Straitjacketing Students?

Although the National Government's introduction of new, across-the-board national standards may have some positive short term benefits, little good can come of further straitjacketing of New Zealand's educational system.

The new national standards are merely the latest in a long line of governmental reforms aimed at curbing the deteriorating quality of education in New Zealand. However well intentioned the latest reforms, the government needs to wake up and realise that the true problems lies with the continual packing of pupils into schools which merely exist for the sake of bureaucratic convenience.

The children and teenagers of New Zealand, like any nation, are an incredibly diverse group of people, with many different talents and abilities that don't reach their full potential. The only way to get pupils to shine, is to treat education as a genuine value.

Education has its greatest value at the individual level, which then rubs off on the rest of society later. How can we expect the youths of the nation to thrive, if they themselves are not taught to see it as that themselves?

The only way to do this is to, once again, get education to be a task of parents and teachers, not of bureaucrats in Wellington. In short: the government needs to butt out of educational arrangements.

So, however well intentioned and well informed National's education reform is, the government simply cannot drastically improve education levels without realising the basic truth: education, fundamentally, is a value. Until the government treats it as such, and gets its head out of bureaucrat-run doll houses known as public schools, continue to expect educational standards to fall into the abyss.

The "Rights" of Beneficiaries

Not surprisingly, the MSM has been all over the case recently of some (not-so) "private" information of some beneficiaries being released into the public sector by Paula Bennett. Although one lady has already realised that her little gesture actually did little to compromise her security at all, the other is still unrepentant.

What she, the public and the MSM are forgetting is that the lady in question is a beneficiary -she lives off public money that has been forcibly extracted from taxpayers. As thus, the taxpayer has the right to know about the people they're paying for!

I suggest something like this, to be available online free of charge, for every beneficiary:

name
sex
age
marital status
no. children
which benefit they're receiving
benefit income per month
other income per month (this could be family income for stay-home mothers)
how long they've been receiving government funds.

This would not apply to pensioners, or children under the age of 18. Once an individual has stopped receiving government benefits, their information is removed from public access. Although the information will allow taxpayers to see how their money is being spent, it will not compromise the security of the beneficiaries.

The database will not include money for tax rebates.

Any beneficiary complaining about the new system will be told that they're receiving public funds; the taxpayer has the right to know who they're paying for, and make decisions accordingly.

The Place of Principals

As a consequence of the National Government’s policy to publicly display school performance data, hundreds of New Zealand Primary School Principals are threatening to boycott literacy and numeracy standards.

As a Libertarian and Objectivist, of course I do not support the governmental interference with matters that rightly belong to schools, teachers, students and parents. But as it stands we are stuck with government’s foot firmly in the door, and millions of taxpayer dollars go to fund primary schools.

As a result, those principals threatening to boycott the standards are public servants –the public has the right to know how good our schools are, as we are paying for them! The taxpayer is their benefactor, so principals have a duty to release information about school performance publicly. Of course, the information doesn't tell all details about every aspect of schooling -but the use of it is at the discretion of parents, not principals.

In a free market for education, principals would reserve the right to release information about their schools. But in a competitive marketplace, it would be a wise decision to release information, to be better able to compete for students and the business they bring. But as parents are forced, through no choice of their own, to fund schooling whether they like it or not, it is their right to choose the best school for their children.

Luckily, Education Minister Anne Tolley believes that parents do have a right to know how about school performance. But principals, in a taxpayer-funded education system, need to remember their place as servants of the public, not masters of their children.

Article:http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/2564336/Principals-in-threat-to-boycott-standards

Open University for Maori?

From the same people talking about the horrid amount of racism that exists in New Zealand society, comes this: no need to have any qualifications to get into University! Unless, of course, you're anything other than Maori.

This is also the same group of people who talk about how they're better than everybody else in New Zealand, because they're "tangata whenua"; essentially, mysticism justifying racism. Somehow, being the first people to migrate here means you deserve more rights than everyone else.

Similarly, they support segregation of seats in Parliament, based on race. A policy that Nelson Mandela may have abhorred, but apparently it's okay because of... skin colour.

The fact of the matter is, you simply can not choose your race, ethnicity, or skin colour. This is a fact that the majority of New Zealanders seem to have grasped by now. Therefore, we should be calling the "tangata whenua" of the Maori Party what they really are:

racist.

Allowing access to University based on race: racist. Discussing how much better your race is over others, due to mysticism: racist. Supporting seats segregated on the basis of race in Parliament: racist.

Indeed, this group thinks based on lines of race. According to them, if an idea is in support of racial equality by not granting preference to people based on race, it's racist. There does not have to be any objective means of proving the racism; this is the absurdity of thinking in terms of race.

Therefore, I think the Maori Party needs to be branded for what it is, once and for all: racist. It can be denied, but the basic truth behind their rhetoric cannot be hidden.

An Irony of Sorts

The Green Party has elected Metiria Turei as their number two -the lesser of two evils, as her rival was Sue Bradford, of Anti-Smacking Bill fame. In response, Tariana Turia, the Maori Party leader, has called the election of a Maori women to the post "a political coup".

Meanwhile, in Porirua, a suburb close to where I live filled with state housing and mongrel mob members on what could've been the prime suburb of New Zealand, we have an arena named after local Maori murderer Te Rauparaha, and no one raises an eyebrow.

Perhaps the real coup would be deliberately naming a new town or infrastructure (an arena, maybe) after, say, William Gladstone. Maori chiefs can do no wrong, surely?

Boscawen's Lamington

For the life of me I'm no ACT supporter, but most ACT members are still head and shoulders above other parliamentarians, one such example being John Boscawen, who led the anti EFA marches last year (which, thankfully, is history).

So, it really annoyed me when a rival candidate at the Mt Albert by-election from the "People Before Profit" Party (whatever in hell that means) went up to him and put a lamington on his head. Fortunately, some others threw food at the perpetrator.

Perhaps he should be lucky I wasn't there -I'm not sure I could resist spitting at him, or something to that degree.

A Culture of Fear

Much to the annoyance of the many conservative bloggers on the Kiwi blogosphere, most libertarian commentators on the internet on this side of the ditch have been out in full force protesting the Drug War. Of course, it makes sense given how the murder of a policeman, shooting of three other people, and 50-hour siege in Napier started, after all, in a "routine drug bust". But one can rant forever on the drug war -it's much deeper than just who's selling what to whom.

Now, in true benefit-of-the-doubt fashion (something akin to "Who is John Galt?"), most people will shrug it off as an isolated incident; after all, this guy did try to shoot 21 people, and opened fire at a friend's house four years ago. The more politically motivated will talk about gun control -we already hear reports about the number of unlicensed guns in New Zealand, and guns being sold freely over the internet. But no one will address the truly pressing concern in New Zealand, and indeed all of Western Society, that led to this siege: the culture of fear -and the accompanying culture of hopelessness- that has penetrated New Zealand society, and how it all leads to tragedies like this. This fear isn't about foreign wars and natural disasters; this is fear of friends, fear of neighbours, fear of government.

The culture of fear has always been present in dictatorships, the Soviet Union being the greatest example. If a neighbour didn't like you, he could simply denounce you -you would be dead soon. If you were caught saying something totally insignificant that the Party didn't like, you would meet a similar fate, and you always had to watch your back.

However, it has always been a rarity throughout the fundamentally optimistic Western World, and New Zealand has never, until recently, had any symptoms of a culture of fear. Similarly, a culture of fear has developed in the United States -observe that a recent cop shooting was over a fear that Obama was going to take away people's guns- Britain and France (riots, and all). To trace the development of the culture of fear seeping through Western society, we need to look at recent political developments.

Let's take Britain, as an example. At the end of WWII and into the 50s and 60s, Britain was hailed as a model society -a society in which you knew your neighbours and would always be happy to help. Its crime rates were some of the world's lowest. At the end of WWII, Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore went to Britain to find out how they managed to create such a polite society, to try to recreate that culture in Singapore. Nowadays the opposite is true: Britain's crime rates are some of the highest in the Western World, and broken families abound.

In the United States, much the same occurred. In the words of Walter Williams:

"During the 1940s and '50s, I grew up in North Philadelphia where many of today's murders occur. It was a time when blacks were much poorer, there was far more racial discrimination, and fewer employment opportunities and other opportunities for upward socioeconomic mobility were available. There was nowhere near the level of crime and wanton destruction that exists today. Behavior accepted today wasn't accepted then by either black adults or policemen." Indeed, according to a recent documentary,* among the victims of many violent crimes, they will not tell who is was that shot, stabbed or assaulted them!

The same is now occurring in New Zealand. With the exponential growth in government powers in all three countries, a culture of fear is taking flight. So what happened in these last fifty years?
___

In philosophy, we saw a much greater emphasis being placed on the "common good"* through the rise of political correctness, and a move away from an objective, independent reality to the primacy of consciousness -observe how art devolved from being based on human interpretations of an objective, proper reality (romanticism through to art deco), to negating such an idea, putting all emphasis on "feeling" (expressionism through to post-modernism). By therefore negating man's existence into inexplicable feelings, modern philosophy helped to destroy the idea of self esteem, and a moral existence.

This had profound implications on society. What would be the result if human actions were based, not out of value seeking rational individuals basing their actions on production, but out of people who believed that no such thing as a rational individual could exist, and that freedom meant freedom from reality, to be administered, by force, from the producers of the world? The idea of a human became one who survives only by short term actions against one another.

Indeed, modern liberalism bases its ideas on the principle that, as men have to be rational producers to survive, no such thing as total liberty (from force and fraud) exists, and that producers have a duty to feed the non-productive.

The outcome has been, and continues to be, the breakdown of human relations. Men can only live in harmony when they deal with each other as rational beings, through the paradigm of values. At this point, liberals will talk about how the welfare state** and "working together" is the antidote to the culture of fear; conservatives will discuss religion and community. Both will say that selfishness is the cause of the culture of fear, propose collectivist solutions, and call for the heads of the productive to roll.
___

Political developments have reflected this trend in attitude. In centuries past, it would have been completely unthinkable that government should have as much control over private affairs, citizen's money and business that it does today. According to the US Libertarian Party, in 1950 the total money collected by all forms of government was 2% of total income. Nowadays, it is often an entire year's salary for a working family. There are over four million security cameras in Britain (all of which seem hopeless in preventing Islamist attacks, somehow).

When a government subscribes to the culture of fear, it does not trust its citizens with their lives or money. People must be controlled.

These developments in turn isolate the citizenry from those assigned to protect their rights -that's where Jan Molenaar, the man behind the Napier siege, comes in. A culture of hopelessness, increases in crime, and a dramatic decrease in living standards, has always been the result of a culture of fear - often followed by dictatorship, either of the proletariat, the Aryan Race, or some form of supreme leader.

And that, I fear, is where we're heading.
___

Notes:

*Many people say that there was actually less emphasis on the individual in the old British Empire than now. However, times of war aside, subjects of the Empire were very astute as to their individual rights which were considered sacrosanct -in effect, going to War, as an example, was to safeguard these rights -not for some purely collectivist reason such as an arbitrary idea of "Britain is good". For a further discussion of this idea, refer to Ayn Rand's essay "Philosophy: Who Needs It".

**Many leftists claim that the reforms of the 1980s and 9os are the cause of the culture of fear. However, economic reforms come and are now going, and the culture of fear can be traced far back before the 1980s. Institutions and cultures are two different things, and capitalism works with a culture of entrepreneurship to accompany it -not a culture of fear.

References:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4770
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5012
http://www.lp.org/issues/family-budget
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6108496.stm“Killadelphia”; Narrator: Louis Theroux
The Economist
A further discussion of the ideas of art discussed here and their philosophical meaning can be found on Not PC, or other Objectivist websites and blogs.

Maori MP Swears at Student

In a lecture given last week at Waikato University, Maori MP Hone Harawira has been accused of swearing at a student, using the 'f' word and phrases like (ironically), "my big black ass".

Not suprisingly, Harawira has been effectively banned from giving any more lectures at Waikato University. But in an interview with a local newspaper, he said "I shut him down because he's just a racist ... He just lumped Maori in with other minorities like homosexuals and Asians. I pointed out to him that we are not a minority, but tangata whenua."

Is it just me, or isn't it racist to think of one group (of a factor completely beyond human control) as intrinsically better than all others?

I think we all know who the real racist is here, Hone. I'm pointing in your direction.

Prince Charles

He's finally gone off the edge.

According to Reuters, he's publishing a book called "Harmony", about how man's recent pursuit of wealth and prosperity (read: the pursuit of happiness) is, in his words, "dangerously disconnected" from the natural world.

What an utterly ridiculous statement from a man in line to become the next King of the nation that led the world in Industrial growth in the 19th Century- thus paving the way to the prosperity enjoyed today, and the nation that first implemented, on a national scale, the ideas of the rule of law, individual rights, and common law, that founded Western politics. A nation without the ideas of which America, and no other Western nation, could exist, let alone develop originally.

So, after the death of Queen Elizabeth, I propose:

-New Zealand immediately declares a Republic;
-The Prime Minister of the time becomes the President of the new Republic; and
-A constitution is drafted similar to the US Constitution, to keep the British ideas of Rule of Law and Individual Rights alive and well.

Luckily, given the recent results of a poll by the Republican Movement, it looks like that may -may- just happen.

Thank God For Secularism

Three recent items from the news/blogosphere tie in nicely today:

Lindsay Perigo's recent PR "Obama Gets One Right" two days before a Woman claiming she was the "anti-Christ" kills herself and her son, a week after a new survey revealed New Zealanders were more likely to believe fortune tellers than have no doubt God exists.

That isn't to say that religion is always a bad thing; indeed the development of Protestantism during and after the Reformation helped to build a base (along with, most importantly, the re-discovery of ancient Greek thought in the Renaissance) upon which the modern, post-Enlightenment world rests. I certainly don't think much of fortune tellers, either.

However, more often than not religion is used as an excuse, justified or not, to commit horrible acts (9/11, for instance). So, a redeeming feature about New Zealand is that, certainly in public affairs, religion takes a "back seat" to more pressing issues.

That doesn't mean we're all anti-religious people; knowing many religious people myself, the great majority of them are good people, and live good lives. What it means is that religion doesn't have to come first all the time, and doesn't dominate politics.

Which (and take note) is the full and final outcome of the Reformation: by stressing the personal relationship with God, Protestantism allowed for the development of classical liberalism, and the development of the true tolerance and freedom which allowed ideas and thoughts to thrive. So while America didn't develop as a direct result of Christianity, the predominant version of Christianity in the US did allow for the Enlightenment ideals on which America is founded.

Helping Form NZ Education Policy :-)

About a week and a half ago, I received this email:

Tena koe Callum

Reading your press release I'm interested in your perspective on education. What do you see as alternative to the current system or changes that could be made to improve what we have?

Regards
Kelvin Davis MP
Associate Spokesman Education
Labour
Kelvin Davis MP
------

My reply (in a formal, rather PC tone):

Hello Kelvin,

Sorry for the delay, and thanks for your interest in my press release. Do many of your colleagues read press releases from organisations such as SOLO?

Throughout most of human history, education has been a highly personal field, built fundamentally upon the relationship between student and teacher -that the educator would take a genuine interest in what goes on inside the student's brain, adjusting curriculum and teaching methods accordingly, and the student would take an interest in what they're taught, and its application. In effect, there existed a relationship of mutual respect and cooperation between the two, education being the common value. Thus, parents and other members of the community would take an active role in the education of schoolchildren.

When this connection between pupil and educator existed most strongly, the results have been good -regardless of external conditions. A good example of this comes from 19th Century Washington D.C -less than ten years after the civil when when institutionalised racism was rampant, at a school called Paul Laurence Dunbar Senior High School. The school was an entirely black school far less resourced than the area's white schools. However, most students, after graduating, went off to Ivy-League or other top American Universities, and soon overtook the white schools of Washington in test scores. Despite being a very working class school with less than adequate facilities, it outshone the other schools of the area.*

State-run education was first introduced by Bismarck in Prussia, during its wars with France, as a means of supplying the military with plenty of new recruits.

However, schools based on the relationship between student and teacher, and one-room community schoolhouses were the norm in the early 20th Century. But as the concept of universal education by the state became common in political thinking after World War II and the development of economies-of-scale in manufacturing, schools in New Zealand (as well as around the world) became far less personalised, with the goal being to get as many children through the education system as possible with the skills needed for the new era of technology. The relationship of mutual respect and cooperation between student and teacher based on the common value of education essentially broke down, and although students and teachers could still be friends with a mutual interest in one another, there were suddenly many other children that needed to be dealt with. The value of education was replaced by the necessity of education -having an inverse effect, as 2 of every 5 NZ adults today are in fact functionally illiterate**, thanks to state curriculum.

A key argument for state education today is that only state funding can provide resources for education in the "knowledge economy". However, looking back to the industrial age when new machines required new skills, we do not see faltering economic growth because of a lack of such education.
__________________________________________________________

Based on this brief summary, three changes need to be made in regards to education:

1) education is a value -not a commodity, and educational thinking needs to be based around this. As thus, educational involvement needs to be done at an individual and community level, where education is a genuine value to all parties.
2) education is not done on a societal level -children do not belong to any one country, but their immediate surroundings and people.
3) the recognition that, therefore, that education is not the state's responsibility -that state-run education is dangerous to a nation's free speech (by having reign of what gets into a child's brain) and is often compromised by political goals, in turn undermining democracy. There is little evidence to suggest that state involvement improves the quality or quantity of education, as the fact that levels of functional literacy in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was higher than today and people had the necessary skills to keep the economy growing.

To reinforce, the goal of these changes is to make education a value with mutual respect and cooperation as its means, as opposed to a commodity.

Thanks,
Callum McPetrie

*http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5241, "Patterns of Black Excellence in Education" by Walter Williams
**"The Free Radical" issue 76 page 19, "The Look and Guess Lady" by Graham Crawshaw

Protests and Factory Schools

At Fairfield College in Hamilton this morning, a student protest against the school's leadership made big news across the country. Concerned about the lack of any real power of decision making in the school, the students staged a protest at the school as 16 protesters swelled to 200.

It is not a surprise in the current educational environment. Over the last fifty years, every aspect of life, rather than the traditional straitjacket model, has become personalised to certain degrees. Schooling, however, sticks stubbornly to the one-size-fits all model.

Every day, thousands of students flood into the countries colleges and high schools, and go through much the same routine. Teachers have to juggle hundreds of students in a day, and class sizes are much larger in New Zealand than other countries, leaving little time to catering to student's needs. Indeed, teachers and students alike are, in their particular contexts, little more than the workers and products of factories, respectively.

The special link between student and educator which has been the heart of education for so much of human history has been replaced by economies of scale, in the interests of "universal education", ultimately serving the interests of bureaucracy.

Perhaps the students at Fairfield High should ponder that -is modern education truly about education, or political goals?

EFA Repealed!

Well, this crept up on everyone. Parliament has, just this afternoon, repealed the Electoral Finance Act.

Looks like Labour saw the light, too, calling the EFA a "mistake". All parties -except the Greens, whoopdie-doo- voted for the repeal.

An excellent day for free speech in New Zealand!

School's Out

As of today, the school year has ended for High Schools and Colleges all over the country, with Primaries and Intermediates finishing now or next week. Some kids will be out around the towns and cities, but most of them will be at home.

Just today, an article appeared in the Dominion Post warning that New Zealand's "She'll be right" attitude (what attitude? it died out years ago when, mysteriously, crime was on the rise) is to blame for fatal accidents where youths are the victims. However, would it be better to condemn those kids to a life of fear of the outside world?

While it is true that parents can take a worthy role in the education of their children about the outside world, a child must learn about it for himself. Children, more so than the rest of us, have an intrinsic desire to explore and learn about the world around them, and to have fun doing so. Education through experience best helps a child to learn about the world around them. How does preventing them from experiencing the outside world help their development?

Once again, the politically-correct cotton-wool culture of modern day New Zealand is at work, trying to protect their child -and intervening in the lives of other people's children- from the culture of self-loathing and hopelessness that they created, by changing New Zealand culture from one of self-reliance to complete reliance on others.

Perhaps removing politically correct cotton-wool culture from every facet of a child's life may help us rebuild that culture and allow our children to discover the world around them, and to build their own ideas of right and wrong, rather than having those ideas forced down their throats by a politically-correct clique.

Should We Get Our Hopes Up?

At his Speech From the Throne today, John Key said :

"In pursuing this goal of economic growth my Government will be guided by the principle of individual freedom and a belief in the capacity and right of individuals to shape and improve their own lives."

There are things that John Key wants to do, that will be applauded by Libertarians. However, as Lindsay Perigo notes, is it all rational to get our hopes up? There are still many anti-freedom elements to the new regime.

Nevertheless, it's still much better having a government that will actually listen to its citizenry (RE: electoral finance act, anti-smacking*) and will at least hold self-responsibility as its ideal, than the all-arrogant and all-pervasive Labour Government of 1999-2008.

*Admittedly, Key had a role to play in this as well.

The Best Thing About a National Government...

...is that, in Government, the Greens are ignored. From the article:

Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said New Zealand should be showing leadership and focus on targets not on the rules around farming and forests.

"Our actions to exclude our largest pollution sources, can only lead to other countries seeking to do the same," Dr Norman said.

"If this happens we will undermine the talks and we will be targeted as a global climate criminal. Tourism Minister John Key will oversee a great leap backwards in our tourism industry."

So, according to Russel Norman, it's perfectly alright to try and cripple New Zealand's greatest money-making industry in the name of a completely arbitrary environmental goal, which is out of our control anyway, and whose only purpose anyway is to destroy human industry and capitalism?

And it's all kind of ironic: New Zealand's emission's are 26% above 1990 levels, compared to the great satan's (US) emissions of 14%. NZ has been, over the nine years of the Clark government, emitting more than the US above 1990 levels. The Clark Government has been one of the greatest proponents of the climate change regime, yet we've done less to get our emissions down than that all-evil US.

Which tells you how much of a farce Kyoto really is.

The Last Tragedy Of Shakespeare

It could read like a Shakespearean tragedy: using the excuse of their students' personal weaknesses, bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education are trying to remove Shakespeare, arguably the finest mind ever in literature, entirely from the national curriculum. Amidst fears that his works are too removed from the mind of the average High School student to understand, Shakespeare could be scrapped.

Perhaps these bureaucrats should consider the reasons why students in New Zealand are so out-performed in other countries. After years of politically-correct, post modern "teaching" strategies implemented by both Labour and National Governments, students, parents and teachers in this country have been left with the short end of the stick. What we are seeing today is a population so dumbed down that many lack basic skills and knowledge, with many ending up on the welfare state. Indeed, the reason why many students "don't get" Shakespeare has been through the curriculum introduced by the same "education officials" now proposing this measure.

This latest proposal to remove Shakespeare, and letting a student who studies a blog as a piece of English literature obtain the same marks as a student who studies Shakespeare's incredible works, is simply the next piece in the puzzle. Shakespeare's works are the best pieces of literature around, and are still very relevant in today's world.

Teachers in schools are smart enough to know this. Said one, "I am genuinely upset that the amount of literature students are required to study is being reduced and replaced with ambiguous standards which seem to water down the work students are required to do."

Said another, "All the challenge and in-depth analysis and skills required at each level are being modified, and in my opinion, made easier. "Is the implication that we should not dare to challenge students, or heaven forbid, ask them to engage with texts that really speak to the human condition in a superbly crafted form? Dumbing down again."

Yet "education officials" who have no idea of how a child's mind works dictate what gets learnt.

Politically-correct, big government dictatorial thinking at work again. Appealing to the lowest common denominator, and not challenging students to think beyond the box of government mandated thinking -the concepts of "sustainability", "equality", or in my English class, "altruism". It is taught much the same in countries such as Britain and the United States -with similar results. The most intelligent students come from countries where they are required to know the facts, instead of writing essays with criteria such as "describe an important scene in [whatever's being studied] and explain why it's important."

In a freer world, schools would be entirely free to teach whatever they want, with the choices of parents and teacher deciding what ought to be taught. As an interim measure, save us from yet more entrenchment of political correctness at school -save Shakespeare.

Phil Goff: John Key

Helen Clark resigned on election night, and promised that "a new leader will be chosen before Christmas". Looks like it was already pre-chosen -Phil Goff is Labour's new leader, with Annette King taking Michael Cullen's place.

Phil Goff is on the right of the party (despite still being leftist nonetheless). After seeing John Key's win on Saturday, Labour was out looking for pragmatism, so Phil Goff was the ideal candidate (and was from the start). After all, he is not too different from John Key. Fundamentally, there is no difference between the two. Labour was merely looking for a candidate who hadn't fallen out of favour with the middle class (as the election result shows).

And where's Don Brash when you need him?

The State Doing Its Job...

...Or not. Instead, the Political Editor of Radio New Zealand, (an institution that prides itself on non-partisanship) the state-owned radio station that uses stolen taxpayer money to fund its existence, is busy spouting stupid political views about Libertarianz.

Winston Peters' "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy"

Libertarianz is now part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy", according to Winston Peters. It's true!