Who knew what and when? Asks our Australian correspondent

If Australia’s federal exchequer had a spare half billion or so dollars sloshing around in the vault, might it not have been a better idea to use it to secure the ownership of the strategic port of Darwin instead of earmarking it for a vague investment in Pacific islands aid; aka climate change?

The government’s willingness to allow the port of Darwin to end up in China’s control for want of the same amount of money it has just topped up in the name of climatics its existing billion dollar contributions to Pacific islands welfare is just one of the bizarre outcomes of the recent Pacific Islands Forum in which Australia must surely have learned the lesson that virtue is not its own reward.

No government on the planet on a population basis has such a comprehensive foreign service as Australia’s, yet in regard to the Tuvalu meet the nation still gives all the signs of walking around in the dark.

Was Australia not warned for example by its high commission in Wellington that the dominant Labour wing of New Zealand’s governing coalition is doctrinally compelled to see everything through a climatic filter?

What about the equally comprehensive United States embassy listening post in Wellington?

Did nobody in Wellington or Washington, or, at a pinch, London, convey the message to Australia about the true nature of the reception that was building up for it at Tuvalu?

How was it that with China’s known expansionary designs on the region and especially so in regard to Port Moresby, was Australia still allowed to wade into the Tuvalu brinkmanship encounter believing that it was dealing with a compliant “family?”

Did nobody know, and then let it be known, that China has associate membership of the Pacific Islands Forum?

And so it goes on. More questions than answers with the only certainty that there will be no answers.

The episode has hallmarks of the end product of a western and certainly Westminster zone intelligence breakdown.

Intelligence has just one single purpose and it is to avoid surprises.

Australia, with perhaps the single exception of Canada, is the Commonwealth nation most closely aligned with method and order. In other words, planning.

Yet it wandered into the Pacific Island Forum exuding paternalism and blind to the fact that its “family” members were ready to lynch it, and had, unseen and unheard, carefully laid the groundwork in preparation for the shakedown.

There are though in fairness several explanations.

One is that the parties involved knew what the true agenda was at Tuvalu and decided to let Australia do a walk-through to draw the sting, and also with the additional purpose of disguising the existence of embedded sources of information.

Still another explanation is that Tuvalu was a pre-arranged pantomime set piece.

One designed to let the island leaders reinforce their own base by showily letting off steam at the expense of a well-intentioned Australia which as the world’s 13th largest economy could happily absorb and sustain a bit of a pasting.

In the normal string of events the ensuing unintentional comedy about gagging piety from New Zealand with socks, followed by island survival through Australian fruit picking would have reinforced pre-knowledge and thus these let-it-happen explanations.

As it is the train of events leading up to this Pacific Islands Forum indicate that the course that the meeting in fact took came as a surprise.

This is just because the seriousness of the evolving alignments, the ones involving China, would have been considered too critical to accommodate such tactical show boating, letting off steam.

Federal prime minister Scott Morrison’s current and subsequent exhortation to Australia’s public service to sharpen up its footwork and to focus on Australia as a whole instead of on sector interests may or may not be connected to events in Tuvalu.

The determination though of Official Australia to continue to refer through gritted teeth to the now unruly Oceania archipelago as “family” carries new weight just because in real family life the head of the household is so often the last to know……..

Island Leaders applied concise and concerted use of linkages

Big hearted Australia in the end got the slap in the face reserved for all generous donors when a more powerful and deeper-pocketed benefactor materialises.

After its immense contributions to Oceania topped up by a half billion dollar bonus, Australia’s premier Scott Morrison was bluntly told by Pacific leaders to shut down its coal mines, the source of its open-handedness, writes our Australian correspondent

Australia’s premier Scott Morrison maintained his stony fixed smile as he and his country were publicly put in their place and compelled to coldly digest the resentment that beneficiaries feel for their benefactors when they have reasons to believe that they are no longer dependent on them.

Nothing fades more quickly than gratitude but the awkward events in Tuvalu unrolled against a background of several shocks hardly yet understood in Australia, and even less understood outside it.

Shock Number One. The discovery that Australia’s back-door the port of Darwin had been leased to the Chinese for 99 years.

Shock Number two. The revelation that China was standing by to securitise and otherwise assume the debt of Papua New Guinea.

Shock Number three. The loss at the general election of Bill Shorten’s Labour Party which was considered by the political class unbeatable due to its climate change at-any-cost policies.

The lease of Darwin’s port and its delayed discovery is explicable only in the context of Australia being the world’s most over-governed country. It has in fact 14 houses of parliament. So the much-quoted belief that the nation at large discovered the lease deal only when a quiz question on national security was broadcast carries a degree of truth.

The assumption by China of Papua New Guinea’s governmental debt similarly burst unexpectedly on the political consciousness.

The utter conviction in political class circles in Australia and New Zealand that Labour’s Bill Shorten would win the general election under the climatic banner was behind much of the trilling from New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern to the effect that Australia had to “explain” itself to Oceania and in addition “take responsibility” for its coal mines.

What actually just happened in this story book Oceania setting was the presence of two elephants on those coral strands.

The Pacific Island yearly forums suddenly became a proving ground for great-power politics.

On the one side there was China yearning for the Oceania atolls and their gigantic economic zones.

On the other side the United States and its proxy Australia.

Napoleon said “Let China sleep; when she wakes she will shake the world.” 

What nobody on the Australasian side had anticipated was that China would island hop quite so quickly all the way to the South Pacific and its atolls with their hitherto undervalued vast maritime jurisdictions.

No wonder the chieftains of this far-flung pattern of islands simultaneously discovered and flexed their new found muscle and did so under the code word of coal.

Their concision, precision, and unanimity in levering the advantage presented by China, coupled with their swift grasp of the encoded significance of the word coal was a lesson to diplomatic-governmental practitioners everywhere.

Compare the clarity of action of the Pacific leaders with for example the display of bumbling and fumbling, leaking, and general dissonance displayed by their counterparts in their efforts to extricate Britain from the EU.

Information is power, said Sir Francis Bacon. Once again it is here that the Pacific leaders had the edge, unlike, say, the Australians who collectively only in the last week woke up to the fact that they no longer owned their key northern China-facing defence port.

The Pacific leaders knew they were being handed a bargaining ace and more importantly still, they knew when and how to play it.

Their firm diplomatic professionalism was a lesson to the unready Australians with their touching belief in enduring gratitude, and also to New Zealand equipped with its anticipated statements to the effect that it was on the side of the angels.

Still unacknowledged by either of the somewhat disarrayed Australasian participants in the landmark forum remains the way in which the Pacific leaders understood and applied the techniques of divide and rule.

Airline anticipated susceptibility to progressivist ideologies

Faced with having its newspapers chucked out of Air New Zealand’s Koru lounges the Fairfax chain could only respond by claiming that its newspapers were made from otherwise unwanted offcuts and were thus sustainable.

No mention was made about the value of the information such as the actual news held in the newsprint.

Neither was there any mention of the unique benefits to the airline’s premium travellers in for example the crossword puzzles, quizzes, word games, anniversaries and other such intellectual minutiae still favoured by newsprint buffs.

Instead of castigating the airline for its thoughtless action in dissing its high-end passengers, the newspaper chain in its own newspapers chose merely to claim that in terms of being “sustainable” its newsprint titles in the materials used in the manufacture of them were just as progressive as anything Air New Zealand was doing.

The incident was mentioned by National Press Club Peter Isaac as symptomatic of the Fairfax chain’s determination to see everything in terms of climate change. It had become so fixated on the issue that the chain in this instance had allowed it to obscure its own priority to protect and promote its titles.

Isaac had been talking to farmers at a meeting of South Wairarapa Rotary.

They could only barely comprehend the pervasive grip that climate change notions had on the contents of daily newspapers, and especially those under the aegis of the Fairfax chain, he said, noting that the chain had been honest enough to disclose its refusal to run anything at all that could be construed in the denier category.

Any moves by the Labour coalition government to identify farmers as primary movers in human-induced climate emissions would be warmly applauded by newspapers, claimed Isaac in a speech entitled “Newspapers Today.”

He said that agricultural reporting in a few short years had made the trajectory from helpful farming pages to a demonization of the industry at large, and which had left the once all-powerful farming lobby voiceless, directionless.

Greenpeace had taken over much of the abandoned ground claimed Isaac, a founder member of the Guild of Agricultural Journalists, and especially so when a new piece of climate change legislation was imposed on the productive sector.

Greenpeace in this orchestrated duet now chimed in to the effect that the restrictions were trifling, should be much tougher….harsher.

This said Isaac was a cute piece of political triangulation designed to encourage the productive sector on the receiving end to believe that they had got off lightly…that the penalty could have been much worse….harsher.

So the productive sector thus simultaneously duped and dealt with got the message: it had better toe the line, or else……

Farming lobbies seeking to cope with this ideologically-driven state of affairs sought to do so from a logical standpoint with the result that they further enmeshed themselves in the barely calculable decimal points and abstract data used so effectively by the climatists.

The factual focus was never going to rise above the media noise level just because farmers and the rest of the productive sector were confronting a moral movement.

Underpinning this claimed Isaac was the accelerating trend for media people to be recruited from a narrowing socio-economic background, far removed from the common herd, and one long defined in social mobility studies which in contrast to other university outputs were ignored by the media.

Therefore it was futile for productive sector lobbies to talk about the nation’s loss of competitive edge when they found themselves slugged with these unilateral productivity restrictions.

Climate change had become the prevailing moral conviction of the era and with it an entire package of associated and elitist beliefs claimed Isaac. This “devoutly” held catechism of assertions suffused the daily newspaper and state broadcasting.

This common media allegiance was shared openly “and even enthusiastically” with the Labour-led coalition which saw this creed as the password to United Nations approbation, and thus to electoral victory in this same activist domestic constituency.

Confronted with Air New Zealand’s “rather petulant” announcement to cease stocking its newspapers in its luxury airport lounges, Fairfax’s response had been to lose its own argument in dwelling on the physical composition of the newspapers, instead of on the value of the contents, the information contained by these same newspapers.

Isaac claimed that the advent of climate change was the overarching media moral issue of the era and it had turned upside down the traditional agribusiness-newspaper relationship.

This was underlined by the Fairfax chain passing up the opportunity to promote the value of the contents of its own titles in the Koru lounges.

Instead and because of the self-hypnosis induced by climate change activism, the chain meandered into a meaningless and weird dissertation devoted exclusively to what it saw as the climate-friendly physical composition, componentry, of the paper newsprint.

The airline had been aware of the chains’ susceptibility to progressivist ideologies and had used this knowledge to slickly rid itself of an unwanted housekeeping chore in its loyalty lounges.

Fairfax had swallowed the climate bait “hook, line and sinker.”

Fairfax allowed itself to become diverted in spite of the chain being particularly vulnerable to restrictions on physical newsprint outlets just because it had “valiantly” kept its web site open, without any pay walling.

Hunt for Mole Futile Because Leaked Memos Widely Circulated En Clair

The faith-based conviction that Donald Trump would lose the United States presidential election led New Zealand into awkward foreign policy fumbles in the aftermath of the Trump ascendancy.

These embarrassing and very public stumbles were compounded by, for example, continuing government donations to the Clinton family foundation.

The utter partisan conviction that Hillary Clinton would win baffled many observers at home and abroad but following the leaking of the British Embassy in Washington memos there is a glimmer of an explanation which is that New Zealand was taking its lead in a shared groupthink with the British foreign affairs apparatus.

The leaked papers demonstrate that from the outset that at a professional level, if not a political level, Britain was utterly hostile to president Trump who they saw as a major and even the ultimate facilitator of Britain’s exit from the EU.

Westminster has sought to obfuscate the leaks in a fog of disinformation centred on the idea that they were the irritable personal value judgements of one official, in the case the British ambassador Sir Kim Darroch.

Yet these same leaked memos also contain strategic estimates of United States policy in for example the recent Straits of Hormuz shadow war with Iran.

Westminster has similarly tried to sustain the belief that the transatlantic memos were decrypted and then broadcast via foreign intervention.

It is now emerging that the memos, by now in clear text, were handed around on a circulation list of hundreds.

The memos are genuine.

This is certified by Whitehall’s failure to invoke any plausible deniability claiming for, example, that the streams of consciousness that have come to light so far were part of a what-if scenario, or some kind of brain storming exercise in a hypothetical vein.

Diplomats are taught only to allow themselves to disclose an opinion on a need to know basis, and this applies especially to written ones.

Excerpts of these communiques, of which there will be more to come, have centred on the florid metaphors used to describe the Trump motives.

Absent is analysis on what exactly is the trade deal that president Trump has in mind for the UK post Brexit?

Whitehall in its fashionable anti-Trump fervour refuses to accommodate the fact that by birth president Trump is as much British as he is American.

His mother was a Scottish emigrant to the United States.

Similarly Whitehall seeks to cloud president Trump’s advice to British prime minister Theresa May.

This was that as long as Britain said it would only leave the EU under a deal with EU, then the EU would never give it a deal just to keep t in the EU.

The smokescreen in its current iteration is to spread the blame around under the generalised collateral that such leaks are the price paid for free and frank discussion, and in doing so ignoring the wikileaks experience which demonstrates the open-letter nature of diplomatic transmission.

Still, the Darroch leaks with their declamatory excerpts has revealed the extent of the partisan idealism allowed to penetrate the UK foreign apparatus and allowed to do so at the expense of technical proficiency in analysing the opportunities presented to the UK by president Trump.

The question remains though as to exactly why en clair memos incorporating such obviously high level inflammatory contents were allowed such free circulation and for a duration of several years?

Not since the civil war of the Cromwellian era has Britain found itself so sundered as it is now by the EU reformation, and this may be one reason for Whitehall failing to understand that this linkage in the Trump context was itself a multiplier on the need to enforce the use of the most measured language, however tempting hip activist words such as “dysfunctional.”

The Darroch Papers confirm that Britain’ public sector in all its forms has found itself vulnerable to the tug of loyalties.

It is a susceptibility that Commonwealth governments need to price into guidance they receive from Whitehall.

Mogul-directed industrial-scale plant-only diet strategy brings premium branding value scope to commodity exporting nation…

Animal foods substitutes made from plants and on an industrial scale will be produced by an enterprise led by Canadian-born New Zealand resident James Cameron who anticipates that the scheme will have the eventual effect of shifting diets from animal to vegetable.

Mr Cameron’s fellow film mogul Sir Peter Jackson is also said to be involved with the scheme.

Both are land holders in the sparsely-populated Wairarapa Valley which is an hour’s drive north of Wellington, centre of the nation’s film industry.

Go-to operations guy in the strategy is Jasper Robards (pictured) who is Mr Cameron’s stepson.

Mr Robard’s grandmother was Lauren Bacall who was married to Old Hollywood star Jason Robards.

Jason Robards, the grandfather, became famed for such films as Tender is the Night, All the President’s Men, and Raise The Titanic.

Raise The Titanic co-incidentally was an earlier version of the genre that was to lay the foundation of Jasper’s stepfather James Cameron’s own global success.

Lauren Bacall was a visitor to New Zealand later in her career

Miss Bacall is remembered for her candid responses to questions she had spent much of her life fielding, notably those about her earlier marriage to Humphrey Bogart.

She was in New Zealand to take part in the fund-raising Telethon charity and sportingly pitched into the televised extravaganza, the pre-eminent broadcast event of its era.

Mr Cameron has invested in plant food substitution research and development in the Wairarapa region for quite some time, since in fact he set up his Avatar special effects processing in Wellington.

Mr Cameron never loses an opportunity to extol the virtues of a vegan diet, crediting it for bestowing upon him the energy to maintain in his later years the energetic output required of an explorer, agronomist, and film maker.

The range of products from the announced venture will go far beyond such well known protein replacements as soy types and will encompass a full slate of substitute extracts and even plant versions of hitherto synthetic and animal-derived garments.

In the meantime Mr Cameron will benefit from his vertical integration in the form of a retail store in one of the Wairarapa’s fashionable tourist hamlets.

It has the capability to render applied market research on contemporary upscale consumer tastes.

There may be in this vegan drive some ironic advantage to New Zealand food exporting in animal products.

This delicatessen approach to foodstuffs will offset the perennial disadvantage of bulk commodity exports in which New Zealand is a price taker, unable to take advantage of branded and processed added value and thus loyalty.

So the promotional possibilities in the foodstuffs produced under the direction of the moguls will be a valuable pointer to the traditional side of the industry which has twisted and turned to obtain global retail premium finished product value on dairy products especially.

The venture chimes with the policy resonance from New Zealand’s governing Labour-Green coalition.

This is especially so in the venture’s forestry emphasis on foodstuffs such as nuts and fungi.

New Zealand’s emphasis on organic cultivation remains fragmented under the critical mass imperatives of volume export demands.

Mr Cameron notes that plant cultivation and processing will re-invigorate rural settlements and it is here that the moguls’ venture harmonises with a government vision that surfaced 55 years ago.

This was to transform New Zealand into the “Switzerland,” of the South Seas.

This, so the notion went, would be accomplished by selling to the world intensively processed and high value products.

This theme would be accomplished now under the announced animal replacement vegan products scheme by producing a greater range of higher value products wrapped and ready for overseas retailers’ shelves in an expanded number of importing nations.

These high value foodstuffs will introduce Swiss-watch grade retail price elasticity simply because consumers will buy them regardless of the price.

The scheme also points to an avenue opening up in by-passing bulk quotas and tariffs both official and unofficial of the type which for example have restricted an established New Zealand plant export, apples.

Import substitution of high value grocery niche products is another benefit of the plant derived foodstuffs diversity scheme.

The cinematographers mission statement in substituting plants where animals once grazed elicits not so much shock and horror from animal graziers as simple disbelief.

And yet…and yet….those promoting the pastoral conversion scheme are in the ideas business and their ideas have so far been, well, fruitful.

“Emergency” Status used to counter low turnout and galvanise younger voters

The climate alarmist proclamation of civic emergencies in Auckland and in other municipalities is centred on a belief that climate alarm is the key to securing the allegiance of the younger vote in New Zealand’s pending local government elections in October.

In the 2016 local government elections voter turnout was 42 percent.

Public information pre-election campaigns to lift the turnout to the 50 percent experienced in the 1980s have failed to lift the turnout.

These new civic emergency declarations follow on the heels of a series of millennial apocalyptic proclamation scares often traced to the Y2K one ushering in the new millennium.

Peak oil was an example of these scares..

In the event when the oil drought was scheduled to make its appearance there was a surplus.

So great was the surplus in fact that one of the first moves of the New Zealand Labour-Green governing coalition was to put an embargo on future exploration for it.

Food miles was another example of this same excitable tendentious computer modelling.

As the logistics of international cargo transport and its economies of scale eventually broke through the artifice of this alarm, it too dissolved into the atmosphere.

In doing so it also saved the New Zealand economy which is based on exporting bulk milk and meat products.

The round of municipal climate emergencies is connected to United Nations winding back its climate doomsday clock to a mere 10 years away.

Another cause is the utter conviction in these municipalities that if only Bill Shorten in the Australian Federal Election had put more campaigning into climate that he would now be the prime minister

Then there were the school-hour extinction marches which further confirmed climatics as the overriding and encompassing dominant moral cause of the hour.

Declarations of emergencies until this round of declarations were reserved for immediate ones.

Emergencies were existential events such as an earthquake, fire or flood.

These were Civil Defence emergencies carrying defined statutory priorities, implications.

The recent round of politically motivated emergency declarations and the events leading up to them remain unchallenged by the mainstream media in New Zealand, anxious itself to accumulate support in a distracted youth market..

Government broadcasting maintains a drumbeat of alarmist reports on polar ice

The Wellington-based chain has candidly announced a deliberate policy not to publish anything in the denier category.

The Auckland-based chain is similarly cautious.

New Zealand’s focus on its top heavy socio and liberal arts at the expense of science education means that there is widespread ignorance on the difference between carbon monoxide (poisonous) and carbon dioxide (beneficial.)

In New Zealand the presence of other reflecting canopy (greenhouse) gases such as water vapour is omitted and the “warming” condition is said to be due simply to “carbon.”

Neither is the dangerous diluting of the word emergency likely to be examined by the social and liberal arts, notably the explosively expanding political-science wing.

The emergency nomenclature applied by the municipalities politicians is technically known as a dialectic.

This is a proposition.

One in which the purpose of a statement however forcibly delivered has several meanings not necessarily connected to the face-value meaning.

Thus an interpretation of the emergency in question could be understood, for example, as saying that unless the young vote is mobilised under the climate cause banner then there will be an electoral emergency in that we, the proclaimers, will lose our seats……

In Washington and Wellington the Fading vendetta for scalp of Megaupload Founder now looks more like Trouble than a Trophy

The tightly knit and warm pattern of alliances which inaugurated the seven year campaign to send Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom from his domicile in New Zealand to the United States to face piracy charges have now chilled and evaporated.

These close sets of relationships converged on the Obama era White House and the keystone alliance was then the one between Hollywood and the White House.

Since president Trump took office this relationship has turned sour.

It is characterised by the open feud demonstrated by the coruscating tweets about the Hollywood galaxy transmitted by president Trump and which dumps the celestial souls so influential in the Obama era into a collective black hole of ignominy.

Wellington and Washington were governmental soul mates at this congenial time between Hawaiian vacationing golfing mates president Obama and New Zealand prime minister John Key.

This friendly relationship curdled the moment that incoming president Trump described man made climate change as a “hoax.”

Then he withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords, much to the anguish of the incoming New Zealand Labour-Green coalition government

An epoch in power and influence has flowed under the political bridge of both Washington and Wellington since the original airborne raid on Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion.

Then the Hollywood lobby the Motion Picture Association of America was led by insider former Democrat senator and onetime White House hopeful l Chris Dodd.

He was determined to make his mark in smoking out Hollywood’s main foe of this era which was copyright infringers, pirates, and working in close harness with the FBI to hunt them down wherever they were.

Then the FBI was among the most revered institutions in the United States.

Now the FBI is severely contaminated and is condemned by both winners and losers in the 2016 presidential election.

Chris Dodd is gone and now the Motion Picture Association is focussed on mending fences with an alienated White House, instead of the showboat corralling of copyright suspects.

The Kim Dotcom saga now well into its seventh year has lasted much longer than World War 2.

Like an Appalachian blood feud its origins are becoming shrouded in the mists of time.

It began when Kim Dotcom was identified as someone who in setting up shop in New Zealand would massively boost New Zealand’s digital technology comprehension base, an immersion style of industrial promotion in vogue at that time.

Which is what happened.

Though not in the anticipated direction.

The gung-ho aerial assault on Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion office did convince the Motion Picture Association that New Zealand meant business on cinematography.

Local digital effects flicks such as the Tolkien and Avatar series surged onward.

So too did the cost to the New Zealand taxpayer in funding the litigation in the long running extradition proceedings bouncing between the courts and which have racked up the equivalent of the cost of a Hollywood-grade international feature film.

In some ways a mystery film because so much in this real life Jarndyce versus Jarndyce process remains unexplained.

Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload servers were based in the United States, thus putting him in the United States jurisdiction.

If he was knowingly doing anything illegal why did he settle in a nation, New Zealand, which has an active extradition treaty with the United States?

Why didn’t he simply stay in Hong Kong which is where he started Megaupload?

Did it have something to do with these very server farms which more than anything else require cooling?

An idea at the time that Kim Dotcom was encouraged to settle in New Zealand was that server farms could be embedded into the chilly if not frozen Southern Alps

Any alliance that Kim Dotcom had with the National government of the time went the way of all the other alliances in this saga which is into anti active hostility.

In a scattershot charge he is also charged with infringing United States RICO statutes designed to combat organised crime.

The notion of a company by definition employing geeks being in a position to deploy the muscle needed to run protection and extortion rackets remains unclear and is thought to be based on a plea bargain deal struck by the US Department of Justice.

Such freedom-for- information deals are standard in the United States in order to secure convictions.

The case reminds us that seven years ago under the Hollywood- White House alliance of that era piracy was the bugaboo of the era in the same way that social media is the political pressure point of today.

In its heyday Megaupload featured a piracy reporting option giving copyright holders the ability to hunt for illegal content. It registered with the U.S. government under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law aimed at fighting piracy.

Government extreme social equity posturing degrades performance and authority

The New Zealand Treasury’s failure to encrypt its pro-forma models of the actual budget can be traced to an engrained governmental procedure of elevating contemporary social sensibilities at the expense of applied practical ability.

This was further emphasised at the time of the budget “hacking” flap when it became clear that a cross-section of departmental officials failed to understand that the budget models had been accessed simply by intruders applying permutations and combinations to the Treasury’s home page search bar and doing so without recourse to passwords.

The access to the budget details at the time was instantly sheeted home to a massive and concerted hack and given criminal status.

The police were called in to investigate some time before the search bar legerdemain was identified and sheeted home to National Party, Opposition, geek-capability operatives.

The deeper implications of the incident were however overshadowed by still another pre-budget drama.

This one centred on the release, authorised, of an official report on “bullying and harassment” within the bounds of Parliament.

Again, the police were called in.

Again the police withdrew.

This time when it was discovered that the events luridly proclaimed involved incidents already long procedurally investigated and settled.

Curiously, and this also was overlooked, a search bar and its application was again involved, indirectly.

This is because had a search been conducted into the Parliamentary Services HR exception incidents archive, the existence of these cases and their procedural outcomes would have been revealed.

The issue remains that the contents of the 2019 Wellbeing Budget, the nation’s first branded budget, became subsumed by the combined drama that attained hysterical levels over these two incidents.

Embedded in all this remains the issue of how Parliament and the government as a whole has the capability to administer its own accelerating matrix of inclusion, diversity, and social equality, and do so without diluting operational efficiencies.

For example, and in quite recent times, one government agency propounded a scheme of the type calculated to sidestep the distracting morality fervour that so spoiled the release of the government’s own landmark and emblematic budget.

This was by promulgating a keep-your-distance edict in which male staff were required to literally ensure that at all times they kept themselves at arms length from their female counterparts.

Such an edict it was believed would enshrine personal space into a no-go zone

At first opposition to this scheme focussed on personal-space necessary infringement occasions such as handing over paper documents, positioning oneself in a lift, sharing a car, participating in a queue, seated at a conference…….

The scheme however ultimately dissolved in a morass of gender boundary eroding initialism characterised today in, for example, LGBTQ2+.

Bluntly, in terms of literal situational ethics alone it had become impossible to define who needed to keep their distance from whom.

HR specialists, psychologists, counsellors abound in the Parliamentary Precinct, so do consultants in areas such as gender and bias studies.

The two torrid events of budget week, the pre-release of the budget itself, and the weirdly-timed release of the official report on bullying and harassment within Parliament, share in common the need for comprehension of the nature of administrative computing.

Such a comprehension would have lowered the temperature of the budget leak episode.

A simple search into the archive would have revealed that the headline incidents in the bullying and harassment disclosure had already been resolved internally.

A curiosity about these fringe budget events was the manifestly excitable behaviour of several of the parliamentary protagonists.

They seemed unable to comprehend connections between cause and effect and even expenditure and value delivered in terms of the immense investment in human resources specialists and also information technology

Parliament deliberately advancing itself as the showcase for workplace social justice activism seems a factor underpinning the anything but calming response to the bullying /harassment report which in its broadcast form pictured parliament actively digging for its dirty linen and then, on discovering it, waving it from its rooftop.

Similarly we can now understand how this same posturing has degraded performance in managing its own publicly accessible departmental networks.

Candidates for senior jobs in government information technology are frequently selected on their ability to promote social equity instead of on their proven ability to deliver area digital services.

Holier-than-thou ploy triggers unintended consequences

A review of bullying and harassment within Parliament instigated by the Speakers Office which is responsible for who are entitled to work in Parliament and for what they do there has involved this same office in obloquy and sensationalism.

The release of the report was accompanied by dire portents from the Speakers Office conjuring up images of at least one rapist stalking Parliament’s carpeted corridors and this sinister figure accompanied by a cohort of like-minded individuals in the sex pest category.

In the event once the hue and cry settled down this somewhat spooky scenario devolved onto three incidents involving the same people and which had been subjected to historical procedural investigations.

Even so, in the accompanying atmosphere one Parliamentary staffer, male, was “stood down” under the cloud of the word rapist.

Another unexpected blow-back was the public accusation by a former department head, female, that they had been on the receiving end of foul language from the instigator of this same review.

The office of the Speaker is supposed to be the tranquil and unquestioned hub of the opposing forces of parliamentary democracy.

Another role, unspoken, is that this same office detects trouble and nips it in the bud before it sees the light of day.

In this instance the opposite happened.

This same office instigated an official review into a topic known to be of such volatility that whatever the result it was bound to detonate in the public domain.

What went wrong?

A generation ago New Zealand began emerging from its cult of exaggerated masculinity.

Pubs and clubs until very recently were gender segregated and few saw anything unusual in this.

Change, held back, now surged into an opposing extreme in which male characteristics instead of being viewed as admirable became viewed as toxic.

The intellectual class, political class, supposed to act as a pathfinder in this kind of sea-change instead seized upon it to trumpet its own value and did so by exaggerating this shift and in doing so further distorted it.

The churches similarly arbiters, if not shepherds, in this kind of sudden societal shift stood aside.

Both protestant and catholic churches in New Zealand traditionally enjoyed rather more influence than in other British outposts just because of the nation’s remoteness.

They now failed to put a brake on the mounting panic just because the churches themselves no longer had any moral suasion.

The need for Parliament to seek out any dirty laundry and then wash it in public emphasises the extent to which these new and untrammelled forces trigger this kind of high profile self-abasement, aka transparency.

There is another explanation, a rather more worldly one.

Westminster parliaments were never designed for proportional representation.

The German version, the one imposed on New Zealand, was designed to ensure enough opposing forces to eliminate one single outcome---the emergence of a dictator, a tyrant.

There remains therefore the unasked question, the taboo question.

It is centred on which of the opposing forces in New Zealand’s coalition government insisted on an inquiry which beyond its purgative value could only have been a public embarrassment lowering still further in the public esteem Parliament, and specifically the office of the Speaker

Oceania nation resonates as perfect sounding board for social activist Atlantic policies

United Nations exercises a supranational influence over New Zealand’s body politic in a way that has not been experienced since the waning of Westminster’s sway followed soon after by Washington’s.

Nothing emphasises this realignment more than the view that the nation’s highest office, that of prime minister, is but a way station en route to assuming the real power which resides in the real high office which is that of secretary general of United Nations.

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark had, at best, a good outsider’s chance in her determined run for the secretary-generalship of United Nations.

Current prime minister Jacinda Ardern is said to be heading into poll position should she at any time in the next 30 or so years either seek the assignment or be tapped for it.

The nation’s bureaucracy has long been attuned to the United Nations ethos and this was demonstrated by its unquestioning belief in a Clinton victory at the last US presidential elections.

Also discarded in this new version of progressive realpolitik is the alignment that once centred on Canberra, notably during the Whitlam and Hawke eras.

Canberra, like Washington and Westminster has been shouldered aside in this new orientation to a new magnetic north.

Prone to believing polls, whole segments of New Zealand’s government found it hard to disguise their fervour in the forecast electoral victory of Bill Shorten and their sense of loss when this failed to come to pass.

From self-dramatizing inquests into its own rumoured official bullying (actually, officiousness) through hate speech (offensive), diversity and multi culturalism and the unifying climate movement, it is United Nations that now incarnates the yearnings of New Zealand’s parliamentary Labour government.

So what caused the inspirational compass to swing so abruptly from East to West?

Beijing’s Marco Polo attractions continue to fade, and only partly due to awkward and embarrassing trade imperatives.

New Zealand’s political Prester John impulse to lead the East into following its more progressive ways have simply dissolved amid Beijing’s ferocious militarism and intolerance of things like diversity, multiculturalism.

Contrary to a view once accepted as a geopolitical article of faith and voiced by former National Party prime minister Jim Bolger that New Zealand was “part of Asia,” those were his words, the nation instead has reconfigured itself on a trans Atlantic axis.

The New Zealand body politic draws its inspiration from an axis rooted in New York at United Nations.

Britain never truly on-message since Tony Blair’s day is nonetheless dipped into.

But merely to superheat on views on climate from only a very few selective sources such as The Guardian and the BBC.

Then the short hop across the English Channel to the terminus of this particular axis which is Paris, the city of enlightenment for this repositioning.

The body politic involved in this realignment includes the nation’s regional and district councils usually referred to as local bodies.

Once pre-occupied with the administration of roads and rubbish collection their elected members nowadays so often put a priority on the rather more rarified and thus engaging globalist procedures involved in podcasting their support for the policies of United Nations.

New Zealand has been a member of the UN security council on several occasions. Even more significantly its diplomats Sir Leslie Munro and more recently Terence O’Brien have served as presidents of the security council.

United Nations has traditionally sought as its secretary general someone from a non-aligned nation meaning a candidate beyond the Western Alliance or the old communist bloc.

As New Zealand politics at so many levels enters a new, and supercharged phase of institutional moral reformation its elected at so many levels see an opportunity to transcend the mundane in echoing this new Atlantic policy centred on United Nations Plaza on Manhattan’s East River.

Globalism suddenly means more than trade, in which nations are encouraged to focus on what they do best.

It now means a transnational approach to the free exchange of moral movements and without the frontiers and thus the boundaries of geography or even hemispheres.