Antipodean Altruism

[Following is an excerpt from Perigo's talk to the 1997 IOS Summer Seminar.]

The breathless accounts of the greatest libertarian revolution ever that you have read about in Liberty and Reason have left out fully half the story. ["Visit to a Small Country," by R. W. Bradford and "The Art of the Possible," by Sir Roger Douglas, Liberty, March 1997; "The Incredible Shrinking State," by William D. Eggers, Reason, May 1997.] Yes it's true that there have been corporatisation and privatisation, tariff reductions, pockets of deregulation and a withdrawal of government from some areas. These progressive developments have been more than offset by regressive ones. Overall, Big Brother is bigger and more ominous than ever. Let me give you just some of the main items here. This is not an exhaustive list, and I present it in no particular order; I number the horrors just for clarity's sake.

One. Private property has been virtually nationalised under a draconian, labrynthian piece of environmental legislation called the Resource Management Act. Prepared by the Labour Government of which Roger Douglas was a member . . . , this Act embodies every Objectivist horror file item you ever read and a lot more besides. It is explicitly based on the premise that nature has an intrinsic value qua nature. Intrinsic values, says this 600-page monstrosity, are "those aspects of ecosystems and their constituent parts which have value in their own right. . . ." It empowers local governments to draw up District Plans to promote the "sustainable management of natural and physical resources," with particular regard to "the intrinsic values of ecosystems," the protection of indigenous plants and animals, the preservation of the "outstanding natural features and landscapes" and other matters of "national importance." So zealous have local governments been to protect natural features and landscapes that they have forbidden residents to paint their houses and sheds and so on in anything but natural colours. They have forbidden residents to park buses or boats on their properties. They have forbidden coastal residents to protect their beachside properties from erosion by shoring them up with rocks. They have told residents that vast tracts of "their" property must be left exactly as they are. The Act provides for jail terms of up to two years and fines of up to $200,000. Thus far, such obscene sentences have not been imposed, but one property owner has been fined $80,000 for clearing native bush on his property. Nowhere, incidentally, does the Act even mention private property rights.

Two. Freedom of speech and association have been severely curtailed by a piece of legislation with the hideously Orwellian misnomer of the Human Rights Act. Passed by the National [Party] Government and supported by [the Labour Party], this Act makes it an imprisonable offence to utter in any public forum sentiments that could be construed as "inciting racial disharmony." I don't need to explain to this audience that the answer to bad ideas such as racism is better ideas, not a ban—but a ban is what the Human Rights Act imposes.

It also prohibits discrimination on the grounds of race, [sex], age, political or religious belief, physical or intellectual disability, sexual orientation, and marital status. After this Act was passed, a golf club was threatened with prosecution when it proceeded with plans for its annual golf tournament for married couples, which it had been holding for thirty-odd years (this was discrimination on the grounds of marital status). A Christian bookbinding firm refused to accept a job from a local atheist group—and was told it had to do the work or it would be in breach of the prohibition of discrimination on religious grounds. Newspapers are forbidden to run job advertisements which specify desired age or [sex]. Employers are not permitted to ask potential employees about their psychiatric history. Hairdressers have been harassed by the Human Rights Commission for charging different prices for men's and women's haircuts. A bus company has been ordered to spend $80,000 on making its buses wheelchair-accessible. (A grand total of three disabled people subsequently used the buses.

Three. Under legislation introduced by the Labour Government in 1986, the so-called indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori, can pursue land grievances dating back to 1840, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between Queen Victoria and Maori tribes. This has resulted in a plethora of extravagant and dubious claims, and an orgy of white liberal guilt. Expensive white liberal guilt. Vast amounts of taxpayers' money have been handed over to Maori tribes, as the current generation of taxpayers have been held accountable for the real or imagined sins of governments [of the] last century. Some government-owned land hitherto accessible to all has now been set aside for the exclusive use of Maori on about 200 days of the year. When challenged that this might constitute apartheid, the Minister in charge of all this said: "The sooner we realise that there are laws for one and laws for another, the better." This unspeakable specimen justifies his policies on the grounds that "Maori are imbued with a spiritual element which is not easy for us to understand."

Four. Rampant, government-sponsored political correctness. This reverence for Maori so-called spirituality, and other facets of political correctness, now pervade the government-run health and education systems. In education, it is deemed to be "ethnocentric" to concentrate on the history of Western civilisation, Western science, Western law, Western literature, etc. All cultures are equal—with the more primitive, superstitious cultures more equal than the others. Teachers do not teach, they "facilitate" the drawing out of a child's inner feelings. Children are encouraged to sit around in groups reaching consensus on everything under the sun. A draft for the new science curriculum, for example, suggested pupils use this method to determine the location of various organs in the body of a cow. In English Literary Criticism courses, students are taught to decode the hidden sexism, racism, classism and whatever else in the text under study. The author's intent is irrelevant; there is no author. The Minister of Education said to me quite brazenly in an interview once that there is no such thing as truth. That's certainly true in the government health system where nursing trainees have to undergo "cultural safety" training in which all manner of outrageous lies are taught. One trainee was expelled because she questioned a cultural safety lecturer—a Maori elder—who claimed that when Europeans arrived in New Zealand, they threw Maori printing presses into the sea. And so on ad nauseam.

Five. It's a myth that New Zealand now has a low-tax regime. As I pointed out, the overall tax take as a percentage of [gross domestic product (GDP)] went up 6 points under Roger Douglas, [R.W.] Bradford's most libertarian politician in the history of the universe, and hasn't come back down. At 38-40 percent of GDP, it's gone up. Here's Texas economics professor Gerald Scully, who was commissioned by Inland Revenue itself to do a report on the subject, on the 16th May [last] year: "Taxes as a share of GDP in central government are as high as they've ever been." When I asked the Business Roundtable for their best estimate as to what date in New Zealand constituted the equivalent of your Tax Freedom Day, when you stop working for the government, they told me that, taking local government spending into account, it was May 29, twenty days later than yours. Half the year we spend working for the government in its various guises—after Mr Bradford's slaying of the statist dragon!

Six. In addition to maintaining persistently high levels of taxation, the government has just enacted into law the most vicious tax penalty regime in the country's history, with vastly increased fines for late filing of tax returns, or "carelessness" in filling them in, and jail terms for what IRD deems to be deliberate tax evasion. Recently one exporter filed his return one day late because he was working round the clock getting his goods on a ship to fill an order. Sight unseen, IRD slapped a thousand dollar penalty on him.

Seven. The Reserve Bank Act, designed to prevent politicians from printing money at whim, has become an albatross around the economy's neck. It charges the Reserve Bank with confining inflation to 3% or less. It fails to distinguish between politically-induced inflation and price rises that reflect supply and demand. Since the government is now not spending money it doesn't have, the Reserve Bank's actions are currently directed against price rises that reflect supply and demand. Its weapon is high wholesale interest rates, leading to artificially high retail interest rates and to an artificially highly. -valued currency that is hell for our exporters. This is state interventionism to make Muldoon blush. [Roger Muldoon, New Zealand's prime minister in 1975-1984 employed industrial incentives, subsidies, import duties, wage-and-price controls, and other interventionist devices.]

Eight. The Employment Court and the Employment Tribunal, set up under the Employment Contracts Act to adjudicate workplace disputes, have become potent forces for old-fashioned class warfare. They have made it virtually impossible for employers to fire anyone, and thus—to hire anyone. The required procedure is so convoluted as to be impossible to observe. Employers must avoid causing "distress and hurt feelings" to anyone they fire, otherwise they're liable for substantial sums of money. That means of course that employers hire as few people as possible because they know once they've taken someone on, they're stuck with him. Deborah Coddington tells the story in a recent Free Radical of an elderly woman who advertised for a student to do about $200 worth of work assisting with the bibliography of a book she was writing. She decided the student who first applied did not have the necessary qualifications, and readvertised the job. The student took her to the Employment Tribunal. Cutting a long story short, she, the author, ended up having to pay that student $2,500 for hurt feelings, and $12,000 in other fees associated with the case

Nine. The government is waging an obsessive, intrusive war against drugs—i.e., against victimless crimes. The police boast that they solve 90% of drug cases, while 85% of burglaries go unsolved. Undisclosed police manpower and taxpayer money are spent on seeking out marijuana crops while police make no bones about the fact that they cannot protect us against muggers and murderers. What they have said is that they will prosecute anyone who keeps a gun handy for self-defence (New Zealand law requires that if you own a gun, it must be kept locked up)! And violations of the liquor laws are an equally high priority. The owner of a wine shop was recently burgled after hosting a wine-tasting event. He got a good look at the burglars and noted the registration number of their getaway car. The police told him that they didn't hold out much hope of catching the burglars, but they would be prosecuting him for holding a wine-tasting without a special licence!

I could go on, but by now it should be plain to you that New Zealand is not a place where the Leviathan State has been successfully challenged or the statist dragon slain. Mr Bradford's claim to that effect is an unfathomable, unconscionable inanity, an insult to those in New Zealand who are carrying the libertarian torch. The reality is, in the words of Sir Robert Jones, a millionaire businessman writing in The Free Radical, "New Zealand is now more regulated than at any time in its history."

Readers might also be interested in to responses to Navigator's Lands of Liberty survey which gave New Zealand top billing: Navigator Letters: Lands of Liberty