DISCRIMINATION AGAINST MARRIAGE

Those who want to interfere with the definition of marriage say they are being falsely and unfairly discriminated against by normal people.

That is not true. What normal people are doing is upholding and defending the truth of what marriage is, and refusing to have it discriminated against with falsehoods.

The real discrimination is being perpetrated the other way, for in denying the truth of what all married people are, the others are fiercely discriminating against them.

False discrimination is discrimination founded on a lies. Those who are denying the truth of what marriage is are pushing a lie.

I someone said, 'I want to be a lawyer; everyone has the right to be a lawyer; everyone should have that right equally; and by having a narrow definition of "lawyer" society is discriminating against me--so change the definition, Parliament', that would actually be discrimination against real lawyers, because it would destroy their profession, it would remove their unique situation and status. It would therefore be discrimination against them, it would be discrimination against what they are, using a lie.

Trumpeting 'lawyer equality' would just be putting the lie in fancy dress--making it appear valid with claptrap, with a meaningless slogan. It never can be valid, it never can have a true meaning, because lawyer is lawyer is lawyer is lawyer is lawyer. Changing the meaning of the word to mean anyone who is in a range of unlawerly situations only destroys a word; it achieves nothing in the real world except confusion.

Only those who qualify to be called lawyers may be called lawyers, and only those who have qualified have the right to a licence to practise as lawyers. To insist on that is not discrimination against non-lawyers. It is reality.

It is not a 'right' to be defined as something you are not and never can be. It is not a 'right' to have a legal licence to call yourself something you are not and never can be.

EUTHENASIA IS CORRUPTION OF LIFE

Regardless of how much pain or distress there may be, life must always be valued more. Otherwise pain and distress will be valued more than life. Life must always have by far the highest value.

GOLD AND PINK

Most people are gold. A small minority are pink, but they want to be called gold, so they are screaming for 'gold equality', which is impossible, because pink is not gold and never can be, but they intend 'getting' it by changing the legal definition of pink to gold. But they will still be pink, no matter what they are called.

But, sadly, all the gold people will then have nothing to call themselves because 'gold' will have been destroyed and made meaningless. And their unique equality will have been destroyed with it.

DEMOCRACY AND TYRANNY

When laws are changed for a manipulative minority rather than for the true good and desire of the majority, that is tyranny not democracy.

Everything enshrined in law should benefit society. There is no benefit to New Zealand society if to satisfy its lust for money a small minority owns even a part of the means of supplying electrical energy to the rest. And there is no benefit to society if to satisfy abnormal lusts a tiny minority changes in law the meaning of marriage so that they can pretend to be what is sexually, spiritually and logically impossible.

On the contrary. In both cases New Zealand society will be harmed.

DEJA VU, THEY DID YOU TOO

In the nineteenth century in the United States the government confiscated and sold off large chunks of the assets of the native Americans against their will--to satisfy greed. Now, in the 21st century, the New Zealand government is about to confiscate and sell off large chunks of the assets of native New Zealanders, Pakeha and Maori, against the will of the majority--to satisfy greed.

Progress!

EQUAL IS NOT UNEQUAL

Those who want to change the definition of 'marriage' by dictate of statute say they want 'marriage equality'--they want to have what truly married people have. But forcibly changing the meaning of the word will not give them that; it will only give them 'equality' with something different, something that is no longer truly marriage. They will have 'equality' with nothing, they will have won nothing. They will have destroyed marriage in order to claim it. They will have only its ashes.

As Shakespeare said: 'Tis won as towns with fire: so won, so lost.'

It will also have been destroyed for everyone else.

It is not 'marriage equality' if the State forces upon all married couples a fundamentally different definition of their state of being (particularly when that is done at the behest of an unrepresentative minority). For the State to say to married couples, 'Your situation is no longer unique to you and all the couples like you, it is no longer what all of you committed to for life, it is now just one of many situations, including many that are fundamentally unlike yours', that is forcing inequality upon them. At present all married people are equal, all over the world. If they are made equal to something else their equality will have been destroyed, and because to achieve that the definition of marriage will have been destroyed it will not have created equality for anyone.

CORRUPTING COMMUNICATION

When the meaning of a word is wilfully changed to mean something it does not mean, cannot mean and has never meant, when its meaning is corrupted, communication with it is also corrupted. Language exists for communication, it exist to enable communication: efficient, direct, simple, straightforward communication. When a word is corrupted it can longer be used to represent the idea or state that it once represented, so communication with it becomes so corrupted that it becomes impossible.

At the moment if a man says, 'I am married' we know instantly without any explanation that he is talking about a state in which he is the husband and a woman is his wife. If a woman says, 'I am married', we know instantly without any explanation that she is talking about a state in which she is the wife and a man is her husband. And if we read the same phrases in a book written hundreds of years ago or thousands, or hear it in old film, we have the same instant knowledge. All the explanation needed is in the meaning of the word. Communication is direct, efficient, instant, simple.

But if the corrupters of marriage, both the state and the word, have their way, it will no longer be possible to communicate about marriage directly and efficiently. And communication with the past will be lost. For then when people say 'I am married' it will be necessary to go into a long-winded explanation, because they may mean what marriage has always meant and truly means, or they mean that they using it to describe the so-called 'sexual' cohabitation of two men, or two women, or five men and three women, or sixteen women and two men, or one man and five women, etc., etc. Communication with the word will be so corrupted that it will be impossible. The word will no longer have a useful meaning, it will be useless. It will have to be replaced by sentences and paragraphs.

There is some irony in that. People who want to be able to call themselves married--to be 'equal' with truly married people--can do so only by changing the word for the state. If they succeed they will only be applying a changed word to themselves, they will not be applying the reality of what it once meant. The reality cannot change, regardless of what they do to the word. Homosexuals cannot have sexual union; therefore they cannot be married. If they call something else marriage they will still not have the sexual-physical-mental-emotional-and-spiritual union that is what marriage is, they will have only the word for it, but it will be a word stripped of meaning, a useless collection of letters.

Yes, words change over time, and may acquire new meanings. Take 'mouse'. It no longer means only a small rodent, or someone who is as timid as one. It also means a device for controlling a computer. That is fine. But the new meaning has not replaced and destroyed the original meanings. So we can still communicate efficiently, using a single word, about rodents and timid people. We can communicate with people in the present day, and with all the people in the past who have used that word in books, other writings and other media. But if the new computer meaning was suddenly written into the law as the only meaning, then communicating about rodents and timid people would no longer be possible with a single word. There would always have to be an explanation to avoid confusion. Simple, direct, efficient communication about rodents and mouse-like timidity would be lost for ever.

'Mouse' is not one of the most important words in the dictionary or in society, but even so its destruction would not be insignificant because it is a word in common use and there is no other word that means the same thing.

And take this sentence: 'He bought a rose for his beloved.' The creates a mental image of man buying a rose, probably red, to give the woman he loves. But if the meaning of 'rose' was changed to mean any plant, to mean whatever you wanted it to mean, to mean something different to everyone, that poetic sentence would become a meaningless, grey, dead thing. And if the sentence was 'He bought a rose to give his beloved on the day they were married', and 'rose', 'beloved' and 'married' have been deprived of their meanings, that
sentence would no longer mean anything.

The Prime Minister has said that if the law is changed it will not affect his marriage. He is wrong. For when the word 'marriage' is corrupted in law, by having its meaning forcibly changed in statute, every true marriage will be corrupted, because in law it will no longer be what it really is--the only true possibility meant by that word. It will be made just one of countless possibilities, and therefore its true state will be made meaningless. No longer will it be a rose, unique and special; it will have been turned into just another weed amongst countless weeds. Including his marriage.

When 'marriage' no longer has a specific meaning that is universally understood, when it is by force of law given a meaning that is different for everyone, it can no longer be used to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. It is socially useless. Language is vital in society; without it there is no society. When we corrupt it we corrupt society. Humpty Dumpty said, 'Words mean whatever I say they mean.' That was in a story, where it was amusing although it was also obvious that it was very stupid--and we all know what happened
to Humpty Dumpty. He fell off the wall and was smashed beyond repair. But if his foolish notion is taken out of the story world into the real world, and is set in the concrete of the law, communication will be corrupted. And when the word legislated into oblivion is one at the very heart of the social fabric and the long history of the world its loss will not be just the corruption of language it will also be the corruption of society. And it will
lead to even worse corruption. The 'What does it matter?', 'Anything goes', 'Why make a fuss?', 'Who cares?' attitude, and the nonsensical notion that such questions are a valid argument, will continue their corrupting, cancerous spread into countless aspects of social functioning. As Shakespeare said, 'It is not and it cannot come to good.'

AN OLD WICKED TRICK AND SALAMI

Now the self-styled 'Queer Avengers' have said that changing the definition of marriage in human law so that they can call two men or two women married is not all they want. They also want polygamy and polyandry and any mixture of them, what they like to call polyamorous'--they want groups of people of any number and any mixture of genders to be able to call themselves married, and to have the same legal rights as those who are married in the true sense of the word.

That is an old, very corrupt trick. You know there will be objections to what you really want (at least what you want now), which is to change the meaning of the word marriage to include pairs of homosexuals, so you put forward a proposal far beyond that, a proposal outrageously wicked. Then people say, 'I wouldn't go that far' but they accept what you really want at this moment because it does not seem nearly as bad in comparison. So you win.

Whether that acceptance is grudging or not does not matter. You win. Your tactics are specious, evil, devoid of truth and reason, but you win by a trick. You get the 'democratic' numbers by trickery. And you get more numbers than you might otherwise have done, because Muslims and extreme Mormons will join you. All you need is the numbers in Parliament. It does not matter how you get them. Numbers are numbers.

If you wanted $10 from someone you pretend you have the right to it and you demand $1000. Your opponent does not have the stomach for a fight and thinks, 'I don't owe that person $10, but handing over $10 is not nearly as bad as fighting about $1000, so I'll give in.' So you get the $10. Then you come back another day and demand $10,000, and you get $100. Then later you demand a million, and you get the $1000 you demanded at the start.

There is also the old salami game. Slice by slice you get more and more of what you want, till there is nothing left but the rind, so you get that too. Homosexuals began with that to establish their position,and now they have moved on to the old wicked trick. In New Zealand they began in 1989 by saying (and they lied) that <i>all</i> they wanted was for homosexual acts to be decriminalised. Their lie fooled just enough people and they got that. But that was the thin end of the long wedge they planned to drive into society. Their next step was to have themselves written into section 21 of New Zealand's Human Rights Act so that no one could then refuse them any employment position on the grounds of 'sexual orientation'. That meant they could then with impunity get themselves into position of power and influence--positions in which they could shape and dictate public opinion, and policy, and law.

Now they are going for what they always wanted: being able to call themselves 'married' by changing the meaning of the word. They can never have what marriage really is in truth, because it is logically impossible, a gross contradiction in terms. They can only have a corrupted and meaningless version of the word, not its true reality, but they cannot see that. They are like big kids who are not allowed into a small tent, because it does not belong to them and they cannot fit into it, so they pull it down and sit on it and kid themselves that they are now in it. But a shapeless mass of canvas lying in the dirt is not a tent and never will be, no matter how many times your queer and vengeful soul insists that it is one, and that it belongs to you, and that you are now the equal of those who own it and fitted it.

CORRUPTION OF LANGUAGE AND LAW

'When men cannot change things they change words.' Roman proverb.

'Righteousness raises a people to honour;
to do wrong is a disgrace to any nation.' -- King Solomon (Proverbs 14:34).

What a hypocritical nation New Zealand is! Its national anthem is a great and fervent prayer to Almighty God titled 'God defend New Zealand', and that phrase is repeated all through its five verses. Over and over and over again, countless times over the years, New Zealanders have proudly raised their voices in 'God defend New Zealand' and have sung out their plea to God to 'make our country good and great', to 'make its praises heard afar',  to 'bless this place', to 'guard our country's spotless name', to 'let our cause be good and right'. The last verse of the anthem ends with a great cry to God:

'Make us faithful unto thee,
God defend our free land.
Guide her in the nations‘ van,
Preaching love and truth to man,
Working out thy glorious plan,
God defend New Zealand.'

And the New Zealand Parliament begins each sitting day with this prayer:

'Almighty God, humbly acknowledging our need for Thy guidance in all things, and laying aside all private and personal interests, we beseech Thee to grant that we may conduct the affairs of this House and of our country to the glory of Thy holy name, the maintenance of true religion and justice, the honour of the Queen, and the public welfare, peace, and tranquillity of New Zealand, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.'

But now the New Zealand Parliament and if the opinion-polls are right the majority of New Zealanders are about to treat God, the truth, Jesus Christ, and God's glorious plan with obscene contempt. They are about to change the country's laws on marriage so that they will no longer be true, they will no longer adhere to God's glorious plan, they will no longer have anything to do with the facts of life and the real world.

Marriage rightly is and always has been the union, the literal joining, of a man and a woman. They are joined sexually, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, and therefore legally. The legality is the seal on the actual union. The man and the woman truly become one flesh, first and foremost sexually: they are literally joined at the hip. And from that union children will normally come. Marriage is the union by which society extends itself through time and space. That is only possibly when a male and a female sexual organ are mutually engaged--an erect penis and a vagina. A rectum, a finger, a fist, etc., are not sexual organs; they cannot make sexual union.

Marriage is not, as the common New Zealand myth has it, 'only a piece of paper.' It is the actual union of a man and a woman, sealed by law. It cannot be anything else. To change the meaning of the word is to change it from the truth to an obscene and socially-destructive lie.

But now with lying slogans like 'marriage equality' a tiny but very vociferous minority is pretending that it is being discriminated against, that it is being denied marriage. For although marriage is only sexually, logically and linguistically possible between a man and a woman, they want to turn language, truth, reality, and right and wrong upside down and inside out so that they can call two men or two women 'married.' But interfering with the word does not change the fact that two of the same sex cannot be sexually joined. That is possible only with two mutually admissible sex-organs; it is possible only with a penis and a vagina; it is possible only with the union that will in normal circumstances bring children into the world.

No one is being discriminated against. If you are of age and there is no incest or other valid impediment you are free to marry. If you are a man you a free to find an agreeable woman; if you are a woman you are free to find an agreeable man; when a man and a woman agree to marry they are free to marry. There is no discrimination.

The 'discrimination' claimed by homosexuals does not exist. It is not discrimination to define the word marriage as the union of a man and a woman and exclude all other meanings any more than it is discrimination to define blue as only the colour of the sky and exclude the colour of blood, grass, buttercups, etc. To use any word truly and correctly is not discrimination. The attempt to change the meaning of marriage is a blatant lie that will degrade the institution and meaning of marriage and flies in the face of Almighty God who ordained it.

God loves homosexuals with divine love, and everyone must love them with neighbourly and brotherly love, but no one should love unrighteous acts or attempts to justify them with lying slogans and the alteration of human laws. God's laws do not change, because they rest on eternal truth. No matter how much 'democracy' may be manipulated with vociferous propaganda it cannot change eternity.

The great words of the Marriage Service speak eternal, immutable truths: 'DEARLY beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church: which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee, and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men: and therefore is not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God. Into this holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. If any man can show just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.'

When a nation rebels against God it must expect punishment. It can sing 'God defend New Zealand' all it pleases, but he will not defend those who defy him. He will punish the nation that does, he will in love punish it to bring it back to him; so if New Zealand goes ahead with this obscenity it will bring that consequence upon itself. What we sow we reap. 

If we sow the wind we will reap the whirlwind.

NZ DOES NOT HAVE FREE AND FAIR LOCAL-BODY ELECTIONS

New Zealanders quite rightly look down on countries where repressive or manipulative regimes prevent elections from being free and fair, from being truly democratic--i.e., elections in which anyone can stand and anyone can vote and there is no interference with the ballot-paper before the election or during it.

But under the heading of elections for local government, New Zealand's elections have not been free and fair since at least 2002, because a corrupt trio of key officials have been interfering behind the scenes with the ballot-papers by severely restricting who can be on them.

Democracy is representative government. If it is prevented from being representative it is not democracy. That corrupt trio of officials, by their wilful failure to comply with excellent statute, have ensured that New Zealand's local-government elections cannot possibly be representative.

If people are to do a full-time job they must be alive, they must be housed and clothed and have enough money to be able to transport themselves about. Those elected to local government in New Zealand are elected to a full-time job for three years. But if the remuneration set for them is not enough, even for those basic requirements, then the only people who free to do stand for election are ones who have independent means.

But because the corrupt trio called the Remuneration Authority has wilfully ignored statute, because it has wilfully ignored the clear, simple mandatory criteria for setting remuneration that Parliament has laid down in Clause 7 of Schedule 7 of the Local Government Act 2002 (LGA2002), there are many local-government elected positions that are paid so little that only those of independent means can stand. That means the ballot-paper is being restricted to a tiny, unrepresentative sample of people. It is not available to all. That is not democracy. Therefore local-government elections in New Zealand are not free and fair.

It is instructive that the Remuneration Authority never cites Clause 7 of Schedule 7 when issuing its determinations. It cannot, because it does not adhere to it. Instead it adheres to what has become known as the Pool Formula, a weird, complicated formula invented by a former chair of the Authority, a formula that would make Einstein's head spin, and has nothing to do with sense, or the real world, or democracy, or the rule of good law.

And Clause 7 of Schedule 7 of the Local Government Act 2002 is very good law:

7 Mandatory criteria for Remuneration Authority
(1) In determining remuneration under clause 6, the Remuneration Authority must have regard to the need to—
(a) minimise the potential for certain types of remuneration to distort the behaviour of the persons listed in clause 6(1) in relation to their positions as listed in clause 6(1); and
(b) achieve and maintain fair relativity with the levels of remuneration received elsewhere; and
(c) be fair both—
(i) to the persons whose remuneration is being determined; and
(ii) o ratepayers; and
(d) ttract and retain competent persons.
(2) The criteria in subclause (1) do not prevent the Remuneration Authority from determining allowances additional to salary for attending meetings.

But because of the infamous Pool Formula and the corruption of the Remuneration Authority in the setting of local-government remuneration many people elected to local government are paid less than $10,000--even as little as $206 a year. That is glaringly in breach of Clause 7. Councillors on the old Auckland Regional Council were the lowest-paid regional councillors in the country, paid only $22,000 for a seniour management position--about half what their counterparts in Wellington were on.

Section 238 of the LGA2002 says explicitly that failure to comply with the Act is an offence, and directs us to section 242 under which offenders are to be haled into the District Court and fined up to $5000. But when that was attempted against the Remuneration Authority the judge who was on duty that week in a backroom of the Auckland District Court blocked the case from coming to court. How? By lying. She ruled that failure to comply with the mandatory criteria in Clause 7 of Schedule 7 of the LGA2002 'is not an offence known to law.' Section 238 clearly says it is. How did she get away with that? The first level of her lie was to pretend that a case in an English court in Battersea in the 1940s gave her the authority, which was of course nonsense because it was the wrong jurisdiction, the wrong country and the wrong century, so it had no bearing on New Zealand now. But her lie was a double lie, because the English case did not say what she quoted it as saying. She made it up.

The corruption got worse, because when the documentary evidence of her arrant lies was put before the Judicial Conduct Commission he found in her favour!!!

New Zealand's unfair, unfree local-body elections continue...

TELECOM'S DISGUSTING DIALUP

Long ago I was with Telecom New Zealand, which was so bad that I called Telecom Rex, or T. Rex for short. But recently because I was getting far worse service from another provider I decided to change back to TelstraClear, but between the two of them they so messed up my voice and Internet lines that they managed to cut them off, and said I could not get them back for 30 days. In trying to get all that sorted out, I happened to called Telecom, and to my astonishment got superb service and was up and running again in a tad over nothing flat.

But there was a horrid fly in that lovely jar of ointment, because in this neck of the woods, thanks to governments that took a while to realise that we really are in the twenty-first century, I cannot get broadband till 2015, so I have to use dialup.

Telecom told me that its dialup service was $9.99 a month for <i>unlimited access.</i> It lied. Because my Internet line kept cutting me off. The physical line was checked by Chorus and found to be excellent. But then I realised, because I happened to be staring at the screen precisely twenty-four hours after I had connected, that it was cutting me off at that mark. A bit more testing confirmed it beyond all doubt.

Telecom's dialup system has a programmed timeout. It will not run for anyone for more than twenty-four hours. Then it disconnects you and you have to dial back, which means you will probably lose the download you were running and have to start it all over again, and if it is one that will take longer than twenty-four hours it is impossible.

At first Telecom denied that it has a timeout programmed in to its dialup service. Then it checked with Alcatel, its supplier, and found that there was.

But it refused, point-blank, to take it out. All it has to do is remove a line or two of program. But it refuses. It wants to be offering us an 'unlimited' dialup 'service' that is limited to twenty-four-hour chunks. It wants to cut you off. It obviously likes being the marketing department for its competitors. That is, in effect, its policy.

When it told me that, I called the Commerce Commission. Now, I hope, Telecom will discover, once again, that there are laws in New Zealand. A service must be of merchantible quality, and you are not allowed to lie to customers, to mislead them with 'unlimited' when they will get only twenty-four-hour chunks.

Then I looked up the Yellow Pages, and saw a company that has no idea of how to create an attractive name, and calls itself NooZoo (0800 151 111), but offers a seven-day free trial of its dialup service. After having been badly bitten by Telecom that was a very attractive offer, so I signed up and changed my ISP ASAP.

NooZoo said it does not have a timeout (Telecom, according to someone who knows the industry, is the only dialup provider that does), and its service runs at a very good speed, and it costs only $9.95 a month. I shall drive it mercilessly for a week, and if it keeps doing what it is doing now, NooZoo will have my dialup account.

I do have to pay for at least three months after that, but that is fair, given that the free trial enables me to know exactly what I shall be getting.


The only drawback is that NooZoo has no mail-servers, so Outlook cannot be used on it, but I have an account with a very good mailserver provider elsewhere (DigiWeb), so $5 a month solves that problem.

Telecom has yet to get it into its entire head that if you treat customers badly you make them customers of someone else. If the dialup part of its empire was as good as the people handling the other services that I have with it, it would be brilliant. But its dialup is disgusting. Steer clear of it. Unless you like being deliberately cut off.

(Footnote: Noo Zoo's dialup did run and run and run and run and run, at a very impressive throughput, so the sparrow easily defeated T. Rex. I signed up, and dumped TR.)

SEXUAL ABUSE ENTRENCHED IN NZ

Sexual abuse across all social classes by men and women, boys and girls, well- and poorly-educated, is deeply embedded in New Zealand society, and despite being explicitly outlawed in public places by section 4 of the Summary Offences Act 1981 it is everywhere considered so normal and acceptable that any law against it is a dead letter.

If a black man is punched in the head because he is black, that is racial abuse of the physical kind. If he is called a nigger, that is racial abuse of the psychological kind. Everyone understands that. Both are acts of racial abuse, both hit him hard in his mind and heart, and both damage both the abused and the abuser.

Words are powerful. The words we use, the words we choose, express our thinking and shape it. Then our thinking shapes our actions.

What are inaccurately and euphemistically called four-letter words, which Tolkien aptly called Black Speech, is sexual abuse of the psychological kind. It pours black abuse on the emblems and the essence of manhood and boyhood, girlhood and womanhood. Especially manhood and boyhood. Even a term that on the surface abuses women‘s genitals is most often hurled at men by men: the c-- word is the worst insult that can be flung at a man; it says he has no manhood.

The destructive power of the black words is multiplied by the fact that they do double duty as terms of strong mockery. For example, the black word for the penis also means a stupid fool, the black word for the glans penis means a very stupid fool, the black word for the testes is part of a term that means a gross and mindless blunder, the black abbreviation for the scrotum means something disgusting and repellent. Boys and men thus constantly have rammed into them the message that what makes and marks them as male is a disgusting and repellent joke. That is a monumental lie.

Women get off comparatively lightly, but it is small wonder that breast-feeding is rejected by so many when the word used for the breasts also means a stupid mistake. That too is a destructive lie.

The f--- word, when made personal with 'you', is a wish for what is obviously thought to be the worst punishment that can be inflicted. As rape yes, but it abuses the most loving act in human life, a damnable lie underscores the rest of the abuse.

Until New Zealand recognises that it is subjecting itself to a torrent of psychological sexual abuse in its addiction to Black Speech and starts eliminating it the physical sexual abuse that arises from it will continue.

For a start, section 4 of the Summary Offences Act 1981 should be rigorously enforced. Which means that police officers must stop using sexually abusive language. Radio and television should eliminate it from the airwaves, and if an otherwise worthwhile programme that includes is shown it it should be preceded by a clip that says what it contains and that it is sexual abuse so must be treated with contempt--in short, the abusive guns should be spiked. The Broadcasting Standards Authority should recognise and fulfil its responsibilities.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which New Zealand has signed, and which it affirmed in our Bill of Rights Act in 1990, lays down the fundamental principle of law as 'recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of the human person.' Together with 'recognition of the equal and inalienable worth of all members of the human family' that is *explicitly defined* as 'the foundation of freedom justice and peace in the world.' So in law and in truth whenever we denigrate our inherent dignity and worth we threaten our freedom, our justice, our peace.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says 'disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind'. That is always so. Therefore to eliminate the barbarism of sexual abuse and assault we must eliminate the contempt that leads to them. Which includes the contempt pouring like black pus from countless conversations.

It is simple cause and effect. That which is held in contempt will inevitably be attacked. There are attacks for good and attacks for evil. Evil attacks are caused by evil contempt. To eliminate them, it is necessary to eliminate the evil contempt. How is evil contempt recognised? It shuns the truth.

We recognise the arrant falsehoods of sexually abusive actions and images, but although the country is drenched in sexually abusive language few recognise it and care. The daily barrage of falsehoods about what makes and marks us as male and female, and which constantly drives down our self-esteem, male self-esteem in particulary, must be recognised for what it is and ruthlessly stamped out. We must accept and honour our bodies, not denigrate them.

When we tell falsehoods to ourselves about ourselves we act falsely to ourselves and others.The only difference is a matter of degree. In some the manifestation is extreme: rape and rape-murder. In others it is poor treatment of themselves and others, especially by men of women. Everyone who uses Black Speech is responsible for the damage it causes.

As W.H. Auden wisely observed:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn.
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

DUBIOUS PROCESS DESTROYS JUSTICE

In theory, the justice system is due process, which always gives you what is due to you--it gives you your rights, and gives you all that is right and just and true. It should. The very word, 'justice', comes from the Latin word ius, which means right, so justice is in theory about getting things right, making things right, setting things to rights.

But in practice what you get in New Zealand's justice system is not due process. You get a chancy game of dubious process that has nothing to do with your rights, with what is right or true or just.

Dubious process is not interested in people, in life, in anything true. It is interested only titles, position, the careless and petty exercise of petty, pettifogging power.

New Zealand prides itself on having a good justice system. It does not.

If you are haled into the District Court on some charge in which the police think they can get a victorious notch in their belts, and those who accused you lie, and the judge believes the lies and convicts you you can in theory appeal to a higher Court and ultimately you will get justice.

But a conviction on lies should not have happened in the first place, because in law, under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, and under international law, under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which New Zealand is a signatory, and which it has also affirmed in the Bill of Rights Act, you are deemed innocent until proved guilty, and you have the right to a fair and impartial trial by a competent authority. So the District Court judge should have the competence to tell whether people are lying, and should be very careful to make sure he finds out if they are. And he has to make sure that guilt or innocence has been proved. But proof is possible only by using logic; and under the rules of logic it is only if the premise is true and the reasoning is true that the conclusion be true. Therefore a verdict not founded on the truth and true reasoning should never issue from any court, even if it is the lowest level of the system.

But what actually happens is a stacked lottery. Because if the District Court judge is too stupid to see that your accusers are lying, if he does not apply logical analysis to what they said, and thus blinds himself to all the places where they contradicted themselves, where they contradicted each other, and where they said things that cannot possibly be true in the real world, and then 'reasons' falsely from all their falsehoods, he will hand down the wrong verdict. He will convict an innocent person.

Then the lottery stacked against you can get far worse. Because to overturn a decision in the District Court you have to appeal in the first instance to the High Court. Again, you have the right to a fair and impartial trial by a compentent authority, and again you are to be deemed innocent until proved guilty.

But if the gown of the High Court judge is cut from the same cloth as the gown of the District Court judge, you will get the wrong verdict affirmed. Then the obvious thing to do is appeal to the Court of Appeal, the second-highest court in New Zealand's four-layer system.

But then you run into the even bigger jaws of dubious process. Because to get to the Court of Appeal from the High Court you have to ask for leave from the High Court judge who has just agreed with the District Court judge's wrong verdict. You have to ask permission of the judge whose judgement you want to call into question. No judge can even pretend to treat that request fairly and impartially. What High Court judges truly want you to go to the Court of Appeal and trash their rulings? None, obviously, so they cannot be fair and impartial when you ask permission to go and do it.

So you will get a refusal, of course. But that's OK, because you can then ask the Court of Appeal for special leave to appeal to it. But the Court of Appeal is not, in law, obliged to consider anything except points of law. It only has to consider if the law has been interpreted correctly. It can, and it will, refuse to consider anything that is only a point of fact. So if the verdict against you was based on lies, not facts, and you are questioning the verdict on that ground, the Court of Appeal will refuse permission to give you special leave to appeal to it. It will say the law was interpreted correctly, there is nothing more to be said. And it was, it was just that the facts used under that interpretation were lies not facts.

But that's OK, because then you can appeal to the Supreme Court of New Zealand. The law says so. And it also says that, unlike the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court is obliged to hear appeals in which there has been a significant miscarriage of justice.

But there you run into the biggest jaws of dubious process. Because in 2004 the Supreme Court ruled that if the Court of Appeal refused to give you leave to appeal to it, the Supreme Court cannot and will not hear your appeal. What!!!

Therefore if the District Court goofs and the High Court goofs, that is it. You can never get justice. You can go no higher. The dubious process wins, and the District Court, is in effect made senior to the Supreme Court.

You could try applying to the Governor-General to exercise the Royal Prerogative. But your request will not actually be handled by the Governor-General or the Queen he represents. It will be handled by some lowly lawyer buried somewhere in the bowels of the Justice Department. And even if the answer is yes, the request will then be referred to--guess who?--the Court of Appeal!!! Which is hardly likely to admit that it goofed the first time you went to it.

So the corruption of dubious process wins. Your life is wrecked. Permanently. By serial incompetence in blue shirts and black gowns.

New Zealand has a shonky system. If it gets things wrong they can never be put right.

After 10,000 years of civilisation, this is as far as this country has got.

As an experienced barrister once said to me: 'There's no such thing as the rule of law. It's just a judge's opinion.'

If the judge is a fool, you get folly, not justice.

And New Zealand's system of appointing judges is shonky, so your chances of standing before a good one are not good. The way police officers are employed is obviously not top-notch either, so there are too many prats running about in blue shirts messing up people's lives. Pre-recruitment testing should be a lot better.

BIG NOTES FOR OFF-KEY OPERA

The lieder of the vanishingly-small big-act party, John Banks, has been accused of being a song way off key with 50,000 cracked notes and laughing (anonymously) all the way to the bank. The New Zealand Herald reports that he broke the law by not declaring the donor of a $50,000 donation to his unsuccessful 2010 campaign for the Auckland mayoralty. The Prime Minister, John Key, is happy with Banks' hymnsheet, or attempt at lieder, or lie-duh, or spin, or explanation, or story, or act, or beat-down, or absolute straight truth, or whatever it is.

The shonky deal National did with ACT and Banks to hand him the Epsom seat in its attempt to fiddle MMP and so get more than one seat on its side of Parliament, after which he became the ACT leader, now looks as if was just the overture to the next act in yet another shonky Kiwi opera.

Time will tell. As the old saying says: 'Truth will out.'

Banks says 'it will all come out in the wash.' What colour will the water be?

So far, not crystal clear. National Business Review pulled together much of the media torrent.

And added more the next day.

The editor of the Gisborne Herald had this to say about it..

SCANDALS OF POLITICIANS AND EX-POLITICIANS

The ACC-Nick-Smith affairs is a dirty rock dropped into a sewage pond. The ripples of yucky cronyism keep spreading. Cronyism is just corruption spelt differently.

National Business Review summarised the affair brilliantly.

The New Zealand Herald had this take on it.

And the Dominion-Post said this.

Then the ripples of name-dropping touched the Prime Minister.

At the same time ex-politicians on both sides of the political divide were ruled in court to have been a tad less than honest as Lombard, the company they directed, had crashed and burned leaving debts of well over $100 million. They paid the penalty by being declared guilty and sentenced. One, a knight, was urged to give up his title.

All of which makes this little gem look astonishingly prescient. Sort of.

POLITICAL LANGUAGE!

'Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.' --George Orwell.

MORE THAN HALF EMPTY IS NOT HALF FULL

John Key said in his victory speech that 'nearly half New Zealanders voted for National.' That is a falsehood. First, the voter-turnout was an abysmal low--only 68.8%, reported to be the lowest turnout since the 1880s. National won only 47.99% of that on the day, and if the specials continue the downward drift we saw as counting went on during the night it will end up with even less. Mr Key needs to get his thinking aligned to the truth.

If he thinks on those numbers that he has a mandate to do even more damage to New Zealand's energy assets than National did before Helen Clark's long reign he is deluding himself even more.

47.99 of 68.8% is only 33% of the voting population. Against him, in the vote, is 52.01% of 68.8%, which is 38.8%. He has no mandate. A mandate is a majority. He does not have one. To say he does is a blatant lie.

Or to look at the election result a different way, National got 60 seats out of 121. When you add its crutches, ACT and United Future, it has 62 seats. Therefore 59 seats are against it. Not a thumping vote of confidence.

On top of that is the fact that 31.2% of the population did not vote at all--not far off the 33% won over by his party. The Did Not Vote Party has almost as much support as National. National's 33% may drift down; the 31.2% is set in concrete. The Did Not Vote may end up winning the election. December the 10th will tell us that.

Anais Nin put it perfectly: 'We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.' Key is seeing what he is, and in saying what he sees he is telling us what he is.

As the generation of energy becomes ever more important we must not have any impediment between us and 100% democratic control. Deluded, dishonest reasoning should not be allowed to create the huge impediment of selling 49% of our generation. The people must own their power. National has already messed up the energy sector quite enough with all the hocking off led by Max Bradford years ago. Now it thinks it has a mandate to trash it even more. It does not. It is lying to itself and us.

NO MMP COAT-TAILS

We need to make two changes to MMP to get the corruption out of it.

First, as this blog has already said, if you got the threshold in the previous election you must stand a candidate in every seat. You may not drop an electorate to do a deal with some splinter Party to get advantage for your party and it.

Second, any party that does not get to the MMP threshold but also wins one of more electorate seats should get no more than that/those seats, not the percentage of seats represented by its under-threshold party-vote.You do not get the under-threshold percentage of seats.

That will eliminate the corrupt trick so beloved by the National Party of letting an under-threshold party ride in on the coat-tails of a lone ranger, then the lone rangers' party exaggerates the big party's coalition.

ADVANCE VOTING CORRUPTS THE POLL

National wanted as much of the vote as possible, and knew that from the polls that it had nowhere to go but down, so it corrupted the game and allowed people to vote in advance of polling day for any reason that suited their convenience. A quarter of a million played the game outside the field before the fixture-date. They voted before the campaign was over, before all the policy announcements had been made, and thus before everyone had all the information needed to make an informed decision. That is grossly unfair. And stupid.

Voting in advance should be allowed only for an extremely good reason, as used to be the case, not just to fit people's lifestyles, their notions of convenience, or whatever pops into their heads. Anything to the contrary is not a free and fair election. It is corruption.

If you cannot find a bit of time to vote during the ten hours of polling day you miss out. Period.

The advance voting in this election was not the same as the result on the night. National dropped about 2%, from 49.81% to 47.99% and Labour came up a bit from 26.30% to 27.13, so there was a 2.65% movement between the two main parties between the advance vote and the election-day vote. That is no trifle. In a 120-seat Parliament it is 3 seats. National might have only 57 seats, not 60, and even with ACT and United Future would have only 59--not a majority.

National's advance-voting trick worked. It got a significant advantage from it.

.........

The point is underlined by the numbers of seats in the advance and voting-night votes:
The seat-count in the advance votes was:   62(N), 32(L), 12(G), 9(NZF), 3(Ma), 1(UF), 1(Ma), 1(A)
In the voting-day votes the seat-count was: 60(N), 34(L), 13(G), 8(NZF), 3(M), 1(UF), 1(Ma), 1(A)

..........

The final count, released on the 10th of December, shows even more graphically how well the trick worked:
                                                                  59(N), 34(L), 14(G), 8(NZF), 3(M), 1(UF), 1(Ma), 1(A)

Obviously, if the playing-field had been level, and everyone had been voting at the same time, the result would have been different. National dropped from 49.81% to 47.31%. Labour went up from 26.30% to 27.48%. So there was in the end a 3.68% change in the difference between the two main parties from the advance votes to election-day votes (the difference between them went down from 23.51% to 19.83%).

Cheating paid off. A lot more subtle than stuffing the ballot-boxes like they did in Russia, and made to look very legal. But cheating. Corruption. Manipulation for your own advantage.

GUTLESS MEDIA

So the Prime Minister, John Key, sets up a conversation over a cup of tea with his ACT Party stooge, John Banks, in Epsom. The media are invited, and turn up in droves.

But when a part of the conversation is inadvertently recorded that John Key decides he does not want the public of New Zealand to know he called the police and claims that the two Johns were bugged--recorded without their knowledge.

The gutless media did not publish the conversation recorded on the so-called Teacup Tape 'for ethical reasons', despite the fact that the people of New Zealand have an absolute right to know as much as possible about those who govern them. Key has no right to prevent that. The media have even less right.

Then the High Court ruled that it could not decide if the conversation was private or not! Please!

But even given that open door the gutless media did not publish.

It is an unwritten rule in the media, a time-honoured and very correct tradition that if you invite the media everything is on the record unless you specifically say of some part of the proceedings, 'That's off the record.' That was never said, so that whole setup was on the record.

Please, gutless media, publish the lot before we vote tomorrow. We want to know who is going to be running the country, warts and all. Otherwise all we have is the spin.

DEAF MPs AND GERRYMANDERING

It afflicts all those who should have chosen a different career. <a href="http://andrew.avowkind.net/nikki-kaye-and-the-no-reply-zone">This blog article records one example</a> and points to others of the same ilk--as it happens from the same party.

The disease may be worse in particular parties, but it is at heart an individual's affliction.

Parties who are so high in the polls that they think election victory is a sure thing obviously do not need to listen to anyone or bother to reply to anyone.

Advice given me decades ago by a Wellington painter should always be heeded: 'It's not the first job you want from a customer, or the second. It's the third, because then you've got him for life.'

Those who fail to listen and, even worse, fail to respond, will not get the second job (or vote if they are MPs).

The gerrymandering the blogger refers to was, and remains, a nasty example of the lies people will tell themselves in their lust for territory. Auckland has long lusted after the islands of the Hauraki Gulf. It first tried to take over Waiheke Island in 1947. Finally, in the local government 'reforms' of 1986 it got it--it got all the islands. Including Great Barrier. The national electorate boundaries did the same. So now we on the islands are compelled to live in the rort in which islands 20-90 kilometres away from Auckland's Central Business District are classified as part of it. What sane or honest person would claim islands far out to sea, even up to 90km away, are part of a central city? As the old Roman saying neatly puts it: 'When men cannot change things they change words.' Bluntly, they lie to get what they want.

The lies of that gerrymandering are made even more blatant by the fact that the political parties that did it and supported it also passed and supported the formation of the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, which contains the Gulf and the Coromandel Peninsular. The Hauraki Gulf Marine Park Act established it. But political lusts kneecapped it.

The Local Government Commission, which is meant to be independent of the government, went along and assisted with that chronic rort by refusing with a stream of weasel-words and defiance of the Local Government Act to put the islands with the peninsular. Two members of the three-person Commission that made the decision were Aucklanders. Should we be surprised?

The corrupt do not see things as they are. They see things as THEY are. They act on their corruption not on reality.

ACT ON A HIGH

Don Brash, the coup-leader of the ACT Party, has created a punster's paradise by coming out and brashly saying that he supports the decriminalisation of marijuana. John Banks, who was standing for the Epsom seat, later came out strongly against what the Beloved Leader had opined. By nice coincidence that happened at the same time as banks round the globe were struggling to prevent a global debt crisis. That had double application, because Don Brash was in charge of New Zealand's Reserve Bank before he switched to politics.

Brash ACT = bad act.

Brash leader of the ACT Potty.

Potty head.

Pot  head of Potty Party.

Brash ACT = comedy skit.

Brash = comedy skite. 
Brash gives comedy skit by putting pot on head.

Don Pot tilts at windmills.

Donning a  pot.

Brash reveals bad potty training.

Brash fires loose pot.

'Weed  dump anti-pot law,' says potty head.

Nothing but a big ACT.

Don puffs ACT into dreamland.

Marijuana oblivion for Don.

All smoke and no fire. 
Brash cannabilises ACT.

A bud too far.

ACT's little buddy.

ACT--from a Hide to a high.

Banks struggle to stave off D fault.

Glib foulup crisis envelops Banks.

Don's pot protrudes in comedy ACT.

Epsom salts drain the Brash pot.
Dopey Don hashes his ACT.
Let's be the Land of the Long White Smoke, says Don.

('Buds' according to a news report is a slang term for cannabis.)

<a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10754787">Brian Rudman's take on it in the New Zealand Herald</a> makes rich reading. The <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10754589">Herald's editorial</a> also questioned Dr Brash's strange behaviour. So did another Herald columnist, <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10755088">Garth George.</a>

RULERS TRASHING THE RULE OF LAW

How to break the law and get away with it. For some time the police have been illegally carrying out covert video-surveillance, by dint of getting a compliant judge or judges to hand out illegal court warrants. They were even blithely trespassing on private property to set up their hidden cameras.

When the Supreme Court stopped all that by telling them that they had no legal right to do it, and is even reported to have questioned the 'implications' for the judge/s involved in issuing the warrants, what happened? A compliant government rolled over and said it would pass, under urgency, <i/>retrospective<i> legislation to make all that law-breaking 'legal.'

That is arrant corruption. The lesson for the police is that they can do what they please, and if
they break the law the lawmakers will make it all right--with backdated law.

When the lawmakers are corrupt the nation is fouled beyond remedy.

This is one of the <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/5651975/Surveillance-law-scrutiny-needed-Labour"> news stories on that abysmal breach of the rule of law,</a> which says that not even Fiji under military dictatorship would stoop so low. Another recorded some of the <a href=http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/5658023/Legal-wrath-at-fixit-lawchange>rage of the legal profession</a> at the assault and battery that the government wants to inflict on the rule of law. Three discussions, <a href="http://www.laws179.co.nz/2011/09/covert-video-surveillance-and-covert.html">here,</a> <a href="http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2011/09/20/gordon-campbell-on-the-police-surveillance-bailout/">here,</a> and <a href="http://www.pundit.co.nz/content/once-upon-a-time-in-te-urewera">here,</a> heavily underscore the point that this is arrant corruption on the part of the police and the government.

Fouled beyond remedy? Not quite... For when King Charles went down that track in the early seventeenth century we fixed the problem by taking him on, arresting him, trying him for treason, and lopping off his head. <i>The people</i> de-fouled the corrupt ruler--permanently.

ROTTEN MODERN ECONOMICS

This article in the<a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10746808"> New Zealand Herald by Gareth Morgan</a> says it all.

So do the comments after it, because they are liberally splattered with howls of protest from the hate-your-neighbour politically-correct greedies who now infest this planet.

He rails against corruption and the corrupt rail against him.

THE RULE OF COMPETITION AND THE MARKET

When Auckland International Airport announced a big profit there were immediately calls for a second airport in Auckland so that competition would drive the prices down.

But when we owned public assets what dictated prices was the democratically elected Parliament, democratically elected councils, democratically elected local-bodies, etc. In short the rule of democratic law.

But that has been replaced all over the place by the rule of the market and the rule of competition. The rule of the people via the rule of democratic law has been replaced by the rule of money. The people have been replaced by persons. The many have been replaced by the few. For the benefit of the few.

When the publicly-owned electricity industry was hocked off we were promised benefits. Remember Max Bradford, the smooth-talking frontman for all that? The handsome MP from Rotorua and his blandishments.

He lied, of course, because look at what we got. Electricity prices have doubled in the last ten years. And we have seen the spot market soar so high that 'over the top' gasped and died of shock.

Progress!

THE CORRUPTION OF SOCIETY

Before the shallow-minded, shallow-thinking, short-sighted PCs and Greedies got control of New Zealand (and much of the Western world), every decision, public and private, was predicated on the family. Now decisions are predicated on money and jobs. When they were predicated on the family we had money and jobs. Now that they are predicated on money and jobs we do not have the family. Or money and jobs.

We moved the foundations of our society from the rock to the sand. The sand liquefied in the inevitable earthquake of reality, the earthquake of inescapable truth; the foundations have collapsed and what was built on them is falling apart.

Matter is only right only if the atoms are right. Society is only right if society in microcosm is right, and the family is to society what the atom is to matter.

Those who mocked the 'nuclear family' and set about destroying it ignored the absolute truth: without a nucleus the atom cannot exist, without a nucleus the cell cannot exist; therefore without a nucleus life cannot exist. In destroying the nucleus they destroyed the social fabric.

What we sow we reap. Now we have increasing social chaos and decay.

CARELESS COST-SAVING KILLS

Shall we act surprised? Quite enough evidence has been already been given in the Royal Enquiry in the Pike River Coalmine disaster to show that what killed those 29 miners was careless cost-saving. The attitude that money is worth more than people. 'The love of money is the root of all evil.' The corrupt people responsible should be charge with manslaughter.

DISCRIMINATING MANSLAUGHTER

The law says that everyone is equal before it, that everyone is to be treated the same, that no one is to be discriminated against.

When a man failed to set the handbrake on his van earlier this year, so it rolled down into a lake and a beloved son was drowned, the New Zealand police quickly had him in court on a charge of manslaughter.

But when the police failed to check the condition of a drunk Spaniard in one of their cells, or get medical help for him when he needed it, and he died, no one was charged with anything.

NATIONAL CORRUPTION CORRUPTS THE NATION

ACT I:

The cynical manipulation of MMP by the National Party should be outlawed, but I am sure they will never do it, because they are only interested in power and their manipulation enables them to keep it.

It should be compulsory for major parties--meaning any party that got more than, say, 25% in the previous election--to stand a candidate in every seat. That means a serious candidate, one chosen to win and really does try to win, and it should also be illegal for a party to do a deal with another one, so that one concentrates on the party vote to let the other get the candidate vote. That would stop dead National's corrupt habit in Epsom and Ohariu.

It makes a deal with a minor right-wing party, ACT in Epsom and United Future in Ohariu, not to stand a National candidate in those electorates, or not to stand a serious one, one who will win the seat, and it tells its supporters to give it the party vote and the minor party the candidate vote. The minor-party candidate is then sure of getting the right-wing vote and winning the seat, and if the percentage of its party vote is enough--as little as 2%--that party will get at least two seats in Parliament, thus getting round the 5% threshold. Then National forms an alliance with it, and thus the right-wing bloc gains at least two seats when it would have gained only one if National had stood its own candidate.

That is blatant corruption. Democracy goes out the window; lust for power marches in the door. The result is that the minor-party tail wags the National Party dog, which is how Rodney Hide was able to get away with trashing local government democracy in his self-hyped Auckland Super Silly.

His minor party, whose trivial party vote, and vanishing poll ratings, prove it to be highly unpopular, nevertheless gets enormous power in the country. We voted against it overwhelmingly, but National's corruption has trashed our wishes.

ACT 2:
Then the cynical National-ACT combine realised as the 2011 election loomed that Hide was so loathed that he might not make in it Epsom and with him as ACT Leader his party might not get enough votes to get National more than one seat for the price of not standing its own candidate in Epson.

So what happened? The former leader of the National Party, Don Brash, who at that stage was not a member of the National Party, not of ACT, gets himself confirmed as the new ACT leader, does the necessaries of membership and all that, all in a bid to pump up ACT's party vote.

Cynical manipulation of MMP on steroids.

Damn their impudence!

The irony is that with Labour shooting itself in every part of its anatomy, none of National's dishonest game-playing is needed. They could win honestly hands down.

ACT 3:

Even if Brash is just a blue-neck raver with a giant anti-Key chip on his shoulder, unless National gets honest and stands honestly in every seat it will still be cynically abusing MMP for its own ends--and abusing the government of the country with it. Corruption is corruption, whatever spin is put on it. Judge the tree by its fruit.

If two businesses got together to cook things for their mutual advantage they would be breaking the law. The same sort of laws should apply to the far more serious business of democracy.

--

A party that does not reach the 5% threshold despite getting an electorate seat or two should not get its quota bumped up. That would stop the big parties using small ones to plump up their own numbers.

--

The <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10740449">New Zealand Herald's editor</a> was scathing about the stitchups between National and ACT.

A BIT OF WEASEL IN THE KIWI

A kiwi is not meant to be mistaken for a weasel. And the kiwi guilty of this bit of corruption usually isn't. In most things it is a very good kiwi. But in one thing someone has genetically modified some weasel into it.

The culprit is Kiwibank. It goes against the grain to criticise it, because it is a good bank, but the problem with weasels is that they grow into voracious monsters unless you shoot them early.

There are three or four ways of doing transactions with a bank. Bricks, clicks, calls and walls. You can go to the bricks-and-mortar branch, you can use the Internet, you can use phonebanking, and for some things you can use an ATM.

With Kiwibank you pay nothing for using bricks, clicks and walls, but if you do the exactly the same thing using calls you are charged for the call. That is inconsistent, and unfair. It is also not the habit of other banks--those Aussie ones that Kiwibank likes to sling off at.

Why penalise people for using the quickest, most convenient way of doing simple things like checking on their balance or paying a bill or moving their money about? Doesn't Kiwibank like customers?

But if you have the temerity to complain to Kiwibank about its phonebanking charges you get an eyeful or an earful of weasel water. When it's all boiled down to the concentrated yellow stuff what you are getting is this:

1) 'We are upfront about our charges.' So--unfairness is unfairness, wrongdoing is wrongdoing, even if you tell people in advance that you are going to do it. If you don't believe that, Kiwibank Complaints Manager (Bruce Thompson), write a letter to the police telling them that you are now going to do 120kph on the motorway all the time, or that you intend driving with too much alcohol in you ditto. Do you think that that will stop them from arresting you?

2) 'We want to work something out.' What Mr Thompson offered was to refund the last five months' of phonebanking charges ($27) and hand out twenty post-paid envelopes--but without any admission of wrondoing or liability--as 'full and final settlement. In short, take a bribe to shut up and go away and stay shut up for ever and ever.

3) 'You can use the Internet or the mail to pay your bills.' Ah, now we have the guts of it. They are control-freaks. They want to tell us how to live our lives. That is the hallmark of bureaucrats; they always want to push people round. The fact that phonebanking is the fastest, the most convenient and the easiest way of doing almost everything is irrelevant to that mindset. It just wants you push you round. Live the way we want, not the way you want, is their mentality.

4) 'We don't charge for the first five calls each month.' More control-freakery. Live how we want you to, not how you want. So if, for example, you have to check five times in a single day to see when a cash-deposit has come in--well, tough. Five times in month. How many bills come in in a month? How many times do you have to check your balance in a month? How many times do you want to move money about in a month. Five! How generous
can a control-frealk be!? Think of all the money Kiwibank is making out of a system run entirely by computers. It's money for old rope.

5) 'We are not going to change.' So at last we got to the bottom line, which translates: 'We intend being stupid and bureaucratically pigheaded, no matter what. So there! We'll keep making lotsa money for old rope.'

The problem, for Kiwibank, is that it is owned by the government, and therefore must toe the line drawn by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, which every one, including its customers, 'the right to the observance of the principles of natural justice.' As a judge has observed that means 'fairness writ large.'

Which means that Kiwibank's attempts to be small, small-minded, weasel-brained and weasel-mouthed are against that pesky thing called the law. Even worse, against the paramount piece of legislation, the Bill of Rights. Which is the law put there to protect Kiwis. From weasels. From unfairness.

It also means that Kiwibank, via its Complaints Manager, was attempting to bribe me into a breach of the Bill of Rights Act with his weasel-piddling $27 and his twenty freeby envelopes.

Please, Kiwibank, stop being Weaselbank in your phonebanking charges. Be 24-carat Kiwibank.

RENEWAL

Disaster
Shocks us
Into renewed knowledge
Of what is real.
Falsehoods fracture and tear apart,
The follies built upon them
Fall into unrecoverable ruin,
And the simple truths of life
Emerge again.

WISE WORDS ON THE EARTHQUAKE

The Bay of Plenty Times quoted Greg O’Connor, the president of the Police Association, after he had visited the site of the CTV building in Christchurch yesterday, where up to 120 people are feared killed by the magnitude 6.3 earthquake. He admitted that the police and other government agencies would need to ‘write a new script’ in response to the disaster.

‘I think it would be a good idea if every MP and senior bureaucrat and every senior decision-maker in New Zealand gets down here over the next two weeks because you just can't get a sense of it unless you’re here.’


Well said. If they did it might shove them into the real world of real people living real lives. They might rediscover their hearts, and raise the temperature of their heads from the absolute zero of corrupt thinking to normal body-temperature.

THE CORRUPTION OF LANGUAGE

'When men cannot change things they change words', is an old, very wise Roman proverb. A glaring sign of corruption is when people change the language. It is the worst form of corruption, because it is far more than just a superficial lie. It changes communication, which is the social glue, and therefore it damages society. It also changes the way we think in a very fundamental way. Changing words is not therefore not cosmetic; it is an evil that goes deep.

Winston Churchill said, 'We build our houses then our houses build us.' The same is true of language. The words we use, the words we choose, alter our thinking. We should therefore take great care with our choice of words. And we should change them only for very good reason. Not for malice, not for vanity, not just for the sake of it.

PC-speak is corruption. It is an evil cancer metastasising through our nation, through our communities, through our families, through our minds. It is a social crime.

....

A recent example of an attempt to change words was in the report of the 'Welfare' Working Group, which wants to us to replace all the welfare benefits with one, to be called the Work-Seeker Benefit. Obviously, those who then fail to find work can be cut off. That ignores the truth that there is 5-10% unemployment, and that therefore there will be a large number of people who will never find work. It also ignores what has pointed out by John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the world's foremost economists, who said that in modern economies unemployment is deliberately factored in as part of the effort to keep inflation under control.

To penalise the people who are the consequence of that policy is wickedness; to change the language to vindicate it is wickedness piled on wickedness.

The victims of the Christchurch earthquake who are being handed wads of money by the government are not being asked if they are looking for work, because a vast amount of employment in Christchurch has been eliminated. The same applies to the whole country, except that the earthquake that has caused the unemployment is man-made, which is even more reason why those who are the victims of it should not be penalised.

We are making two classes of beneficiaries: Christchurch ones and others&emdash;and a policy to tick the first and kick the second.

THE MAORI PARTY NIXES HUMAN RIGHTS

The government of New Zealand relies on the support of the Maori Party to remain in power, and New Zealand, in theory, operates under the rule of law. Our pre-eminent law is the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, which says this, very plainly, in sections 13 and 14:

....
13. Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion--Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, including the right to adopt and to hold opinions without interference.

14. Freedom of expression--Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the right to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.
....


Whatever anyone's opinion of what Hone Harawira said, those in the Maori Party who dreamed up and decided to enforce their party rules to crush him obviously do not understand 'everyone', 'without interference' or 'freedom'. Or perhaps they have never read the Bill of Rights Act.

It is comforting to know that the government of New Zealand is in such law-abiding hands...

SHAKEN BACK TO REALITY

A silver lining to the black cloud of a terrible disaster is that everyone is very forcibly shaken back to reality, to the fundamentals of life, to what truly matters. Habits of falsehood, evasion, ideology, party-political nonsense and fallacious thinking vanish, suddenly replaced by the simple truth.

Long may it last!


The jarring reality in Christchurch on Tuesday the 22nd contrasts with the heartless follies of the 'Welfare' Working Group, which had only the day before released its disgusting report, which did not have the slightest connection with reality. The very next day thousands were flung out of work, out of normal existence, into circumstances that could not be covered by the trivial handouts proposed by the malicious WWG.

If we were to apply the same corrupt thinking to those caught by the combination of circumstance and the physical earthquake in Christchurch that the WWG is telling us to apply to those caught by the combination of circumstance and the global financial earthquakes, we would be handing the people of Christchurch a dollar or two for a short time then telling them to get lost, get off their chuffs and help themselves.

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF LAW AND CORRUPTION

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, passed by our Parliament in 1990, begins with very strong language, setting out the Act's reason for existence with these words, in boldface:

....
NEW ZEALAND BILL OF RIGHTS

An Act--
(a) To affirm, protect, and promote human rights and fundamental freedoms in New Zealand; and
(b) To affirm New Zealand's commitment to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
....

To affirm means to make strong. To commit means to entrust, consign for treatment or safe keeping. Thus to proclaim before the world, on top of signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICOCAPR), that you are affirming your commitment to it, could not state things more powerfully.

ICOCAPR, like all United Nations instruments, begins with a very powerful statement of the fundamentals of a free society, of law, of human rights:

'Considering that, in accordance with the principles proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world'.

Then it underlines the fundamental of fundamentals: 'Recognising that these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person'.

Different United Nations instruments use slightly different wording to state that absolute fundamental. Some say 'inherent dignity'; the United Nations Charter says, 'inherent dignity and worth', which nicely underlines the central point by doubling it. But that is the explicitly stated bedrock of law. Every good law, every good official act in society has as its aim the fulfilment of that principle.

'Recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of the human person' is the sharp, clear dividing-line between the light of human rights and the darkness of human wrongs. Judgements are therefore very simple. If an action or expression recognises the inherent dignity and worth of the human person it is a right; if not it is a criminal wrong.

Corruption in all its forms is a denial of the inherent dignity and worth of the human person. It is therefore a denial of the fundamental principle of human rights, a denial of the fundamental principle of law, a denial of the fundamental truth of what it is to be human. It is a monstrous lie, which is why it must be implacably resisted wherever it shows itself. Lies damage or destroy human life.

That is the point starkly made by another United Nations instrument, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says: 'disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which outraged the conscience of all mankind'.

That puts in a nutshell the fundamental cause of all barbarous acts: disregard and contempt for human rights--in particular the bedrock of human rights, 'recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of the human person.'

Therefore to rid ourselves of a particular barbarous act that outrages the human conscience we need only to identify and eliminate the particular human right that is being disregarded and contemned. We need to identify where and how the inherent dignity and worth of the human person is being denied, then take whatever action is necessary to change denial to recognition.

IUS

The foundation of the word justice is the Latin word ius, which means right. So justice should be concerned only with achieving the right, in all senses: in truth, in logic, in human rights and in law.

That is underlined by sections 25(a) and 27(1) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, which lay down that everyone has the right to a 'fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial court' and 'to the observance of the principles of natural justice.'

It is also underlined by sections 6(a) and 6(b) of the Evidence Act 2006. Section 6 of that Act lays down its purpose, and begins with:

....
The purpose of this Act is to help secure the just determination of proceedings by--
(a) providing for facts to be established by the application of logical rules; and
(b) providing rules of evidence that recognise the importance of the rights affirmed by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990;
....

Logical rules are simple. Establish a true premise, reason logically from it, and the conclusion will be right, must be right, cannot be anything but right.

The fundamental rule of logic is simple and powerful: 'If, if and only if the premise is true and the reasoning is true will the conclusion be true.'

Thus judges are told to establish the truth, to reason truly from it, and thus to come down with the true verdict, the right verdict. Failure to adhere to 6(a) and (b) is the corruption of incompetence or carelessness. Wilful failure to is deliberate corruption.