The contempt in which so many hold politicians is unfair to those with integrity and high ideals. However, the revelation that Sam Uffindell, the New Zealand National party’s winning candidate at the recent Tauranga by-election, has conceded he was a bully at King’s College, a prestigious private school with its own reputation for a history of bullying, is a blow to National. Some months ago Uffindell apologised to a bullied victim who accepted his apology, but is now expressing cynicism about it being politically motivated.

It’s a double blow to National, given the march away from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s destructive, racially divisive policies, the polls presently showing National and ACT could form the next government. Worse is to come, not only because National’s leader, Christopher Luxon, was not informed by his staff of the contrite Uffindell’s virtual expulsion. Allegations are also being made by a former Otago University flatmate of Uffindell’s that he was so bullying and abusive that she climbed out the window one night to escape, her father arriving next morning to find the flat trashed. Uffindell, now under investigation, denies these allegations but admits he ‘enjoyed a student lifestyle’ with alcohol and cannabis usage. If this is now the common practice in our universities, given their hierarchies’ subservience to racist requirements in relation to degree courses and research funding, it is little wonder so many parents are now looking elsewhere for their children to achieve qualifications – including overseas and distance learning.

The flight from Labour is under way, with well-respected Labour MP, Dr Guarav Sharma, expelled from the Labour caucus because of his accusations of internal bullying, inevitably denied by his leader, assisted by our now complaint media describing him as a rogue MP. However, National has gained some prospective voters largely by default. Its low-polling leader, Christopher Luxon, is now widely viewed as not up to the job of addressing more than one of the concerning issues of the day. These include around 1 million New Zealanders, about one-fifth of the population, who are expressing interest in leaving, not only because of better living opportunities overseas but from concern about the racist initiatives Ardern is so determinedly promoting.

That politicians are more than economical with the truth when it suits is no new discovery. However, our slippery Prime Minister, a mistress of evasion when it comes to answering direct questions, is in a class of her own. Interviewed recently about her government’s failure to deliver on its important promises – such as building 100,000 new houses in ten years (it built just 1,366) she rebuked the interviewer for not recognising her as ‘aspirational’. This from a government spending over $1 billion on emergency housing grants, including buying motel rooms. Her flagship policy of reducing childhood poverty has overseen its increase, with mental health outcomes worsening under her watch. Businesses are closing, desperate for workers. Our over-stretched hospitals lack nurses because of her government’s emphasis on wealthy immigrants.

A surge in violent crime accompanies increased gang activities, including drive-by shootings and ‘ram-raids’ – cars smashing into shopfronts to steal merchandise – the police seen as failing the public.

We are becoming an increasingly conflicted people with Labour’s plans for virtual control of our assets by today’s tribal corporations. We now have a separate Maori health authority with veto rights over our whole system. The Department of Conservation has recommended giving control and governance of the entire conservation estate to Maori. Land owned by wealthy iwi corporations worth several billion dollars is largely exempted from paying rates. $100 million of taxpayer funding was used to upgrade maraes – Maori meeting houses and adjoining property – a spectacular failure. The history syllabus of the school’s curriculum has been re-written, bowdlerising the lifestyles of pre- and post-European Maori.

The list goes on with the government abolishing local communities’ rights to hold a binding referendum on unelected Maori representatives being given voting rights on councils.  At least five per cent of all government procurement contracts must now go to Maori businesses.

A Maori court system is to see Common Law replaced by Tikanga; supposed customs, with people of Maori ancestry having greater legal rights. Maori jails will treat differently those claiming Maori ancestry. Maori are to have rights to all fresh water, and access to taxpayer funding for their legal costs to claim the seabed and foreshore, from mean high tide up to twelve nautical miles. We can thank former National party prime minister John Key, an admirer of China’s tyrannical Xi Jinping, and then minister Chris Finlayson, for making it possible for part-Maori litigants to claim ownership of all of our foreshore and seabed, right around the country.

It doesn’t stop. Maori language, most newly invented, is being forced into government departments, local authorities and mainstream media, the latter bribed with $55 million to acquiesce to the government’s fabrication that the Treaty of Waitangi was ‘a partnership’ between the Crown and scores of disparate, warring tribes scattered throughout the country. All this, while there is no accepted definition of what it is to be Maori. So part-Maori, many overwhelmingly European or Eurasian in descent, holding privileged, well-funded positions, blithely claim disadvantage.

However,  the tide is turning, not because of the lacklustre Chris Luxon, who has pledged only to repeal the Three Waters legislation. Labour is now on the defensive. Parliament’s watchdog on accountability and transparency, the Auditor-General, has scathingly assessed its proposed changes. His summary is that they will result in a ‘serious diminution in accountability to the public for a critical service’ and ‘no proposed audit scrutiny’. His damning analysis points out that the bill doesn’t even have enough information to see who controls the water entities.

Labour’s response to widespread objections is to dismiss them as ‘mischief-making’. However, a legal opinion commissioned by the Taxpayers Union stated bluntly that, ‘Ministers appear to have cold-bloodedly decided to confuse councils and ratepayers with false statements’ – that claims ‘have been calculated to deceive parliamentarians, and, when it becomes law, to deceive New Zealanders generally.’

While people making false statements would normally face prosecution, the defence applying to politicians does not apply to those assisting ministers in a professional capacity, who can be held complicit in making untrue claims.

With these matters merely the tip of the iceberg in relation to what is becoming close to a dysfunctional country – certainly no longer a democracy – other almost unhinged proposals, including those by the anti-car fanatics, are overdue for scrutiny.