Do the Greens really back the demands of #schoolstrike4climate?

So on Friday the #schoolstrike4climate was held, whereby a bunch of hysterical school children demand that a Government, which is literally obsessed with mitigating climate change (even though the impacts of its measures are infinitesimal), should do MORE, NOW!

I don't want to bother with critiquing a bunch of kids, backed by environmentalist/leftist teachers (and the poor quality teacher protectionist racket), demanding public policy changes without the faintest clue of the consequences, but I do care about the Green Party - the main future coalition partner of the Labour Party, agreeing to all of its demands.  The kids aren't to blame, because the kids are being used by politicians and their supporters, because of the assumption that they'll get entirely positive media coverage and not be subject to criticism because... well... kids being political is meant to be a GOOD thing (imagine if kids were organised to go on a protest for something the Greens opposed though...)

#schoolstrike4climate put out a press release, published on Scoop of their rambling demands: 

• banning the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, 
• halving the herd of cows

(Taxpayers should apparently be forced to "invest in a just transition" to compensate farmers for this)

Then there is this 

"agriculture isn’t the only thing we want to see changes in"  (I bet, you little meddlers)

 In the words of one of our organisers, Charlotte Hoffman: 

‘We need to start making big changes to transport, too. If the New Zealand Government is really serious about committing to a sustainable future, then they need to completely cut our transport emissions. Compared to other things, these changes are simple to make. Ban unnecessary air travel, invest in better public transport. If the Government wanted to, they would.’

So add:

• Ban unnecessary air travel and
• Invest in better public transport

So what of it?

The last demand is just silly, because this government is pouring unprecedented amounts of road user tax and general tax income into public transport. The latest National Land Transport Programme is spending $2.3 billion on public transport infrastructure, $2.6 billion on subsidising public transport services.  Sure it's NEVER enough for the kids, but this is the most benign of the demands.

The rest are absolutely destructive.

• Synthetic fertilisers literally help sustain 3.5 billion people on the planet. This is a demand that will kill people. Without synthetic fertilisers food production would drop significantly, prices would rise, and although you can be sure the kids and the Greens wont suffer, it would mean hundreds of millions of people would starve, and billions would be undernourished.  Sure, if farmers can find alternatives good for them, let them do as they see fit, but let's remember New Zealand does NOT subsidise fertiliser (and hasn't done so since the late 1980s when the free-market liberal reforms the likes of the Greens opposed, got rid of agricultural subsidies).

• Halving the dairy farm herd would cut the country's export earnings by around 5% and GDP by 1.5%. That's about a quarter of the education budget. This will make the country poorer, especially rural areas. Sure the kids want to "invest in a just transition" (spend more taxpayers' money on people not producing anything to compensate them for banning their business), but it's just more money coming from nowhere.  This would also put up dairy prices and modestly increase global food prices. For some reason the Greens think it is "just" for the world's least subsidised dairy sector to kneecap itself by half, but the Greens don't care very much about production of anything.  If dairy drops because it is no longer commercially viable, then that's one thing, but this is just a demand of destruction.

• Banning "unnecessary" air travel is the real authoritarian scold streak coming out.  What's "unnecessary"? I am fairly sure foreigners taking a holiday in NZ is "unnecessary" so maybe kneecap international air travel (except, of course, for politicians going to climate change conferences). That's around $17.5 billion a year of revenue, which IS the total education budget.  Imagine the mentality that would want a law and a bureaucracy judging if your travel is "necessary".

So the Greens want an end to synthetic fertiliser, want to halve the dairy industry and stop you flying on holiday, or to go to a conference (except perhaps a Green approved one).

This will make people poorer, make them less free and will make next to no difference to the impacts of climate change, except by making them LESS able to respond to it, LESS able to afford to adapt.

The posh kids don't know or understand any of this, but the Green Party which uses them, which facilitates them as tools to advance its agenda should know better.  It's an agenda of misanthropy, of degrowth and authoritarianism.

What epitomised it was an interview on Newstalk ZB on Friday between Heather du-Plessis-Allan (HDPA) and Izzy Cook, one of the organisers of the #schoolstrike4climate.  She's under 18, so let's be clear here, she is being put forward to represent this movement, with the support of the Greens, environmentalist groups, some of her teachers and presumably her parents, but the kitchen of politics can get hot - and she has learnt a humiliating lesson is what being an adult, engaging in political debate, is all about.

The peak was HDPA asking how the ban on unnecessary flights would be implemented.  HDPA asked if it was ok if she flew to a conference, Cook said no, it should be done by video.  Then HDPA asked about travel, paraphrased as follows:

HDPA: I'm planning to fly to Fiji on holiday should I be allowed to do that?

IC: No, you shouldn't.

HDPA: When did you last fly anywhere?

IC: A few months ago

HDPA: Where did you go?

IC: Fiji...

I can't imagine how awful Izzy Cook is feeling after that, but she will be buttressed by adults who will call HDPA a "fascist" and play on Cook's youth as being a shield that should defend her from being cross examined on a political issue.

However, this is so profoundly dishonest and cruel.  The Greens want 16 and 17yos to have the vote, ostensibly because the decisions made in Parliament affect them too, and they can have jobs, pay taxes etc. Many of these arguments could go down to 12yos etc etc. but of course the Greens wouldn't want them to have votes if they didn't think they could harvest power from it.  Have no doubt, the Greens think that its brand of dishing out other people's money with no conditions and solving the world through banning "what's bad", making compulsory "what's good" and endlessly trotting out and abusing words like "fairness" and "sharing power", will bamboozle plenty of kids brought up in an education system that is tilted towards promoting their ideological view of the world.

Furthermore the utter intolerance of this ideological view is what the kids are brought up on.  Greta Thunberg's "How Dare You", is THE response to simply questioning the effectiveness and impact of poorly thought out extreme ideas about destroying parts of the economy.  The kids are taught themselves to humiliate those who disagree with them with hyperbole like "why do you want the planet to die?".  After all, they're being taught that extinction is coming, armageddon is near, and that the people getting in the way just want to  "make profits at their expense".  This simplistic binary, us (good) vs. them (bad) is what fuels this hysteria, and it is largely invented in the minds of Green activists.  

However they DON'T want the kids to be subject to the same scrutiny.  They want a mob of kids to be immune from criticism, advancing the policies THEY want.  Because it's a lot easier to risk one or two kids being cannon fodder to a critical journalist than to actually have James Shaw, Marama Davidson and the Green caucus confront voters with "you'll need a permit to book a flight somewhere".

The Greens are grooming a new generation of hypocritical climate scolds who want to destroy people's livelihoods, regulate how they live their lives and make food much much more expensive harming the poor.

So bear a moment of sympathy for Izzy Cook, she didn't expect to get scrutinised, to have her own personal hypocrisy highlighted on radio across the country, and she wasn't prepared. Nothing the activists who have groomed her mind prepared her for an alternative point of view, and the Green Party itself, eager to be a much more influential force on the next Government, used her and the other school kids to advance policies that, if subject to proper media scrutiny, would shrink the party's support close to the 5% threshold.

If you're going to advance political ideas that impose enormous costs on people, then you actually need to front up and propose them openly yourself James Shaw, Marama Davidson, Chloe Swarbrick et al.

Which wannabe busybodies do you want on your council?

Academics, journalists and politicians bemoan every three years how little interest there is in the local body elections in New Zealand.  The narrative being that if more people voted, then local government would be "better" and people being more "engaged" would result in bette Councillors, better decisions, better cities, towns and districts.

It's utter nonsense. There's a reason why most people aren't engaged with local government, because by and large, the things it tends to do adequately are taken for granted (local roads, footpaths, rubbish collection), and people have busy lives getting on with making a living, looking after their families, their homes, and living their lives.  

Local government has little to do with many issues, such as healthcare, education, justice, policing, but it DOES have a lot to do with areas that are in crisis, such as:

• Water, fresh, waste and storm.  You may not agree with the Three Waters prescription of the Ardern Government, but local government in most of the country has mismanaged water infrastructure for decades.  Why? Because local government is dominated by socialists who don't believe in user pays, don't believe in running ANYTHING like a business and don't get excited about infrastructure that is largely out of sight.  It's no wonder central government is, essentially, taking water off them.

• Housing. Councils stop housing being built, whether low, medium or high density. When it gets approved, it adds costs to that approval, because it is dominated by central planning types who think they know what's best for other people's land.  Councillors think they "build communities", when in fact it is they, facilitated by the Resource Management Act, that mean housing is scarcer and more expensive than it should be.  Central Government may have been monetarily incontinent, but the clot on housing supply lies squarely with local government.

• Supermarket competition. Councils stop supermarkets being built. Again they are dominated by socialists who think supermarkets are awfully vulgar places where big companies serve common people who dreadfully arrive by car.  As with housing, Councils use the Resource Management Act to constrain supply and even listen to incumbent supermarkets that don't want competition, facilitating higher grocery prices for everyone.

Local government also attracts a particular type of person.  More often than not it attracts busybodies, planners, pushy finger-wagging types who think they know what's best, over what people actually indicate according to their willingness to pay. It particularly attracts socialists who see local government as a stepping stone to central government for Labour and Green Party members.  They all have a set of principles and views in common, being:

• Rates should go up, beyond inflation, because Councils can always spend your money better than you can.
• Economic development occurs because Councils write plans and set up bureaucracies to enable it, not because people choose to set up businesses in their districts
• Councils should prioritise fighting climate change, because if they don't, then the consequences will be catastrophic
• Recycling of as much as possible is a good thing, regardless of cost and regardless of whether the collected recycling actually gets used
• Driving is a malign, public transport is good, cycling is divine, freight doesn't exist or isn't important

Take Auckland's leftwing contender for Mayor, Efeso Collins, who is promising to make public transport fully subsidised ("free" in socialist marketing parlance). Who is going to pay? Blank out.  What's the impact going to be?  Well if it is anything following the experience of Tallinn, Estonia, it wont be much (as it barely reduced car traffic, but cost a lot of money and significantly reduced the amount of walking).

However, look at the other side, the so-called "rightwing" Wayne Brown, who wants to move the Port of Auckland.  The Port of Auckland should be privatised, but no, Mr Brown knows best how to use the land and doesn't care about the location of New Zealand's number one import port. 

Look at Wellington where the choice is between the former NZ First aligned encumbent Andy Foster (who has been on Council 20 or so years), the existing Labour MP for Rongotai Paul Eagle (who was once a Councillor, but whom Labour isn't willing to rank on its party list, so little do they think of him) and the hard-left former Green Party chief of staff and spin merchant Tory Whanau. Do you want encumbent, a bit left or far left leading Wellington?  As Karl du Fresne pointed out, in reference to GWRC Councillor Thomas Nash, some of these people are "troughers", who think that the city and the world would be a better place if only there were more and more central planning, more taxes to spend on grand plans, more regulation of people and businesses doing what's "wrong", and endlessly bigger local government. 

So vote if you must, but the real problem is that local government has too much power.  It has stuffed up water, the only unreformed network utility (except in Auckland).  Local government used to manage local electricity distribution, but that was taken off it in the 1990s.  At one time it was responsible for milk distribution, which is why until the late 1980s buying milk OTHER than by kerbside bottles was unusual, and indeed there was no plastic or cartoned milk.

So pick candidates who want to get out of the way, of new housing, of new supermarkets, of enterprise and don't want to promise grand totemic projects that you have to pay for.  Don't pick those who think that local government can "do so much good" by spending your money and pushing people around.  Maybe pick those who actually have some understanding of the limits of the ability of local government.

If you get to ask them any questions then ask them this....

1. How much do you want me to pay for (insert expensive promise)?
2. Given how poorly Councils have performed in delivering water infrastructure why do you think it is competent in delivering (insert expensive promise)?
3. Why wont people pay voluntarily for (insert expensive promise)?  
4. Do you think Council has hindered the supply of housing and if so, what will you do about it? (if the answer is no, then, if you're in a major city, you know you're talking to an idiot). 
5. What do you think Council is not good at and shouldn't be involved in?
6. What have you learned from your own life and career that causes you are able to make a judgment on how to spend other people's money and regulate use of their land and businesses?
7. Do you think your Council should have members on it that are not elected but appointed by local Iwi, because this is the "new democracy"?

As a footnote, the Taxpayers' Union has launched a guide on which it asks a bunch of useful questions of candidates, only some of whom have responded.  It infuriatingly asks for your postcode (who knows that?) to find a council name, not just the council names. However, some pertinent questions on rates, spending and curiously discouraging car use are answered, so make of that as you will.  I'm no fan of Three Waters as a solution, but the status quo in MOST districts is not good either, so make of that what you will either.

The Free Speech Union also has a guide to candidates which is more accessible. It asks various free speech questions and you may be surprised on its stance (it IS libertarian), on matters like transgenderism, abortion and drag-queen story time.  

Much more well publicised in the media has been FACT Aotearoa, which publishes its own list of candidates that it claims promote conspiracy theories and misinformation, again make of that as you will. 

Other lobby groups have their own perspectives,  I find them all mildly useful, if only because it can flag people having opinions I both like and don't like, and it may not be the view expressed by the lobby group. 

However, I'm largely quite pessimistic. People wildly enthusiastic about local government are generally the opposite of people I want in local government, because local government attracts far too many meddlers, regulators and planners.  

Try to pick the least worst and hope for the best, at least until there is a central government that keeps them on the leash.  You'll have to make some compromises.

When I get my voting forms, I might do a review of the candidates where I'm voting, and I might do a splattergun of identifying those who I have found who are good sorts and worth a tick, and those you should run a mile from..

Gorbachev dies, the Queen dies

I'm no monarchist, but I appreciate that Queen Elizabeth II was handed quite a job, to preside over the dismantling of the British Empire, to reconcile with the new Commonwealth and to be the symbol of the United Kingdom as it, and its former Empire transform itself.  I have little time for the vulgarians who wish to damn her as some sort of party to crimes against humanity, but equally I find the entire British Royal Family almost endlessly tedious. These are very ordinary people, of average intelligence, ability and below average achievement. It is perhaps because of this that they remain primarily because the people of Britain at the same time are rather fond of having a Head of State that is essentially benign, and because they can't be arsed to get rid of it (and look on at horror at the idea of it being someone who actually WANTS the job).

Because let's be clear, Queen Elizabeth II did the job because she felt a duty to do it, it seems unlikely that even Charles III and William really WANT to be Head of State. In many ways that's much more preferable to those who want power.

I'd be supportive of a republic, if it could guarantee a Head of State that exercised next to no power, that could guarantee a Constitution that would protect the right of the individual to control his or her body, property and life, subject only to respecting the same rights in others, and a state that did not violate those rights. Sadly I fear that many (notwithstanding Lewis Holden), wanting a republic want one that would guarantee the political future they want, and for that, I'd prefer the status quo thank you...

Mikhail Gorbachev didn't pursue a political career advancing the supremacy of the human individual, but rather a vision of Marxism-Leninism with glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). He thought he could reform a system of central command and control, by allowing people to criticise what was wrong, and through freedom enable people to centrally plan an economy and society based on the competition of ideas of how best to centrally plan. What he didn't figure was that freedom and central planning are fundamentally incompatible.

Critics of Gorbachev come from two sides. Russian nationalists criticise him for breaking up the USSR and the Soviet empire, but they are simply rebranded totalitarians that have succeeded the Communist Party old guard.  Libertarians who criticise him for being a commie miss the point, his mistake was to think the system he had spent his life defending and advancing was reformable. The tyrants in Beijing will say you can, if you let capitalism flourish under a jackboot of zero political freedom. Gorbachev did it the other way round, he let freedom emerge before setting capitalism free, but he also faced a country that had had 70 years of trauma of Marxism-Leninism (China had had 30) and had little tradition of trading and entrepreneurship (nor enough of a diaspora to support it).

Gorbachev was the great Russian anti-imperialist, because he decided that the Red Army would NOT stop the people of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic rising up against their putrid, jackbooted, sclerotic regimes. The "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" (Berlin Wall) was to be no more because feeble little excrescences like Erich Honecker were dependent on Moscow to do their dirty work. Most of the eastern half of Europe became free because Gorbachev let Stalin's satellite countries go. Even Romania, which had notably no Red Army presence, would turn against perhaps* the most despicable of eastern Europe's dictators - the Ceausescus.  

He tried to hang onto the USSR, and briefly used force to keep the Baltic States within Moscow's grasp, but it didn't last. Ultimately the system and philosophy that put the USSR at odds with the Western allies brought it down, because it didn't deliver a standard of living remotely commensurate with the west and because inherent to the system was evasion of reality. It was built on lying, because freedom of expression weakened a system that not only didn't deliver on what it promised, but which was so fundamentally antithetical to humanity, that it couldn't stand up to criticism or any inference of error on behalf of the single authority that led it - the Party.

Beyond the USSR (most of which reverted to totalitarianism and authoritarianism after independence, especially in Central Asia, but also in the Caucasus and Belarus), Gorbachev oversaw the end of the Cold War, as it became clear that neither side wanted to invade the other. The collapse of the risk of communism was a prime reason why the National Party of South Africa started to dismantle apartheid, legalise the ANC and hold a referendum on apartheid, before ultimately allowing South Africa to become a full-fledged liberal democracy. Peace talks between Israel and, ultimately, the PLO arose because the collapse of the USSR effectively forced the Palestinians to seek concessions, and resulted in Israel withdrawing from Gaza and permitting Palestinian self-governance, as fraught as that has been.  Dictatorships across Africa fell to liberal democracy, as flawed as many were, with some political plurality that had never been tolerated when Moscow was the paymaster. Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Tanzania among others, and on the other side of the ledger, it saw the West totally abandon the likes of Mobutu.

Ending the Cold War, and the 40 years of the risk of global thermonuclear conflict, because Gorbachev not only knew he could not compete with the West militarily or economically, and he wanted his people to have a better life, was no small achievement. It is perhaps difficult for current generations to grasp what it was like growing up with the fear generated that, at some point, the nuclear deterrent would not work.

but it did, Gorbachev backed down and to this day almost all of Europe is now free. Much more freedom and liberal democracy exists in the world because of what he did and didn't do, than otherwise. He brought to an end one of history's most despotic, destructive, murderous and imperialist regimes, that itself spawned multiple mini-versions of itself. We also shouldn't forget those who shilled for that regime.

Sure, Putin's Russia is also despotic, murderous and imperialist, but Gorbachev took the jackboots out of eastern Europe. Millions of people are safer, healthier, wealthier and happier as a result.

For all of the pomp and circumstance around remembering Queen Elizabeth II, it is Gorbachev I would give the pomp for, because he was the great liberator.

* Enver Hoxha is the rival for Europe's worst post-war tyrant.

Supermarket competition - the morons are trying to fix a problem their friends create

I'm fairly convinced that the Cabinet of the Ardern Government is dominated by complete morons when it comes to economics.  It is akin to a selection of the candidates that Jim Anderton's New Labour Party/Alliance put forward in the 1990s, a team of well-meaning, earnest, but limited people who had supreme confidence in their ability to play the public and businesses as pieces on a chessboard, without much of a clue as to unintended consequences.  The key being they "mean-well", they think they are doing good for "ordinary" people (for they are not far removed from being ordinary themselves), by their wielding of heavy handed control over businesses and people who put their money and time on the line to be productive.

The announcement that the two dominant supermarket chains will have to provide access to their wholesale supplies is exactly of that ilk. To those who don't invest their own money or are directly responsible for investing other people's money (in that they lose money if they fail), this seems like a great idea to enable new supermarkets to be able to access supply chains, but it smacks of naive student politicians who have no sense of the consequences of their clunking fist.

The barriers to competition in supermarkets are not in accessing groceries from suppliers, but in obtaining sites where supermarkets could be built and resource consent to actually build them.  However, the ideological allies of the Ardern Government, in the form of the majority of local politicians across the country, have done all they could to make this difficult.

The Resource Management Act has enabled the supermarket duopoly by empowering local government to not enable zoning of more supermarket sites, and to require local government to pay regard to the supermarket duopoly when any business wants to build another supermarket.

It's got so silly that in Havelock North, with a new New World supermarket being built to replace the existing one on a constrained site, that Hastings District Council thinks it is optimum value for the community to buy the old supermarket so that it can demolish it and expand the local car park.  This is ridiculous.  Hastings ratepayers shouldn't be destroying a supermarket building so that a surface car park can be expanded, it should be up to investors to decide whether another supermarket might be opened, or a different large retail outlet.

Dr Eric Crampton of the New Zealand Initiative amply described the restrictions that well-meaning, earnest, but limited people with supreme confidence in their abilities impose on supermarket development in local government:

very little land is zoned for larger footprint grocery. And land with the right zoning is often tied up by restrictive land covenants forbidding their use in grocery retail...

If the would-be entrant managed to find the right set of sites, there’s another problem. Council consenting can take anywhere from months to years – or even a decade in some cases. And councils too often decide that a new retailer should be blocked if it would hurt the amenity provided by other retail centres

Then there is the Overseas Investment Office, applying its xenophobic approach to investment from foreign supermarket chains, with the full consent of the Ardern Government, along with liquor licensing laws (which are highly restrictive, and still absurdly prohibit sales of spirits in supermarkets). 

Instead of liberalising foreign investment rules on supermarkets, liberalising liquor licensing for supermarkets and forcing local government to remove barriers to building supermarkets, the morons have decided to take the approach that any anti-capitalist, socialist student politician would prefer - forcing supermarkets (retail outlets) to WHOLESALE the goods they buy from other wholesalers and suppliers, to rivals.

How would that work? (The morons in Cabinet would just assume some public servants can work that out, because they are clever people, like them)

Where on the planet do ANY supermarkets acquire their goods from their rivals on any meaningful scale? (Aotearoa's "special" so don't ask such a ridiculous question)

What incentives are there on an encumbent to not provide goods near expiry, or not supply only the goods that sell the worst to rivals? (Oh more public servants can fix that right?)

What's the deadweight cost of employing an army of inspectors to check whether each supermarket is appropriately supplying the right goods at the right price and quality to rivals? (JOBS JOBS JOBS.. with a fair pay agreement underlying them, WHY DO YOU NOT WANT WELL PAID JOBS THAT HELP THE POOR?)

Who is going to pay for the cost of administration of supermarkets wholesaling goods to rivals and who is going to pay for the regulators? (You, but you'll be grateful for how much less you're paying, eventually).

It's mind numbingly stupid. If you think the Greens are the dominant provider of stupid hard-left economics, then don't worry, they wholesale ideas to Labour, and Labour is now Labour of old. 

Labour that absolutely disowns the lessons it learned in 1984-1990, that even disowns how much Labour of 1999-2008 was aware that it couldn't turn its back on those lessons.

We can only hope that National WILL disown 1975-1984, because Jacinda Muldoon and her Cabinet of Muldoons are hell bent on policies driven by short-term populism and an overinflated sense of their own ability to change the world to fit what they want.

What does the future of co-governance look like?

Power without being elected

With the impending passage of the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngāi Tahu Representation) Bill, New Zealand will have taken a giant leap in the direction of reducing democracy in local government. It's important to be very clear about what this means:

1. Ngai Tahu will appoint two members of the Canterbury Regional Council (known as Environment Canterbury), they will sit alongside and have identical powers to elected members. 
2. Ngai Tahu members will be selected by Ngai Tahu by whatever means Ngai Tahu deems appropriate
3. Those councillors will have full powers to vote on spending, on taxes (rates), on buying and selling assets and on bylaws.
4. No electors in Canterbury region will be able to remove Ngai Tahu representatives (except of course, those with authority in Ngai Tahu), includes those affiliated with Ngai Tahu who do not have influence with the iwi.

It's very important to recognise what government, including local government actually is. 

Government is an institution with the monopoly of legalised use of initiated force against people and their property, and it devolves some of that power to local government. 

Environment Canterbury has such powers, powers to forcibly take money in the form of rates and to levy the public for services, it has powers to make bylaws and has powers to constrain the use of property. 

In a liberal democracy the constraints on that power come in two forms:

• Legislative constraints (as local government is constrained by legislation and regulation);
• Local democracy (the ability to vote out and replace Councillors who exercise these powers).

Parliament has chosen to weaken the ability of Canterbury electors to do the latter.  The key element in a free liberal democracy is more the ability to peacefully remove people from power than to select those that exercise power, but this legislation removes the right of Canterbury electors to remove two councillors.  Indeed, those councillors are only accountable to those with power in Ngai Tahu, not electors at large.

This is literal corporatism, in which a corporate private entity exercises direct political power, with there being no effective means of removing them (except of course if Parliament changes the law to abolish their position).

Bear in mind there is nothing stopping Ngai Tahu proposing candidates for election now, or funding and supporting the campaign of candidates it approves of, but it doesn't believe that would be successful.  

Bear in mind also that members of Ngai Tahu who are Canterbury electors retain the power to vote for Councillors, they have that power now, but they will also have some influence (it could be a lot or it could be negligible) in the selection of unelected councillors.  Members of Ngai Tahu who are Canterbury electors get two chances at selecting councillors.

Some may say sure but non-resident ratepayers get a vote too. Yes they do, but it is a vote and if they were residents as well, there would still only be one vote. There are sound arguments either way about non-resident ratepayer voting rights, but that is a separate issue.  Note that there are plenty of people affiliated to Ngai Tahu who are not electors in Canterbury too.

Where next?

There are  other examples that have parallels to Canterbury.  The Rotorua District Council (Representation Arrangements) Bill, would have generated higher Maori representation on that Council than their proportion of the population.  David Farrar ably demonstrated how unjust that would have been, as each Maori ward councillor would have represented far fewer people than a non-Maori ward councillor.  The Bill was dropped  in part because the Bill of Rights assessment said Maori wards would have disproportionately higher representation. 

Wellington City Council took it upon itself to include two mana whenua representatives on Council Committees (not full Council). One each from Taranaki Whānui ki Te Upoko o Te Ika and Ngāti Toa Rangatira sit on all Council Committee with FULL voting rights. It justified the idea as contributing towards decision making, but this is frankly absurd.  Having voting rights for unelected councillors (which is effectively what it is) is more than "contributing" it is exercising power.  The representatives also get reimbursed by ratepayers, "by paying each iwi an annual fee, equivalent to the remuneration of a full time elected member, which is currently $111,225".  So ratepayers get to pay for representatives they cannot vote for or against, that exercise power over them.  6 Councillors voted against this nonsense, namely Mayor Foster, Councillor Calvert, Councillor Rush, Councillor Sparrow, Councillor Woolf, and Councillor Young. However, the majority prevailed (Councillor Condie, Councillor Day, Councillor Fitzsimons, Councillor Foon, Councillor Matthews, Councillor O'Neill, Councillor Pannett, and Councillor Paul).

Noting this already happens for Rotorua Lakes District Council, it has iwi representatives with voting rights on Council Committees.

What would need legislation is to enable full Councillors to be appointed by iwi rather than be elected by electors. 

It seems highly likely that the Labour Government, with full support from the Greens and Te Pati Maori, would endorse local government having appointed (not elected) City, District and Regional Councillors, with the rights to vote on your rates, bylaws, spending, sale and purchase of assets and planning rules.

Let's be clear this is NOT the same as Maori wards. In principle, if a Council wants those on the Maori electoral roll to have Maori ward councillors, as it is for Parliament, it does not undermine democratic accountability. Maori electors shifting from general wards to Maori wards changes their representation, but they are still elected and accountable to electors.

Having iwi choose representatives is the same as having any large private interest choose representatives on Council. Councils exist to provide certain public goods and services, but also to regulate activity including planning activity.  Iwi themselves have substantial commercial and property interests.  Consider if Councillors (as some do) have large property or business interests in a district, they are at least accountable to electors, but the iwi representatives are not.  

So could Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Maori require all Councils to have unelected Mana Whenua councillors? Of course.... but could it go beyond that?

Iwi selected MPs?

Te Pati Maori Co-Leader Rawiri Waititi has already expressed his contempt for democracy as being the tyranny of the majority. Now I SHARE this concern, which is why I want the power of government limited, but I don't share his objectives or solution, or his perception of the problem. He wants a separate Maori Parliament which would decide on matters for Maori, although does not explain how that would work in practice.  

Applying the principles of the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngāi Tahu Representation) Bill to Parliament would mean that all iwi would be able to appoint MPs to Parliament (perhaps with some proportionality? or perhaps each being equal?) to have the same voting rights as elected MPs (which Maori would continue to be able to vote for).  

That would make Aotearoa/New Zealand far from being a liberal democracy, as Parliament would be dominated by entities that themselves determine how to select people to exercise legislative power over people and their property. 

This isn't about race, this is about the exercise of powers of coercion and the primary means of constraining that, which is the ability of the subjects of that coercion to exercise a vote to change those exercising that power.

If Iwi Representation were required to enlist electors that are iwi affiliated, removing them from being able to vote for other Councillors (and indeed with numbers of Iwi Representatives proportionate to population of iwi affiliated electors), it would be completely different. It would simply be redesigning Maori wards to fit that model. The same in Parliament. 

If Maori seats were simply redesigned to be selected by Maori voters voting for representatives by iwi (and then there being some system to elect the appropriate representatives across multiple smaller iwi), it would also not be a problematic in applying liberal democracy.  However, if some MPs were just appointed, it would be undemocratic. 

Consider that Myanmar adopts this model, except it is the army that appoints MPs. 

Why do this?

Supporters of the legislation see it as implementing the Treaty of Waitangi, under the interpretation that the Treaty is not just about granting sovereignty over taonga and governorship to the Crown, but about a power-sharing relationship between the Crown and iwi (an interpretation that was largely confined to academic and radical political circles until the 2000s). 

If the Crown, represented by the liberal democracy of the New Zealand Parliament were separate and excluded Maori (as repulsive and Rhodesia like that would be) then this interpretation may have merit. Yet it does not exclude Maori, Maori have the same voting rights as everyone else, and both Maori and non-Maori vote for MPs who are Maori (and non-Maori).  In other words, Maori are represented in Parliament, their views are heard, and communicated by the MPs they elect, both from the Maori roll and the General roll. They are equal in their exercise of power to everyone else. 

Beyond that, consultation and engagement over public policy is extensive and is entirely within the role of a liberal democracy and for consultation with iwi to be treated as being part of implementing the Treaty.  Consulting Mana Whenua is entirely right and correct for local and central government, but when it comes to choosing who gets to exercise the monopoly of the use of legitimised force - through government- it should NOT be determined by unelected people.

For better or for worse, every single MP in Parliament, and up till now, every single Councillor in regional councils, territorial authorities and unitary authorities (et al) have their authority through public endorsement at the ballot box. The worst form of government every devised, except for all of the others tried throughout history, as Churchill was purported to have said.

Sure, I think most central and local politicians are utterly hopeless at defending the rights and freedoms of the public and private property rights, but their power is constrained by the ability of sufficiently outraged electors to throw them out of office.

Unelected politicians do not have such constraints. Be suspicious of anyone who is appointed to exercise legislative and tax raising powers.  

Environment Canterbury disgraces itself by actively seeking to weaken the power of its elected Councillors in this way, and Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Maori have all shown themselves to be parties in enabling this to come to pass. Imagine if Federated Farmers had appointed representatives on rural councils, or Chambers of Commerce on urban councils etc. 

Any future government should explicitly prohibit any local authority from appointing anyone to have voting rights in Councils or Council Committees without having been elected in local body elections, at a bare minimum.  

What's the alternative?

The role of liberal democracy in New Zealand needs to be able to be debated without the kneejerk reaction of "racist" from unreconstructed leftists and ethno-nationalists who want to shut down debate using pejoratives. 

Those who think mana whenua do not have a role in being consulted on local and central government matters are not helpful, because if the Treaty is to work in the context of a liberal democracy, then engagement and consultation is essential. However, mana whenua should not expect to exercise direct political power to erode or undermine the wishes of directly elected representatives of all electors in New Zealand (especially since they too get to choose those representatives).

Those on the radical left who think this is "white supremacy" and "neo-colonialism" ought to put up their models for a form of government, and have them subjected to scrutiny as to whether or not they can protect the rights of all individuals from unbridled power and the corruption of power which is much more likely under systems of those appointing people with power.  After all, the UK retains the House of Lords, with appointed politicians, who scrutinise and delay legislation (although they cannot stop it), as a hangover from a very much class supremacist view of government.  New Zealand should not replicate this sort of political structure.

After all, liberal democracy is now the dominant form of government in most of Asia, Africa and the Americas, and frankly it is only autocracies like the People's Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkmenistan that question the validity of governments that are constrained by secret ballots and the essential, concurrent freedom of speech and the press. 

Have mana whenua consulted, include them on informal committees and boards used to advise Councils and Government.  Government and Councils can also include them in co-governance of assets or systems if they wish - the whole debate on Three Waters co-governance is entirely legitimate (sure I don't agree with the proposal, but everything local government does is entirely at the behest of Parliament, which grants local government its power, it is still fundamentally accountable to electors).

The co-governance of Urewera National Park and the Waikato River are enshrined in Treaty settlements, and there is no conflict between any of this and a liberal democracy, because elected MPs agreed to it.  

In liberal democracy power IS shared, between representatives by geography and representatives by political ideology and philosophy, and when enough electors tire of one lot, they replace them with a new bunch. Does it achieve much? Often it doesn't, but it does achieve one thing - it means that all of them fear causing so much disenchantment that they lose government or worse of all, lose their seat in power.  Ngai Tahu and all Iwi ought to value that, and ought not to be immune from it.

UPDATE: So Tamati Coffey is inviting other iwi to consider "this path" to better representation.  He introduced the Rotorua rorting local elections District Council (Representation Arrangements) Bill, so he's showing his colours around corporatist government. Maybe it would be better if the former TV presenter simply abandoned representative democracy altogether if he doesn't believe in it?