Xenophobia Makes Unwelcome Return

Reflexive Cloth-Cap Labour Pollies

Commentator, Mike Hosking has written an excellent piece, published in the NZ Herald a few days ago.  It concerns the proposed NZ government ban on "furreigners" buying real estate in general and houses in particular.  This policy put forward by the obtuse Labour Party is antediluvian insofar as it comes right out of the socialist playbook written well over a century ago.  It also contains elements of crass nationalism.  It represents protectionism.  

Labour unions and left wing politicians think it makes eminent sense for New Zealand to be kept for NZ citizens.  Keep furreigners out.  However such populist twaddle turns out to be positively dangerous when the respective countries of those horrible furreigners start to retaliate with trade and investment barriers against New Zealand.  All of a sudden we are confronted with the unfortunate reality that New Zealand is a minnow in the grand global scheme of things.  We are easily netted and squashed.

Here is Hosking at his splenetic best:

Encouraging Signs

Not Yet Living Within Our Means, But Progress Nonetheless

And now, a good news story.  One of the things that has bedevilled the New Zealand economy for decades is the dearth of capital.  As a nation which has practised "socialism without doctrines", as historian Michael Bassett put it, we have not saved, nor valued, nor husbanded sufficient capital.  Why save, when the state taxes and distributes, with the goal of creating cradle to the grave security? 

Consequently, the Balance of Payments has run at a deficit for a long, long time.  This econometric statistic measures whether NZ Inc is trading at a surplus or deficit, whether as a nation it is making more than it spends, or whether it is relying upon others outside New Zealand to fund our lifestyles in aggregate.  The perpetual deficit is a record of our having become accustomed to living standards way beyond our national means. 

Gradually this situation is changing.

A Man of Principle

A Politician Not For Turning

Most politicians are seen as venal and self-serving.  They will do anything, say anything to get their name and their "brand" in the public's mind.  But not the mercurial Winston Peters.  Here is a politician of different stamp, not only with deep convictions, but one willing to pursue and investigate wrongs, exposing the corruption and evil actions of his own class. 

We have long admired his campaign against selling 8,000 hectares of (not-so-prime-farmland-at-the-time) to Chinese company Shanghai Pengxin last year. Land is precious to New Zealand, argues Mr Peters.  We should not be selling it off to foreigners.  Peters has the evidence to prove his point.  He has personally tramped over every hectare of the Shanghai Pengxin farms at not inconsiderable personal cost.  He has seen what has happened to the land.

Raggle Taggle Leaders

Deafening Silence

We expect a chorus of indignation and outrage swelling to a climactic crescendo in Parliament this week.  Something truly terrible has happened in the land--the kind of thing so bad that mothers clutch their children to their breasts in mortal dread. 

A Maori tribe has sold--yes sold!--land given to it as part of a treaty settlement.  Te Uri o Hau was awarded some land near Mangawhai just north of Auckland which consisted of 616 hectares of forest in prime coastal land.  They are selling off a third (230 hectares).  Who is going to stand up to protest? 

Well, we expect that the Mana Party, the Green Party, and probably the Maori party are going to express moral outrage at the betrayal of Maori being disenfranchised from their land with which they have a deep spiritual connection, and in communion with which Maori hear the ancient spirits talking to them.