One of the most unfortunate things that has happened to this country is the fact that we no longer have a quality magazine examining what is happening in this part of the world from a socio-political point of view. Given this, fine Australian magazines such as News Weekly and Quadrant for which I write are well worth support.  

 Given the extraordinary damage done to the economy of this country by the former Labour government, the National Party’s initiatives to attract investment to this country can only be applauded. However, the voting public can be particularly ungrateful, especially when the government’s focus, no matter how important in economic terms, is not taking into account issues of considerable importance to the majority of New Zealanders. And public perception is everything.

We all know that what is being taught in our schools is a travesty of a genuine education. And no one Minister of Education, no matter how well intentioned,  has a chance of restoring standards, given that the Ministry of Education has become an institution where neo-Marxist controllers of the curriculum have long become entrenched.

There will be no chance at all for genuine education reform until the Ministry of Education is disbanded and the decisions on what should be taught in schools are left to parents. Decentralising education,  so that in every province education establishments are set up with parents in control — not the bureaucrats, nor the left wing teacher unions — would facilitate a return to what needs to be taught, and taught well.

Former Labour leader Chris Hipkin’s left-wing mother will have had considerable influence on the dumbing down of the curriculum. Chief Researcher for the New Zealand Council of Educational Research, she is one of the strongest advocates for the new science curriculum with its politicised agenda prioritising  “matters of concern” over actual facts. Under this last Labour government, Latin, which I later regarded as the most important subject I studied in school, was conveniently removed. It necessitated academic standards high enough to challenge bored pupils, such as I was, to change their attitudes. In fact it wasn’t so long ago in England that one could pass all other exams but would not get into some top universities if one failed to pass in Latin, so much was it valued.

Moreover, most parents would not be mandating the celebration in schools of LGBT identification as a source of great pride and would certainly be in favour of removing from the curriculum the highly graphic sex education which is today basically encouraging teenagers towards sexual experimentation, even anal sex, and constitutes an emotional attack upon younger children. And while strong male and female friendships have long been celebrated within the same sex, in basically Christian societies the actual physical practice of anal penetration, for example, has traditionally been regarded as morally wrong, condemned in the Bible, even apart from the physical risks it involves. Few would ever wish the once cruel, demeaning treatment inflicted on homosexuals to ever again be revisited. However, the ostentatious celebration of “Gay Pride” as if it is a superior form of behaviour ignores the fact that, for many, such behaviour is not in line with their moral values, and they do not wish their children in schools to be required to celebrate the rainbow flag. It is by no means a question of “homophobia”, but concern by parents in particular about the increasing attack on those family values which contribute to the stabilising of our society.

Parents are going to have to object more strongly, as is now happening overseas, where, for example strong opposition is now being mounted against Drag Queens being allowed to perform in front of children in libraries. In spite of the inevitable media frenzy, many New Zealanders will be quietly applauding the protest the Destiny church has mounted against this — although they might well prefer that it didn’t involve the usual tedious hakas, the eye-rolling and tongue-protruding.

The tragedy, as always, that so many New Zealanders, intimidated by bullying accusations of being homophobic and racist, lack courage — leaving it to so few to protest for them. And why our successive, supposedly conservative prime ministers always feel they have to endorse the show-off parades of gay activists is a mystery.

Moreover, Luxon is now under fire, as the Conservative Party points out, because of his dismissive response to an early childhood educator who raised the alarm over a growing number of tiny pre-school children requiring to be addressed as they/them rather than as boys or girls. Pre-school children! Rather than acknowledge such growing concerns and the effect on vulnerable children of all ages of the transgender movement, the Prime Minister dismissed this concern, instead issuing a generic statement of support for the LGBT community, completely ignoring the issue at hand. Moreover, a previous government’s decision to ban conversion theory from being accessed to help youngsters wanting to free themselves from same sex relationships should never have been a government decision. This of course came about because of the usual propaganda about the damage which it was claimed would be done to those embarking on such a course — a victory once again for the smooth-tongued minority of activists very good at getting their own way.

Moreover, New Zealand is now short of hundreds of teachers — no wonder. When writing some years back for Ian Wishart’s INVESTIGATE magazine in relation to the deliberate dumbing down of education in this country, I was contacted by so many teachers, HODs, principals, even lecturers and former professors appalled at what was happening, some writing in the trade journals to object. I would try to encourage them to write for the mainstream media where what was happening would then be more widely known, only to be to be told that their articles were always refused publication.

There has in fact long been a battle for the minds and hearts of young New Zealanders, and indeed their parents. And conservative parents have lost, because “the long march through the institutions” by neo-Marxists, i.e.  basically communist influencers, was well underway by the 1960s, and the Ministry of Education is now well under their control.

No wonder so many teachers resigned. And where are they now going to come from? No intelligent, academically well-qualified graduates, even those keen to share their enthusiasm for their chosen subjects of physics, chemistry, history  (long designedly removed from our curriculum)  languages, etc. who would like to become teachers, are going to want to enter a profession where they will be compelled to learn and inflict upon their pupils that almost completely fake language, te Reo, with little resemblance to the original Maori language – and spoken nowhere else in the world.

It is undeniably an almost a complete waste of time for children to learn it at the expense of far more important languages, spoken widely. And how many would-be teachers are going to be willing to be forced to sign up to a radicalised version of the Treaty of Waitangi bearing very little relationship to the treaty’s original intent? How many would be willing to be compelled to acquiesce to inappropriately use absurd pronouns such as they/them, simply because some deluded child thinks quite wrongly that he or she can change the biological sex they were born into? How many prospective teachers want to be forced to teach a sex education curriculum which goes against their basic values?  And how many are going to be willing to face classrooms encountering today’s disruptive, emotionally disturbed, even violent pupils?

These things considered, it is quite obvious why the teacher shortage is going to remain. It is also quite obvious that we are never going to have genuine reform as long as the control of education in schools remains in their hands of a now thoroughly corrupted ministry, intent on propagandising and politicising the children in its care.

And what is Luxon’s National-led government doing about all this? After all, perception is everything, and the coalition has broken its very important promise to restore the English names to all government departments and institutions so that the public can understand what they stand for. The fact that people feel betrayed has been overlooked, to this government’s cost. People do not easily forgive broken promises, particularly given Christopher Luxon’s cavalier attitude to so much else.

There are so many issues this conservative coalition is failing to address. Both the destructive Jacinda Ardern and Christopher Luxon’s governments have set emission targets so ridiculously high that they would impinge on agricultural productivity. Already the targeting of prime agricultural land to turn into forests to combat the supposedly disastrous effects of CO2 emissions and covering such land with solar panels is costing us – as with the closing down of the meat processing works in Timaru where 600 workers had to be laid off because of the declining sheep numbers – without enough land to graze them.

However, as the world respected scientist Ian Plimer as pointed out, there has never been any evidence whatsoever that CO2 causes global warming — in fact the opposite. And yet climate change catastrophists, headed by minister Simon Watts with his advisory panel of by no means a scientifically qualified team, are intent on costing New Zealanders $24 billion, for no good reason at all.  $24 billion, from a cash strapped economy!

What a parlous state we have come to. And why is this supposedly conservative government not representing the wishes of the majority of New Zealanders, but operating with such blinkers on that it would lose the election if it would be held tomorrow? Luxon is no longer viewed as a leader with a finely-tuned antennae.  On the contrary, he is costing the National Party votes.

And no, we do not need a four-year parliamentary term. This is quite obvious if we reflect upon the further damage that Jacinda Ardern’s and Grant Robertson’s government would have done had they been allowed to proceed for a year longer. A three-year term is quite sufficient. After all, if the country the country approves of the direction in which government is going it will get a second term.

 This coalition government needs to start listening to the people or this is not going to happen, and even the sensible decisions it has made are not going to save us. It is letting the country down.

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