Don't laugh. It's true. My poor bloody country!
Currently, the New Zealand parliament is in one of its all too frequent recesses, which exacerbates the problem of taxpayers not getting value for money out of these people. But recesses do give us a respite from the inanity of the main political players, while providing an opportunity for the lesser lights to hit the headlines.
And hitting the headlines is just what two of them did this week. One was named Supreme Queer of the Year at the Queer of the Year awards 2000, and the other, a Rastafarian, achieved notoriety because he uses a skate board as a regular mode of transport, risking the possibility of his meter long dreadlocks tangling with the undercarriage.
While the socialist politician named "Queer of the Year" has been paraded by the liberal left media as the world's first transsexual member of parliament, it is not an international honor that fills the whole country with great pride. A swing to the left as well as slick packaging by the gay lobby and their apologists got this person in to parliament. Nothing else. It certainly wasn't brainpower or an affinity with the average citizen. After falling for the pre-election hype, it is now difficult to find anyone admitting to voting for the ex-prostitute.
Thankfully, the "Queer of the Year" award is little more than an over-publicized non-event. It is simply a gay lobby stunt that on the one hand praises and publicizes gays, and on the other vilifies those in positions of responsibility who are against such things as same-sex marriages. This is the same lobby which seeks to ban certain Christian videos, while loudly proclaiming its right to freedom of speech and the promotion of homosexuality and lesbianism in street parades, partially financed by public money.
The Rastafarian politician is a member of the neo-Marxist New Zealand Green political party. Clearly, this fellow was unelectable, but he got there under a proportional representation voting system that gave the Greens a certain number of parliamentarians because 5% of the people voted for them. While there is a lot about this man's history that has not been made public, we do know that he was involved in left-wing protest in Britain. This apparently stood him in good stead in coordinating the activities of the Wild Greens, an extremist group within the New Zealand Green party. Last year they took "direct action" (code for eco-terrorism) against genetically modified food by vandalizing a potato crop, thus curtailing a significant project and costing three PhD students a year's work.
The Green parliamentarian smokes pot and justifies this on Rastafarian religious grounds, despite the fact that it is illegal to smoke the stuff. He spends a good deal of his time traveling the country and visiting schools at the taxpayers' expense promoting the decriminalization of marijuana.
It is said the people deserve the politicians they get. But wait a moment. Nobody in New Zealand voted for this guy. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and more so under a crazy proportional voting system that provides for un-elected members of parliament.
July 17, 2000
Colin Robertson, a former officer of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, is a businessman and writer. He is working on a book on New Zealand’s race relations industry.
