Not only have we seen the passing of a universally admired and much-loved woman who, as Queen Elizabeth, dedicated her life to the service of her people. We are also witnessing the decline of reasoning, even rationality, and the self-evident truth of issues upon which these depend. In fact, the shadows are not just over my homeland of New Zealand but over other Western democracies including Canada, where, shockingly enough, the sixth-leading cause of death is euthanasia.

New Zealand’s own strongly pro-death ACT party leader David Seymour, who, like Jacinda Ardern, voted that aborted babies born alive should be denied medical help or care, assured New Zealanders that introducing assisted death into this country would not be the beginning of a slippery slope downwards. Really?

Unfortunate enough to be dominated by one of Western democracies’ most tyrannical and obnoxious prime ministers, Canadians have found the eligibility criteria for choosing assisted death inevitably broadened. Any adult with a serious disease or a mental health condition can now choose euthanasia, with policies being prepared for further liberalisation. More than 10,000 Canadians chose to be put to death in the most recent year for which data is available, with some choosing death because of mounting medical debts. Two instances are cited: one of an individual opting for euthanasia because he couldn’t keep up with the high costs of living at home with caregivers. The other was after a hospital staffer informed him it would cost $1,500 per day to keep him alive in hospital… before then mentioning euthanasia.

A civilisation is in decline when its members are urged to commit suicide. An age of insanity has come upon us, with our hierarchies (too often now wrongly called elites) cynically supporting the politics of delusion, arguably even of madness, as when people refuse to accept certain realities. Such as when an individual is born indisputably biologically male, equipped with the body and physique to substantiate this, but claims to be female. Instead of being offered the mental and emotional support which he may well need to introduce him to the reality that he is provably not female, our hierarchies, especially throughout our degraded universities, have connived at this assault upon fact and reason. Even worse has been their support for our young being propagandised into believing they can choose to change their gender by physically and chemically undergoing what is basically an assault against the bodies of confused children.

Those who argue that this is an actual crime, even when misguidedly undertaken, have an excellent case. The howls of outrage, even of hatred, today directed against those on the side of sanity would not have been heard even one or two decades ago. Pointing out that biology determines whether an individual is a man or a woman, and that simply choosing to identify as ‘transgender’ does not establish it as a truth, was not necessary. I myself identifying as a male would be nonsensical – as silly as someone claiming to be a werewolf or to be invisible. That undoubted truths get dismissed because of their inconvenience has seen the dark creeping further out over the West.

Our democracies have become further assaulted by the battering ram of totalitarianism, as with Premier Dan Andrews employing the police as a brutal political weapon against peaceful protesters. And on this side of the Tasman, Jacinda Ardern faces mounting public pressure for a review into an explosive Interpol leak. Australian reporters Avi Yemini and Rukshan Fernando were inexplicably politically profiled by NZ Police, with Interpol Wellington seeking to stop them entering the country to report on an anti-government protest. Independent reporter Sean Plunket noted that someone in the New Zealand police made the decision to ‘dig up dirt’ to stop them coming, with our typically evasive Prime Minister saying she could not ‘verify’ the secret police memo. Plunket pointed out that if instructions were not given to the police by the government, this question needs to be asked: Do our police have the statutory right to decide whom they want or don’t want in the country, based on their political or other views?

New Zealanders now have almost no say about what is happening in their country. Directives have been given to all government departments to now refer to this country as Aotearoa – overwhelmingly rejected by 90 per cent of New Zealanders in an independent poll. Not for a moment does this faze Ardern, determinedly ignoring the wishes of the majority, not only with regard to her utterly undemocratic policies of co-governance – i.e. regarding a minority of part-Maori descent, often markedly minimal, as legally entitled to not only share, but even control decision-making.

We are ahead, still, of Australia, where the parallel movement to provide special rights to those of aboriginal descent is now underway. Australians need to wake up faster than most well-meaning, but dozy New Zealanders, who good-naturedly did not object to Maori greetings such as Kia ora and Nga mihi taking precedence over English, and our national anthem being first sung in reconstituted Maori. But little by little we have got to the stage where our important institutions now have reinvented, Maori-only names, incomprehensible to most New Zealanders – and telling us nothing about why they exist. Waka Kohati, for example, is meaningless, as is Kainga Ora. And when a sentence incomprehensibly states that a rahui has been put over some land, it is basically insulting to the majority – including new migrants struggling to learn English, our most important national and international language, as well as to preserve their own.

As the so-called indigenous movement gains strength around the world – which should be irrelevant to us here in New Zealand – Maori are not indigenous, and can name the canoes in which they arrived – it’s time for the majority to fight far more determinedly for the values for which our forebears gave their lives in two world wars. It is high time for both our peoples to wake up to the reality that we are facing the deliberate promotion of policies of disaffection, with the fanning of the fires of the grievance industry as part of communism’s  long war against the West. We are late to wake up to the poet Yeats’ warning, ‘The good lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’