fall from their banquet table.
Ngai Tahu are the biggest business in the South Island, own the most land, and are the biggest landlord in the South Island.
Tainui are a multi billion dollar business – $9.5b in 2019.
Why do you and some others spell Maori as Maaori?
Is it for some political or ideological agenda?
Or is it taking the piss out of Willie Jackson’s pronunciation, which I believe is rendered better by being spelt Marri?
No, you’ve got it wrong R+C. The ‘a’ in Maori is a long vowel and is type-written with a macron above. Most word processing software allows this but not apparently in this reply box (or some folk don’t know how to activate it). So knowing it is a long vowel folk write it with ‘aa’. There you go R+C. Perhaps not what you thought.
It’s a good way to spot pretentious wankers.
I can’t do macrons on this old computer. The double ‘a’ is a way to not mis-spell without it.
Feel uncomfortable knowingly mis-spelling. Especially when others are not doing so. Even though when all others do, I often just mis-spell as well.
So sue me.
” after more than a 100 years received $30m and a sorry. This is compensation of a few cents in the dollar of the value lost.”
The current value of the land is based on 100 years of white colonisers investing enormous amounts of hard work, time and know how to make that land productive. Compensation should be based on what it was worth at the time – which is not much.
Well, the Transnational Capital Party is co-governed by the Chinese and Indian Business Associations.
If Chris Trotter hasn’t already been cancelled by the Left he will be soon. He’s a brave man for standing up against this woke madness that has afflicted Labour.
100% Ernie
Absolutely. Smart, honest and brave.
Occam’s razor would suggest it’s just another grubby money grab dressed up as something else.
I see Ardern as an advertising executive. No idea what she is selling, just get in front of the message and market the shit out of it. Hence her bewildering lack of risk assessment on this subject.
Labour had a fine history, it’s high tide mark being the 30’s and 40’s but small iterations along the way like the Kirk government were something to be proud of. But Ardern Robertson iteration is about to burn the house down.
I wonder if it is a sense of they’re history, may as well obliterate the entire party in the process. I can’t think of a more rational reason to destroy everything Labour once stood for that was not race based.
A sizeable chunk of their caucus will be looking for work next year. But I’m guessing Willie will be just fine and dandy at his radio station thinking, job done!
“I see Ardern as an advertising executive. No idea what she is selling, just get in front of the message and market the shit out of it”
/agreed.
And a real waste of a human specimen’s obvious talent.
She’s obviously got an above average IQ, a well-functioning memory, and a concern for kindness, humility and humanity, but all wasted on shit and the prevailing economic orthodoxy of the past 30-40 years.
And that commodified media and political marketing is all that matters apparently.
It’ll jump up and bite them in the bum when the natives really start to get restless
I am afraid I dont see her that benignly.
This was planned and ready to go for election 2020. The lengths they have gone to and the amount of work and money they have put into it is immense. I dont believe it has anything to do with kindness. Ardern’s daughter is Maori and she is chasing down a seat at the big boy’s table so No, I dont believe this is kindness at all.
If it is, she is a zealot on a par with the Inquisition which let ‘kind’ Catholic priests torture and murder thousands and sleep well at night.
Good point. She has in this case avoided fronting it like the plague because she knows how divisive it will be. All the better to pretend there’s nothing to see and it will just magic itself away. And in some warped fantasy, go on to win the next election.
Labour need toadk themselves this, when was the last successful separatist race focused based us and them governorship model ever successful? Can’t think of any myself!
Chris is interested in how many Labour Caucus members may have attended a Tiriti Workshop. Similarly I would be interested generally in how many pākehā and other tauiwi NZers have never been on a Marae or in regular contact with any Māori people?
Been to a marae. Husband is Maori.
I attended a Treaty workshop twenty years back and found it interesting and useful. But that was before Critical race theory was introduced (think all white people are racist, all white people are priveledged).
My understanding is public servants are incalcated with the idea of de-colonizing the public service (what happened to public service neutrality?). Of course the irony of this would be that if they were truly going to decolonize the public service, they would cease to exist. So it is very selective decolonizing.
agree Ada.
It truly shocked me seeing the Labour women MPs at the Select Committee on gender ID. They have completely and ardently embraced the cult of gender ideology. To hear them spout nonsence like sex is on a spectrum and watch there hostility towards submitters who didn’t agree with the gender orthodoxy was jaw dropping. So I think it is entirely possible Labour MPs have sucummbed to the cult of CRT that drives policies like Health NZ and Three (five ) waters.
I am a Labour Party member (am waiting for the most strategic time to resign) and have only ever voted Labour. I can wait for them to be voted out
I started reading your article thinking you were going a bit nutty but by the time I had read the 6th & 7th paragraphs it made a lot of sense. Maybe if we took a bit more notice of the OT ideas that Martyn disparages society might be a better place.
“Yet you say, ‘Why should the son not bear the guilt of the father?’ Because the son has done what is lawful and right, and has kept all My statutes and observed them, he shall surely live. The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
Yes Chris. I think you must be right – astonishing as it is that people with IQs probably 100 or above can be so unintelligent. I read once in my psychology studies that about 75% of people rate highly in ‘agreeableness’ the tendency to meet new information with a readiness to accept it as true. Only 25% are sceptical or even unbelieving. Postulated as a survival mechanism for the tribe, and when I look at the history of the human race it seems to make sense to me, although I am definitely in the 25% – as are you, I guess, and most of us who are subscribing to the large number of blogs and books which provide rational and well-researched information. I have to say for my disagreeable self though, that I am pretty strongly socialised not to speak my disagreement – it’s not polite. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” I was told as a small child. Thank you for your readiness to disagree so acceptably Chris. More of us have to learn this.
We need people to voice their opinions – how can things change if people are too scared to give their opinion. Next time you are asked tell them your views and dont be ashamed – we are talking about the future of NZ
And all to be reversed by a future NACT government… Way to go Labour, what a hill to die on lol.
Vote for Winston Peters. Easy fix.
You think? When NZFirstNAct come to power I envisage the maori representatives appointed to the 3 Waters cogovernance boards will be Maori like Seymour, Winston, Goldsmith, Tamihere etc and they will happily firesale water assets to International Water Inc (french or chinese) while retaining some semblance of Maori control for a peppercorn rental. Meanwhile ordinary consumers will pay International Waters capital and interest costs on their monthly water bill. Cogovernance is a scam. Ordinary people pakeha and maori are being hustled big time.
Reading this article @ Chris Triotter was like wiping my arse with a cheese grater in that I can’t help but feel you’re going to get shredded by a lot of your former comrades in your views on this co- governance and 3 waters milarkey
One can’t help but think that if this is passed into being, nothing will change for the majority of AO/NZ citizens both Māori and pakeha. But will benefit a few in the nouveau Iwi aristocracy who will own the water assets and there corporate multinational compatriots who will eagerly embrace tikanga Māori in the running and management of this taonga. And as with all old boys clubs/networks there’s going to be a shit load of lucrative iwi/ corporate directorships on offer to the right people of course.
To quote Cheech and Chong in regards to co governance and 3-5 waters” If it looks like, feels like, tastes like dog shit then it must be dog shit.
What will change is that we will pay 3 times as much for water probably over a 5 year period and it will steadily rise from there.
Look no further. With 15 Māori MPs, Labour’s Māori caucus also holds six of the seven Māori electorate seats, and boasts six ministers. It means the caucus holds serious mana around the cabinet table. That influence infiltrates a good many aspects of everyday life. In order to keep political power Labour will do (almost) anything to keep them from abandoning ship in the next election. But will it be enough? Choppy seas ahead.
Chris, Pakeha are damaged by this. However, it is the whole country that suffers.
The polarisation is real. Pakeha who have supported Maori in the past have quietly closed the door to them. Maori (mainly younger ones) are convinced colonialism is everywhere and must be rooted out and it is the author of all their problems. They are convinced every Pakeha is racist.
Pakeha losers with a tiny bit of Maori blood have become the most vocal advocates in the anti colonisation war. Some have a tailor made victim narrative for why they havent succeeded. Many have done amazingly well out of it and push it for all it’s worth.
No one wins, everyone has lost and our unique taonga, that of our largely colour blind, equality, democracy loving culture has been totally trashed and I am not sure we will ever get it back.
Fantail. Agree 100%. Plus it’s a deliberate assault on our sovereign state, and on democracy, possibly part of the WEF agenda.
Chris, while you question the indoctrination of the members of the Labour caucu. Shame.
aori exchanged land for callte with my great grandmother and it turned out it was not there land. he calle were not returned
Arthur
What happens in the future when everyone has some Maori in their lineage? How will the elite hate squad split us up then? No doubt it will be on percentage of Maori in your blood, our future caste system, with Willie or his spawn on top of course.
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