Yes, the Uffindell affair is a sideshow - but that doesn't let National off the hook

Some commenters on this blog have chided me for joining the criticism of the National Party over the Uffindell fiasco. The implication is that I’ve added my rather insubstantial weight to a media offensive calculated to cause maximum damage to National at a time when things were otherwise looking good for the party. Conspiracy theorists are even speculating that Labour sympathisers in the media have known about Uffindell’s past for months but chose to break the story now as a distraction from the government’s shredded credibility across a range of issues that grows wider and more obvious by the day.

My response to those who suggest I shouldn’t support what is seen as a media gang-up against National is that no matter how bad Labour is, we shouldn’t let the major opposition party off the hook for its own failings. It’s not only possible but legitimate to hold what some people might regard as the contradictory ideas that while Labour is a disaster, National doesn’t automatically present an overwhelmingly attractive alternative. Only dyed in the wool National supporters would turn a completely blind eye to the party’s faults on the basis that the other lot is worse.

People accuse me of being anti-National, but I want the Nats to be an effective opposition and it irritates me that they aren’t. While it’s true that I’ve never been a supporter of the party, that doesn’t mean I don’t want it to be good at its job – which, right now, is to expose and highlight the damage Jacinda Ardern’s rogue government, possibly the most destructive in our history, is doing to the country. It’s in the interests of all voters for the main opposition party to do its job properly, and it can’t do that if it’s constantly distracted by the need to extinguish self-ignited bushfires. The media may delight in exploiting those screw-ups, but they don’t cause them.

Having said all that, it’s true that in the big picture, the Uffindell affair is a mere sideshow – albeit one that has come at a convenient time for Labour. It has given the media an excuse to shift the focus from issues of far greater concern, such as (to mention just two):

■ The Auditor-General’s finding that the Three Waters proposal would allow the four so-called water “entities” to operate without proper accountability, which is what critics of the scheme have been saying from day one. In a submission to Parliament, Auditor-General John Ryan said the Three Waters legislation “could have an adverse effect on public accountability, transparency and organisational performance” – an admirably polite and restrained way of saying Nanaia Mahuta’s plan overturns virtually all established principles relating to the management of publicly owned infrastructure assets.

Significantly, most media coverage of Three Waters continues to play down or completely ignore its most offensive feature – namely, the imposition of 50-50 co-governance with unelected iwi interests via deliberately convoluted and opaque mechanisms. RNZ’s otherwise thorough coverage of the Auditor-General's statement gave the co-governance issue only a brief, passing mention. Stuff managed to avoid it altogether. Sceptics, noting this strange reluctance to confront the taniwha in the whare, can hardly be blamed for wondering if it’s connected with the media’s acceptance of government funding conditional on endorsement of still-undefined Treaty principles.

Meanwhile we have been given fresh reason to be highly sceptical about Three Waters. A Wairarapa iwi organisation has complained that under the draft legislation, its voice and autonomy will be diminished because it will be only one of 40 iwi in the proposed entity “C”. “We believe,” Rangitane o Wairarapa told the government, “that the Crown has an obligation to listen to and honour each of the voices of the iwi, not through consensus [which the tribe described as “not how we work in te ao Maori”] and not by determining six people represent 40-plus iwi.”

You can see where this could lead. Brace yourself, if the legislation goes ahead in its present form, for disputes of the type that have repeatedly dogged Treaty settlement negotiations.

■ Then there's the broader but related issue of Labour’s attack on democracy and the principle of one person, one vote. The most recent manifestation was the passing of legislation granting the powerful Ngai Tahu iwi the right to appoint – that’s right, appoint, not elect – two members to the Canterbury regional council. The Ngai Tahu councillors will have full voting rights but won’t have to submit themselves for election and will presumably be accountable only to the tribal hierarchy. That’s how easily democracy is dismantled.

The supposed justification arises from a radical re-interpretation of the Treaty under which democracy is subverted in favour of automatic, guaranteed representation for people of Maori ancestry. The sponsor of the Ngai Tahu bill, Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene, airily pronounced that “Ngai Tahu are entitled to this representation. They’re entitled to this representation because that is the promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and this is a modern-day expression of that promise.” There you go, then – 182 years of constitutional practice and precedent discarded in a few words.

All this is in line with Maori Development Minister Willie Jackson’s decree earlier this year that democracy has changed from being what he derisively called “the tyranny of the majority”. But if democracy no longer means that the majority ultimately holds sway, which after all is its key defining feature, then the game is up: New Zealand is no longer a democracy and we will have to find a new name for whatever mongrel form of government has replaced it. Pardon me, but did I miss the reference to this revolutionary change in Labour’s 2020 election manifesto?

Jackson makes no attempt to disguise his contempt for the notion that in a democracy, all citizens should exercise equal rights, labelling it a “political stunt”. He attacks what he calls “dog whistle” politics by opponents of the Ngai Tahu legislation while he himself unashamedly indulges in what might be labelled kuri whistling that can only promote racial division and separatism. He’s the Labour Cabinet’s resident brown-neck, aggressively championing race-based policies that threaten to drive a wedge between New Zealand’s two main racial groups and ramp up antagonism among extremists on both sides.

This is the same Willie Jackson who, when it suits him, has a highly selective view of who counts as Maori, as was made obvious when he disparaged ACT leader David Seymour (who claims Ngapuhi descent) as a “useless Maori” because he opposes separatist government departments such as Te Puni Kokiri.

The message couldn’t be clearer: if you sign up to Jackson’s radical ideology, you’re a good, authentic Maori. If you exercise your democratic right to dissent, you risk being dismissed as someone who doesn’t deserve to call themselves a true Maori. Jackson is a loudmouth and a bully. At the risk of stretching an analogy to breaking point, he’s the Labour government’s attack kuri.

Alongside these big issues, of course, are the continuing, everyday reminders of the shortcomings of a government whose ambition greatly exceeds its ability to deliver. Look no further than the Te Pukenga Polytechnic debacle for evidence of that. Two other examples from today: new migration figures that show a continuing net loss as people leave the country for better prospects elsewhere (many of the departees were Brits and Americans, presumably disillusioned with life under the sainted Ardern), and a Treasury forecast that an extra 3423 public servants and consultants will be needed to fulfil commitments made in the latest Budget – an increase of 6 percent when most New Zealanders think we have more than enough bureaucrats and jobsworths already. The Treasury noted a particular demand for climate and Maori policy advisers. Quelle surprise ….

On virtue signalling, Kiri Allan, Three Waters and secret donations

Newly promoted minister Kiritapu Allan has said what a lot of people think but feel unable to say.

She lashed out in a tweet against “tokenistic” use of te reo by employees of DOC “as an attempt to show govt depts are culturally competent”. She told Stuff she encouraged the use of the Maori language, but wanted it used “with integrity”.

“You want to use te reo, you use it with integrity and use it responsibly,” Stuff quoted Allan as saying. “This isn’t a ‘everybody go out and use mahi and kaupapa’ and say you have a deep and enduring relationship with te ao Māori.”

Of course this shouldn’t apply only to DOC, where Allan was in charge before this week’s cabinet reshuffle resulted in her elevation to the justice portfolio. The same message could be directed at all government agencies where middle-class Pakeha public servants, eager to demonstrate their solidarity with the tangata whenua, indulge in an ostentatious display of virtue-signalling by using token Maori words and phrases. I wonder whether Radio New Zealand also got the memo.

Being Maori, Allan could get away with this rebuke. No Pakeha could; the cries of racism would be deafening. But to me it has always seemed patronising that many Pakeha liberals flaunt their cultural sensitivity with expressions such as “morena”, “nga mihi” and "doing the mahi” (the latter a term practically unknown in the Pakeha world until a couple of years ago).

If they were truly committed to the use of te reo, they would take the trouble to learn the language. I think that’s the point Allan was trying to make.

Many people do make the effort, of course, and good for them. The rest of us should stick to English, since it’s our lingua franca – the language everyone knows and understands. And the primary purpose of language, as Joe Bennett reminded us in a recent column for which he predictably got caned, is to communicate, not to signal cultural empathy or indulge in a form of verbal snobbery.

I like what I’ve seen of Allan. She’s Maori and lesbian, but she doesn’t appear to play the woke card and deserves better than to be dismissed as someone who got where she is simply by ticking fashionable diversity boxes.

She’s a former KFC employee who got a law degree – big ups for that, as they say – and who represents a real electorate (East Coast), so earned her seat in Parliament in the honest, old-fashioned way. She also impressed a lot of people with the gutsy, no-nonsense way in which she confronted a life-threatening cancer. And though I know we’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, she has an open, honest face. We now know she’s blunt too, a refreshing quality lacking in the majority of politicians on both sides of the House who prefer to play it safe.

I tested my opinion of Allan on Clive Bibby, a politically alert resident of her electorate. He largely confirmed my impression, saying that Allan had served the electorate well and National would have a hard job finding someone to stand against her (this from a retired Tolaga Bay farmer whose political inclinations are firmly to the centre-right).

Another good friend and long-term East Coast voter – again, not a natural Labour supporter – agreed that Allan was well-liked in the electorate. The fact that Gisborne’s population is 50 percent Maori probably helps, although her tribal roots (Ngati Ranginui and Tuwharetoa) lie outside the district.

Clive noted that Allan had resisted any temptation to serve as a flagbearer for the radical rainbow movement, which he thought was a smart tactic in conservative Gisborne. But he wasn’t sure that her impressive performance would be enough to save her in the event of the expected anti-Labour backlash in 2023, and he hoped she would secure a good position on the Labour list.

He thinks Allan is marked for higher office – a view shared by political commentator Tim Watkin, who speculated this week that she and Michael Wood, who were both promoted in the “minor” (ha!) reshuffle, might be a Labour leadership team of the future.

Wood strikes me as a bit too polished and smiley for comfort (I’m reminded of a politician from a former era of whom it was said, “Behind the thin veneer there’s a thin veneer”), but Allan has an aura of authenticity – an impression reinforced by her obvious exasperation with the virtue-signallers. If we must have Labour governments – and history suggests they’re the yin to National’s yang – then we could probably do worse.

Then again, maybe I’m so desperate for something to feel positive about that I’m reduced to searching for promising omens on the Left. Certainly the picture is pretty bleak everywhere else.

The past week was a particularly depressing one. Consider the following:

■ The blandly named Water Services Entities Bill, aka Three Waters, passed its first reading – an event virtually ignored by most mainstream media outlets, reflecting their wilful indifference to an issue arousing acute agitation in the heartland (or as on-trend journalists would say, “across the motu”). Cynics will quite reasonably suspect that the media’s failure to subject the Bill’s co-governance provisions to anything resembling critical analysis is linked to their craven acceptance of the ideological conditions attached to funding from the Public Interest Journalism Fund, aka the Pravda Project. (You can read the Hansard record of the first reading debate here. It’s worth reading for Nanaia Mahuta’s speech, which raised the bar for bare-faced spin to a new level, and for Labour’s arrogant failure to explain, still less defend, the co-governance proposals that are driving much of the opposition to the Bill.)

■ Court proceedings over hitherto secret donations to the New Zealand First Foundation revealed that wealthy business people contributed large sums to the party in the clear expectation that it would promote their interests, leading inescapably to the conclusion that New Zealand may not be the transparent, corruption-free democracy we all fondly supposed it to be. As political scientist Bryce Edwards put it: “That wealthy interests were secretly donating large amounts of money both before and after [NZ First] was elected into office should raise questions of whether [the] Government led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was corrupted in some of its decision-making.” Coming on top of accusations of nepotism swirling around Mahuta – largely unreported in the mainstream media – the NZ First court case will leave many New Zealanders gravely concerned about integrity in public life and wondering whether Central America or the Middle East now serves as our political model.

Again, superficial media coverage would have left most of the country in ignorance of what was disclosed in court, indicating that news executives were either unwilling or unable to grasp the significance of the case. Only Newsroom reported the evidence in all its damning detail. Conclusion: we can no longer rely on the New Zealand mainstream media to fulfil their vital function as one of the last lines of defence against corruption and abuses of power. While the media may have no formal constitutional role in a country such as New Zealand, a democracy can only function properly if people are informed about matters of public importance. It goes without saying that when the media fail in that duty, democracy is at risk. Do the leaders of the media recognise and accept that responsibility? If they do, then the evidence suggests they exercise it very selectively.

■ There’s no shortage of other uplifting news I could mention from the past few days, such as the failure by police to make any arrests, despite multiple witnesses, for a shocking assault by Tribesmen gang members on a motorist in the Waikato; the forcible snatching from Lower Hutt of a Maori man’s body by his Northland whanau, against the wishes of the man’s widow and immediate family (a violent act subsequently justified by his cousin, Hone Harawira’s wife Hilda Halkyard, as being in accordance with tikanga); another week of ram-raids and shootings, including one while children were being dropped at school; and the government’s cynical and vindictive emasculation of the job of Children’s Commissioner, despite overwhelming opposition from submitters, and evidently for no better reason than that Labour was fed up with Oranga Tamariki being criticised.

Oh, and I shouldn’t forget that the health system is collapsing and schools have run out of teachers. I don’t personally blame Jacinda Ardern for all this, but it adds insult to injury to be told constantly by the international media that we should feel blessed to be living in blissful Aotearoa under the world’s most empathetic and inspirational leader.

Squeeze your eyes shut, cross your fingers and hope

The Three Waters project is a con and a fiasco on every level.

First, it fails to satisfy even the most basic democratic test. A system in which the nation’s water infrastructure is run by opaque “entities” where 16 percent of the population wields 50 percent of the power (and that’s assuming the representatives of the iwi elite truly speak for all people of Maori descent, which is far from assured) makes a mockery of representative government.

Second, and in addition to the above, it severs the links by which the public is able to exercise control over infrastructure that it owns. The recent attempt to overcome opposition to Three Waters by tweaking the shareholding arrangements, so as to create an illusion of financial control by councils, was a feat of prestidigitation that fooled no one.

Those two failings could be described as the primary constitutional objections to Three Waters, but there are others – such as the absence of an informed mandate from the public (co-governance wasn’t mentioned in Labour’s 2020 manifesto) and not even a pretence of adequate consultation. (Far from it. Once Nanaia Mahuta realised dozens of councils intended to fight her asset grab, she resolved to bulldoze it through whether they liked it or not.)

A cynic might say such arrogance should be no surprise coming from a minister who enjoys quasi-regal standing within the Tainui confederation and is thus steeped in a hierarchical tribal culture that dates back to the Maori King Movement. While her manner is quiet and understated, it’s possible she’s accustomed to getting her own way by virtue of her hereditary status. (Just a personal theory …)

Against all that, we have a vague promise that the country’s water infrastructure will be better funded and more efficiently managed under the new mechanisms. But while even critics of Three Waters acknowledge there’s scope for improvement, the failings of the existing arrangements – and especially the supposed health risks from poor water – have been grossly overstated in an attempt to frighten the public, with assistance from a crude TV propaganda campaign that would have embarrassed even Joseph Goebbels.

So much for the constitutional flaws (for want of a better term) in the Three Waters project. But on top of that, and just as glaring, are the potential bureaucratic and administrative fishhooks.

Today’s Wairarapa Times-Age reports concern within local councils – or should I say panic? – over the cost of the transition to the new structure. Carterton District Council, one of the smallest in the country (population 9700), expects to spend $850,000 preparing for Three Waters over the next two years. The council’s chief executive says the plan has imposed an “enormous” programme of work that the council’s not resourced to cope with it. Mayor Greg Laing describes the process as “absolutely appalling”.

The Times-Age quotes the Department of Internal Affairs as saying funding will be provided to cover transition costs, but it’s obvious that councils haven’t seen any of the money and don’t know when they will. In any case, South Wairarapa’s mayor Alex Beijen, who presides over a district with a population of only 11,000 (and one that’s already financially stretched to breaking point), says resourcing will be a big challenge even with extra government money.

Reading between the lines, it seems clear the process has been so rushed that no one thought to put transitional funding arrangements in place – or alternatively, didn’t have the time. Could this urgency have anything to do with the fact that there’s an election next year and Labour is anxious to lock in its audacious ideological projects before it gets booted out of office, as seems more likely with every passing day?

Similar unseemly haste is evident in health, where the consequences, at least on a personal level, could be even more catastrophic. In a scathing assessment, Ian Powell – former executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – points to the massive disruption and destabilisation likely to be caused by Health Minister Andrew Little’s madcap scheme to abolish district health boards and replace them with … what, exactly? 

If anyone knows, we haven’t been told. That's exactly Powell's point. But in the meantime, God alone knows how much money, energy and expertise will be diverted from the provision of health care – to the detriment of sick people desperately in need of treatment – as the health system struggles to restructure itself to comply with Little’s ill-defined vision.

As Powell points out, “With only 40 working days to go, DHBs have no more information on what will replace them on 1 July than they had on 21 April last year when the health minister announced their abolition.” You can read his damning appraisal here – and if that’s not depressing enough, Richard Prebble has more to say about the state of the health system here.

All this has a wearying familiarity. Labour governments tend to come into office bursting with grand ideas but lacking the ministerial talent necessary to convert their missionary zeal into effective action. Their ambitions consistently outstrip their ability to deliver, resulting in reliance on obscurantist jargon and slogans (Powell cites the empty vow to end the “postcode lottery” in health care) and promiscuous spending binges as a substitute for good policy. Little, who should have been one of Labour’s more competent ministers, has turned out to be anything but.

When it’s plain to everyone except fervent true believers that the wheels are falling off, Labour collectively squeezes its eyes shut, crosses its fingers and hopes everything will magically turn out okay. That’s what Mahuta and Little appear to be doing now, metaphorically speaking, and by the time voters are able to do anything it will be too late. The damage will have been done.

 

 

Bryce Edwards on Three Waters

Possibly the most damning condemnation yet of the pernicious Three Waters project comes today from Victoria University political scientist Bryce Edwards. You can read it here:

Political Roundup: Is Three Waters really about water infrastructure or iwi co-governance? (mailchi.mp)

Edwards' denunciation carries great weight because unlike some who have attacked Three Waters, he is not a habitual critic of the Labour government. If anything, he naturally leans toward the left.

Edwards makes the important point that there are two issues here. One is the need for better administration of the country's creaking water infrastructure, on which there is wide agreement. The other is the way Nanaia Mahuta has cynically used this as an excuse for a massive asset grab and transfer of power to unelected iwi interests, all without any mandate or explanation.

Mahuta's propaganda machine has focused exclusively on the former while pretending the idea of 50-50 co-governance isn't an issue - in fact sidestepping it altogether, with the help of journalists who have obligingly parroted the government's talking points. It's hard to recall a more brazen example of political dissembling.

Pssst ... don't mention the iwi

From disgrace to sham to travesty and back again – that pretty much sums up the Three Waters project so far.  (I won’t use the government’s preferred term “reform”, because reform means a change for the better.)

When it became clear last year that Nanaia Mahuta’s pet ideological project faced concerted opposition across a broad front, the government sought to defuse it by setting up an “independent working group” to review the proposed governance arrangements.

The working group’s report is now in, and it has justifiably been slammed for merely tinkering at the edges – hardly surprising, given that the group was stacked with iwi representatives and people broadly sympathetic to the government. (One example is my own mayor, Lyn Patterson, a reliable friend of Labour who told the Wairarapa Times-Age that the report addresses local government’s concerns. Yet her own council recently joined 29 others in opposing Three Waters and looking at alternative proposals.)

The working group’s most significant recommendation is for a restructuring of shareholding arrangements in the proposed governance structure, in the hope this will create an illusion of greater accountability and so mollify opponents – among them, Auckland mayor and former Labour cabinet minister Phil Goff, who is standing firm despite having been on the working party. (Question: if the recommendations didn’t even satisfy one of the group’s own members, why should the rest of us be convinced?)

To appease those who complain that the existing proposals don’t allow sufficient input for local voices, the working party proposes to strengthen the roles of regional representative groups (RRGs) by creating advisory groups (sub-RRGs – I kid you not) that would “feed into the larger body”. So an already opaque and unwieldy governance structure would become still more opaque and unwieldy, and local voices would be safely submerged and rendered impotent.  The Labour Party is very good at this sort of thing, preferring to place its faith in big government rather than allow local democracy to get in the way.

The report also seeks to divert attention away from crucial governance issues to the supposed risk of privatisation of water, which my former colleague Barrie Saunders rightly dismisses as a red herring. Amid all the debate of the past few months, the fear of privatisation has hardly been raised at all.

Most significantly, the working group ignores the elephant in the room (or should I say the taniwha in the whare). The shibboleth of 50-50 Treaty partnership remains central to the project. The report does nothing to address concerns that Three Waters, as it stands, would represent a massive transfer of power and control to unelected and unaccountable iwi interests.

In the longer term that raises profound constitutional implications, because Three Waters could serve as a test run for implementing a radical re-interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi. If the government gets away with it, we should expect the principle of 50-50 co-governance to be extended into other spheres of government.

Already we’re seeing parallel Maori governance structures taking shape in health and education. The Three Waters project will take that a step further. No one should be in any doubt that what’s underway is nothing less than a subversion of democratic principles and a jettisoning of the notion that all citizens enjoy equal rights.

Interestingly, media coverage of the working group’s report – or at least what I’ve seen and heard of it – has deftly skirted around the crucial issue of tribal influence in the Three Waters project by the simple expedient of not referring to it at all. To paraphrase Basil Fawlty, it’s a case of “Don’t mention the iwi”.

Conspiracy theorists are likely to see this as further evidence of the government’s influence over the media via the Public Interest Journalism Fund – and who can blame them? That’s the type of suspicion media outlets inevitably invite when they line up to take the taxpayers’ money on terms dictated by the government, central among which is the insistence on recognition of arbitrarily defined Treaty rights.

Throughout this exercise, a persistent issue has been lack of transparency. At every step along the way, the government has seemed determined to (pardon the pun) muddy the waters.

A good example is the diagram purporting to show how the governance of Three Waters will work, which is a triumph of obfuscation. I defy anyone to make sense of it. There has to be a reason why it’s so convoluted, and I believe that reason is to disguise where true power and control will reside.

The public still has no idea who came up with the idea of four regional “water service entities” – whose territories just happened to be aligned with tribal boundaries – or what the rationale was. That part of the exercise appears to have taken place out of the public view. It emerged fully formed, without public consultation.

In place of transparency, the government has tried hyperbole, disinformation and scaremongering – witness the infantile and dishonest “public information and education campaign” put together by advertising agency FCB New Zealand (to its everlasting shame) at a cost to the taxpayer of $4 million. The aim was to frighten New Zealanders into thinking our water infrastructure is in a parlous state and thus soften us up for the hijacking of council-owned assets and the removal of democratic accountability mechanisms.

In fact many, if not most, councils manage their water infrastructure efficiently and safely. In any case, the debate now is not so much about whether the management of water can be improved, which many critics of Three Waters accept. What’s contentious is the means by which the government proposes to do it.

As I said in a recent letter to the Times-Age, New Zealanders need to decide what type of government they want: one that serves all citizens equally, or one that recognises a minority racial group as having rights that trump those of the majority.

This doesn’t mean sweeping aside Maori rights. But it’s one thing to treat Maori fairly and respectfully, as is their due, and quite another to undermine the fundamental democratic principles from which all New Zealanders – Maori, Pakeha and everyone else – benefit.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that people of Maori descent enjoy the same rights as the rest of us. These include the right to stand for councils and to get elected, as many have done. That would provide the opportunity to be represented in the running of a legitimately constituted Three Waters governance structure. But the powerful iwi interests that influence the government (and in particular Labour’s Maori caucus, which is a power centre in its own right) want to bypass that process and enjoy a seat at the table as of right.

To put it another way, the Three Waters project, as it stands, involves replacing democracy with another form of government for which we don’t have a name.

That accountability thing that Susie Ferguson doesn't seem to get

Now here’s a surprise (or on second thoughts, perhaps not): one of the two presenters on Radio New Zealand’s flagship news and current show appears not to understand why a functioning democracy depends on accountability mechanisms.

Interviewing Manawatu District mayor Helen Worboys, one of 23 mayors who have formed an action group to resist the Three Waters project, Morning Report co-host Susie Ferguson wanted to know what was the point of their opposition.

Worboys’ answer (and here I’m paraphrasing): The councils the mayors represent want to retain control of the water infrastructure that their communities have built and paid for. They believe they can come up with smarter and more acceptable ways of reforming water management and want the government to hit the “pause” button until they can put forward alternative proposals. Having paid for the assets, their communities want a say in how they’re run, but under Nanaia Mahuta’s master plan there will be no line of accountability back to them. (If I could interject here, that’s surely the key objection to the Three Waters project. It’s not so much about whether there’s a need to impose uniform standards and bring inadequate infrastructure up to standard; what’s at issue is the process by which this would be achieved, which involves transferring control to opaque, unelected and remote “entities” with no lines of accountability to, or even direct connection with, the communities whose water assets they’ll be appropriating.)

Ferguson didn’t quite seem to get any of this. As long as water assets remained in public ownership, she asked, what did it matter who controlled them? To which Worboys explained that the issue of ownership was actually quite a big deal. “The government says we will still own them, but they won’t sit on councils’ balance sheets.” (You might call it a Clayton’s type of ownership, then.)

Worboys again made the point that communities would have no voice and there would be no accountability. To which Ferguson, by now sounding slightly impatient and querulous, demanded to know: “Why does that matter?” Good grief.

After Worboys had patiently explained – again – that it indeed mattered to communities which had invested in good infrastructure that met the required standards, as in Manawatu (which Ferguson had wrongly suggested was one of the poor-performing councils that Mahuta is using as an excuse for her radical master plan), Ferguson – now sounding positively obtuse – insisted: “But you still haven’t explained why the ownership matters.”

At this point you could have forgiven Worboys for getting impatient herself, but she tried again. “Because we want a local voice in what happens to our infrastructure ...” Ferguson then imperiously talked over the top of her, again demanding to know: “Why?” Worboys' answer (and I’m again taking the liberty of paraphrasing her) was that every council’s situation is different and they want the right to make their own decisions, specific to their own needs and circumstances – a right that will be denied to them once they’re absorbed into an amorphous entity with 21 other councils, as would happen in Manawatu’s case.

It’s the accountability thing that Ferguson seemed either unwilling or unable to grasp, and it’s worrying – to put it mildly – that someone in her position professes not to see the massive accountability deficit that arises when control over billions of dollars’ worth of assets is transferred from councils, which are directly answerable to local voters, to remote bureaucracies appointed by a political and tribal elite accountable to … well, who, exactly? We don’t really know. (Coincidentally, Three Waters is based on a model from Scotland, which is where Ferguson came from. Former Far North mayor Wayne Brown explained here why the government would have learned more from Madagascar.)

Ferguson gave the impression she saw no harm in a bullying government using its power to push through radical changes, unmandated by voters. Her line of questioning could be summarised thus: "What's the problem? Why are you getting in the way?" But accountability lies at the heart of a functioning democracy. Take it away and we might as well also dispense with Parliament, councils and all the other institutions that are supposed to be ultimately answerable to the public. Come to that, there’d be no place for programmes like Morning Report either, because they depend for their existence on acceptance of the notion that in a democracy, people in power must be held accountable.

But then, democracy is notoriously untidy and inconvenient. How much cleaner and more efficient it would be if we delegated all power to an unelected central authority that knows what’s best for us. There’s even a ready-made name for it: the Politburo.

Mental health gets the standard Labour treatment

Labour governments typically have two standard responses to a political problem, or even the mere perception of one. They either throw vast amounts of money at it, or they create an unwieldy, centralised bureaucracy to give the impression something is being done. Sometimes it’s both, since these solutions often overlap.

We’ve already seen several examples of both approaches under this government and it’s not even one-third of the way through its term. In health and education, Labour is re-inventing the wheel by setting up potentially cumbersome bureaucracies that will strip away all pretence of local representation – and in the former case, create a co-governance structure that will give Maori power vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Reform of local government is still to come, and we can expect it to follow a similar path.

Even more egregious is Labour’s proposed Three Waters upheaval – a project so flawed and obnoxious that even the mayors of Auckland and Christchurch, both former Labour cabinet ministers, have declared their opposition.  

Another former Labour minister, Richard Prebble, succinctly describes Three Waters as the biggest robbery in our history. “The government is taking over $35.7 billion of ratepayers’ water assets and leaving the ratepayers with the debt,” Prebble writes in the New Zealand Herald.

Once again a centralised, opaque governance structure will be created that will give grossly disproportionate power to unelected Maori, sweep away local representation and discard generations of local knowledge, investment and experience.

Arguably the most offensive aspect of Three Waters is its audacious dishonesty. Rather than solving a problem, the government has invented one. The entire exercise has been sold to the public on the basis of a one-off incident – Havelock North’s 2016 water crisis, when four people died and thousands fell ill as a result of contaminated groundwater.

Using that isolated event as its primary justification, Labour has insulted our intelligence by spending millions on an infantile advertising campaign aimed at scaring us into believing the entire country’s water infrastructure is in such a parlous state that only the imposition of a new layer of remote, unaccountable bureaucracy can save us. In fact most councils manage their water safely and effectively without help from the Big State, still less any need for a dodgy Scottish governance model.

Another striking example of textbook Labour kneejerk-ism is Health Minister Andrew Little’s action plan (I use that term sardonically) for mental health.

It bears all the familiar hallmarks of Labour box-ticking: a Maori name, Kia Manawanui (apparently it means “have patience”, which seems apposite given how long the mentally ill may have to wait for anything to happen); a blizzard of empty buzzwords (two examples: “joined-up investment” and “a digital eco-system of support”); a 10-year plan (Stalin and Mao were fond of visionary plans too); and the creation of yet another new bureaucracy, in this instance an "external oversight group” headed by a dependable Labour favourite in the person of Professor Judy McGregor.

All this is intended to create the illusion of decisive, meaningful action, but it’s merely the announcement of a plan that has yet to be formulated. It contains nothing substantive or concrete – not even any goals or targets (they’ll come later, presumably).  It will provide work for lots of highly paid consultants and hangers-on but do nothing in the short term to help people suffering from mental illness. In short, it’s a disgrace and a travesty.

It’s not as if the government hasn’t had plenty of time already to assess the problem. It commissioned a mental health inquiry (another thing Labour’s good at) that produced a doorstop of a report in 2018, and it has budgeted for $1.9 billion to sort things out – money that it doesn’t seem to know how to spend. Responsible governments decide what needs to be done then work out what it’s likely to cost. But this one appears to work backwards, plucking a sum out of the air then wondering what to do with it.

In the meantime, Little continues to huff and puff over National’s supposed neglect of mental health (which may have been a fair criticism in 2018, but voters allow governments only one term to blame the previous lot; after that the excuse just doesn’t cut it) and wrings his hands in frustration at his inability to get anything done. Pardon me, but isn’t he supposed to be in charge?

And now, after all that, it seems we’re being told that what’s needed is more talk, more planning and ... oh yes, a layer of "oversight". If words and reports were all it took to solve the problem, New Zealand would be the most mentally robust nation on the planet.

Someone who has monitored the deepening crisis in mental crisis over many years is Andy Espersen of Nelson, a regular commenter on this blog who spent his entire working life in psychiatric hospitals. Following the announcement of Labour’s mental health “plan” he wrote the following letter to Little, part of which I reproduce here with his permission:

Dear Andrew Little.

Your government uncritically followed He Ara Oranga [the 2018 inquiry into mental health and addiction] by almost immediately accepting 38 of its 40 recommendations –  practically rubber-stamping them. You simply did not leave enough time to properly investigate, understand and weigh up the recommendations.

This inquiry was set up exclusively to solve the following New Zealand mental health problems:

 1. The increased number of suicides among clients of our mental health services.

2. The obvious shortage of fully serviced, psychiatric in-patient beds.

3. The number of atrocious murders of innocent people by known mental health patients.

4. The chaotic and dangerous state of affairs in our acute mental health units where both staff and patients are regularly assaulted by insane patients.

5. The never-ending complaints from carers (usually parents) of schizophrenic sufferers re lack of realistic support for them.

6. The problem with our many single, homeless people now slumped in our streets – of whom at least 70% are suffering from schizophrenia. 

7. The fact that whereas before 1992 we did not have one single schizophrenic sufferer in prison (it was actually illegal to imprison a schizophrenic person) – we now have ca. 2000 mentally ill prisoners (20% of our total prison population!). Tony Bouchier, then President of the NZ Criminal Bar Association, in an RNZ interview on Feb. 18th 2016, stated, “One of the main reasons the prison muster is so high is that our prisons are our proxy for our mental health institutions which we no longer have. And everybody in criminal law will tell you this, from judges through to defence counsel, if there was another way to deal with these people through proper mental health legislation our muster would be a lot smaller”.

Those were the reasons for setting up the Paterson Inquiry. Jonathan Coleman (former  Minister of Health) resisted an inquiry into mental health, dryly observing :”We know the problems – why set up an inquiry?”. Those were the problems Dr Coleman and all other people working with the mentally ill then knew as facts.

Nevertheless, in came your Labour party –  up came Ron Paterson [the inquiry chair] – and out came He Ara Oranga.

My proofs for your being ill advised by your public service employees consist of the following facts :

 1. Nowhere in the 219 pages report will you find any reference to any of the above mentioned 7 stark, accepted mental health problems, except suicide.

2. Nowhere in its 219 pages will you find any mention of the treatment of mental illnesses -  schizophrenia, human insanity, dementia, endogenous depressions  or any of the neuroses. You won't even find the words for those conditions mentioned (except schizophrenia once, in passing,  in chapter 1, page 33).

3. Nowhere in the 219 pages will you find any reference to the most drastic changes happening to New Zealand's philosophy of treating mental illness in 150 years, namely the enactment of the 1992 Mental Health Act -  which you are now blithely revoking and replacing. As none of the 7 problems mentioned above existed prior to 1992, one can hardly avoid suspecting that those changes might be a factor behind those problems!

4. All you get from the report is an incredibly vague treatise on something the commission calls   “mental well-being” -  which has nothing whatsoever  to do with mental illness. We are advised that we shall all attain that state of  eternal bliss when we have enough mental health personnel  to reach 20% of our population rather than the miserable 3.7% as at present!

5. The report lacks any practical suggestions how to initiate working towards this eventual utopia. It is all just fine words and sentiments  – all politically correct. There is nothing to hang your hat on – as is  amply proved by the fact that nobody has yet  figured out how to even begin to spend the $1.9 billion so generously promised by Labour!!   And by the way,  we who are passionately concerned about mental health were jubilant when Labour came out with that fantastic budget.

It beggars belief that your Mental Health Directorate advised you to follow the recommendations from He Ara Oranga  - ignoring  the facts shown above.

So far I have only criticised  -  which is easy.    I wish to finish on a positive note: How then should we proceed to repeal and replace the 1992 Act?  In 1991 British social historian Waltroud Ernst wrote a paper on 19^th century psychiatry in New Zealand.  Our first mental health legislation was The Lunatics Ordinance 1846.   Ernst wrote that it aimed to “provide safe custody and the prevention of offences by persons dangerously insane and for the care and maintenance of persons of unsound minds”. This brief synopsis  shows the foundation for the building of all our designated,  psychiatric hospitals  for 150 years - together with our whole philosophy of our treatment of all our mental illnesses. 1. It authorised society to contain acutely psychotic persons and charitably protect them from their own actions over which they have no control. 2. It gave all mentally ill persons the right to remain as a wards of the state under protection for the rest of their lives, if they so desired.

We enjoyed this mental hospital based system for 150 years – and everybody, including the mentally ill, were very satisfied and content.  I here must stress that other groups of people who eventually became patients in our mental hospitals (e.g. the intellectually disabled and the epileptics) were never happy here. This system was destroyed for ideological reasons only by the enactment of the 1992 Act – and its consequential closure of our charitable, residential institutions.

Our ten-year mental health plan should be simply to revert to the charitable philosophy of yesteryear. And would it not be good if  the whole of parliament would agree to that plan?

I have been in touch with Shane Reti  [deputy leader of the Opposition] and happen to know  that he sympathises with my views – he is an old time medical doctor who spent part of his training working in mental hospitals but, of course, like you he is thwarted by the convictions of our present mental health ideologues.  It would be ideal if you and he  could get together to talk about all this.  And why not include Brooke van Velden [ACT deputy leader]?  Please, please – do try to work towards a multi-party solution to the mental health issue.   It is ironic (and saddening)  that Judith Collins and Jacinda Ardern both claim to have mental health as a priority  but don't get together to work something out.

You politicians are supposed to be running the show – not your advisors.  It is the same with all this Covid nonsense. Here you are legislating and issuing decrees  – all terribly destructive  to New Zealanders, with long-lasting,  devastating effects both economically and psychologically.  And meekly excusing it  by saying that  you are following expert advice. But you are not obliged to follow “expert advice”.   Your job is exclusively to do the best, the most humane, the most charitable, the most rational for your fellow New Zealanders who have honoured you and elected you to govern –  and if that runs counter to scientific, epidemiological opinions, so be it. 

Yours sincerely,

Andy Espersen

Updates on propaganda, Piney and the Pravda Project

Three postscripts to recent blogs:

■ Political scientist Bryce Edwards, who runs The Democracy Project out of Victoria University, has stitched together a very useful summary of media comment on the Three Waters project, opposition to which is rapidly mounting as its implications – mainly relating to centralisation of control and the consequent erosion of local accountability – become more obvious.

As already noted in an addendum to my post last Friday on the subject, the government has committed $3.5 million to an advertising blitz intended to soften us up for this massive power grab. The egregiously patronising tone of the campaign indicates that neither the government nor its advertising agency think much of the public’s intelligence.

But Edwards’ wrap-up reveals something equally disturbing. He cites an article by Stuff local democracy reporter Chloe Ranford which suggests that the boundaries of the four proposed water authorities, which some perplexed commentators have called illogical, were drawn to align with iwi boundaries.

Coming on top of the He Puapua report, with its vision of 50-50 co-governance with Maori, this will stoke suspicions that the Three Waters project is as much about power-sharing with iwi as it is about reducing costs and ensuring consistency of water quality and administrative efficiency.

Does anyone remember Labour being up-front about this in last year’s election campaign? I don’t, but of course that could be incipient dementia.

■ One of the regrettable things about sports radio station SENZ’s sacking of producer Sam Casey for saying what he thought (always a risk in the mainstream media these days, unless you’re a certified, card-carrying wokester) was that Jason Pine got caught up in the controversy.

For those who don’t know him, "Piney" is a veteran NewstalkZB sports broadcaster who was head-hunted by the new Australian-owned outfit to host its night-time show and help put the station’s team together.

Pine, a close colleague and friend of my late brother Justin at Newstalk, is well-liked and respected. I imagine he would have felt acutely uncomfortable at being required to issue a media statement on behalf of his new employers confirming Casey’s dismissal. It wasn’t the type of start he would have anticipated.

Well, waddya know? The digital news service BusinessDesk reports today that Pine has handed in his resignation and is believed to be heading back to Newstalk, where I imagine he’ll be welcomed home with open arms.

Sources told BusinessDesk there had been no falling-out between Pine and SENZ and that he’d simply decided the new job wasn’t the “right fit”. But that sounds to me like HR-speak designed to gloss over an embarrassing situation for the company. More likely he formed the opinion, after the Casey episode, that SENZ wasn’t the type of outfit he wanted to work for.  

So I’m pleased to report that Pine’s honour is intact. But as BusinessDesk says, it’s hardly an auspicious start for SENZ, which doesn’t launch till July 19. The immortal words of Sergeant-Major Williams from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum come to mind: “Oh dear, how sad, never mind”.

■ Further to my previous references to the government’s $55 million media bribe (sorry, I meant to say its heroic attempt to save journalism, which you can read about here and here), Graham Adams on Muriel Newman’s Breaking Views website reports an exchange in Parliament last week that I haven’t seen covered elsewhere.

Judith Collins and David Seymour were putting the heat on Jacinda Ardern over Labour’s so-called Public Interest Journalism Fund. Collins wanted to know whether the fund – applicants for which must commit to Treaty principles and support for te reo, among other things – was influencing the editorial decisions of media outlets. Seymour more pointedly asked what would happen to a media outlet that had accepted money from the fund but wanted to report something deemed inconsistent with Treaty principles.

Ardern brushed off the questions as if they weren’t worthy of an answer, but that’s by the bye. What interests me is whether the exchange in the House was reported by any media outlet that has accepted, or has its hand out for, money from the fund.

This highlights another potentially disturbing and insidious aspect of the media slush fund. Can we expect mainstream media outlets to report criticism of the fund or possible revelations and concerns about its misuse, or will that be left to independent journalists such as Adams?  

You see what's happening here? I'm already wondering whether the media are choosing to ignore stories about the fund that might not reflect favourably on it or them. The mere fact that it’s necessary to ask this question shows how media companies compromise their credibility by accepting money from a highly politicised government agency.  

Incidentally, “Public Interest Journalism Fund” strikes me as a bit of a mouthful, and time-consuming to type, besides. So I’m giving it a shorter, punchier name: the Pravda Project, after the old Soviet Union’s esteemed official press organ, on the assumption that the PIJF will exhibit the same fearless independence and unstinting commitment to the truth.

Funding our own indoctrination

A couple of weeks ago I was confronted by an unusually puerile full-page advertisement in the local paper. I say “unusually” because it goes without saying that a lot of advertising, on TV especially, could most charitably be described as less than cerebral. But this took infantilism in advertising to a new low.

The text was written as if intended for pre-schoolers. But rather than try to convey the tone of this nonsensical doggerel with a mere excerpt, I’ll reproduce it in its entirety:

IMAGINE AOTEAROA WITHOUT GOOD WATER

What a stink as place that would be.

Trout would be grumpy.

Boating no fun.

And dirty ducks a sad sight to see.

Mean as manus wouldn’t be mean.

Showers a complete waste of time.

Bathrooms would be just rooms.

Togs just undies.

And our awa, all filthy with slime.

 

That’s why we’ve got a plan,

‘cos we’re water’s biggest fan.

So let’s make it better than fine.

The accompanying illustrations, crudely drawn comic-style, showed a pipe belching noxious-looking waste into a river, a duck swimming through sludge and a horrified child bather coated in muck, all eye-catchingly presented in full colour.

It finished with the inspirational slogan “Better Water is Better for Everyone”, complete with a Maori translation for the benefit of the many readers who don’t understand English.

You may have figured out by now that it was a government ad promoting the Three Waters project, and I now note that TV viewers are being bombarded with an animated version.

That’s right: we’re paying for an extravagant advertising campaign aimed at persuading us that the government’s grab for control over the nation’s water infrastructure is in our own best interests.

Even as the government is going through the motions of seeking endorsement from the 67 local authorities that stand to lose control over a crucial part of their operations, it’s trying to go around them by pitching directly to us – in effect, circumventing its own process. And we’re picking up the tab – in other words, funding our own indoctrination.

If nothing else impresses you about Jacinda Ardern’s government, you have to gasp at its sheer hubris. This is a government that thinks the public so passive and malleable that it can get away with anything.

Regardless of what you think about the Three Waters proposal (and my main concern, as with many of this government’s initiatives, is that it represents a further centralisation of power and erosion of local autonomy), it’s a breathtakingly brazen misuse of taxpayers’ money.

There might be a case for a fact-based information campaign (Ha! Faint chance, I hear you say) setting out the arguments for and against the plan. That might have provided some helpful context for the debate the country needs to have before deciding whether Three Waters is worth supporting.

But this campaign doesn’t pretend to explain anything. It doesn’t have so much as a fig-leaf of legitimacy. It’s targeted at the same gormless, credulous lot who swoon with admiration for Greta Thunberg. Not content with misusing our money, the government and its advertising agency (Who are they? They should be named and shamed) insult the nation’s intelligence with a propaganda campaign that’s thumb-suckingly fatuous.  

And as long as we’re paying to subject ourselves to a blatantly politicised ad campaign, is it too much to expect that it should at least be semi-literate?

“Stink as” and “mean as” would make marginally more sense – only marginally, mind you – if they were written as stink-as and mean-as, indicating that the expressions were adjectival. And what about that culturally inappropriate “s” on “manus”? Why would the copy writer carefully omit the “s” when he/she pluralised the Maori word for river (awa), recognising that there’s no “s” in te reo, but leave it on the word for bird?

I guess this is the sort of confused mess that sub-literate advertising creatives (as they like to call themselves) get into when they try to ingratiate themselves with a target audience that never reads newspapers anyway. Then there’s “’cos we’re [plural] water’s biggest fan [singular]” – but now I’m starting to sound like a grammar Nazi.

The final affront in all this is the knowledge that the ad agency will have banked a preposterous sum of money for this juvenile dreck. How do I know? Because that’s what ad agencies do. The Three Waters campaign is further proof (not that it was needed) that in the advertising racket, there’s no ad too inane and no client too gullible.

Footnote (added July 11): I see $3.5 million has been budgeted for the advertising campaign. My case rests.