NZ values a sad excuse to attack immigrants
Sometimes a political party does something so stupid it almost disqualifies itself from ever holding any sort of power.
That is not to say it shouldn’t continue to represent its voters, even if those voters are the desperate, the confused and the plain dumb. It’s just that the party should forever be marked as an irrelevance, the equivalent of a bunch of pre-schoolers among a group of sensible adult students.
If it actually holds power at the time of its stupidity, the party should do the decent thing and step down and relinquish any responsibility for affairs of state. Not to do so contaminates everyone around it, especially those who have entered the Faustian pact of inviting the party into government.
I write, of course, of NZ First, whose antics and parliamentary personnel have, since it formed a coalition government with Labour, driven most reasonable and productive people in New Zealand to despair.
The party’s parliamentary wing is a bit like the clever people who produce rubbish reality television such as Married at First Sight, Real Housewives of Auckland or Sensing Murder. The makers know it’s rubbish, they know it’s crass, they know it’s unmitigated dross and yet make it because it turns a buck.
I don’t have a problem with the reality-TV audience. People can’t help it if they are not very smart. But I do despise the cynical exploitation of that stupidity to make money and, in NZ First’s case, to win power.
The thing that sealed my view of NZ First was its 25th birthday convention last weekend when it had nothing new to say, nothing new to propose and nothing new to advise.
To justify its sad existence with something, anything, it dreamed up the Respecting New Zealand Values Bill, which would require refugees and migrants to agree to respect New Zealand’s values and to live a life that ‘‘demonstrates that they respect New Zealand values’’.
Rest assured this bill, if you can call it that, will never sully the chambers of Parliament, although it will discussed by the party’s caucus and left to die quietly because it has served its purpose. Already, if you go to NZ First’s website, you will be hard-pressed to see a hint of it.
Not even Winston Peters gave it whole-hearted endorsement and cabinet minister Tracey Martin said the bill looked good on paper but its objectives were covered by other legislation.
What they should have said was that such a bill was actually so stupid it made them ashamed to be part of a party that could conceive it.
. . . a vile anti-immigrant bill at a time when half the country is run by migrants doing the jobs New Zealanders, with their wonderful values, won’t or can’t do.
Two main problems with this bill make it so obviously dumb that it should never have seen the light of day.
The first is that any migrant with an ounce of sense would know exactly what to say or write if some sort of values test was put in front of them.
The second is the notion that New Zealand has some unique value system, outside the law, that migrants must abide by. The idea suggests that apart from being a democratic, secular country that values free speech, open government, independent courts and tolerance of all religions and creeds, we have some unwritten rule system, any breach of which threatens our fragile way of life.
Of course we do, but that system is impossible to define, completely subjective and changeable from one day to the next. No migrant should or could be expected to know it or adhere to it.
If the proposed legislation is simply meant to ensure compliance with the law, then it is absolutely redundant.
The fact the bill wouldn’t work and is unnecessary is not its most pernicious feature. Its worst element is its fundamental dishonesty and what it says about NZ First.
The bill is clearly aimed at Muslim migrants and other foreigners bringing their sometimes unenlightened views to bear on New Zealand society. If the party had called it the Anti-Muslim and Foreign Practices Bill, it would have at least been more workable and honest.
Instead it came up with a mealymouthed version of what in reality is a vile anti-immigrant bill at a time when half the country is run by migrants doing the jobs New Zealanders, with their wonderful values, won’t or can’t do.
People and their parties have a right to be anti-anything. But it’s not too much to ask for them to be honest about it.
What this bill says about NZ First is perhaps the most disturbing and it’s not the fact most of its members are not too keen on immigration or foreigners.
It’s more that it presents a picture of pragmatist, opportunist MPs who represent probably the dumbest part of New Zealand’s electorate. Now and then, and in the most cynical way possible, they have to throw their slowly dwindling crowd a bone. And that’s how you arrive at the nonsense that is the Respect New Zealand Values Bill.