The Haps
Jenny-May Clarkson from TVNZ is our MVP for her interview with David Seymour. TVNZ said it’s a ‘must watch’ and we wholeheartedly agree. The interview has now been watched over 200,000 times on various channels. The kids are mixing it up on TikTok where it’s being watched hundreds of thousands more times. If you’d like to watch the interview, you can do so here. It has now been watched far more on social media than on the original TV screening. A sign of the times.
Meanwhile the Treaty Principles Bill is out, and scheduled to be debated in Parliament on Thursday. If you’d like to read it, it is here.
Kindness 2.0
Free Press handily picked the Trump Triumph two weeks ago. Winning the popular vote, the Presidency, and both houses is a seismic shift. Now every opinionator is showing the world that statistics from the American Election support their prior beliefs.
Why not join in? Here are our priors. We believe identity politics is dead. It always contained a contradiction, that you had to be kind to people after checking their (and your own) identity. Surely the point of kindness is being kind to people regardless of their (and your) background?
So it goes with the Trump reelection. According to exit polling (where people are asked how they voted as they leave the polling both), the real loser of the American election was identity politics. All sorts of people didn’t play the stereotypical roles they were supposed to.
Incidentally, Hilary Clinton made the Democrats’ mistake more explicitly in 2016. The campaign slogan ‘I’m with her,’ suggesting that women should vote for her because she’s a woman, was cringey.
For example Latinos are supposed to be a minority and therefore opposed to Trump. According to the Democrats and the media they’re supposed to vote left to protect their lived experience against the tyranny of the majority.
One theory is that Latino voters swung Republican because they like student education accounts and charter schools. It’s also possible that stereotyping is as silly as any other. It turns out each American with Latin heritage may be, in the words of Free Press hero F.A. Hayek, a ‘thinking and valuing being,’ after all.
We can only hope our interpretation of the American results is correct. What’s more, American trends tend to spread, so we hope the death of identity politics is our next political import. We may be biased, but we can’t ignore a parallel with the Treaty Principles Bill.
Pilloried by the bureaucracy, the media and the academics, but it speaks to real kindness. The Treaty did not create the ‘partnership between races,’ the identity politics of New Zealand, that the Court of Appeal said it did.
Nor did it create a country where tangata whenua are in partnership with the Crown, and tangata tiriti are not. It created a country where all people would have the same rights and duties, which is the only known basis for a successful society.
Over the coming weeks there will be extreme outrage at the bill, protests, condemnations, and dismissals from all the usual suspects. And yet, what they won’t offer is a reason to oppose the bill.
It says the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi should be defined as:
Principle 1
The Executive Government of New Zealand has full power to govern, and the Parliament of New Zealand has full power to make laws,—
(a) in the best interests of everyone; and
(b) in accordance with the rule of law and the maintenance of a free and democratic society.
Principle 2
(1) The Crown recognises, and will respect and protect, the rights that hapū and iwi Māori had under the Treaty of Waitangi/te Tiriti o Waitangi at the time they signed it.
(2) However, if those rights differ from the rights of everyone, subclause (1) applies only if those rights are agreed in the settlement of a historical treaty claim under the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975.
Principle 3
(1) Everyone is equal before the law.
(2) Everyone is entitled, without discrimination, to—
(a) the equal protection and equal benefit of the law; and
(b) the equal enjoyment of the same fundamental human rights.
In other words the basis of a free society, real kindness, Kindness 2.0.