Who Asked Us?

Why Are Politicians Making Decisions Without Consulting New Zealanders?

When that fine Australian writer Christopher Akehurst began a column with “Damn you, politicians. Damn you for what you have done to this country you were supposed to serve and govern well. Damn you for your chicanery, your incompetence and your ignorance” there would be very few New Zealanders who would not understand his lament.

In New Zealand we could provide a special condemnation for the previous Ardern/Hipkins government, undoubtedly the most incompetent and destructive in our history, which has not only left us with a sky-high legacy of debt and soaring inflation - thanks to former finance minister Grant Robertson’s gross mismanagement of his portfolio. Add to this a ballooning, unproductive public sector which has seen our present government struggling to tackle - and the heavy promotion of Ardern’s divisive race-based policies. We are undoubtedly in a very bad way.

However, not only Ardern and Hipkins, but previous National Party leaders and ministers have also accumulatively wreaked enormous damage in this country - too extensive to illustrate here, but readers should have no trouble itemising for themselves the list of poor decisions that have caused this once far more prosperous and socially cohesive country so much.

Akehurst himself goes on to enumerate the damage that has been done by both the sheer, unforgivable ignorance of the majority of Australian politicians in relation to the issues of the day and the ideologically-driven, destructive agenda which has produced the damage inflicted upon his and our societies.

We can include here the enormous cost inflicted upon New Zealanders by our governments endorsing the CO2 global scam, ignorantly demonising fossil fuels and permanently destroying productive farmland by covering it with pine forests – and Chinese manufactured wind farms - while acknowledging that even if New Zealand achieved the impossible Net Zero, it wouldn’t make a whit of difference to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - which, of course, has never been proven to contribute to global warming.

As British science writer Matt Ridley points out, the global warming craze is dying out, with hundreds of companies dropping their climate targets and Australia backing out of hosting next year’s climate conference. He notes that it has been a long, lucrative ride, that predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, with consulting fees spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, best sellers, and research grants.

As he illustrates, different themes in recent years took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, pollution, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, falling sperm count and so on. Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, but no scare has grown as big or lasted as long as global warming. He adds that 40 years ago he first wrote a doom-laden article for The Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air but soon realised that the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models, that the greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat, and was beneficial to plant growth.

How familiar we are now with what he states, e.g. that the activists who took over the climate debate, often with minimal understanding of climate science, competed for attention by painting ever more catastrophic pictures of future greenhouse warming. “They altered the name to climate change so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heat waves. Then they inflated the language to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis” even as projections about future warming came down.’

“Yet scientists knew the announcements were nonsense, but they turned a blind eye because the alarm kept the grant money coming in. Journalists always love exaggeration. Capitalists were happy to cash in. Politicians welcomed the chance to blame others. Almost nobody had an incentive to downplay the alarm. If a wildfire or flood devastates your town, point the finger at the changing climate rather than your own failure to prepare. Almost nobody had an incentive to downplay the alarm.”

We are aware of the consequences that Ridley points out. For four long decades climate change alarm went on a protracted match through the institutions, capturing newsrooms, classrooms, boardrooms and our politicians. The price New Zealanders have paid for this has lessened our productivity.

The sheer hypocrisy of politicians acknowledging this, while white-anting our economy to make sure we goose-step in line with the ideologically captured members of our trading parties is unforgivable. While the American government now acknowledges the demonization of carbon dioxide is a massive scam, and China and India – far from phasing out fossil fuels – continue to aggressively build more and more coal fired power stations - our hypocritical government continues to pretend that the increased taxation it produces - and the control over individuals lives it has imposed - is necessary.

Arguably, although the damage accumulatively done to this country is multifaceted, the sheer folly of our politicians is possibly nowhere greater than in relation to the lack of intelligent oversight of our immigration policies… about which New Zealanders are never consulted. And although the prime duty of our government is what used to be called the defence of the realm – i.e. to serve and protect its people - our successive governments have long bought into the failed theory of the benefits of multiculturalism – and are still doing so, in spite of the shocking toll it has taken on other countries.

The relatively recent notion that the people of a country should be open to welcoming all comers, no matter what their cultural backgrounds, gave rise to the promotion of multiculturalism, with little regard for its consequences which, worldwide, have led to civic unrest and the fragmentation of social cohesion. Multiculturalism has been a massive failure, and has been well described as an idea whose time has gone.

NZ Flag from Ground Zero

Are our politicians really so ignorant in failing to learn what has happened to every Western country which has allowed Muslim immigration? Parts of England, France and Australia have become no-go areas, with endemic violence and the rise of anti-Semitism.

There are undoubtedly good, moderate Muslims, by no means wedded to the belief of death to the infidel, many of whom have wished to escape the fanaticism of Islamists in their own country with their inexorable hatred of Christianity. I well recall the kindness of a Muslim coffee shop owner north of Wellington, devoted to his three little girls, who, learning that my sister and I were returning from farewelling our mother who had recently died, insisted on providing us with second cups of coffee and almond biscuits for no charge. And then there was the well-disposed Muslim taxi driver in Auckland with whom I amicably argued about the undesirability of Muslim women being forced to wear the hijab - to the point where he conceded that he would not like to wear one himself – and that indeed the women had a right to object.

Jacinda Ardern, never one to miss a photo opportunity - no doubt to the dismay of brave Arabian women fighting against its imposition - donned one after the appalling Christchurch Mosque shootings by the Australian Brendan Tarrant in 2019. Was Jacinda Ardern, thus aligned with the oppressive mullahs, really ignorant of the fact that brave Iranian women, with enormous courage (openly defying the country’s most symbolic tool of the control of women - the compulsory hijab) risk imprisonment, fines - and even arrest and torture by refusing to wear it? One can only honour Mahsa Amini, the 22 year old Iranian woman detained in September 2022 by the religious morality police after she was accused of wearing an “improper” hijab. Her death while in custody produced widespread anti-hijab demonstrations with thousands of women taking to the streets to burn hijabs, advocate for women’s rights, and call for the dissolution of the Islamic Republic. These demonstrations resulted in over 22,000 arrests and more than 530 deaths.

Incidentally, one wonders why Tarrant has not been deported back to be imprisoned in Australia, given that Australia sends back to New Zealand criminals who were born New Zealanders.

Basically, we are being faced with a numbers game. Given a tipping point of immigrants from a country basically antipathetic to the Christian values that underpin our democracy, then our country is in trouble, as indeed we are. Already, we are far from the one so basically harmonious that both Maoris and Europeans freely intermarried, to the extent that Maori, an ethnically separate race, no longer exist.– a fact conveniently overlooked when radicalised individuals constantly claim, as Maoris, special funding, attention, preferential treatment and co-governance, persuading our successive governments to grant them benefits not available to New Zealanders as a whole.

The disastrous path we are now taking is that of our politicians also embracing multiculturalism, under the aegis of Jacinda Ardern’s promotion of that weasel word diversity. One can only wonder if there is any aspect of our country which she and her government did not succeed in damaging.

It should, of course, be we New Zealanders who decide who gets to live here. A fundamental question for any country should be, “Who are these people and what are they like?” But we never get to decide – our culpable governments continue to simply inflict their decisions on us. Yet we well know that although all human beings are equal under the law – (or should be, which is now not happening in New Zealand, given the promotion of Tikanga by activist judges, and the favouring of those of part-Maori descent) all cultures and religions are not equal. And the underlying issue in relation to this and elsewhere – where the consequences have been obvious – is population change, and the effect on social cohesion which our governments are failing to address.

Of particular concern should be the fact that in 2019 there were already over 60 mosques in the small country. Reportedly, we now have 85 and two Islamic schools. Concern is raised about what they may be teaching, and given that one result of Muslim immigration worldwide is infiltration by fanatical extremists, which has produced the results in civic unrest and criminal violence we now see, we would be incredibly naïve to think that New Zealand will be the only country to not be faced with what has happened in so many other countries as a result of Muslim aggression. Nor, as it is sometimes claimed is, Islam a religion of peace. On the contrary, the word itself apparently means submission, not, peace - and historically it is not known for its peace movements but for that unique Arab word known as jihad which means an offensive war intended to lead to the conversion of the infidel or to have him annihilated. We should remember Salman Rushdie. What we have seen worldwide in France, the UK and elsewhere – even Australia - is the inevitable rise of Islamic fundamentalism - given a tipping point of Muslim immigration.

So New Zealanders have every right to ask if the government is going to cap the number of Muslim immigrants - given the important lessons to be learned…or if it has already done so.

Undoubtedly the usual vilification of those asking these important questions will occur here, with accusations of Islamophobia in the same way as homophobia and racism are targeted by those who undoubtedly have an agenda of their own. And undoubtedly most Muslims here at present would be good family people. But what the is government thinking of? In every western country where the Muslim population has grown large enough, even as close as in Australia, infiltration by Islamists with an anti-Christian agenda, often violently anti-semitic, reminds us that embracing multiculturalism - and so called diversity - inevitably promotes divisiveness. The December Bondi Beach attack is a salutary lesson.

Moreover, a 2019 study of Australian Muslims found 61% of Muslim men want classical Sharia laws recognised in Australian law, while 25% want to implement Sharia punishments. It is a sign of the times that whereas the Australian political leader Pauline Hanson was formerly vilified for the concerns she raised about uncontrolled immigration transforming our closest nation’s culture and demographics, her party is rapidly gaining ground.

Many would maintain we should only welcome immigrants whose values are not inimical to our Judeo-Christian heritage - encouraging assimilation - not fragmentation - to prioritise the Christian values which once stabilised this country… an issue which now needs no urgent attention… given the rise in violent crime and civic unrest.

How many New Zealanders - in fact, how many politicians - do realise that we now over 85 mosques in this country? Are they going to proliferate - and if so, what does it say about out immigration policies - and the possible consequences of Islamic infiltration? Have there been any limits set on the number of Muslims being allowed into New Zealand? Our government, without consulting New Zealanders, has apparently embraced multiculturalism based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal. But as as that great Australian writer the late Hal Colebatch pointed out “a multiculturalism” which seriously says that all cultures are equal and that people should be welcomed holus-bolus into a country is mad. “

How many New Zealanders even know that 90% of the cattle and sheep slaughtered in this country are halal-killed and that the killing must be done by a “a sane, adult Muslim man” invoking the name Allah?

Where do we see the evidence our governments - our immigration ministers - are aware of the supremely important fact that rapid demographic changes without public consultation risk eroding social cohesion and reshaping democratic power in ways that are difficult to reverse?

We’ve already seen this in the constant kowtowing of our governments to a small, radicalised minority of part-Maori - by no means the majority - which has ever-expanding benefits showered on them on racial grounds only. A disgraceful recent example being New Zealand First MP Shane Jones making the Ratana group a gratuitous gift of ten million dollars - which Winston Peters cynically described as koha, a gift. Why? It certainly wasn’t a gift out of their own pockets. It was taken from all of us taxpayers, as usual, without our consent.

But what do New Zealanders now ever get a chance to consent or object to? In this election year the standard promises will be made – as usual disregarded after the election - as with the disgraceful abandoning of the promise to restore English names to all our government departments and institutions.

The only practicable way for New Zealanders to control their own governments and make the decisions themselves is to look to the Swiss model - see www.100days.co.nz

Without this, we remain little more than virtual slaves of the state - not citizens of a democracy.

© Amy Brooke.

New Zealand children’s author, poet, and socio-political commentator can be found at www.amybrooke.co.nz