Not the best place to build a nation: on the sand. But Helen Clark has no choice of ground. This is a defining moment for the nation.
For the most vociferous Maori Clark’s foreshore/seabed proposal is the last great land grab. For large numbers of non-Maori the Maori claim for title is a beach too far.
It is 2pm Friday in Feilding town square and about 250 whingers — sorry, farmers and spouses — have turned up from the surrounding lush acreages that make the town rich.
They’re prosperous, these folk, even in the dairy downturn. A local vehicle dealer says four-wheel-drive tanks are going out the door like hot cakes. The cockies have not put their chequebooks away.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer said Harry Duynhoven’s breach of the Electoral Act could be considered “trifling” and ignored by Parliament. “The law does not concern itself with trifling matters,” he told Parliament’s privileges committee.
Palmer is a former Prime Minister, a much-published constitutional lawyer who rewrote the Constitution Act in 1986 and an adviser to rich corporations on constitutional and administrative law and practice.
This coming Friday Labour, Progressive and United Future will mark a year in harness. Last Wednesday United Future MP Marc Alexander had this to say: “Labour is starting to inspire confidence in the same way that the Titanic inspires buoyancy.”
Not very collegial. What’s going on?
Alexander was objecting to Labour’s “evangelical bunch of ideologues” who “think that minority rights override those of just about everyone else”.
First, note an under-reported visit by China’s No 2, Li Chang-chun, two weekends ago. Next, note Helen Clark’s visit to Korea last weekend. Then prepare for a conference in November on relations with Asia, to be launched later this month. New Zealand’s Asia policy is being revitalised.
This is becoming a heavy-duty session for bills that test MPs’ personal beliefs and political footwork: last month, prostitution; next, euthanasia; coming later this year, cannabis’ legal status and same-sex marriage.
Such bills rouse high passions. They brutally divide society, political parties and friendships. Lobbies with fierce, irreconcilable views put MPs under heavy pressure. And, usually promoted by an individual MP, they are typically decided on “conscience”: MPs personally decide how to vote, free of the party whip.
Today the National party caucus disposes of Maurice Williamson, its leader has said. The party board is to do its bit on membership on Thursday.
The first question this messy affair raises is: What damage suspending or expelling Williamson will do? The party’s answer: less than leaving him in.
Leaving him in risks more such episodes as his rock-throwing on conference eve. Counselling by present and past grandees did not work before the conference so cannot be counted on to work now.
If the Treaty of Waitangi hadn’t been around, would we be bothering about the foreshore and seabed? Yes.
This is not a matter driven by the Treaty. It is a matter of indigenous rights. Indeed, the very fact that the Treaty has become a hot topic over the past 20 years is at least partly due to a rise to prominence of indigenous rights in ex-colonial countries, Australia, Canada and the United States among them.
Holding government spending growth to no more than the rise in population and prices is one of eight goals proposed by National party finance spokesman Don Brash.
Brash stated his goals at the National party conference in Christchurch yesterday [Sunday]. They are not yet party policy. Though Leader Bill English told the Herald he was “relaxed” about them, he described them as “proposed goals”. Detailed policy is still some distance away.
God is a socialist, surely. Just as voters braced for cold showers and blackouts, the rains came and filled the lakes. For good measure, June was warm (well, not too cold).
This is the second year it has rained on cue. In April last year one generator gravely warned me of price spikes in the campaign if Helen Clark pulled an early election.