Monday 17 November 2008

Arise, Ministers Sharples and Turia [updated]

Why's everybody so gosh-darned excited about Sharples and Turia getting high profile Ministries  -- Maori Affairs for Sharples; Associate at Social Development for Turia -- with uncapped budgets to match?

Remember, these are still the same people who want rangatiratanga -- which to them means 'independence' at your expense.  They still want something for nothing.  They're still tribalists and collectivists who think government should "fix everything, fund everything and give 'whanau' the power to veto anything in their communities."

Remember that Tariana didn't leave Labour just for objecting to the Foreshore and Seabed Act -- she'd already been sacked as a minister for making up that nonsense about a "holocaust" in Taranaki.  And Sharples is still the same idiot who said that the "police raids" that netted the Te Qaeda tribalists  "set race relations in New Zealand back one-hundred years" (as I said at the time, "I wish!")

Remember that, as Lindsay Mitchell reminds us,

Tariana's solution to the relative poverty that many Maori children experience is to increase benefits. John Key has given her a role in which she can promote that solution.

Good old John Boy.  So generous with putting these people in charge of spending your money.  Sharples and Turia haven't changed at all -- as Cactus Kate alos reminds us.  All that's changed is that National's thirst for power at any expense now puts them firmly inside the tent, instead of outside the tent where Clark left them.

Here's a message from former slave Frederick Douglass to Pita Sharples, Tariana Turia and anyone else who wants to 'do something' for 'their people.'  They would do well to have the words printed out and engraved and fixed on a plaque on their office walls:

Everybody has asked the question . . . ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

It's a message that is clear and unambiguous -- and just as relevant here and now as it was there and then. [Hat tip Stephen Hicks]

UPDATE: Incidentally, I love Oswald's prescription for anyone who's Ministerial title contains the words Cultural, Woman's, Children's, Auckland, Racing, Race, Climate or Gender.  That would be a start.

3 comments:

Oswald Bastable said...

That's a message for the Nat soft-cocks on how to trim deadwood.

I prefer your more comprehensive list of ministries to disband!

Luke H said...

Great quote PC. Here's another.

"We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind...."

- Marcus Garvey, speaking in Nova Scotia during October, 1937.

Unknown said...

Worse than this for me, and indicative that nothing has changed, Dunne retains his job as head of the mafia.


Actually, I'll paste my words here as well, because I am so angry with this:

...

Yes, but then I note with horror that Peter Dunne is probably to keep Revenue. Disaster.

He has been a weak Minister, which normally would be good, however, IRD is the most powerful Department of all and desperately needs to be reigned in. Over eighteen years of practice I have been stunned by how callous IRD have become over the last three years, wielding their penalty system with a viciousness that is obscene. They will destroy the individual for no other reason than that they can; even when they will admit their interpretation of whatever applicable law makes a mockery of the intention of the legislator (and normally that intention was evil enough).

With Dunne back in, nothing will change, and the war on the productive sector, where it really matters, will in fact gather pace. And not even for any such misguided (im)morality of the much bloodied altar of the 'common good', it's much more cold blooded than that - again, it is simply because bureaucrats can use what has become a very badly drafted Act, and are not bound to their own word, or past practice, and they can destroy, and do, because they can. No other reason necessary. And be warned, they seem to have developed, particularly, a disliking for the rural sector, which they judge as having had too many concessions in the tax law: as soon as a Department passes judgment such as this, independent of its Minister, and worse, on the only sector keeping our economy afloat, then we are in dire times indeed.

I am gutted at this decision. As far as I'm concerned, the next three years represent the continuation of tyranny, just as I always thought it would be under the populace Key.