Thank you for coming out today in one of Heartland New Zealand’s most successful towns, and for the chance to speak with you.
Cambridge is at the centre of the Waikato region with a proud record of creating real wealth in this province and indeed for our country.
There is no doubt that if we had many more Cambridges our country would be doing so much better. Besides all the amenities here, this region is famous for growing the best grass for animals in the world.
The standout performance of your region should be cause for celebration, respect, and a willingness to really care about what you think. To listen to what you really want.
Success, the result of decades of planning and sacrifice, should mean that in Wellington politicians pay attention to you.
But as you know that is not happening.
Economy, Cost of Living, Cost of Energy, Cost of Rates
We are seventeen weeks away from our most critical election. Critical because if we don’t get the right outcomes, with the right policies, and with the right leadership, then clearly as indicated in the last budget we are heading for the third world.
Given the state of the country’s economy we need an election and not an auction.
The debate in Wellington leading up to the last budget and its aftermath, was truly alarming. Not for what it contained, but for what was so demonstrably absent.
And the analysis of the budget details would have set few, but the one eyed political bigots, at ease.
For what we were told on budget day, for the second year in a row, was that we have no more money for critical expenditure.
Nowhere in the budget was there any plan to rapidly grow this country’s wealth, through new and expanded exports, added value before and not after sale overseas. Or to rapidly modernise with IT and skill training all aspects of our economy.
And one of the last budget’s many failures was the lack of planning to take our young to the level of opportunities and careers that in former times our leaders made available to us.
And in doing so took New Zealand to be in the top three economies in the world, with levels of housing, health, education, and employment unmatched by any other country.
Mind you, the leaders that took us there had in the main never been to university, except they were graduates of the “University of Life”.
They had experience, and they had common sense.
Politicians back then kept in touch with the people, knew that with one mouth and two ears listening was twice as important as talking.
All that has sadly changed and for the worse.
Today, most politicians simply don’t understand what every house owner knows – that if you spend more money than you’re earning something has got to give. That sooner rather than later, someone has to ‘pay the piper’.
This week we found out what some of us had predicted; that we are in a recession, that the recession is not technical, but deep seated because of the amount of debt that we owe.
The lucky can theorise as to how we got there.
The mass majority; the victims of hopeless promises and forecasts are beginning to find out that our standard of living is on borrowed money.
After the budget binge of 2022 and 2023, and no doubt the irresponsible promises that will be made over the next four months, New Zealand will be simply worse off.
More in debt, facing high inflation, high interest rates, both for longer – and all manner of personal cost challenges.
Many of the forward predictions resemble academic gobbledygook with the Treasury’s forecast laid out to 2037.
Every Labour Party campaign promise to restrain the operating allowance blew out between 46% and 120% – in just the last three budgets.
The most amusing thing one could read in the commentary was this statement: “the budget is expansionary in the short term, meaning it helps fuel inflation initially, but reverses out to become contractionary in the long term, meaning it helps put a lid on inflation”.
What does that mean in layman’s terms? It means some of the commentariat, having seen the Minister of Finance blow out the budget spending in the last three budgets are saying that he will not do it again, if given the chance.
Apparently past performance is no longer an indicator of future performance.
Meanwhile the Greens and the Maori Party have no problem with that, excepting, the budget blow out isn’t nearly big enough for them – seeing as they are always talking about spending other people’s money – that’s your money.
Meanwhile across the other side of parliament, National says “the spending promises underpinning the budget forecasts are ‘shaky'”. That must surely be the understatement of the year.
And Act says that they are going to reduce government spending by $28 billion in the next four years.
And here is a warning. Whenever our economy is on trouble the first two groups to get attacked are the young and the seniors.
Here’s the rub; none of them are talking about what this country really needs alongside fiscal caution; and that is policies to rapidly grow our country’s wealth, which in former times, in our once great economic history, is exactly what our forefathers did.
That’s why New Zealand politics has always needed a protection against political extremists – against those who would experiment with economic theory to govern your lives although they can’t point to one example where it has ever worked in any country at any time in history.
New Zealand First is a common-sense Party, in the middle of the extremists, and that is why in the last thirty years we have been New Zealand’s most successful new Party.
New Zealand has always needed a supercharger for good ideas and a handbrake against bad ones.
Remember 2017-2020. The countless restraints put in by New Zealand First against Labour’s ill-conceived policies, yet we saw Labour take all the credit into the 2020 election and get rewarded for it.
If you doubt that then explain what’s gone wrong since 2020? And what has been missing since 2020?
They haven’t got balance, experience or common sense guiding them anymore.
They are rudderless on their own and now every impartial observer knows it – including a growing number of previous Labour Party voters.
In the next four months New Zealand First is going to lay out its economic and political record and plans for the future.
Central to that is our economic strategy to rapidly grow our exports and our national wealth.
We will show examples around this country of how our policies have given hope to many communities that they hadn’t seen for decades.
Right here in Cambridge we built the first all-weather artificial racetrack. The horse racing industry, of which Cambridge is the heart, contributes billions to our economy and tens of thousands of jobs.
Or in Opotiki, sadly the scene of so much chaos lately, we built a mussel factory and now the biggest deep sea mussel farm in the world.
New Zealand First did that and so many other initiatives through NZ First’s Provincial Growth Fund. And Labour took, and is still taking, all the credit encouraged by a wanton media.
Cost of Living
In 2020 Labour’s campaign publicity claimed they were “forcing competition on supermarkets to make sure you’re paying a fair price for your weekly shop” (see Labour’s 2020 campaign pamphlet).
And that they would “after the 2020 election, continue working to make sure you pay a fair price at the till”.
Sadly, too many voters believed them. They don’t anymore.
Last April Stats NZ reported the “largest annual increase in food prices in more than 30 years”.
15 months ago, then Commerce Minister David Clarke, said a Grocery Commissioner “would be appointed to oversee supermarkets’ conduct and ramp up competition.”
He promised a Grocery Commissioner would be appointed within three months. That was the promise but what was the performance.
Today, the role of the Grocery Commissioner is still being considered fifteen months after Labour first promised it.
This is all ‘hui and no doey”. Like a bad second-hand car salesman – ‘all presales promises, no aftersales delivery.’
The fact is the mass majority of Labour politicians don’t give a rats derriere for the working people they claim to represent. The lack of a Grocery Commissioner fifteen months later is evidence of that. And your grocery bill has just kept on going up while government dilly dallys.
Law and Order
Last week a 12-year-old girl was brutally beaten and bloodied outside a North Shore McDonalds after school by a 14-year-old teenager in broad daylight with onlookers.
In Opotiki schools and other public services were shutdown when gang members en masse decided to take over the town because of the death of a gang leader.
The same gang behaviour was happening again in Auckland last Friday.
Law and order in this country is a thing of the past:
- Total crime is up 33%
- Violent offending is up 42%
- Theft offences is up 39%
- Ram raids, mostly by youth, was up 465% last year, and
- Supermarkets alone are reporting a 36% increase in serious crime within their stores in the last year.
A journalist called this week questioning those figures. Apparently some media don’t know what we all know.
That too many of our streets are not safe anymore, even in broad daylight, and that many New Zealanders are fearful in their own homes.
Lawlessness has been allowed to grow in New Zealand and politicians are busy making all sorts of excuses and taking no action.
What we are seeing on our streets is the result of successive governments allowing our justice system to treat offenders as the victims.
Victims of colonization, victims of bad upbringings, victims of racism, victims of poverty, and victims of everything but their own free will.
We need to restore our justice system to bring justice to the real victims and security to our communities.
New Zealand First policy is to outlaw gangs and declare them terrorists.
If they can do that in Western Australia and Queensland, we can do it here.
New Zealand First will restore personal responsibility.
Over the past few years, we have seen the transformation of a ‘catch and warn’ policy under National, into a ‘catch and release’ policy under Labour.
Youth crime is rampant because there are no longer any real consequences for their actions.
And when we have violent, criminal youth unchecked and unchallenged, then violent criminal adults is the inevitable outcome.
Having more frontline police is essential, and New Zealand First delivered 1800 more for our country, but they need the court system to hold these offenders to account – and not release them back into our communities to reoffend time after time.
Labour has long held a measurement of success as the nearly 30% drop in prison numbers – but at what social cost when our violent crime is rising so alarmingly?
New Zealand First is going to maintain our focus on increasing frontline police numbers, but as importantly, we will ensure we have a court system that holds these offenders to account.
If that means introducing minimum mandatory sentences for violent repeat criminals then we will, as we have tried in parliament – and yet been voted down by both sides of parliament.
If that means telling the courts that we expect our laws to be enforced when offenders come before them then that is precisely what we are going to do.
We need to start holding offenders to account with sentences that will send them all a clear message – that we have had enough, and we aren’t putting up with it any longer.
One Country and Democracy – Not Co-Government and Racist Separatism
Of all the things for discussion here today one is the most dangerous.
It is the cancerous introduction of policies designed to politically and socially re-engineer this country.
These are policies which politicians never campaigned on and have done their best to introduce by stealth.
It is their modern version of the ‘Pandora principle’ – once out of the box these laws will never be able to be changed by you.
It is breath-taking in its arrogance and audacity.
But it is here in all parts of our bureaucracy and law making, and many politicians from many political parties are totally responsible for it.
You all have busy lives but please stop sometime in the next four months and ask these politicians what has been their role in it?
They have allowed, or encouraged, or worse been complicit in law changes, or policy directives to be imposed nationwide that are an attack on New Zealander’s freedoms, New Zealander’s rights, and New Zealander’s once shared citizenship.
They are re-writing history, then using that rewrite, to justify new laws which are purely based on racism, separatism, and the seeds of apartheid.
To do that, they have to first deny history, deny facts, and substitute them with fiction.
This is their nefarious platform justifying the unnotified, unmandated, unelected, policies so secretly being introduced.
How else can you explain Prime Minister Hipkins claiming that Three Waters is “not co-governance and it wasn’t co-governance”, then the next day have the Minister in charge, Kieran McAnulty, say they are keeping co-governance in Three Waters “for a number of reasons, one of which is that Maori have a special interest in water.”
This is both an absolute farce and deceit.
Put simply, what Maori think they get thirsty, but you don’t? Or that you and your ancestors having built all of the water infrastructure in this country now don’t get a final say in owning and running it?
But, this is not about ordinary Maori. This is about a certain Maori elite who have never even asked their own people, the mass majority of who are on the General Electoral Roll with you.
To get to where these politicians are taking us, they deal in shibboleths and lies, including these four claims:
- That the arrival of Europeans ruined the peaceful paradise of Maori,
- That the Treaty of Waitangi saw Maori begin a partnership with Queen Victoria,
- That the Treaty of Waitangi was not about Maori ceding sovereignty,
- That the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 meant Maori ‘self-government’
Stop for a moment and ask yourself, whether you’re Maori or non-Maori, can any of those four statements be remotely true?
It puts one in mind of the malignant statement – “if you’re going to tell a lie, make sure it’s a big one, because its more likely to be believed.”
- Every Iwi anthology of the inter-tribal wars makes the ‘Maori Garden of Eden’ a complete myth.
- If no one in Britain or the UK or the whole British Empire was in a partnership with the Crown on the 5th of February 1840, then how could it be constitutionally true that Maori were, two days later?
- The fact is Maori ceded sovereignty to the Crown when they signed the Treaty. The Chiefs back then said so, as did many leading Maori later, including Sir Apriana Ngata, Sir Maui Pomare, and Sir Peter Buck. Only todays elite power hungry Maori and their cultural fellow travelers seek to deny history and facts and arrogantly argue otherwise.
- All Māori Iwi pre-1840 and well after, were under the control of their ‘Rangatiratanga’. That means their Chief’s word was gospel. If there was back then co-government, which Chief’s word, if different, was gospel?
The elite’s argument does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Under their own description of ‘co-government’ pre 1840 then Māori were constantly at war.
And every honest Māori knows it. And there’s the rub.
Democracy
We’ve known since 1893 that to have a democracy every qualifying adult must have a right to vote and each vote should be of the same value.
Today there are political parties with policies that will destroy this basic principle of democracy. Look at their record.
Not one of them can make New Zealand First’s claim, to have remained steadfast in support of one franchise, where all citizens regardless of creed or race, are equal.
Conclusion
Every meeting we have had lately has been packed, no seats remaining, and standing room only. But you won’t see reports of these meetings in the main stream media.
Amazing really. The so called Fourth Estate is trying to shut New Zealand First out. This while every other political party is watching our every move, our every post, our every tile, our every tweet.
Other Parties are watching our posts and saying “me too”.
Except, while imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, it lacks authenticity. And if it lacks authenticity, then they won’t have the grit, the guts, the courage, or the know-how to stop these political extremists on both sides of parliament.
In four months time you will have two votes. One for a local electorate political Party candidate, the other for the political Party of your choice, the Party Vote.
It is said that politicians shake your hand before the election, and your confidence after it.
Don’t let that happen to you in 2023. This is an election at an inflection point in our country’s history, and the wrong electoral outcome will not be able to be repaired.
The people who have allowed these separatist policies to gain so much sway in our country will be dug in deeper than ticks on a hound.
Other countries have reached the same political crossroads, made the wrong choices, and have suffered ever since, languishing in the third world.
New Zealand First is asking you to take care in this election like never before.
We are asking you for your Party Vote.
We are asking you to vote New Zealand First to ensure balance, experience, and common sense is restored to Parliament.
We won’t always get it right, but we’ll keep on trying. Our founding principles means ‘Nationalism’ had a capital ‘N’ in front of it. It means one law for all. It means putting New Zealand and New Zealanders First. We will fight to rebuild our economy and preserve our democracy against those secretly planning to destroy it for their own extremist ideology.
Politics should be about what governs your life, balance, experience and common sense.
Give New Zealand First your Party Vote and you will save your province, and your country.
It’s time to step up and take back control where you are no longer the servants but the master of your destiny.
Give us your Party Vote, give us the tools and we will together finish the job.
