The New Zealand Government is a Bully and a Thief, Sometimes.

The New Zealand Government is a Bully and a Thief, Sometimes.

And by this I don't mean that taxation is theft, it's not, or most of it isn't.

And those on the fringes of reality who believe that taxation is theft should reflect on what it's like to live where there's no rule of law - like in Somalia for example.  Powerless residents there would be more than happy to pay even half of what they could earn in a functioning economy in return for a legal structure that protected them from the arbitrary violence of their neighbours. The rule of law costs- and it's worth it. 

But there unquestionably is potential for taxation to become theft in substantially democratic states when a majority uses it's votes to make laws that take from a minority and redistribute to themselves.  There are times when New Zealand has arguably strayed into this, but those targeted have so far retained the freedom to leave if they don't like the way things are set up here- and perhaps this is the best that can be expected.  We are not North Korea - nor even Cuba. 

It's an entirely different matter when a country takes from some minority group without giving them any choice or adequate redress.  An extreme example of this was when Jews were plundered by the state (with the tacit and sometimes enthusiastic support of the 'volk') in Nazi era Germany.

A key element in such "thefts by the state" is that the target group must have something worth taking and have no great voting leverage.  Preferably it should be able to be demonised, but at least it should not have widespread support- for reasons of race, religion, culture, class, or if none of these are available, envy will do.   Basically then, the state decides what it wants to take, makes a law to validate this, bullies whoever is targeted, then post facto justifies the actions by saying it was 'consulted on' and 'legal'.

Regrettably, New Zealand governments have been guilty of this sort of behaviour a number of times in our history.

Perhaps confiscations after the 19th century land wars are an early example- though armed insurrection tends to generate reprisals by the victorious side, irrespective of legal niceties or whether the defeated had a just cause- and those tribes that now complain most also seem to be those who had gained the most by 'right of conquest' in preceding intertribal wars.  Current queasiness about the rightness of outcomes back then have supported NZ's current treaty settlements program with M?ori tribal entities.  Fair enough.

But more recently, there have been some particularly egregious examples of NZ governments bullying and thieving from minorities.  Here are some:

After the 1975 Maruia Declaration, West Coast South Island indigenous forest industries were closed down.  Some monetary compensation was made, by way of an investment fund to incubate start-up industries that wouldn't offend urbanites, but these failed to take.  Poverty, 'welfare' and relative de-population have now become the West Coast's leitmotif.  The irony that it was Auckland (their prosperity originally founded in no small part on the clear felling of Kauri), who's overwhelming voting block and  lack of sympathy for 'those rural hicks' (Helen Clark labelled them 'ferals')  drove the prohibition, was not lost on 'coasters - though little noted in Auckland or Wellington.

Then the boot was put into the same tiny (just 35,000) community again, but this time driven by Wellington political agendas, in the great greenstone heist of 1997.   As part of a Treaty Settlement, the ownership of all Poanamu on the West Coast was transferred to Nga Tahu.  If you had greenstone on your land, one day you owned it, the next day you didn't, no compensation, simple as that.  One family that had a fair bit of it took the unusual step of trying to disguise their continued (but now illegal) possession of a few sizeable boulders from aerial discovery by painting them brown.  Sadly, this ruse was seen through, and jail time has been imposed.   As it was for some enterprising coasters (I wonder why the bother to try any more?) who dredged up and milled indigenous logs that had sunk in Lake Brunner while being towed across to a sawmill during the 100 years and more when logging was permitted.  The sentences that these 'crimes' resulted in were on average more than for a robbery with violence at your local dairy- for the reason I suspect that bullies (our government in this case) can be tolerant of lesser bullies, but always react badly to challenges to their own authority. 

But then, in the 1980's central government created  a proxy to take over the worst of it's  bullying;  regional government, the 'third tier'.

Born in inspiration, the enabling legislation for regional governments included a clause that allowed compensation for individuals who had been randomly fucked over when laws were changed for the so called greater common good.   This is in essence a 'magna carta' issue (an 1103 English law defining the boundaries between the rights of the individual and the powers of the state).   But at the last minute, the compensation clause was deleted- and the rest, as they say, is history.  

Rather than being 'enabling', the regional tier's central business of administering the Resource Management Act has become a way to stop things happening- and as a consequence the RMA has religious level support from conservative reactionaries (especially of the green variety) who strangely (given their anti-fossil fuels agenda) don't want a wind turbine within their sight.  This vocal constituency has made the RMA difficult to reform.

The Canterbury Regional Council changed its name to ECAN in 2016, which wasn't very self aware, as it immediately transmogrified to ECAN'T in the vernacular.  And regional councils have another fundamental conflict; their voters are mainly city people, while the wealth of NZ is generated predominantly in rural areas. By granting city folk control over rural areas (which they would choose to have as a pristine park that they may visit in leisure hours), quite soon, their agendas seriously impacted on the earning capacity of our primary production.   In the dying days of the Clark administration, it is said that they were about to disestablish ECAN, to save the country's economic bacon- but they wimped out (or maybe just made a strategic judgement knowing they were about to lose) leaving this necessary action to Key's incoming government (which didn't happen either).

But I've digressed:

Regional governments established things called SNA's - significant natural areas. 'Consultation' with the land owners effected involves, at the best, telling them what is about to happen.  If someone somewhere in the impenetrable regional council bureaucracy decides that there is a SNA on your property, then the first time you might know this is when a line on a map came to your notice.  A SNA can delineate the presence of some indigenous plant, or animal, or it can be some visual feature- an area of tussock, a top, a ridge line, even a stand of trees.  When these faceless and nameless people have decided you have a SNA, then you are prohibited from doing anything at all that may alter it without going through an expensive and tortuous consenting process - which will very likely be denied anyway.  I had a farmer friend who was also a local body politician (so you might think somewhat protected against this nonsense, but he wasn't).  An area of rough scrub he owned was simultaneously under notice from our district council requiring clearing while subject to a regional council notice requiring preservation (native broom?).  When he suggested they sort this out between themselves they refused, and both pushed their court actions- to what final resolution I've not yet heard.   

Declaring a SNA is theft pure and simple.  if the community at large decides to take away ownership of something for "the greater good" then it should compensate the original owner for their loss. There is no compensation for SNA's; theft that wouldn't be countenanced if the subjects weren't from a tiny minority class (farmers) and culture (rural), and I doubt that it would be currently acceptable if they weren't generally also Pakeha - notwithstanding that a bit of take-some-of-your-own-medicine isn't justified.  

But the most brazen theft ever perpetrated by New Zealand government is "heritage" buildings.

If you happen to own a building or structure with "heritage " values, then your notification of this may arrive like a letter from the office of racial purity to those with a Jewish parent in 1930's Germany and will be about as welcome.  Of course, you will probably (but not always) have suspected that this classification was likely, but once it's happened there's often no practical way to escape the economic consequences.

                                                    Peter Lynn, Ashburton, August 13'2013