Hone Harawira

Hyperbole seems to be the order of the day with the left wing.

Yesterday Hone Harawira would have us believe that children would die because parents couldn’t  afford a maximum of 11c per day for prescriptions.

Now Clare Curran is claiming that the government will have TV blood on its hands:

The NZ Herald has video coverage here of last night’s event which began with pallbearers bringing in the coffin of TVNZ7. Worth a watch.

The death of public television will be at the National Govt’s hands.

She talks like there was never any public television before TVNZ7 and there will be none after….and she speaks like it is a bad thing. Hardly anyone watches TVNZ7.  Labour just can’t stop itself from promising to spend money we don’t have.

And finally we have Helen Kelly’s CTU claiming:

The Council of Trade Unions says the changes to industrial relations laws being considered are the worst attack on workers’ rights since the 1990s

And here was me thinking that 90 day trial period were the worst thing ever for workers:I.

 “The largest step backwards in workers’ rights since 1990.”

Between wilfully killing children, assassinating public television and now screwing over the workers I can see why Labour is rocketing ahead in the polls as we chat.

ᔥ NZ Herald

Hone Harawira says children will die if the government raises prescription charges by a maximum of $0.77 per week (just over $0.10 per day)….rubbish…everyone knows you can feed a child in Africa for just a dollar a day, if Hone thinks kids are going to die because prescription charges are raised by a maximum of $0.77 per week (just over $0.10 per day) then he has rocks in his head.

Of course he says nothing about the appalling record of Maori in the bashing and killing of children. No amount of prescriptions is going to fix that.

Harawira told Radio New Zealand the increase will prove to be lethal.

“Doctors are saying right now that children’s health is being threatened by the price of medicine now. You have to assume that if Government raises that price then children will die as a result of that measure,” Mr Harawira told Morning Report.

“I don’t believe that any Government could be so callous.

Harawira said parents are already not taking their children to the doctor and getting them medicine due to the cost.

“Absolutely I think that these measures, although it is going to be difficult to prove, will lead to children dying, through the inability of their parents to afford the charges for medicine that are being proposed by this National/Maori Party Government.

Harawira accused the Prime Minister of being “bloody blind if he thinks this is not going to impact on poor people”.

“Every price rise impacts poor people in a far greater way than it does people on the kinds of levels of income that him and his mates are on. So yes it is going to hurt every poor person in this country – Maori, Pacific and Pakeha.”

NZ Herald

Mana Party leader Hone Harawira has called for a “Talley-ban”, to send a signal to the family business, which is in bitter dispute with workers over collective bargaining.

Not sure that the tiny bunch of looney lefties will actually make much of a difference to Talley’s bottom line but in his ongoing quest for relevance Hone probably had to say something.

Given that Talley’s employ mostly Kiwi’s and that their fishing fleet staff is around 26% Maori I would think that Hone’s ill advised Talley-ban might actually hurt Maori. The Maori Fishing Companies employ Filipino or Indonesian workers.

I haven’t seen Hone Harawira calling for a ban on those companies.

As the old saying goes, “be careful what you wish for; you might not like it if you get it.”  Never more apposite than for those clowns who regard Hone Harawira as some sort of messiah who are currently  talking about a “separate state” in the far north for them – presumably with Hone as President for Life, like some sort of south seas Mugabe. So how would it work?

Well, first the boundaries, which would become borders with New Zealand. How about a line from Kawakawa north, and then  east to the coast just south of Waitangi, and west from Kawakawa  in a straight line to the coast? Not much point including Paihia and Russell – game fishing boats require a lot of maintenance and  spare parts, and there probably wont be  sufficient foreign exchange  to buy those from New Zealand. But I guess the borders could be open for negotiation. Anything to get rid of the malcontents  I say.

That leaves the happy residents of Honeland with two harbours – the Hokianga, which though pretty treacherous, was one of the earliest routes into New Zealand back in the day, and  the Whangaroa on the east coast which is more navigable.  But with  the Maori being such great seafarers, if the captains of sailing ships could  get over the Hokianga  bar, it should be no problem for the boys in motor powered craft.

But that raises just the first problem. How to pay for petrol and spares? This of course will also be a problem at Kaitaia International Airport – perhaps renamed after Hone’s much loved mother, and kuia to the tribe. Titewhai International has a certain ring to it….But that is probably for the future. For now, transiting through Auckland  en route to international hui might have to do. But then there is the problem of visas  for Hone and his citizens. Having just got rid of them, we might  not be too keen on having them back, even as transit passengers.

So how to pay for all this? There will be the orchards around Kerikeri – the former owners of which will have to be compensated if they don’t wish to stay in Hone’s paradise –  which will provide some cash, but then orchards are also costly to maintain, and require a fair bit of work.  And of course the markets for the produce will be across the border in New Zealand, and there would be very strict border controls to ensure no plant diseases are imported inadvertently from Honeland. We are known for our strict border controls, so no question of non tariff barriers could arise.  And those pesticides can be very costly.

Then there are the 4WD’s and large cars the bros are so keen on.  They make a great sound, but are  very heavy on the gas. And the roads they run on…labour should be no problem because plenty of the boys are just dying for work – except in the forestry industry which can’t get workers up there because of the small matter of drug testing. But that asphalt is very expensive stuff, as are the machines which apply it.

The forests of course would become the national property of Honeland –generous compensation having to be paid to the present owners who are so picky about who they employ.  So timber – eventually – would provide an income…at the cost of what would inevitably be large numbers of serious injuries as workers high on their “sacrament” sliced into their legs when trying to fell the trees.  Although much derided, forestry work is skilled and hard – no job for the stoned and unfit.

Then of course there are computers, cell phones, ipods TV’s and all the other accoutrements of 21^st century society – unless the good residents of Honeland would be content with entertaining themselves as they did pre-European settlement.  Somehow I think kapa haka nights every Saturday just might not satisfy the younger residents of Honeland for long.  They might then resort to other more traditional activities to liven things up…like bloody internecine warfare. But let’s not go there because, thank God, it would no longer be any of our business.

The great advantage of Honeland  for the rest of us of course is that down here in New Zealand we would no longer have to listen to whining about how badly the colonized race had been treated; all such whiners could simply be told “move to Honeland! Enjoy traditional Maori life unpolluted and completely free from the iniquitous white man!”  I am not entirely sure how large scale immigration by iwi  the Ngapuhi once ate and enslaved would go, but no doubt President Hone and his wise council of elders would be able to sort it out.

I  almost forgot electricity. Even assuming hapa haka nights became the dominant form of entertainment, the residents of Honeland would presumably wish to have lights to see the show, and be able to brew a hot cuppa afterwards before retiring to the whare. The Ngawha area may well be capable of fueling a geothermal power station, but then drilling wells is so expensive – a lot of pine trees and kerikeri oranges to drill  and complete half a dozen geothermal wells and the power station atop them.

So there you have it – just a small sample of the problems an independent state of Honeland would entail. Or is the idea that  WE fund it?  Somehow I think  that idea would be considerably less welcome as a use of our taxation dollar than the rise in GST last parliamentary term. So be careful what you wish for lads…we might just grant your wishes!

Desperation is indeed a stinky cologne:

Labour Party leader David Shearer has opened the door to discussions with Mana Party leader Hone Harawira.

Mr Shearer’s predecessor, Phil Goff, explicitly ruled out any kind of relationship with Mr Harawira.

The new leader says he will respect ideas wherever they come from, including from the Mana Party.

He says he does not have any baggage with the Mana Party.

“I’ll take them as I find them and if they turn out to be somebody I can’t work with, I’ll make that determination then.”

Mr Shearer says he has already met with New Zealand First leader Winston Peters and the Green Party co-leaders.

Mr Harawira says he welcomes the opportunity to sit down with Labour to start planning a united opposition to what he calls the anti-worker, anti-beneficiary policy that National is rolling out.

Matthew Hooton responds to Hone Harawira’s attack on Paul Holmes:

Notably, the criticism of Mr Holmes was more for his tone than his message.

The exception was veteran hothead Hone Harawira who took to his keyboard to bash out a response nearly as vitriolic as Mr Holmes’ original but hilariously revealing that Mr Holmes had a point.

Mr Holmes, Mr Harawira said, was “mean and nasty”; “offensive and uncaring.”

Many Maori hadn’t really wanted to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, worrying that the British couldn’t be trusted and “just wanted to steal our land.”

The treaty opponents also wanted to stop “untrustworthy pakeha traders from pushing gut-rot alcohol into Maori communities” and make “dirty, stinking, pakeha whalers, sailors, thieves and brigands wash more than three times a year.”

The early Europeans also mistreated Maori children, “telling them to shut up, hitting them.”

Mr Harawira acknowledged that pre-European New Zealand “wasn’t exactly a bunch of roses,” but Maori had “strong and vibrant societies … until you guys introduced the gun, the Bible and the pox, and wreaked havoc and devastation like we’d never seen before.”

Despite all this, Mr Harawira tells us, Maori signed the treaty anyway.

It was all downhill for Maori since then according to the rent a mob.

Nothing improved.“In terms of health, welfare, education, employment, housing and justice,” he wrote, “Maori statistics are still worse than everyone else in the country. There’s not a lot to make Maori want to smile and clap.”

Mr Harawira is to be commended for clarifying the message of the Waitangi rent-a-mob.

Thanks to him, we now understand that the influence of Europeans on New Zealand has been almost entirely negative. It is their fault Maori are unhealthy, fail at school, don’t have jobs or houses and get sent to jail.

It’s only because of pakeha that Maori kids get ignored and beaten up.

Yep It’s all our fault. The effects of colonisation were truly horrible:

It is true that European colonisation was deeply traumatic when it occurred on every continent in the second half of the second millennium.People were killed directly or because of exotic diseases.Land was stolen. Everyone experienced profound culture shock.

But it’s also true that the process led to a hitherto unimaginable improvement in living standards everywhere in the world as people traded, learned from one another and exchanged technologies and ideas.

All New Zealanders, Maori and pakeha, whether rich or poor by contemporary standards, enjoy a material standard of living far superior to the vast majority of people living in the world today and certainly in the top fraction of a percent of all the people who have ever lived.

Even as New Zealand slips from first world to second, future generations of New Zealanders will enjoy material comforts superior to anything imaginable today.

It is possible – and, if Mr Harwira’s ideas pollute another few generations, even probable – that Maori will continue, on average, to enjoy a lower standard of living than other New Zealanders.

The fading impact of colonisation will be one factor but far more important will be the loser attitudes that people like Mr Harawira spread among their young.

Yes, we are constantly told about those ideas and attitudes and how they will solve all ills:

Ideas like holding up one social structure that evolved in a stone-age environment in two islands in the South Pacific as a model for the future.

Ideas like the primacy of whakapapa, which says that the value of an individual is driven by who their ancestors were – a concept some contemporary Maori leaders are coming to regard as fitting better in feudal England than in a vibrant South Pacific nation in the 21st century.

Ideas like diluting the responsibility for child-rearing among a wider group than holding parents to be primarily responsible for the welfare of their children.

Ideas like poorly-defined tribal ownership of property.

Ideas like saying an individual’s health, housing or education status is determined by what Governor Hobson did in 1840, and what promises may have subsequently been broken.

Individual Maori, of course, may live anyway they want.

But people who focus on events over the last 200 years rather than the next 20 years, who prefer feudalism and collectivism to individualism and meritocracy, and enjoy protesting more than working, have to accept they will tend to be poorer, sicker and dumber than everyone else.

I suspect Matthew Hooton is lucky this was published in the NBR and not somewhere with a great deal more readership.

The NZ Herald has run a story about a Mana Party volunteer who crashed his car into a family and is now in hospital in a coma, unlikely to ever recover.

The article raises more questions than it answers.

Awanui is a small place and the street where Hone Harawira lives is even smaller…my sources tell me that the accident occurred less than 1km from his house, where a pre-wedding party was in full swing and had been all day. The article supports the distance being short from the party:

Members of the Harawira family, who were partying at home ahead of a family wedding, ran to help in the aftermath of the accident.

Is it really believable that Joseph “Reti” Nathan was never at Hone’s house during the day. Hone Harawira is adamant that he was “never” at his house….a Mana party activist, in Awanui where a party is being held full of Mana party people and he was “never” there….yet smashed his car just 1km away necessitating Mana party people to run to the scene…not to save Joseph or assist in the rescue of the poor bastards he drove into…no instead they ran to retrieve a flag:

…Mana Party members were waiting at the cordon wanting to retrieve a flag in the back of Nathan’s car but were restrained by police.

So, let’s get this straight…Hone says Nathan wasnt at the party or his house at all yet moments after the accident Mana party people and Hone’s family are running towards the accident…to retrieve a flag…How did they know there was a flag in the car of the person who was never there, or that the person who was never there had been involved in an accident less than 1km from the house he was never at.

My local sources also tell me that the reason this story has taken a month to get out was because of a culture of intimidation. The local media initially ran a story but have been told to remain silent. People are now all singing from the same song sheet in a Kahui style culture of silence.

Which is all in stark contrast from Hone Harawira’s public stance on the evils of alcohol:

Mr Speaker, today is Armistice Day – the day we remember the deaths of soldiers and civilians sacrificed on the altar of war and greed.

And today we also remember the deaths of soldiers and civilians sacrificed on the altar of ignorance, drunkenness, profit, greed, and government’s ongoing unwillingness to put an end to the destruction visited upon our communities by alcohol in all its pernicious and evil forms.

And today we remember the families who bear the scars of lives lost to cirrhosis of the liver, cancer, depression, alcoholism and heart disease, and those families suffering the lasting effects of drunk driving, and alcohol-related falls, drownings, poisoning, assault, injury, and foetal alcohol syndrome.

There is more to this story, and I suspect that the Herald on Sunday has withheld some information because there is now a wall of silence from all involved. Hone Harawira needs to come clean on what happened that day.

Why didn’t someone stop a mate from driving drunk…no legends up North apparently:

About 50 back-end bureaucrats bro-racrats are to be cut loose in a shake up at Te Puni Kokiri:

Redundancies at Te Puni Kokiri have been slammed by Mana MP Hone Harawira.

Staff at the ministry, which advises the Government on Maori issues and development, are believed to have been told that about 50 of their number will lose their jobs.

Maori Affairs Minister Dr Pita Sharples this afternoon confirmed  Te Puni Kokiri staff had been briefed by its chief executive on “efficiency” measures today.

“How the Ministry manages their fiscal pressures and efficiency dividend is of course an operational matter for management. I expect to be consulted on the chief executive’s proposals for how Te Puni Kokiri continues to deliver the most effective services to the public, within the budget they have been allocated,” he said.

Fifty is a good start. Perhaps Tony Ryall could have a word with Pita Sharples and explain how he must try harder.

David Cunliffe is being touted as the new leader for the Labour party.

Bryce Edwards described him yesterday as “He’s kind of charismatic – I think he’s quite a competent leader.”

Hone Harawira though thinks that Cunliffe is “Silent T“:

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Some in the media are talking up David Cunliffe. He is described as charismatic:

A leading political commentator says Labour leadership candidate David Cunliffe is the most appealing candidate “amongst the public”, and the party would be better off moving away from “Phil Goff clones”.

Political commentator Bryce Edwards told TV3′s Firstline today that Mr Cunliffe would be a better public choice.

“Amongst the public he’s the most appealing. He’s kind of charismatic – I think he’s quite a competent leader.”

Yep he is, and here is a good example of his charisma at work. I can’t wait watching him trying to “stop the greasy little fulla in the blue suit”.

I note too that Cunliffe says he is friends with Mana. Phil Goff of course ruled out working with Hone Harawira.

He will stop the “rich fullas, the millionaires, the bankers, that give them lots of money” from getting their “free ride”. Yep please let it be David Cunliffe leading Labour.