Conservative revolution in New Zealand
New Zealand has a track record for this. After leftism gets destructive enough, conservatism comes back with a rush. The Lange/Douglas government in the 1980s was very capitalist. Roger Douglas abolished whole government departments
It took 40 days for a three-party coalition to form government in New Zealand but, now that it has arrived, it’s not wasting any time in unwinding many of the progressive policies of its former leader, Jacinda Ardern.
The three-party coalition of NZ National Party, ACT New Zealand and NZ First has committed to reverse a number of key Labour policies that made headlines around the world during Ardern’s 5½ years in charge.
The new government – a coalition between centre-right National, libertarians ACT and populists NZ First – has already made global headlines for abandoning world-leading smoke-free laws. But changes are also coming to electric vehicles, sex education and hard-fought gains for the Maori community.
The new coalition is the most reactionary government Mark Boyd, a political researcher at Auckland University, has seen during his 40 years covering New Zealand politics. He said the vast majority of the policies announced by the government are taking things “back to the way they were” before Ardern’s election in 2018.
“By reactionary, what I really mean is reacting to Labour: they have very few policies, they just want to roll back what Labour have done,” he said.
“If you argue that the government of the last six years was more ‘woke’ or ‘radical’ and the previous was more conservative – its like: ‘take us back’. Not to the ’50s, like Donald Trump wants to do in America – but it’s almost like there’s a nostalgia for the [John] Key years, which was only six years ago.”
World-first smoking ban
Late last month, the government announced it would roll back a landmark smoking policy that banned the sale of tobacco to anyone born after 2009. That ban was among a raft anti-smoking measures that also included reducing the amount of nicotine allowed in smoked tobacco products and cutting the number of retailers able to sell tobacco by over 90 per cent.
They marked some of the toughest anti-tobacco rules in the world. A ban on smoking for future generations was subsequently proposed in the United Kingdom, with other countries also considering similar rules.
But axing the world-leading legislation was among the 49 priorities listed by Prime Minister Chris Luxon’s first 100 days.
“A 36-year-old can smoke, but a 35-year-old can’t? ... That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said when asked about the decision.
The ACT party, then represented by sole MP David Seymour, was the only party to oppose Ardern’s gun law reform in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosques massacre.
Now, with ACT part of the governing coalition, (with Seymour to become deputy prime minister halfway through the term as part of their agreement), it has won several concessions from the National Party to deregulate firearms. This includes rewriting the Arms Act and go to a “graduated system not unlike the way you get a driver’s licence”, according to Seymour.
A legally binding target to lower New Zealand’s jail population is also being abandoned. Labour had pitched the policy during its ill-fated campaign, but new policing minster Mark Mitchell says the policy was focused on “emptying out New Zealand’s prisons rather than trying to reduce crime”.
Incumbent Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has conceded defeat to Christopher Luxon in a decisive election victory as Kiwis vote for a change after six years of a liberal government.
The deputy political editor of the New Zealand Herald, Thomas Coughlan, said the recent election result was more about the Labour government being “voted out more than the new government was voted in”.
“It’s very difficult to say this is the policy agenda that people wanted,” Coughlan said. “There was certainly a sense under Labour the pace of change was too fast but the new government, and particularly some on the coalition’s fringe, has perhaps misinterpreted that as a desire for rolling back those changes rather than just slowing them up.”
The new government has also vowed to rebrand dozens of government departments that use Maori names, which could reportedly cost millions of dollars, a move quickly adopted and rolled out by Labour.
“Under Labour there was an explosion of new departments and agencies and they usually had a Maori name first and English second, if they even did [have English] at all,” Coughlan said.
“It seemed like that was a straw that broke the camel’s back. The last 20 years, the use of Maori language has been widespread, no reaction to it – all of a sudden over the last couple of years the reaction has exploded.”
The new government’s Indigenous policies saw thousands of protesters rally this week as the parliament convened for the first time since the October election.
Organised by the Maori Party, its co-leader Rawiri Waititi said the new policies of Luxon’s administration would take New Zealand “back to the 1800s”.
The most controversial aspect would introduce a bill that reinterprets the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi – the country’s founding document – which outline the need for the government to partner with Maori, protect Maori resources and address the impact of colonisation.
Sex education
Also included in the new government’s agenda was the move to scrap gender and sexuality education, known locally as RSE.
The pledge to “refocus the curriculum on academic achievement and not ideology, including the removal and replacement of the gender, sexuality, and relationship-based education guidelines” is one that has drawn particular outrage.
“My initial reaction was dismay,” education union NZEI president Mark Potter, a Wellington-based primary school teacher, told AAP. “The one thing our children don’t need is less education in the area of relationships and health.”
The inclusion of the clause to scrap gender and sexuality education in the coalition deals caught the eye because the issue did not feature in the election campaign.
Electric Vehicles
Labour’s incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – which offered rebates of up to $NZ7015 ($6500) for electric vehicles and slapped $NZ6900 fees on high-emissions vehicles – are gone.
The coalition parties had framed the legislation as unfairly targeting farmers and tradies and successfully relabelled the policy as the “ute tax”. Scrapped too are plans to install 10,000 new electric vehicle charges across New Zealand.
Work has stopped too on the Auckland Light Rail, an embattled project that was intended to have already been completed but was labelled “a white elephant” by Luxon during his election campaign.
The changes represent a return to an earlier status quo. Like many other democracies, through, controversy frequently centres on cultural issues. The uptick in Maori names for government departments under Labour, for example, has topped the incoming government’s agenda.
“That’s one of the areas where the pace of change was a bit fast for people,” Coughlan said.
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A woman said she felt “betrayed by feminism” after deciding she wanted to settle down, have a family and a husband as she approached 39th birthday.
At one point during the interview with Fox News Digital, she broke down crying describing how she feared she would end up alone and childless.
Melissa Persling recently wrote an essay for Business Insider titled, “I’m 38 and single, and I recently realised I want a child. I’m terrified I’ve missed my opportunity.” She said after it went viral in November, hate began to pour in from men telling her that she’s lived a selfish life. Persling has a much different account of her story.
When Persling was 22, she married a traditional man and moved to a rural community in Idaho, where she grew up.
“He wanted a simple life with children and home-cooked meals,” she said. However, Persling – despite coming from a religious Christian background – made it clear to her husband-to-be that she did not want children.
“At that time I felt very strongly I did not want children, that I wasn’t going to be like the traditional housewife. I knew I did want to pursue a career,” she told Fox News Digital in an interview. “And I felt very strongly that that would never change. And I guess I was wrong.”
Persling said both her and her ex thought that love could conquer everything, but after 10 years, it was clear their differences in life goals were irreconcilable. Persling said she became resentful when he would ask for dinner or for his laundry to be done.
“I did little to hide my disdain for our small-town life. He was a good and hardworking man, but I don’t think I made him feel that way,” she said.
At 30, Persling and her ex divorced; she swore off the idea of marriage.
“I told my friends and family I’d never get married again. I needed independence, a fulfilling career, and space to chart my own course, and I didn’t think marriage fit into that vision. I was content to look toward a future without a husband, children, or the trappings of a ‘traditional’ life,‘” she wrote.
As she grew older, however, the fun, carefree lifestyle – being wined and dined, going to parties – began to get old. The pursuit of comfort and self became dull, she said.
When she turned 38, terror began to take over.
“I was panic-stricken. I really thought I’m going to be alone forever. It really scared me. I almost wrote [the article] as sort of a warning to other women. I don’t want people to miss out on the important things in life because they’re just enjoying themselves because I don’t think that that’s ever going to really make you happy,” she said.
She wrote in the article how she felt “urgency” to find a stable relationship and was rethinking about wanting marriage and children.
“I hardly recognised myself,” she wrote in the article. “I also began to feel selfish for spending so much time focusing solely on myself … My very existence started to feel shallow and hollow.”
In retrospect, Persling believed she had some self-discovery and work for herself to do, and it took time to sort through previous trauma. Her parents’ divorce, which she described as coming from “a broken home,” took time to heal and sort through to find out what she really wanted.
“I grew up in a fairly traditional family, but my parents were divorced. And I would say that probably had some effect on my feelings about having a family coming from a broken home certainly has its hardships,” she told Fox News Digital.
At one point, she recalled a man coming over to her in a coffee store who randomly told her not to lose hope – that God had a plan for her.
And then a happy turn to Persling’s story arrived, which she describes as the exception and not the rule for women in her age group. Shortly after penning the article, she dated a man who she previously befriended. They’re already talking about marriage and a future.
She dished on the details: “So it’s a guy that I’ve been friends with, and we’ve always just sort of stayed in touch. And we did go on one date about a year ago, and I told him, ‘I just want to be friends with you.‘”
After her epiphany that she wanted a traditional life – the realisation that he was “the one” hit her like “a ton of bricks.”
“This guy is the one that God’s been preparing for me,” she said.
“I’ve had these relationships since where there were so many butterflies and so many like, ‘Oh my gosh, checking my phone. Did he text?’ And I realised, that’s not love. That’s anxiety. I never knew where I stood with those people. I could never envision a future with those people.”
Persling said she is looking forward to a modest, meaningful and happy future.
“Moving into my future, I’m not going to be travelling. I’m not going to have a lot of extra money. I’m not going to be going out for fancy dinners and I’m OK with that,” she said. “I’m ready for that. I think that’s what’s really going to make me happy. Like I’m so done just making myself happy.”
“You think you’re happy when you’re doing all these things [when you’re single] to make yourself happy. I don’t think you really are. It’s the relationships that make you happy. It’s building something with another person. It’s creating a life with another person, having goals and plans with another person. It’s making other people happy. Making people you love happy. That’s happiness. I really don’t think I will know true happiness until I’m in that place.”
While Persling doesn’t consider herself a feminist, she attributed feminism – in part – as the reason she had thought negatively about marriage.
“I feel unbelievably betrayed by feminism, and I don’t want to put it on the movement [entirely] because I believe you make your own choices … But I was constantly fed this idea that women can do everything. We don’t really need men … I kind of want to go back to some of those teachers and coaches and say, ‘What did you mean by that? Because we can’t do it all.’”
“I feel like I’m in such a different place now. And I’m so ready for that now. I understand what the sacrifice of marriage is and what the beauty of marriage is now, and I don’t think I appreciated what family means for a long time. I don’t think I truly understood,” she said during the interview. “I don’t care if I ever put on heels and go to a fancy dinner again. That stuff does not matter. I promise you young women it will never make you happy.”
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Biden/Buttigieg DEI Policies Endanger the Country. They Don't Care
The FAA is seeking people suffering from "severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities" to be air traffic controllers.
The country currently is in the throes of an epidemic of mass insanity and irrationality. The manifestations of the disorder are too numerous to cite, but the explosion of the DEI plague being pushed by the government, many businesses, and the intellectual pigmies in most of the media, must be included in any list of the most egregious. As currently advocated and practiced by our leftist “elites,”1 it is incompatible with rationality, common sense, and morality, among other things, and, as the Wall Street Journal, not to mention the Supreme Court, have pointed out, the U.S. Constitution.
There is a brand of this particular wokeness that is relatively unknown to the general public, but that is particularly irrational and dangerous. It is the Federal Aviation Administration’s relatively young DEI mandates. These Biden/Buttigieg DEI commands now apply to the employment of FAA air traffic controllers in an insidious way, a way that threatens the safety of our skies and of anyone who flies.
To understand how insidious and dangerous the FAA's DEI policies are, it is necessary to examine briefly just what air traffic controllers do and the nature of the job. The description that follows includes some detail about their tasks. Bear with me because it shows that being an ATC is not a job for dummies, or even for intellectual giants who cannot make crucial decisions in a short amount of time while under great stress.
First, just to be considered for possible employment, an ATC candidate must first pass a battery of seven tests covering numerical calculations, progressively difficult memory tests, problems involving rapidly changing image relationships, visual computer problems simulating collision avoidance, reading comprehension, logical reasoning, and a personality test. A description of the tests and sample problems are here. Take a stab at some of the sample problems to see how difficult they are and the built-in time limitations and pressures.
By the time they finish their training, ATCs must be experts in a number of areas that affect safety. These include weather, types of aircraft and their characteristics, navigation and the use of multiple types of navigational aids, effective communications with pilots, and radio and radar operations. To ensure pilot and passenger safety, ATCs must be skilled in, among other things, math, including the ability to make quick calculations in a dynamic environment, problem-solving, effective communication, and split-second decision making.
The ATCs at a local airport must monitor not only aircraft in the air, but personnel and vehicles on the ground, planes both on the runways and those taking off, as well as approaching aircraft that will be landing soon. They coordinate both inbound and outbound aircraft to assure that they are safe distances apart, vertically and horizontally.
At any given time, there can be many scores of aircraft within the airspace controlled by the local ATC. Atlanta’s controlled airspace, for example, extends thirty nautical miles from the airport. There is over 3,700 square miles under that airspace that they must control. In this airspace, the ATCs must maintain safe distances between aircraft that are flying at wildly varying airspeeds. For example, a small single-engine private plane may have a cruising speed of 90 - 150 knots/hour, while commercial airliners typically are flying at hundreds of miles per hour.2 Performing this analysis and giving the necessary instructions to pilots may be particularly difficult in the traffic landing pattern, when a small single-engine Cessna is sandwiched between, perhaps, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air and a commercial airliner, all with different approach speeds.
In short, the ATCs’ role is complex and stressful, sometimes requiring split-second life-and-death decisions. An error, inattention, or even hesitation can cost the lives of hundreds of people both in the air and on the ground.
The FAA has eagerly embraced the extreme DEI strategies that are now oh-so-popular in “progressive” leftist and socialist circles. On its webpage, the FAA clearly sets out how it will discriminate against the wicked white males. As this article will show below, it does so by seeking to employ people who are clearly less qualified than the general applicant pool. Less qualified, that is, unless you believe that the average applicant suffers from, for example, a “severe intellectual disability.”
The FAA makes clear the tribes that it includes in the Diversity Nation: It touts that it specifically “targets” for “special emphasis,” in both recruiting and hiring, people with disabilities in “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
Wait. It gets worse. Such disabled applicants get even more special treatment because they are eligible for preferential hiring. The FAA calls this “On-the-Spot hiring.” That is exactly what it sounds like – the FAA admits that it is a “non-competitive hiring method.” They are eligible for this non-competitive hiring even if their intellectual or psychiatric disability is “severe.”
https://johnalucas6.substack.com/p/bidenbuttigieg-dei-policies-endanger
********************************************First Amendment Right to Religious Freedom Applies to Everyone but Jews
The First Amendment no longer applies to the openly Jewish. As antisemitic rallies, chants, and violence skyrocket in the United States and the Biden administration shifts focus to Islamophobia, many Jews have been forced to take their safety into their own hands.
In America, rallies and other activities in support of the Hamas terrorist organization that are often met with little resistance or protection from local authorities and a neutral passing glance from political leaders and celebrities have driven many Jews to change how they travel, dress, and express their worship.
Columnist and commentator Bethany Mandel told The Daily Signal that her family was no longer allowing her kids to walk to synagogue without protection.
Mandel said that she and several colleagues also have been forced to stop keeping the Sabbath in order to stay up to date on threats and to cover the Israel-Hamas war and its effects abroad.
Heritage Foundation research fellows Jason Bedrick and Jay Greene both canceled plans to travel to conferences where they didn’t feel safe as Jews. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
Several Jewish students at MIT told The Daily Signal that they’ve changed how they dress to avoid being targeted again by pro-Hamas students on campus—for example, swapping yarmulkes for baseball caps.
Countless synagogues, Jewish day schools, museums, and community centers have increased armed security drastically.
Why change your behavior in a nation where your right to religious liberty is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution? Because pro-Hamas protesters from Pennsylvania to California continually chant threats such as “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide; we charge you with genocide.”
Heaven help the Jew who is noticed acting a little too Jewish near a progressive university or pocket of fundamentalist Muslims. He might find his business, synagogue, student center, or cemetery protested, surrounded, and vandalized, as happened in New York, California, Florida, and Ohio.
The pro-Hamas protesters never explain how an Israeli Jew owning a coffee shop or retail store is equivalent to funding “the war against Palestine.” But like most other conspiracies steeped in antisemitism, sound data and logic are absent on principle.
In true American fashion, many Jews are preparing for the increased threats to the safety of their families and communities by arming themselves and taking firearms and self-defense training courses.
Chris Radcliff, a police officer in rural Indiana, told The Daily Signal that a large number of local Jews who didn’t carry prior to Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis have been filling up his classes on personal defense and firearms safety—and encouraging their friends to do the same.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, an orthodox Jew living in Florida, consistently reports the same. On his daily podcast, Shapiro has reported that gun stores and shooting ranges are packed with Jewish individuals who don’t wish to be the targets of the racial lynch mobs that have begun to form in urban areas such as New York City.
In the past month, two distinct groups of pro-Hamas protesters, one made up of college students at Cooper Union and the other of high school students in Queens, surrounded Jews until police officers had to escort the Jews to safety.
In both cases, the mobs of young people screamed the genocidal chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as they beat on doors separating them from terrified Jews inside.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, dispatched counselors from a “diversity, equity, and inclusion” group to lecture the mob of violent students in Queens, in place of any real consequence.
Jewish students have been harassed at MIT, Columbia, Penn State, Harvard, and NYU. Antisemitic incidents in the U.S. rose by over 400% in the first two weeks after Oct. 7.
Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old Jewish man, was beaten to death with a megaphone in Thousand Oaks, California, by a pro-Hamas protester, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office reported.
A California middle school forced four 11-year-old Jewish students to sign a gag order after they were harassed by a pro-Hamas student who told them that “all Israelis and Jews should be killed.”
Community leaders also have altered their behavior to avoid offending pro-Hamas groups at the expense of Jews.
The Second Sundays Art and Music Festival in Williamsburg, Virginia, canceled an annual menorah lighting scheduled for Dec. 10 after the founder of the festival said the event “seemed very inappropriate” in view of the Israel-Hamas war and might indicate the festival had chosen a side in the conflict.
The event organizer later offered to allow the menorah lighting, if it were done “under a banner calling for a cease-fire.”
This action drew severe condemnation from the United Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula, which labeled as antisemitic this pandering and singling out of an apolitical religious event:
We should be very clear: It is antisemitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s policies and actions, and to require a political litmus test for Jews’ participation in community events that have nothing to do with Israel. Those standards would never be applied to another community.
After being heckled by pro-Hamas protesters, Brown University President Christina Paxson altered her speech to omit a student’s right to safely wear a yarmulke or the Star of David on campus—choosing only to mention a student’s right to wear a keffiyeh or hijab.
Jews in the United States are under attack, and the Left only has eyes for Islamophobia.
This isn’t new—only a different flavor of disgrace. After a transgender shooter slaughtered six, including three children, at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre mourned transphobia.
Racial crimes in which a black individual kills a white individual are often left without the FBI’s “hate crime” label.
There isn’t a single reason that the full weight of our federal government—the same government that found Jan. 6 protesters in mere moments—shouldn’t be brought down on those who cause our fellow Jewish citizens to live in fear.
Where is the social justice crowd now?
On paper, you have the freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. But after the cowardly responses to the blatant antisemitism that has become so common following Oct. 7, it’s clear that the First Amendment is extended only to a few select groups. Jews need not apply.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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