As New Zealand slides into poverty status, our worst-ever government determinedly wages war against the very concept of a democracy – where individuals have the same rights and responsibilities, regardless of their ethnic background. Nowhere has this been more flagrantly demonstrated than in the recent shocking pay-out of $NZ835 million to groups of part-Maori individuals, although their spokesman, Willie Jackson, Minister of Maori Development, openly admits that this nearly $900 million is not going to go to most Maori.

There are no longer any Maori-only individuals in New Zealand. And the majority of those of part-Maori descent, like all other New Zealanders, disassociate themselves from the highly vocal and aggressive minority from whom most of the incessant whinging about disadvantage comes – well-heeled individuals in government and academic circles. Many, if not most, are predominantly European, with as little as 1/16th or 1/32nd Maori genetic inheritance, and are also descended from those colonists who travelled across the world to make a better life for themselves and their families. The latter’s contribution to the lives of slave-owning, cannibalistic tribes, locked into a cycle of internecine warfare and utu (revenge), sharing a barbaric culture of chisel-tattooing the faces of captives prior to their heads being cut off and smoked, was utterly invaluable. In spite of the inevitable wrongs occurring in any people’s co-history, no country has been more generous in paying accumulatively billions of dollars in compensation for supposed breaches of treaty settlements.

However, it has all gone too far. That there is no official definition of Maori is unacceptable, with the continuing handouts to hierarchical part-Maori utterly inexcusable. With the Maori economy now worth approximately $70 billion, there is no excuse for our government’s constant caving in to radicalised individuals’ incessant demands for special, race-based funding – particularly because it is well recognised that having vested interest groups managing these has certainly enriched the latter, but done little for those in genuine need.

This is demonstrably so, given that throwing billions of dollars over the years to ameliorate claimed Maori poverty and other social disadvantages has apparently not worked. Interestingly, if $1million had been given to every individual of part-Maori descent – to ensure their escape from personal disadvantage – most of those billions of dollars would have been saved…

Given these facts, prioritising the interests of radicalised part-Maori is inexcusable. As Willie Jackson openly admitted, most others are not attached to organisations receiving this race-based funding. The inappropriate nature of these grants is not only utterly inexcusable: it deflects funding away from where it is badly needed in so many other cash-strapped areas.

Jacinda Ardern’s ridiculous deification of Matariki Day, making a public holiday of the day Maoris formerly celebrated the rising of the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters – as if they themselves had discovered this long-known astral cluster – cost this country an estimated $500 to $700 million, with employers and manufacturers describing it as a blow to businesses and productivity. Yet the recent budget blowout allocated another $18 million over four years for Matariki Day. And at a time when so many families struggle to survive, the constant financing of events such as $34 million over two years for a Te Matatina Kapa Haka cultural festival, grandiosely describing it as achieving equivalence with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – is inexcusable. It could well be funded from the wealthy Maori economy. Cash-strapped taxpayers are not called upon to carry the costs of other ethnic groups’ festivals. It is quite untrue to claim the Treaty of Waitangi requires New Zealanders to divert funding from much-needed initiatives elsewhere for such non-essential happenings.

New Zealand, for example, is now bottom of the OECD for access to modern medicines with cancer treatments unfunded that are widely available elsewhere. Doctors‘ waiting times are now fifth to bottom of the 38 OECD countries. Emergency Department wait times have further deteriorated, with more than one in five people waiting at least six hours even for urgent treatment. The number of patients waiting for specialists for over a year has gone up seventeen-fold since 2019, with lengthening surgery waiting lists. We have a desperate shortage of nurses – particularly so given the Ardern government’s refusal to grant them priority in assessment criteria for immigration. We have paid a devastating price, as reportedly nearly 5,000 New Zealand nurses have registered to work in Australia since last August, with only one nurse arriving from overseas. New Zealand, in 2023, has reportedly had 19,000 nurses leaving the profession in the last five years under this Labour government, a 60 per cent increase since 2017.

Government debt has more than doubled, and the IMF’s 2023 outlook forecasts we will have one of the lowest GDP growth rates in the Asia-Pacific region, with New Zealand’s current account balance reported as 8.6 per cent of GDP – worse than Greece. We have gone from one of the best GDP performing countries in the world to having the worst current account deficits.

One can well regard it as a great wickedness when a government determinedly creates two classes of citizens, although well aware that prioritising the rights of those from a particular ethnic background not only offends against the concept of fairness, but will of course provoke resentment. The inevitable ensuing backlash produces a virtual culture war resulting in the destabilising of a country – grist to the mill of neo-Marxists apparently long well-placed not only in ‘the long march’ throughout our institutions, but also within our political parties.

Labour’s appalling record is of contriving a decline in virtually every aspect of our national life since the Ardern government took office in 2017.Our public services and infrastructure are crumbling, and New Zealanders are increasingly aware that we need a major reset of priorities – and to value productivity – with separatist iwi consultations regarded as a black hole.

Public sector managers are growing at nearly twice the rate of frontline workers since the current government came to power, and spurious, reinvented requirements by the Treaty of Waitangi industry has ‘Treaty Training’ now mandatory for members of New Zealand professional bodies – providing a huge disincentive to skilled, prospective immigrants with no wish to learn today’s demonstrably inauthentic, reinvented Maori language.

The fact that our far-left government must be very well aware of this forces the question: what is its real agenda?