DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Filipinos, Foreign Aid and Five-Year-Olds

In which Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath takes his regularly irreverent look at some of the past week’s headlines.

1. Taxpayers Get Bill For MPs’ Campaign Trips – Productive New Zealanders have just funded seventeen Molesworth St parasites to visit Mt Albert during the recent by-election campaign. These cockroaches attended sham meetings and conducted “parliamentary business” in Auckland so that you and I would be forced to pick up the tab for their hotel bills, taxi fares and electioneering. Jonathan Hunt would be proud of them. National’s party whip says all MPs acted within the rules. Time then, I say, for an immediate overhaul of those rules. Let’s make political parties self-funding. Why the hell should I be forced to fund Phil Goff or John Key, when the policies they espouse turn my stomach? Quote of the week has to be Parliamentary Services general manager Geoff Thorn who in a moment of psychosis described MPs as “honourable people.” Honourable people who don’t hesitate to spend other people’s money in the pursuit of power. At least the Libertarianz Party were honourable enough to refuse taxpayer funding for television advertising during the 2008 election campaign. In addition, they were not allowed to fund their own television advertising, thus closing that door as a means of putting their message across. I say it again: why should an individual be forced to fund campaigns for organisations whose ideas and policies are diametrically opposed to his own? It’s high time we abolished restrictions on political advertising, and stopped public funding of political parties.
2. ‘Give Maori Free Access To Uni’ – Pita Sharples insults Maori students with his call for tertiary institutions to lower their entry standards for a favoured minority group that he considers incapable of entering university under their own steam. Sharples presumably wants not just equality of opportunity in our universities - which Maori people already have now - but equality of outcome. How on earth does he think someone who has failed to achieve at secondary school could march straight into university and succeed? If Dr Sharples is so worried about the absence of Maori in mainstream education, why not get rid of “mainstream”? What’s wrong with a bit of diversity in our education system? Why not make it easier for interested parties to set up new educational facilities, including ones who gave free access to everyone regardless of school achievement? Or even race-based ones, as preferred by Dr Sharples. Just don’t ask me to fund race-based universities, because I have other priorities for my money – such as educating my own children. In fact, get the state right out of education. If Dr Sharples is so concerned about the lack of Maori participation in universities, why doesn’t he petition the tribes, with their billions in Treaty settlement pay-offs, to fund their own private universities, with their own entry criteria?
3. Don't repatriate Filipino workers, pleads consul – Thousands of workers from the Philippines plan to outstay their work permits. Their consul-general here has asked that these people be allowed to stay, as many of them have sold everything they own back home to come and work here. I say: why not let them stay? Get rid of minimum wage laws, so that they can all find work; and stop them from claiming taxpayer-funded welfare, so they don’t become a drain on the rest of us. Let’s make these Filipinos the recipients of “foreign aid” by giving them jobs here. Once they find employment, give them a vote. Equally, remove the franchise from native-born sickness, invalid and unemployment beneficiaries. Give people incentive to be self-supporting, instead of rewarding non-production.
4. Fury As Five Year Old Told To Clean Toilets – A five year old who hit another child in the face with a ball is not smacked but instead is told to clean toilets at the child care facility he attends. This has apparently caused damage to his mother’s ‘mana’ and trampled his spirit. Well, diddums. This child has been directed into some work that will benefit other children. I say well done to the caregivers responsible for turning a negative into a positive, and exposing this child to a work situation early in his life. Too many children in situations of intergenerational welfare dependency never learn what work is, and survive (if they are lucky) in squalid filthy conditions, looked after by dope-addled criminals. And here’s the kicker: the five year old’s mother is now seeking advice from Annette Sykes - the same Annette Sykes who rejoiced when Islamic terrorists killed thousands of innocent people on September 11, 2001. A real expert on human rights, our Annette. Wonder if she thought for one second about the mana and spirit of those who perished in the World Trade Centre?

See y’all next week!
Doc McGrath

* * Read Richard McGrath’s column every Wednesday here at NOT PC . . .  except when when you read it on a Friday * *