It’s bad enough that the outgoing Labour government laid down a minefield of concealed costs of which the present coalition should have been made aware. Worse is what can be legitimately questioned as sheer corruption, and deliberate attempts to subvert our democracy and kneecap our economy. With former finance minister Grant Robertson now hailed as arguably the most incompetent in our history, the cheques to be written to pay out the many contracts canned as a result of repealing Three Waters will be astronomically expensive. The Labour government signing off on these well knew all New Zealanders were going to be saddled with this burden. And as the new year begins, on an unprecedented scale and increasingly so, the war against the majority in this country is being ramped up on three fronts, including, apparently, the fifth columnists in the mainstream media.

The nationally opposed Three Waters centralisation planning harked back to communist-style control of our local body amenities, removing them from ratepayers’ hands, with racist provisions to basically hand ultimate control of all water assets to wealthy tribal corporations. Fronted by Nanaia Mahuta, who recently lost her seat in parliament, and backed, if not actually instigated, by Jacinda Ardern (but with minimal, if any, support from within the culpably silent Labour caucus) the Labour government and its bureaucracy were well aware of National’s commitment to repeal this legislation. So what did they do?

They booby-trapped the incoming government with the Internal Affairs Department’s five-year contracts, so that, for example, employees who have completed only one year under the scheme are going to have to be paid in full. As over 400 staff were employed, taking up whole office floors – their jobs simply to design policy applicable to the Three Waters – the scrapping of the relevant contracts means an enormous amount of money will be wasted on a scheme against which New Zealanders were protesting. Upwards of one billion dollars has already been spent, reckoned at $503 per household. The point is well made by commentator David Farrar that whoever so recently approved these five-year contracts – which will cost about $500 million, with an extra $12 million for iwi (tribal) collectives – should be named, as it was known this centralisation model was going to be reversed by the very likely incoming government.

What does this say about Labour’s supposed commitment to democratic principles, to governing for the good of the country?

Still to be made public are the IT contracts containing cancellation clauses with penalties worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, Department of Internal Affairs bureaucrats were also caught secretly making changes to the Three Waters legislation – going behind the backs of even Labour ministers. Not one head has rolled. Moreover, Labour has also been accused of proceeding with their unfunded transport plans which would have needed $43 billion over the next decade. Told they were unfunded and impossible to deliver, they still announced them. Why?

Already, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, less than stalwart when under media pressure, is facing backsliding by colleagues saying that it is too hard. Never particularly well-supported by the public, Luxon would be foolish to attempt to silence the Deputy Prime Minister, New Zealand First’s Winston Peters, whom he recently attempted to cut short during Peters’ inaugural, clever, and highly amusing speech in parliament, in which he accused journalists in the mainstream media of allowing themselves to be bribed by the Labour government into accepting the $55m journalist fund. This was provided only if they upheld the government’s policy of inaccurately presenting the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi as establishing a supposed, but impossible, ‘partnership’ between scattered, cannibalistic, warring tribes – and the Crown. The media’s antagonism to Peters (his speech was inaccurately described as a ‘diatribe’) and their encouragement of extremist Maoris is shown in their eagerness to report and exaggerate protests, with flagrantly provocative headlines such as ‘Is the government trying to start a culture war?’, ‘The National-led government faces years of protest over Maori issues’ and, ‘The government is seeking to publicly humiliate Maori’.

Although the highly intelligent Peters, largely known as Winston, was vilified by many for initially choosing, in the 2017 election, to join Ardern’s Labour Party rather than National – ensuring Labour’s electoral victory – what is forgotten is that the open enmity shown to him at the time by a small group of National MPs made it difficult for him to support National. Furthermore, from within Labour, he opposed some of Ardern’s ideological planning, accusing her government of dishonesty, and vowing to not support it in the future.

Winston has also pointed out that Te Pāti Māori – which received only 3 per cent of the vote, about a fifth of the part-Maori population – does not speak for Maori. Both he and ACT Leader David Seymour are part-Maori, and with twenty-five part-Maori in parliament, the abolition of separate Maori seats, long advocated, is well overdue. Moreover, Te Pāti Māori’s attempt to disrupt parliament’s opening ceremony is an insult to our democratic process. Its grandstanding featured unparliamentary dress, what Reuters has wrongly described as indigenous ‘chanting’, and the replacement of the accepted reference to King Charles with a term with objectionable connotations.

Labour’s recent government in coalition with the eco-fascist Greens, and a minority of well-indoctrinated, facially tattooed part-Maori, acting as if their European heritage does not exist (which insults their forebears, and all New Zealanders) has cost us. This is not only in economic terms: our whole demography is changing with the flight of New Zealanders to Australia in particular. A net migration of 44,500 intent on escaping the promotion of racial divisiveness, as well as leaving for more rewarding jobs and pay, is not compensated by an unsustainable increase of 173,000 non-citizen immigrants putting pressure on our infrastructure, accommodation (already long under pressure), transport, and wages. Moreover, we have not been bringing in enough skilled workers to help struggling businesses.

It could well be argued that if Ardern’s socialist Labour government did not actually set out to turn New Zealand into a basket case – this is surely debatable – they are certainly answerable for their ill-designed, divisive, and costly policies. An avowedly Marxist government could hardly have done worse.