Tariana Turia's Legacy

Smoke Free New Zealand by 2025

We have written numerous times about the idiocy of the NZ government declaring that New Zealand will be ciggie free by 2025.  The mechanism to bring this about is steep increases in the price of the deadly evil every year until they will become more expensive than a pot of gold. 

The Force behind this utopian dream was the Maori Party, and in particular its uber-mothering leader, Tariana Turia.  Columnist Barry Soper writes:

The Māori Party will have done a lot of reflection as to why it's no longer in politics. The answer's pretty obvious, they didn't represent the wishes of their people even though they felt they had their best interests at heart.

Their former co leader Tariana Turia, a fierce advocate for all things Maori, wanted better health for her people and one of the best ways to do that she believed was to stop them from smoking, setting silly target of a smoke free New Zealand by 2025.  As the target became more elusive, Turia wanted to ban tobacco products, to make them illegal. When that failed they began pricing them off the market.

Vacuity on Steroids

Idiocy To the Power of Ten

Greenist Julie Anne Genter has already failed.  We are certain of this.  She has announced a meaningless target--meaningless because it represents a make-believe-world where accidents and injuries can be removed totally from roads.  

The Government has proposed an "audacious" target of zero deaths on New Zealand roads.  Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter announced plans for a new road safety strategy this morning, which will include the "Vision Zero" target.  "A target of zero deaths is audacious, and it's also been successful," Genter told an audience of mayors, councillors and officials in Wellington.

"Countries like Canada, Sweden, and Norway all aim for zero road deaths and have considerably lower fatality rates than New Zealand." [NZ Herald]

One blogger, David Farrar calls out this sort of stupid nonsense.

A zero target is a meaningless target and one that a Government does when it is too chicken to be held accountable.  If you have a realistic target such as a 10% reduction, then if you fail to meet it, you can have some accountability.  But a zero target means no one expects it to be met, so it will be ignored.

So, every year from now on, until utopian Genter is voted out of government, we can mark her a failure.  There will be inevitable deaths on New Zealand roads and Genter will be to blame.  She announced a goal and will have failed every year to achieve it. 

We have never claimed to be prophets--but in this case we are claiming perfect certainty that Genter will fail. 

For a certain kind of politician the image or the symbol is more important than reality.  We call such politicians "utopians".  They do not belong, nor can they operate, in the real world.  They are living in the Aboriginal equivalent of dream time.

The More Things Change . . .

Are You Ready For a Great Leap Forward?

It's election season in New Zealand.  As to be expected, it's the season when whacky ideas get airtime.

Here is a sample, a guest post, published by a local blogger.

Maybe instead of voting for the red or blue leader once every few years we should work back from what we value. From my experience, here in NZ we value things like preservation of the environment, more time for personal and creative pursuits, more time for family and friends, less time working, and generally improving the well-being of all citizens. In fact, those values may well be universal. . . . 

It seems as though this contributor wants more "leisure" time to do whatever might take his fancy.  He wants an escape from the drudgery of work.

 They’ve now developed technology that could produce a largely automated abundance of resources for everyone, reducing work time and increasing leisure time substantially, with countless other benefits as a by-product. Within an efficiently designed political, social, and economic framework, their technology could support a radical transformation to the way they make decisions, utilise discoveries, interact with one another, preserve their environment, accelerate progress, and live their lives.

The author bemoans the fact that not enough time and attention is being paid to creating this wunnerful world he envisions.

Ceaselessly Tossed To and Fro

Seething In Vain

All Christians are utopians insofar as they believe that a day is coming when the Lord of heaven and earth will descend from heaven to dwell here and establish a perfect world, without sin--the unfolded and optimised and glorified Paradise of God's original creation.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more  And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.  He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."  (Revelation 21: 1-4)

Most human beings--whether Christian or not--are utopians of one stripe or other.  But at the same time, there is a strong streak of dystopianism running through the race.  In the Unbelieving frame, evil threatens to destroy us all; were it to succeed, suffering and devastation would be universal.  The causes vary--global warming, asteroid strike, economic inequality, famine, destructive ideologies, disease--but the general theme remains fairly constant.  So, the human race is bedevilled by a contradictory utopian-dystopian antithesis which gives no peace--social, personal or otherwise.  Sound familiar?  Any regular reader of a daily metropolitan newspaper will confirm it so. 

Hollow Progress

 In Need of Mercy

Christians believe in progress.  For good reason.  They believe in things getting better because they believe in God, Who is the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer of all things.  In other words, the Christian view of progress is decidedly non-secular. 

Redemptive history reveals at the earliest beginnings that without God, human history becomes a maelstrom of self-destructive evil.  The covenant God subsequently made with Noah assures us that never again would He permit evil to become universally regnant upon the earth.  Progress becomes at least possible in a world where evil is constantly being restrained from its worst excesses.

Secondly, the Bible declares God's providential control and sustenance of His creation.  He loves what He has made, and hates the despoilation wrought by wickedness.  He feeds the animals and cares for them.  He sets boundaries for the sea.  He brings the life-giving sequence of the seasons. 

Thirdly, He has settled the reign over all things upon His Son, Who has come into human history to cast out the Devil and destroy all his works.  This gives a certain assurance of historical progress.

Progress and Its False Prophets

Moving Backwards

Most people assume that history is moving forward.  The present is better than the past.  The human race is heading to a higher, greater future.   In our secular humanist culture this assumption is undergirded by Darwinian evolutionism.  This has always seemed to us to be a most amusing idea: Darwinian evolutionism claims that development is achieved by the survival of the fittest.  That implies that there must be plenty of casualties along the way. 

Modern Western man never assumes that he (or Western culture) will be one of those casualties.  It's always someone else, some other culture that is less than fit and will be destroyed.  Yet within the Darwinian philosophy, Islam might prove to be the better, more powerful culture that sweeps the West into the sea.  Darwinianism cannot predict such things; it only identifies the more fit ex post facto.  Herein lies one of its idiocies.

You Shall Not Pass!

Only Force Standing in the Gap

Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge - for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.

The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of powerworship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith]

The New Model Man

Trying Harder

Over recent months we have discovered the corpus of C J Sanson, a writer of tight, illuminating historical novels.  His premier character is a hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake practising amidst the turbulent times of Henry VIII.  It has often been observed that superior historical novels are one of the best ways to access particular historical periods and times: Dr Sanson's work perfectly illustrates the point.  His historical knowledge is both comprehensive and compelling. 

He has also set novels in the twentieth century.  We have recently read Winter in Madrid, a novel set in Franco's Spain in the early 40's.  In this novel Sanson portrays (in passing) the fantastical notion held by many communists and socialists of the day: when the revolution comes, human nature will be transformed.

Waiting for the Inevitable

Another Grandiose Utopian Project To Follow the Dodo

Ho hum.  Another day.  Another crisis meeting in Europe.  We predict after this weekend's meeting communiques will be issued and declarations made to the effect that "important steps" have been taken.  The crisis can now abate.  It will last twenty-four hours, then the crisis will return, with a vengeance.

Euro-politicians are living in denial.  They cannot bring themselves to face the inevitable and brutal truth.  The euro project is finished.  It is over.  It has to be broken apart.  You can do this in a relatively orderly fashion, once the pollies bow to reality, or it can break apart by itself.  Either way it is going.  Jeff Randall, writing in the Financial Times and the Sydney Morning Herald explains why the euro has to fail:

New Communism on the Trail

The Comeback Kid

Communism is making a comeback.  The windshift has fired up the radicals of yesteryear and got them out on the barricades again "occupying" things.

Where is the new wind coming from?  A cluster of intellectuals who have "had it" with capitalism.  Strangely they are being listened to.  Apparently desperate times call for desperate measures.  Irony lurks here because the European Union of Socialist Republics has told itself for generations that if the states of Europe did not agree to subsidize and fund everyone using other people's money the resulting social dislocation would lead to a recrudescence of National Socialism.  Apparently the diagnosis and prognosis was right yet quite wrong.  The hardships of fiscal austerity are causing a resurgence of interest in Communism amongst the intellectual elites, not Nazism (which so far remains the preserve of the uneducated disaffected).

Alan Johnson, writing in World Affairs, documents the new Communism.  Funnily enough it looks woolly, vacuous, and wishfully utopian--remarkably like the Occupy Wall Street people.

Afghanistan Stocktake

So, How's It Working Out, Then?

Readers of this blog will know that we oppose the war in Afghanistan as an ill-considered utopian debacle, without ethical foundation.

To say this is not to deny the courage or skill or tenacity or application of the combatants on both sides.  But it is to say that whilst the US fight in Afghanistan began as a defensive invasion to defend the US against Al Qaeda--a perfectly legitimate moral and just action--it soon morphed into "nation building", which is unethical and imperialistic.  It is a classic example of the adage that little wars grow into big wars and big wars suck out all your blood. 

But, we really could not expect anything else, given the US's maniacal utopian vision of bestowing the West's peculiar, secular "human rights" doctrine on the rest of humanity.

Bad Weather Coming

Idiotic Utopians and Mountains of Vainglorious Pride

The Soviet Union believed in Five Year Plans--central, government plans--to develop the economy of the Soviet Union to reach a prosperous nirvana whilst creating a new order in the world.  Government planners would focus the resources of the economy on what was vital and important; resources would be delivered; production targets would be set; and the entire army of Soviet New Socialist Citizens would go to work to transform the USSR from poverty to a socialist paradise.

None can gainsay that every attempt was made, every resource was committed.  Yet for nearly one hundred years the Soviet Union was so poor and backward that it did not have enough food for its own people.  Millions upon millions died through starvation and its attendant diseases.  Ah, but the propaganda machine had a ready series of excuses and explanations.