Give that Man a DB

An Old Curmudgeon Makes Sense

Mike Moore, of the notorious "fish and chips brigade", former Prime Minister, and former head of the World Trade Organisation, is making a lot of sense these days. Maybe it is the growing wisdom of age. Or possibly it is that he has no political axe to grind any more and he is free to speak his mind.

His opinion piece on the imbroglio over child discipline is salutary. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are some highlights.

The expensive, puerile, futile controversy over the ill-considered anti-smacking legislation is a monument to political cowardice and opportunism.

The legislation was never going to achieve what its promoters claimed, and was never going to send good parents to court, as its opponents suggested. Monsters who harm babies are not going to consult the Law Library, and no sane court is going to convict a parent because of a gentle, corrective pat.

Believing the courts are always sane might be stretching things a bit. And it is cold comfort to parents who have been put through the wringer of a police or CYFS investigation under the aegis of the current law, but we digress . . .

Why the multimillion-dollar political hoax of a referendum? Because a series of dreadful child abuse cases hit the headlines and some politicians needed a headline and wanted to be seen to be doing something.

The tears of some politicians on television would have shamed a weeping crocodile. So, someone reached for the law book, wound up the lobby groups and the media.

Now, here is where it gets interesting. Moore begins to put his finger on the ratchet-like clamp which is now perverting good government in this country.

This brings up a wider question; we have the fastest law-making system in the West. If there is a problem, we demand the Government take legislative action. The melancholy truth about law-making is that 90 per cent of our repressive laws are passed to cover the actions of less than 10 per cent of the people.

We now have unaccountable, well-funded commissions on just about everything. These commissions pump out recommendations that are always costly and seek law changes.

They have compliant accomplices in the media who demand accommodating politicians make these priorities theirs. I coughed my coffee through my nose when I heard the Law Commission release the stunning revelation that young people ingest alcohol late at night. All this time I had thought they drank booze.

The tradeoffs between personal liberty, collective guilt, and the need to satisfy special interests, has not abated nor been debated. The view that we should be left alone because most people are not the problem is swamped by a tsunami of advocates.

This forces the politicians to respond. They must be seen to be doing something.

When man is put at the centre of the world, arrogation of power into the hands of elites is inevitable. Checks and balances can only be maintained in a polity where the broad consensus (long since laid to rest) is that man is fundamentally flawed and implicitly evil. This applies to governors, as well as governed. But since governors have power, and because man is actually evil, power corrupts. Governors will serve themselves first, and lust for more and more controls, more and more powers--unless they are restrained and checked.

But when you believe, as the vast majority do, that man is fundamentally the biggest and the brightest and the best living being on the planet--and is fundamentally good in a moral and ethical sense--arrogation and concentration of power into the hands of elites and the few makes excellent sense.

The liberal academic media complex now dominates government in our country. It is no longer an exaggeration to speak of a governing class in our country. It has even got to the stage of the government funding special advocacy and interest groups so that they can give the government "researched" advice along the lines that the government is seeking, with a media standing as the complicit and willing mouthpiece for both advocacy interests and government. All operate under a common assumption that they know what is best for everyone.

The Commission for Families is typical. Set up by the government as an advocacy group, funded by taxpayers, staffed by people carefully selected to reflect the prevailing humanist world-view, it sets out to counter family violence. Within a few years it has expanded the definitional boundaries of family violence to include arguments and abuse to self-worth. Then it funds a bunch of academics to survey families, only to come back and report that family violence is a much bigger problem than we had ever thought. Now that's a surprise.

So, clearly the Commission for Families must be doing good work. And it will need more funding because the problem is bigger. And its advocacy role is suddenly much much greater. It went ahead and produced a report advocating and arguing for Maori seats in the new Auckland Council. What? What on earth has local body governance structures got to do with a families? Yes, but elites are, well, superior--and as such they need to give people the benefit of their wisdom in every area of life.

And so it goes on. What Moore has described is a deep structural malaise in our polity. But it will not be addressed nor torn down as long as the majority of people in our country make an idol out of man, and bow down to him in every place.