a strict and narrow view

Comrades,

So, the High Court, unsurprisingly for mine, has taken a strict and narrow view of s.44 of the Constitution, and punted five of the Citizenship Seven.
It says what it means:
s44 (i.) "Is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or citizen of a foreign power."
You simply cannot be a "subject or a citizen … of a foreign power" and sit in the Australian Parliament.
The Court agreed that the framers of Constitution back in the 1890's were playing the race card, yet again, and were determined to keep bloody foreigners out of the Corridors of Power.
Nothing's changed.
That's it - by unanimous decision of the full bench.
To put it in simple and easily understood terms it is the Court saying "Righto then, off the fuck you go."
Never mind this nonsense about how can you know if you a dual citizen if you don't know.
It's incumbent on anyone standing as a candidate to find out.
Senators Canavan and Xenophon got off on technicalities - Xenophon has already decided to piss off back to South Australia where he belongs - the wowser state can gladly have Nick the Greek back, he can even be Premier if he likes and ban the pokies and close all the pubs for all I care.
Canavan survived only because the court agreed with the submission of the amicus curiae that under "the best reading of Italian law", Canavan is not and was not Italian.
Calls for a referendum to amend s.44 are a waste of time and money - there are two chances of a poll of that sort succeeding - none and Buckley's.
The people of Australia - immigrants included - are inherently racist, and just won't have it.
Yr either Strayan, or yr not.
Never mind that the country will be running without a Deputy Prime Minister in the last week of Parliamentary sittings, while B.Joyce in on the hustings in New England.
What does a deputy Prime Minister do anyway when the Prime Minister is in the country?
Absolutely nothing.
And Trundle must be delighted to take on the responsibilities of being Agriculture Minister, he'll be able to devote a lot of time and energy to the portfolio while being a Prime Minister who is flat out like a lizard drinking extinguishing spot fires everywhere.
Labor - with the Liberal/Country Party coalition now having no guaranteed majority on the floor - have sensibly decided not to move a no confidence motion, because there is little or no point.
Barnaby will breeze back into the House of Reps in the by-election, Windsor or no Windsor.
The sensible move now is to audit every last politician to find out if they have any known or unknown allegiances to any foreign powers, and if they don't pass the test, they're out.
Simple.
End of story.
It's the law.

Winston & Jacinda

Comrades,

Well, well, well...Wily Ol' Winston gets exactly what he wanted, and then some.
He's been Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of New Zealand before, but never at the same time.
Winner!
And at a lazy pace too, days after he tapped Jacinda Arden and got into bed with NZ Labour to do the deed, in order to rule.
That's all it took really, as you'd have to think that National were unwilling to give the Rt. Hon. Winston Peters the Deputy Prime Ministership - he's got form, and carries a lot of baggage with them over the eons.
And he must fondly remember Helen Clark more than a decade ago when he was Foreign Minister in her Govt. before some unfortunate business about party funding irregularities found him out.
"Hey Jacinda! Why not make me Foreign Minister as well!?"
"What a cracking idea, Winston! Who better to represent the Land of the Long White Cloud on the World Stage!?"
I really hope Ms Arden does bring Mr Peters with her on her first visit to Australia as PM - you can imagine That Mad Maori waddling down the Corridors of Power in Canberra to Julie Bishop's office for a Death Stare competition; she would have been warned.
Everyone in diplomatic circles knows that he's as the hatter, they have long memories and are top-notch experts in accommodating that sort of thing.
There will always be a free scotch for Winston on the cocktail circuit.
Who actually gets to do the puppeteering, tho', will play out over the next three years.
I'm putting my money on the Top Dog, as she's got control of the purse strings, the yoof vote, and actually cares about climate change, she'll use Winston as her eyes and ears abroad as Foreign Minister, and keep him safely outside of the country as much as humanly possible.
Home Affairs can look after itself, as New Zealand First, with their measly nine seats, get three other Cabinet portfolio's; taking care of defence, education, economic development...and oh...forestry...so they are punching way way above their weight, while the Greens are sidelined out of Cabinet altogether, stuck on the outer ministry.
And three-way coalitions are always interesting, as they have a dynamic all their own.
Especially when an ultra-nationalist racist like Winston has to sign-off on Jacinda's socialist agrarian platform in a trade-off for cutting immigration by 30,000 folks p.a., while keeping those unreformed-Trot tree-huggers who've got some wild and wacky ideas of their own over at The Greens, happy.
But, they all agree that the regions have been neglected for at least a decade, child poverty is an issue that's rarely discussed, as is poor housing, but no-one minds at all that 100% of the income tax collected in NZ is spent on social security and welfare.
When people can't afford firewood, in a joint thick with forest, that's a worry.
It looks like Labour will at long last finally fully embrace the time-honoured trope that New Zealand is fundamentally an insular rural society - most people are more or less happy with that idea - and oh my, don't they have some ruralness to go on with?
I remember driving down towards Lake Taupo there, on the way to Mt Ruapehu one time with an Australian mate of mine who'd been in residence in NZ for many years when he suddenly exclaimed "See this! The whole country looks like one gigantic farkin' golf course with sheep on it".
Give people jobs planting a million trees a year.
Winner!
And why not increase the minimum wage to $NZ20 per hour over the next few years while yr at it.
Winner!
On an issue close to my heart, I note that the Greens and Labour both support the complete legalisation of cannabis - carte blanche - as there's no point in going on with the pretence and hypocrisy, and the matter will be settled by 2020 at the latest.
Apparently, our Cuz across The Ditch are among some of the heaviest cannabis users in the world [along with us], and vast tracts of the North Island have an ideal climate for growing some frightfully powerful marijuana.
Satisfying local demand and getting a thriving export trade going in super-duper top-notch hospital-grade hooch would be an absolute financial bonanza for the Govt. in tax returns
And just think of the old hippie & pot-head tourist possibilities, with maps of tourist drives and hand-painted road-side signs in March-April-May saying "Pick Your Own Weed! $10 a bag!".
Winner!
But I have no idea where opinion polls on this are going - has anyone bothered to conduct one?
For some arcane reason I can't fathom, cannabis law reform needs a referendum to deal with.
And New Zealanders don't muck about when they cut to the chase; it's either on, or it's not.
Witness the recent referendum on changing the national flag into a beach towel, that was roundly beaten at the polls.
And who knew that SSM ceased to be an issue in 2013 when gays were allowed to marry each other to their heart's content across the Tasman while we get all het up over a non-binding postal survey?
That one only needed an amendment to an Act of Parliament, as it does here.
Or that there are about 450 local same-sex weddings every year, or that NZ has become a leading SSM tourist destination?
I was chatting with the Good Lady Wife over the dinner table about Trans-Tasman affairs when she commented in her laconic way "Old Bill, well he didn't last long then, did he?"
As it turns out, only about ten months at the helm for Mr English, after John Key literally disappeared into thin air with his very peculiar family, a Knighthood, and about $NZ60M in net worth.
Boring-as-Batshit Bill's must be one of the shortest NZ Prime Ministership's in living memory.
I did note that the Guardian [Australian edition] reported last week:
"On Thursday evening Ardern celebrated her appointment to the top job by returning to her Wellington studio apartment with partner Clarke Gayford and eating a pot of noodles."
That was a bit rude to the Prime Minister elect, for mine.
Surely by common courtesy if she has a partner by the name of Clarke Gayford, then she should at all times be referred to in the press as "Ms Arden" or by her full name.
No one would dream of addressing Trundle, Trumbler, or whatever his name is, other than as "Mr Turnbull".
She can do what she likes.
And the best of British luck to her.
All power to her oars [on some of the most polluted waterways in the world - New Zealand 100% pure, as the old tourism advertising slogan used to go?].
I sincerely hope that her Pinko agenda succeeds, seeing that she will only be 40 when she comes up for re-election.
It's all over for us baby-boomers, we're done, we had our chance and blew it, and no-one will thank us for it.
A inexperienced youngster has her hands on the Levers of Power and will learn fast, never mind that old man looking over her shoulder from afar.

PS>
The Miracle of Democracy is mighty hard to keep up with at the minute.
The Czech's get a new billionaire populist PM in Andrej Babiš [unlike Australia who have an unpopular billionaire PM], Austria drifts to the Euro-skeptic centre-right with 31-year-old wunderwuzzi Sebastian Kurz looking to form minority Govt to become the next Chancellor, The Donald's old mate Shinzō Abe gets re-elected in Japan in a landslide simply because there was no-one else seemingly available, Mr Xi Jinping Sir of China is elevated to legendary status by vote of The People's Congress - no need to ask non Party-types what they think on that one, given that's not high on the agenda - everybody seems a bit feisty and antsy over Catalonia way, and only God knows what is going on in Kenya.
Phew.

Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty

lawyer's picnic at the High Court

The epitome of "clout".

Appearances before the full bench of the High Court [sitting as the Court of Disputed Returns], Canberra, 10-12 October 2017. Re: Election of Members of Parliament and s.44 Constitution.


The Solicitor-General, Stephen Donaghue QC, for the Commonwealth.
David Bennett AC QC, for Canavan.
Brett Walker SC, for Joyce & Nash.
Andrew Tokely SC, for Xenophon.
Brian Walters QC, for Ludlum & Walters.
Justin Gleeson QC and Ron Merkel SC, for Windsor.
Robert Newlinds SC, for Roberts.
Geoffrey Kennett SC, appearing as animus curiae.

Enough said, already!
Aaaah...the Miracle of Democracy...

to the barricades children!

Comrades,


I can only say that it warms the cockles of the heart of a proud long-time member of Drinkers for Disarmament that my good friends at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons [ICAN] have won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
Not before time.
That's 8 million Kroner in the protest "war chest" and you can auction off the gold medal itself in due course for north of a million $US.
Has it struck anyone as ironic in the extreme that the people who want to rid the world of nuclear weapons forever have won a prize donated by the inventor of dynamite - who heavily invested his enormous profits in artillery and munitions manufacturing - as a sop to his own late-life regret at devising such a dastardly thing?
Or that the all important explosive yield of The Bomb has always been measured in tons of TNT?
What is TNT?
It's not at all similar to dynamite, which is really dangerous shit - although it is often confused with it - it was dynamite's natural successor, because it's as safe as houses to handle and you don't need as much TNT to blow the living' bejesus out of something or someone.
If you were a military man and you could have kilotons, nay megatons of the stuff in just a few hundred kilo's of really heavy uranium derivative, would you argue?
Nah.
It was a pretty soft choice, I'd say a no-brainer, for the Norwegian Committee this year - in a world racked and riven by internecine warfare and ethnic cleansing - after the UN adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons a few months ago [that's explained elsewhere in this bloggy blog blog thingy].
Never mind that the idea of ICAN was cobbled together by a few Pinko's sitting around a card table in Melbourne, there are two chances at the moment of Australia agreeing to the thing, let alone ratifying it - none and Buckley's.
Thailand, Guyana and the Holy See are the only lot to have signed-up and ratified the prohibition treaty.
There is a long, long, long way to go and it is vitally important to keep pursuing it.
The last genuine protest placard I made I stole the slogan from a photograph I'd seen from some protest march in D.C. that read "I Can't Believe We Are Still Protesting About This" and that must have been more than five years ago now.
[It was about retaining as public land a choice slice of Sydney real estate; the only bit of remnant Cumberland Plain forest left in the Inner West, as I recall - and yes, we're still protesting about it].
While that's by-the-by, the message applies all the same to The Bomb.
Why-oh-why so long?
It took an enormous amount of time and effort in protesting to drive nuclear testing underground...18 years to ban atmospheric testing with the Partial Test Ban Treaty, and then another 33 years for the USA and USSR to stop testing altogether with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, then another four years again before China and France finally gave the game away, but they've kept their options open, not signing up to any nuclear ban treaty of any kind.
It's been 21 years since the final significant nuclear weapons test; The Yoof of Today have no personal history of it or investment in it, so it's oh so easy to be complacent.
I was six years old when atmospheric testing ended, and they were still letting them go at Maralinga just up the road from where I lived at the time in Adelaide to the bitter end, and it took forever to get the Poms to pay the British Army the $100M+ to pick up all the 100,000+ bits of plutonium left behind - and still they didn't do a great job of it.
Secrecy surrounded British atmospheric tests going horribly wrong back in '57, you know, the "Black Mist", that sort of thing and in the end, plutonium had purposefully and shamefully been shattered to smithereens by conventional explosives and scattered over a large defined range that's now fucked-over forever, all in the name of finding out whether you could have a nuclear weapon, bomb it, and blow it up without actually setting it off.
Turns out, you can.
There was a Royal Commission into the whole gigantic fiasco, goddamit.
But I digress.
Read the report.
The really strange thing about this weird uranium gear is that nobody now can be absolutely 100% certain that the weapons will actually work at all, although there's a mighty mighty good chance they will.
Without testing, the staggeringly stupendous cost of maintaining nuclear weapons alone should have seen an end to it by now, but no, wiping out these things altogether, most unfortunately, won't be done in my lifetime, so...to the barricades children!
Everybody's talkin' about and thinks Fatboy Kim is real bad, and while the world nuclear stockpile has shrunk by about two-thirds from its Cold War highs, there are still at least 14,000 nukes on the loose [roughly 5,000 are effectively decommissioned, in the process of being dismantled and won't be replaced, about 8 or 9,000 are in some kind of rotational operational state, of those, about 4,000 are deployed, and 1500 or so are fully-armed and ready to go at a minute's notice].
And about 93% of all nuclear warheads are held in America and Russia.
I grew up with this obscene madness [MAD, the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction"] and got mad about it, still do, as you might have guessed.
Even a very cursory study of the truly awesome destructive power of The Bomb can't fail to impress, let alone the gruesome invidious nature of radiation - "the invisible silent killer" - it's all enough to put you right off it for life.
In an ideal world, it should have finished where it began in '45, as if Japan wasn't enough of an ideal test bed to see what two low yield primitive nuclear weapons can do to living breathing cities.
And we've gone way out there - thermonuclear, baby - since then.
72 years on and I'm sorry, but on this one, if you don't say NO, you're complicit in it.
There isn't any saying "I don't care" here.
Never forget.
Dream the impossible dream no longer.
Just do it.
Ban The Bomb.

Photo: Pamela Hall. 299 Park Avenue, NYC, 2016.

that "Mad Maori"

Comrades,

I rolled my eyes when that NZ "Kingmaker" Winston Peters was quoted as saying last week that he wouldn't make up his mind up on whether to cast his lot in with Labour or National to form a minority Govt. in the Land of the Long White Cloud "until October" after their recent exercise in the Miracle of Democracy resulted in a stalemate.
When it became apparent that he would hold the balance of power, he said that he "won't be testing the water with both feet" and accused all other politicians of talking "bulldust".
It'll be weeks, even months, before our Cuz across the Tasman have a Govt.
In the meantime, Boring As Batshit Bill's still running the shop as Caretaker PM and it's business as usual.
Me and Winston go back a long way.
He's been in The Beehive for 38 years - on & off - after being elected 14 times, resigning from Parliament once, and losing twice, both the subject of litigation - or something or another like that - it's too hard to keep track of this crazy.
Sheesh...I'm old enough to clearly remember working as a journo in the 2GB & 2UE newsrooms in Sydney way back when and the news editor would cast a desultory morning eye over the day's newspapers, press calls, court lists, public speeches, doings in the big end of town and the halls of power etc etc etc and start barking orders.
"Jesus!" they would shout "that fuckin' Mad Maori is in town again. Craves! [and it was always me] Go and tail the tool, and don't come back until you've got a good quote".
It was never that hard because Winston could always be goaded into saying something completely ridiculous, or spruik some wild idea that was clean outta left field at the minimum.
Winston has been the self-styled de-facto Maori political leader of the country since he was sacked as Maori Affairs Minister by PM Jim Bolger for being a buffoon in '91 and he's never looked back, eventually giving Jim the stink finger, and forming the populist centre-right New Zealand First Party.
And he's been running that party without a single public challenger for the top job for 24 years.
You have to be controversial and cantankerous and in a constant running battle with your enemies in the press to do that.
It's a very strange electoral system indeed - and no wonder there are calls for major change - when Winston can still hold the balance of power after mustering little more than a mere 7% of the popular vote and losing his own constituent seat of Northland [but was elected to the "list"] and losing two of his "list seats" to go down from 11 to 9 seats in a 120 seat Parliament [which, by the way, is way way too many anyway for their relatively tiny population].
Never mind the complete annihilation of the official Maori Party, who lost both their seats, falling below the 5% popular vote threshold.
WTF!?
You call that democratic?
Has Winston gamed the system or is it just an unforeseen quirk, a lucky break, whatever, something's seriously wrong there.
The Dude's been in coalition with both Labour and his natural home in National before now, it's been that long - he's more than happy to flip-flop when it suits him - and you can see as plain as day that he's angling for the Deputy Prime Ministership [again?!] but neither of the main party's are buying it, because, put simply, he's a nut job.
Don't get me wrong, I've got time for the bloke -- there's no doubt at all about Winston - he's got enormous amount of front and that innate ability to stop a room when he walks in by his good looks, charm, terrific facial gestures, melodious voice...just the way he holds himself...but whenever he opens his mouth he's more than likely to shoot it off.
As a former lawyer, he firmly believes in "law and order" and loves the welfare state, particularly pensioners, but most of his economic policies are way off the map and generally isolationist
And he's far right out there with the Senator for Qld Pauline Hanson; he wants to keep the Kiwi race pure, and doesn't like NZ being invaded and taken over by wogs, spics, slopes, and now muzzies...you can only really be born a New Zealander...and that's that...just don't call me racist, white boy...
"I'm putting it to you and to all of my critics, if you can find any Asian leader in any Asian country of whatever political persuasion who doesn't subscribe to the immigration views of New Zealand First, then name that person now. None of you can, all the way to Turkey."
This time around on the campaign trail he claimed "there are more foreign chefs coming into this country than New Zealand has restaurants".
He promised to apologise to Australia for previous Govts. allowing so many illegal immigrants to sneak in via the back door through NZ.
But, in a press conference after the election he asked a journalist: "where are you from?"..."Australia"..."it shows".
Enough said.
National hate him with a passion, but he's likely to go with them anyway if he gets the right deal to preserve the time honoured Kiwi tradition of maintaining the status quo, and Labour has already got into bed with the fast-fading Greens, but also still need Winston to form Govt.
At 72 years of age, Winston will most probably say that Labour's Jacinda Arden, at 37, needs time leading in Opposition to prove her fettle.
Or he might just go right outta left field once again, flip the baby boomers the bird, give the young-un a run, and see how she goes.
Unlikely, but who knows, when it comes to the Rt. Hon. Winston Peters?
However, first and foremost, he's clearly loving every minute of being back in the limelight after having been politically sidelined for almost a decade.

Photo/AP Wellington. 27 Sept 2017.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Asz262IFqBA
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/watch-next-question-belligerent-winston-peters-has-press-pack-in-stitches-after-shutting-down-aussie-reporter