Fantasy in Middle Earth

It looks like New Zealand has lost The Hobbit films. Sir Peter Jackson has said that Warner Brothers are coming to New Zealand next week to discuss moving the film production offshore. Sir Peter will remain as director but thousands of New Zealand actors, production staff and support contractors will not have the opportunity that the Lord of the Rings provided them in past years. Why? It is because of the greed and stupidity of the union, Actors Equity, and a few scurrilous troublemakers in the actors fraternity. They have bitten the hand that feeds them and now they are left to wonder why they won't have any work at all.

This is typical of the mentality of many New Zealanders. People in this country live in a political fantasy land. They seem to forget that money and jobs don't grow on trees. They adhere to the utopian, socialist notion that a benevolent government can provide for everyone. They aren't prepared to ask the question, who provides the benefits they expect the government to bestow on them? They aren't prepared to acknowledge the obvious - that it is always an entrepreneur like Peter Jackson (for that is exactly what he is) who ultimately creates all the wealth they consume.

It is not that these people are stupid - we could forgive them if they were. No, they know perfectly well that their beliefs are based on a fantasy that has never worked well anywhere in the world. That makes their views, and their sabotaging politics, all the more reprehensible. They are the same people who demand higher salaries for teachers without being prepared to link pay to performance, or who demand higher taxes to pay for ever more welfare handouts and more money for their pet social engineering projects like preserving the Maori language, without questioning whether such extortion is damaging to enterprise and jobs.

Unfortunately, such dishonesty is the stock in trade of a fair proportion of our elected representatives who give their fellow travellers want they want. Although in the case of some of the politicians, I think lack of intelligence is a valid excuse. That is the effect of a dishonest electoral system that puts half the seats in Parliament in the hands of party apparatchiks who appoint people they can control to party lists.

Unfortunately I don't think The Hobbit debacle will be a wake up call for these mediocre bludgers. They will continue to sell their brand of politics that says all anyone needs is a benevolent government (run by their friends, of course). And New Zealand will continue to get poorer as a result. I just hope they reflect for a moment on the damage they have done in this instance.

New Years Honours and the Republic

The Government has seen fit to give Helen Clark the Order of New Zealand, supposedly our highest honour, replacing Edmund Hillary on the list. I suppose on the basis of her tenure she deserves an honour as much as any other politician but I think there is something very unsavoury about giving such a polarising politician our highest award.

Actually, I find the whole honours system very unsavoury. The idea that you receive an award from the Government - who are, after all, meant to be serving us not the other way around - seems very feudal to me.

They also chose to give Peter Jackson a knighthood. Again, I guess he deserves it as much as any New Zealander. But it doesn't add anything to his accomplishments, which I think stand on their own merits. He doesn't need the 'Sir' to tell the world how successful he has been.

The honours systems brings the republican debate into focus. Keith Locke, with whom I wouldn't normally agree on anything, wrote a piece in The Bin Liner (otherwise known as The Dominion Post) the other day, in support of New Zealand becoming a republic. While I have my doubts about what sort of republic the likes of Keith Locke would turn New Zealand into, I whole-hearted support his sentiment.

The one thing that makes me a republican is the idea that my children cannot grow up to be head of state of New Zealand because that role is inherited by the eldest son in a family twenty thousand kilometres away. In America, every child is taught at school that they can aspire to be the President. In New Zealand, we cannot teach our children that. We believe our own children are not good enough to be our head of state. The only ones who are, under our constitutional conventions, are the descendants of a corrupt, despotic, incestuous family in Britain. I find this situation offensive.