Truth pulls its boots on
Weekend freebie edition
Hello! Here’s this week’s freebie edition of More Than A Feilding which begins in the customary way with an invitation to become a paying subscriber.
I’d love to be able to give it all away, but sadly New World and the bookshop and Hammer Hardware continue to put their stuff behind a paywall, so I’m forced to follow suit. Trust you understand.
In a moment, this week's free edition, Truth pulls its boots on plus a preview of other recent editions.
But first, the button.
Truth pulls its boots on
David Slack
It's a lot easier to pull off a lie if people don't know much about what you're lying about.
Sometimes, watching Christopher Luxon, you get the impression he doesn't know all that much about it, either.
That's the charitable interpretation. The other is that he knows full well.
He was on the tube this week, expressing in his best Broken English style his great concern about the shocking state of learning in the greatest little country on earth:
In the education space we have about 46% of our kids attend school regularly.
In the education space. God save us.
I've mentioned this particular line before, but he’s evidently updated his number. So let's take a look at the new data he’s using and drag it back inside the truth-telling space.
46% is terrible, eh? Well, yes, it would be. If that were actually the state of things.
But this is short for:
Last year only 46% of kids attended school more than 90% of the time.
If you were to ask: Okay, well, what percentage attended more than 80% of the time? the percentage is much greater, much closer to where it was before COVID.
You can read what's really going on here. But here’s a big clue: it has a hell of a lot, still, to do with kids staying away for a week with COVID. Not with other things.
There are other problems too. But their extent is nowhere near as wide or deep as his cynical fearmongering soundbite clearly implies.
Also, this is not a problem particular to us. Hello, NY Times!
Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere
The pandemic changed families’ lives and the culture of education: “Our relationship with school became optional.”
But the lies, the misrepresentations, they’re relentless.
No sooner had they got their beast with three backs into position than they started taking away good and decent things. Say goodbye to 20 hours free early childhood education for 2-year-olds, hard-working Kiwi Mums and Dads.
Now, a few months down the track, they make themselves out to be a kind and generous benefactor with a rebate for ECE that costs $500m less than the deal they axed. In other words, they've cut ECE funding by half a billion. And we're supposed to say thank you Daddy omg your subsidy is SO BIG.
It's a lot easier to pull off a lie if people don't know much about what you're lying about.
David Seymour’s Treaty of Waitangi Principles stuff might sound superficially fair and appealing, but that doesn’t mean it's either fair or good.
Melanie Nelson in E-Tangata calls his so-called Treaty principles a wolf dressed up in sheep’s clothing.
They use words selected from the Māori text of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and mimic the structure of its articles. But they don’t accurately represent Te Tiriti or the Treaty by any stretch of the imagination.
In effect, the proposed “Treaty principles” erase the guarantee of tino rangatiratanga, remove Indigenous rights, create a seismic shift of focus away from equity to the same individual rights for all, and introduce the concepts of individual private property rights, individual sovereignty, self-reliance and the rights of all New Zealanders.
There are particular reasons, very sound ones, for our treaty arrangements having evolved the way they did. Anyone fair-minded who's made themselves familiar with our history can see the sense of what’s been done so far and where it seeks to take us.
Who controls the past controls the future, we read in 1984, Who controls the present controls the past.
Mr Seymour aims to do so with dimwitted simplistic nostrums.
I wrote at the start of the year about the immediate and enormous impact Mr. Bates v the Post Office was having in the UK.
For years, I had been reading in Private Eye about innocent post shop owners being wrongfully prosecuted and some being jailed and some taking their lives, and wondering why is there no uproar? But it seemed to keep getting no more than an indifferent shrug. Until now. A TV drama has brought it to life, and people have been utterly shocked. Suddenly, the government cannot do enough to help the innocent victims of a colossal travesty.
What a difference it can make when you can get people into someone else’s shoes. What a difference it can make when you can get people to identify with someone else’s experience. Here, come and live this. Imagine going through this.
There have been many great films and documentaries and books about our colonisation story, but we haven’t yet had the perfect work that says Here, come and live this. Imagine going through this.
I hope for a work that shows us the huge role played by Māori in helping new arrivals make their way here, the betrayals that followed, the utter marginalisation. I’m imagining a story of Parihaka; and assimilation; and the Māori Battalion; and Whina Cooper, all the way to the Christchurch earthquake where many take their insurance money and leave, but Ngāi Tahu remains funding project after project in the rebuild. And through it all, a litany of stop complaining, and be grateful for what we gave you, you Stone Age brutes, and so much more.
That’s not the script that will do it. But can you get where I'm going?
Mr Prime Minister and Mr Prime Minister in waiting, better conservatives than you know this.
If you don't want to hear us lefties, at least listen to them. They speak the truth.
