[00:00:04] Speaker A: Hi, my name is Brendan Malone and you're listening to the dispatches, the podcast that strives to cut through all the noise in order to challenge the popular narratives of the day with some good old fashioned contrarian thinking. You might not always agree, but at least you'll be taking a deeper look at the world around you.
Welcome to Dispatches with Dewa, the monthly episode of the Dispatch Dispatches podcast where we talk with political commentator Dewa de Boer about exactly what is going on in the world of New Zealand politics and we discuss and dissect everything that's trending globally as well. Dewa de Boer is a political commentator who runs conservative think tank right minds New Zealand. He also writes a column for the BFD and he has a Friday morning radio show on reality czech radio. He advocates for a return to tradition, is optimistic about the future, and he lives in Auckland with his wife and their three kids. So without any further ado, let's get into this episode of Dispatches with Dewa.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Run now, lava.
Run all day till you can't be found. Run out, I gotta run on. Keep on running till the sun goes down.
You can outrun the devil, but you ain't gonna outrun me.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Dewa, it is great to be back with you again. It feels like a lifetime, but it's actually not. It's only been about five weeks, hasn't it?
[00:01:35] Speaker C: It has been five or six weeks and it does feel like a lot longer. I think you've been busy as well. But I've had basically my entire guttering system replaced. It kind of failed a little bit during the last winter when we put off having everything replaced over the summer because it's so expensive. But we. Yeah, basically. Basically, the last month has been massive construction around my house and that's been quite, quite busy. Busy. Sort of stressful in a way. It's always at the back of your mind when this stuff is being worked on.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: So basically, your guttering failed under the new national government. Didn't happen under labor?
[00:02:13] Speaker C: No, no, no. It did fail under labor. I had it replaced under the national government.
The easing off in the economy has helped us easier to get people to come in and do work now. So that's. If you're a tradie, that's bad news for you. If you are a homeowner, it's good news.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: A couple of bits of little, I guess, passing stories that I thought we'd just touch on.
One is, I don't know, have you heard about this in the last week or so? The national government talking about the possibility of bringing in 120 kilometre an hour speed zones on some roads. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because I. I'm actually. I'm not so keen on that, but I'd love to hear what you think.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: I've been driving 120 km on those roads anyway. So I guess what my opinion is, I think having done some driving in some european countries and our freeways, I call them freeways, what are they called? Expressways, I think is what we call them. Further south of Auckland, new roads that have been built in a very safe way. Wide open roads, very safely separated, separated traffic.
I believe that on those kinds of roads higher speeds are more than appropriate. And I'm a big supporter of those higher speed limits on those roads. The ones.
The slower speed limits that I would support are the ones that are being implemented in some of the city centers and around schools. Because, I mean, traffic is so bad anyway, it doesn't make much of a difference. But you've seen. I think you'll see this inevitably in New Zealand anyway, even with the rolling back of some of the speed limits. It's been the case densely populated european city centres for a long time that 30 km hr speed limits in sort of urban areas is just going to be inevitable simply because we're packing in too many people into small spaces. And that means you've got too many cars. And that's really the problem.
The number of vehicles you have on the road actually impact the speed limits a lot.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: I've got this theory.
Knowing what I know about human frailty and the human condition, I suspect that if you make it 120 km, I'm okay. I think with 110 kilometre roads. But I suspect if you create 120 kilometer an hour roads in New Zealand you'll probably end up with 140 k's on those roads. Which just gives me the jitters a little bit. However, I agree with you about the around town. I think that although I've been thinking about this a bit, actually driving around a bit lately and I think that possibly what's an even better measure is around some of those key areas is to actually put in speed bumps where you want people to slow down, where they have to slow down, otherwise they lose their suspension. And it seems to me that that kind of a strategy in some places could be even better, do you know what I mean? Those places where you can't speed, whether.
[00:05:04] Speaker C: You support it or not, it will happen and it has already happened in many areas.
And it is inevitable with high density urbanization and it's come to New Zealand quite late, but I think the very high levels of immigration that we have had in the last few years basically make this inevitable because your roads end up clogging up anyway. But yeah, I'm more in favor of more human friendly streets. I think it's a very traditional, conservative thing to sort of see the street as a space for people. And I grew up in a really small village in the Netherlands. For the first seven years of my life we'd actually play soccer on the street.
And that was only possible because they'd have like brick roads and speed bumps everywhere in 30 km, our speeds and stuff. And the kids would play on the roads and everyone bikes, bikes around on the roads. And that's kind of only really possible if you prioritize other modes of transportation over vehicles. But that is a massive social engineering project in New Zealand to get that kind of change. And there is a lot of pushback against it. And I don't blame people for pushing back against it because it is deliberate social engineering that the government is doing. But I don't know if it's necessarily a. I mean, I personally don't consider it to be a bad thing.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: No. And I think being a conservative, I think in actual fact you recognise the human condition. You recognize that the state in the position of higher power, should use that power to actually try and help the lower authorities and the lower powers like families and local communities, to flourish. And I think this is part of it, is that they can actually do responsible things that really do encourage particular behaviours on the roads. And I think also even in neighbourhoods and consent planning and things like that was recently in Australia, just last week, and I got out for a walk one day and I was in this area and to be fair, it's sort of a newer subdivision and it's built around like a lakes type golf course sort of area. But what was interesting to me was getting out and just walking around all of the street after street after street. Every single one of them sort of came to almost like a cul de sac type end. But if you imagine like a big cul de sac, and instead of just being a cul de sac where you walk around the outside in the middle, instead of it just being road, there was, there's a little small park field area. And so all the houses are effectively round the outside of a small little park, like small, small enough that you could look across it and easily see your neighbours. And so you're all looking out, your doors open out onto this little park. And it's got like, it had a slide and a swing. Not much, not huge plaque equipment, but a green area. And you could easily, probably everyone in those houses could come out and sit on that patch of grass and have a picnic together and things like that. And I thought, like, street after street was like that. And I thought, man, this is a great concept. It would be awesome if we saw more of that kind of town planning instead of the bureaucrat driven tick box stuff. Have you done x, Y and z, as? Has health and safety met? It'd be great if we saw more of that sort of productive communal type building taking place.
[00:08:02] Speaker C: Absolutely. And I think you will see more of that deliberately. The suburbs deliberately designed in that way. The only maybe downside is as they become more densely packed, is that people have less space for themselves. You know, the sections become smaller, the houses become taller. I've seen a lot of that in Europe, like having lived in those houses, I enjoy my quarter acre section with my big backyard. So I don't want to have people live in the pod, basically own smaller bits of space.
But yeah, it's as long as these options are available for people. And as I said, the biggest problem really is that as you bring more people in, as the city gets bigger, it will naturally change. It has to change. And so it's more, if people are worried about this, it's more an issue of immigration policy, basically. It's a population policy issue. It's not really a deliberate, a nefarious plot to shrink the houses and to shrink the plot spaces and to force people to live in smaller, you know, more confined spaces as some kind of globalist plot. But it is only, only it's the immigration that's the problem.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:18] Speaker C: And it just necessitates that kind of planning.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: It's not, it's not a plot, it's just ineptitude, really, is what it boils down to. A utopian, delusional belief about how you could, you know, structure the world as one big, giant global community, which you can't, because too many people live together on the planet for it to be a community. You can't relate to that many people. And when you try and do stuff like that, you end up treating people like economic units and. And you just import en masse. And no one in the gated communities is really too bothered about it because they generally escape the worst effects. And in fact, I think the only reason we're starting to see some action now is because even inside the gated communities, I suspect they're starting to realise that there are certain effects that are affecting them as well and so they have to start taking a bit of action. But, yeah, ineptitude really, isn't it?
[00:10:07] Speaker C: Yeah. The economic figures today were, or yesterday now for when people are listening, were released and saying, oh, it's the end of the recession. New Zealand GDP grew by 0.2%, but it's complete garbage because per capita GDP is still shrinking. The only reason the numbers look like, the only reason they're slightly positive is just because they brought in a massive number of immigrants. And the per capita figures, the per person figures, the ones that actually affect you, have declined. So your standard of living is declining and people are realizing that. They're noticing that. They just haven't quite figured out that it's due to government policy, particularly around immigration, that's reducing the standard of living.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: Exactly. I saw that headline, in fact, just before he came on, I saw another version of that same article. Good news. We're just about out of the woods. And I thought to myself, well, in actual fact, if you ask your average person on the street, do you feel like we're out of the woods? I suspect the answer would be, in the majority of cases, no, this doesn't feel like we are out of the woods at all or any stretch of the imagination.
[00:11:17] Speaker C: Who do you trust? The statistics or your own lying eyes?
[00:11:21] Speaker A: That's right. You're an idiot. And we'll tell you what's wrong with you. Trust the experts. The recession is over. One other thing that I thought we'd touch on before we get into the political tracker, and that is the rather sad news, that Marima Davidson has been diagnosed with cancer and so she's now going to be undergoing the process of cancer treatment. And having known and knowing some people who are going through that same process right now for that same cancer, this is a lengthy process that will not be quick. And so effectively, this looks like Chloe is now the queen of the Greens. Does it? Dewa? Or, I mean, they'll put in a substitute leader, right? Surely. Maybe. But even if they do that, this person won't carry the authority. It seems that.
[00:12:07] Speaker C: Clary, well, I think you named a previous episode like Chloe Queen of the Greens. I know it's a thing that you like. It's a phrase you like to use. And I actually had this thought when I heard the news, obviously very sad news. But I thought Chloe is sort of playing this Game of Thrones where she's climbed to the like, worked her way to the top and everyone else has mysteriously fallen by the wayside and, and Chloe is the only one that's left standing.
So that's a funny way to look at it. They have subbed in Julianne Genter, I believe, to kind of be a temporary co leader. But see, I don't really believe the co leader arrangement the Greens have is particularly relevant. And that there's always a big boss, a top dog. And Chloe was that from the beginning. She, you know, she replaced the previous guy whose name nobody can remember, James Shaw.
He was the top dog at the time as well, and she replaced him to fill that role. And it really is all about her. And the Greens are actually polling quite well. People are like, wow, the greens are crazy. Yeah, but they're polling very, very well. So whatever she's selling, people are buying.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: Well, it could be interesting, actually, because I have a feeling that if you look at the Green party, probably for your average left wing voter, Marma Davidson might be the handbrake that causes you to go, oh, I just can't quite give them my vote. But if it becomes the Chloe Swarbrick party she did start in that labor camp, then it could well be that she's got the, I guess, the smoosh and the schmaltz to sort of sway a few more voters and maybe they might actually go that way with their vote.
[00:13:58] Speaker C: Yeah. The big problem that they have, they had two big problems. One was they required a male and female co leader and they got rid of that problem. They could have two women, but they changed the requirements. To also have one has to be of Mori descent or maybe just identify, like Chloe could identify as Mori, that sort of problem. But they can't really replace Marama Davidson with anyone else at this stage. Like, I'm sure there's somebody further down the roster, but they kind of, because they have ethnic requirements, you've got to find not just somebody of that ethnicity, but somebody of the right caliber in that ethnic group. And so I haven't actually had a look at their list. I should have, I should have thought of this earlier, but, yeah, I should check, like, who in the Green caucus could actually replace her legally as co leader? Because it has to be someone who's Mori.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Like, Julian Genta is. Well, she.
Yeah, exactly. She's definitely not Mori. And she is sort of, I mean, she's absolutely like, if I was in the Green Party and I thought, hmm, who can I pick who's not going to be machiavellian and try and steal my place and, you know, just because they're not going to have enough public support. Oh, yeah, I'll pick Julian Jenner. And so it really is quite clearly signalling that they're not looking to replace her and they are definitely playing their own Game of Thrones here to try and keep their own position and their power intact. But, yeah, absolutely, you're right. I look through that party, though, and I think, well, who could be the contender? And I'm not sure that they've. That they. They don't. Yeah, they've gone to the halcyon days of the Green party when they had a few potential contenders and candidates. It's really a bit sparse pickings now, as they might say.
Right, dewa, that was our political tracker theme song. So you know what that means? That means that you get to tell us the results of all of your trolling through documents and press releases and everything else where we were at. And I believe before we got on air today, you told me you've actually. You've burnt out your eyeballs reading press releases.
[00:16:11] Speaker C: That's right. I was shocked to find out that the government had released 15 pages of press releases and that's not. That's not 15 pages, like, worth of, you know, paper worth of press release. I'm talking online. So each page contains 25 press releases times 15.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:16:30] Speaker C: You can do that in your head. I'm not going to do any mental maths while I'm recording. It's not going to work. But that's a lot of press releases. I didn't have to read through all of them, thankfully. I could just check the headlines and be like, that's clearly garbage. That's not, you know, that's not relevant. And compare it to items on the coalition tracker. And I think I managed to get there.
We have had a little bit of progress and nobody's going to remember what the numbers were last time, so I may as well repeat them. So we've got about 200, 220 items that we're tracking in terms of commitments that the coalition has made. They had achieved 46 of them and they had another 21 in progress when. When we talked last, 20% done and another 10% in progress with 70% unstarted. And if you load up the coalition tracker at coalitionTracker NZ, you will see that the numbers have now improved, that they finished 54 items, which is about 24%.
So they're nearly a quarter of the way through the official commitments. So that's some interesting, interesting good news. And it's a change of about eight, eight or so items since we last talked. And they've got a few extra items in progress as well. 26 items that I've marked as in progress, which is about 12% there. So we're getting through and they're still tracking in terms of the promises they're making. Keep in mind they've got an action plan in progress that basically is supposed to run quarterly. And the current quarter runs out this month and another one should start sometime. I don't know. So there's one more month to go. So we've still got July to go and then the next quarter starts in August. So they're currently tracking the, targeting about eight more items in the next month.
So I think they'll probably achieve that because items that have been completed since we last talked starts with the cold medication. So pseudo. If. What is it?
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Pseudoephedrine is bad.
[00:18:32] Speaker C: Pseudoephedrine. The drugs. What is it, c class drug or something?
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Hillbilly. Hillbilly meth.
[00:18:38] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So if you, if you want to cook that up, I mean, if you would like to buy that from the, from the, from the drugstore, you've got a. Apparently it's a. You've got to go jump through a few hoops to get it, but you can get it. If it's your thing, you can get the cold medication. And they promised it. The funny one that the New Zealand first delivered on was the gumboot Friday money. So $6 million per year. So they've assigned four years worth of funding for that and then $24 million.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw a bit of left wing angst on Twitter about that when that came through.
[00:19:10] Speaker C: And just as a political thing, this is obviously bizarre in that you're just like handing out money to a particular company as an election promise, but it's a case of delivering for your. For your voters. Right. I mean, you're being very transparent about this. It's not like a dodgy deal they're doing in the background. They put this in their manifesto to deliver this amount of money to this organization if they got elected and if they got into coalition and they actually did it. So there you go. It's not really corruption if you're upfront about it. I think.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: Yeah, we need to make some friends in high places, I think. Dewa.
[00:19:43] Speaker C: Absolutely. I think getting a little bit of funding assigned to the dispatches. A little bit.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: Just a couple of mil a year would do nicely. Thanks, Winston.
[00:19:53] Speaker C: So there you go. A little bit. If you lobby hard enough, you can get cold hard cash out of the government and they'll follow through. They've also made a big start, a little start on the Resource Management act reforms. So they've put forward a first amendment to the Resource Management act, the RMA, and that's quite a big item. I suspect it'll take them a while to get through all of it, but they have made some big promises there and they're starting to roll that out. Same thing with the firearms legislation. They've announced like, four stages of various reviews that are going to happen, including reviewing the register, which was one of the promises the act party made. And they've started the review on that.
They promised to do it by the beginning of this month and that's what they did. They delivered tax cuts in the budget and the 15 pages of press releases I told you I went through, a lot of that was because of the budget, like they did a couple of pages worth of press releases just on the budget. So that's the kind of thing that the government wants to make sure they're looking busy. The regional infrastructure fund was kind of wrapped up in that as well. So it's Shane Jones slush fund, if you remember.
[00:21:01] Speaker A: That's right. We talked about that previously, didn't we?
[00:21:03] Speaker C: He had that and he had that in the previous government as well. So he's got it back, but a bit smaller.
And what else am I. They're working on repealing the offshore oil and gas ban as well. I don't believe it's officially gone because they've still got to get the legislation through parliament. So that's getting there. And also removing section seven AA from the Oranga Tamariki act is in progress. So. And again, that's in its second reading or something at the moment. I'm sure it will be signed off next time that we talk. So quite a few bits of legislation that they are progressing. So that is a big change from earlier discussions we've had where a lot of it was things that cabinet was delivering and kind of easy to deliver promises. Now they're actually going through a lot of these promises that require them to pass legislation.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: I can't help. I can't help but sense Sudi with it. There's something about this. This is sort of giving me a sense of positive vibes about what a coalition government can actually be when it works properly. So you don't have one big party and a couple of hangers on. You have three parties with actual interests and they're trying to achieve those interests. And it certainly feels to me like, there's a lot more action happening. There's things happening and a lot of things happening as the various parties are doing their best, particularly the two smaller ones, to try and really ensure that their place in parliament, I guess, is secured going forward. And they do that by honouring the pledges they made to their voters and giving themselves a point of difference by saying, hey, we did x, Y and Z and so you've got to do x, Y and z to have that on your resume. So it feels like this is like a good coalition government. This is what it should look like. But I don't know if it's something we've ever really experienced in New Zealand before.
[00:22:45] Speaker C: No, we've never had a coalition government like this before in New Zealand. And it's MMP kind of finally getting into form, into what it was meant to be, which was basically to require these kinds of coalition governments. And this is the first time I mentioned this before, that we have actually got like a list of 220 items that a government is promised that it's going to deliver and you can actually go through and track them. And they're also very keen on letting you know that they've achieved them because come the next election, as you mentioned, this is going to be a big part of their election campaign. And getting back in to say, here's what we promised. We delivered it and here's our new list of promises. Vote for us and we've proven we can deliver. We'll deliver again. So I can see them working out that strategy. I'm sure they're sitting around the table and they're head officers and that's how they're strategizing and commentators. We're just sitting around on the Internet blabbing on about this. But, yeah, it's very clear to me, reading through their press releases, they're specifically saying, hey, look, we hit this. We checked this off. The coalition agreement. This was in the coalition agreement. We're delivering on that. There's something that they're very methodical about.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: So a working party rather than the party of the working group, which is, I think, a welcome relief. One last thing before we wrap up the track. What were your thoughts on the budget? Was there anything that, you know, did you go, yeah, this is great, or no, I hate this, or was it just bland for you?
[00:24:14] Speaker C: I didn't consider it worthy of making any comment on. I don't believe as a political commentator that I've made a comment on the budget. You know, I've got my show on RCR and we didn't talk about the budget there. And I'm in the show with you now. I'm not talking about the budget either. There was nothing in the budget. Some small tax cuts that start in two months, but everything was basically, they promised that. So there's no surprises, nothing special.
I don't think anyone saw anything in the budget that they were blown away by. So, yeah, it's, you can say that they achieved sort of what they said they were going to achieve with the budget. And that can be a good scene as a good thing. The bad thing is that I think it was unimaginative and they should, you know, they should have done better. But I also know that the National Party doesn't want to do better. So, you know, you've got to see it that way as well. In fact, maybe the only reason they did as good as the budget was, you know, basically kind of workable is because of the pressure that was being applied by New Zealand, first by the ACT party, because they wanted specific things out of the budget. And of course, the ACT party in particular has a very strong principle as part of their party constitution to balance budgets. So this doesn't quite balance the budget. It still kicks the can down the road by three more years. In fact, that's the worst thing about the budget, is that it spends more money than Grant Robertson never did. It just, it's the biggest.
The size of the government is growing. People need to understand that they're not shrinking the size of the government. So this is something potentially that could hurt the ACT party as well. By the time you roll around to the next election and the actual size of the government has only gotten bigger, well, then the ACT party has failed at one of its fundamental principles.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting to me. As for. I'm with you there, the budget was very much a vanilla budget. And I'd have to say also, as far as tax cuts go, I was asked about this on another show and I said, look, I'm just not in favour of them. I get it, they made a promise. But I just, I don't see this as a convincing strategy to actually help a society flourish. I don't really see the money going where it really needs to go. And what we really need is the tax brackets to be properly adjusted for inflation. That's actually a proactive thing. And secondly, I looked at the tax cuts and quite clearly the most advantage is given to people who are, you know, set up their home with both parents working in the child and childcare for big chunks of the day. And I'm not convinced that's in the best interest of our nation to have a society structured that way. Now, I'm a realist, not a utopian thinker, but yeah, there's just not much here that's creative, I think, in the right kind of ways.
[00:26:58] Speaker C: Yes. I am always in favor of less tax, though, so I won't criticize the tax cut. Less tax is good, but yeah, it didn't really alter the structure of the government in the way it should have. Really. Ideally, you'd be cutting things left and right, trimming the fat, trimming even more than just the fat off a lot of these government projects that are just a waste of money and reassigning a lot of it to be more effective and then cutting taxes. But right now they're still running deficits. So as I said, they didn't actually shrink the size of the government.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: Dewa, that was the theme song that tells us we've come to the end of our political tracker segment. Thank you once again for burning out your retinas to read through all the propaganda. Probably a lot of it was just meaningless. And hey, look at me, look at me. I'm doing a thing kind of stuff. But you did well and it's good to know where we're at. We've got two other issues that we're going to talk about in this episode, and we are determined we're going to stick to time this week, folks. I'm not gonna delay Dewa anymore and keep him away from his family. No good talking about family values and family friendly policies. And then I keep him up all night recording podcasts so he can't be with his wife and children. So we're gonna work really hard to keep to time. Just a quick little reminder, folks, that this is the free to air Friday episode. If you want to get part two, there's a part two of this episode with Dewa. It will be published on Monday and it's exclusively for our patrons only. So in order to get access to that, you need to be a five dollar monthly
[email protected]. left media the link is in the show notes. And I should also say I'll take this little opportunity just to tease a little something. But in the next couple of months, there is a brand new monthly in house live stream coming, so that'll be something to keep an eye out for. So, you know, plenty good reasons to consider becoming a patron. Dewa, let's jump into it. We're going to cover two stories and we're going to try and cover them. I'm going to see if we can do this in like sort of, I don't know, five minutes max per story to see if we can, can get through this. But the first is the crisis in the Mori party. Can you give us like a 32nd, 62nd overview to explain this crisis? Because, look, I've got to be honest, I've looked at the media coverage. I'm still not 100% clear myself. The media coverage has been interesting. We'll talk about that in a second. But give me the overview, the Reader's digest version. What are the key points we need to know about what appears to be a bit of a growing crisis within the Mori party and what's sort of erupted there in the last couple of weeks.
[00:29:39] Speaker C: So firstly, if you would like the long version of this, I talk every week with William McGimpsey on my show on RCR Friday afternoons. We have something called the weekly roundup and we've been talking about it every single week for the last month. So tune into that for the long version. But the very short version is that due to basically a low level of cooperation, interest in a lot of the Mori community to engage with government departments because they don't trust them and don't blame them either. Government departments have basically outsourced a lot of work to agencies in the Mori community and who are going to go and collect that data for them. The problem is that most of these agencies are under the control of a man by the name of John Tamahiri. And someone who used to work with him, Haimoana Grey, dubbed this the Tamahiri fiefdom. And he basically controls a lot of these agencies that get government contracts. And he is also the president of the Mori party. So he's got a lot of interest in using this data for political purposes. And basically that's where the controversy came from. One of these marae that are part of Tamahiri's fiefdom, Manyariwa Marae, ended up taking some of the census data that they were collecting for Stats NZ. They scanned them in and they gave it to the Mori party as well. They handed it off to all Tamahiri's organizations. And then they also basically gave people free food if they would come and register to vote, come and actually vote by giving them free food. And they had Mori party activists who were involved in running the polling booths and potentially even the Mori party candidate for Auckland Tatami ki Makaro, actually present on election day. I don't know if that's been fully confirmed, but essentially big allegations that they mishandled census data and that they used treating, as it is called, giving people food, sort of paying people off to vote for you. And they won the seat by 40 votes, 43 votes. So that in and of itself should be a pretty big electoral scandal.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: I think you should say that they won the seat by 43 hamburgers or something like that.
Well, honestly, I looked at this and I thought, holy guacamole. So you've mentioned John Tamahiri. I was going to ask you about him next. Is this a John Tamihiri fiefdom problem or is it something else?
I think the other player that we need to consider, and this is John Tamahiri, I think is the king. And I think Willie Jackson is the king's right hand in parliament as well. And he certainly seems to run a lot of interference publicly for him because they are old friends. But is this a John Tamahiri fiefdom thing or is it something else?
[00:32:30] Speaker C: Yeah, it's interesting you bring up Willie Jackson because even though he's a Mori party, so he's a Labour Party MP, he's potentially a leadership candidate in the Labour Party to roll Chris Hipkins and he's the leader of the Maori caucus in the Labour Party, yet he is very close friends with John Tamahira. He's publicly running interference for the fiefdom as well. And all of this looks pretty dodgy.
Loyalties there. Yeah. Ultimately, this is a problem where government agencies are giving contracts to what they believe are, or claim to be various community organisations that work in the community with Mori, when really they're under the thumb of a political operative.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: What about the media reporting on this?
It seems to have started slow, but there does now seem to be a little bit more. They've stepped up a bit. But how would you rate the media accountability on this?
[00:33:27] Speaker C: I think they would have been very happy to bury this. But we did have ZB, which is run by Thomas Cranmer. That's not his real name.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: That's his handle. Yeah. He's a lawyer too, isn't he?
[00:33:41] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right. Crump. Philip Crump is his name. And he was the first one to really go public with this. And it continued to expand. The allegations continue to go out and it is being covered a little bit more. Various investigations have been launched, but even those government investigations, they may just want to whitewash it, they may want to sweep it under the carpet.
It's interesting because I guess all of the allegations around the Mori party continue to grow in terms of their ethnonationalism, like the comments that they're making about other MP's and whether or not the very racialist comments that their MP's like to make is causing a lot of, I guess, angst from the more liberal, multicultural MP's and especially the AK Party. And the media is not comfortable because they don't want to discuss this issue like any issue. It's got anything to do with race, anything to do with ethnicity is like a forbidden, the ultimate forbidden subject. But the Mori party is like just gunning for it and the media is freaking out. They don't know what to do.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting, as I was going to say, it's a bit of a perfect storm, isn't it, really? So you've got left wing politicians and parties involved and so the media generally tend to give them a bit more of a quieter ride. You've also got race embroiled in this. And again, that's another reason to, you know, don't touch that third rail. And then you've also got John Tamahiri and those who regularly listen to the patrons podcast, you'll know I covered the really good investigative reporting that was actually being done by the Herald last year about the Waiperera Trust and how they had illegally used charitable donations to fund the Mori party. And the Charities commission had finally acted on it, said, no, you shouldn't have done that. But they didn't get deregistered as a charity. They were told, I'll just pay the money back. Then they closed the file at the charities commission and the Herald reporter went back several months later and they said, well, what's happened? Have they paid the money back? And they said, well, we don't know. And they followed up. The money doesn't appear to have been paid back. I'm not sure if it has by now. It might have actually been paid back by now, but it was just unbelievable. The kid gloves and the latitude that John Tamahiri seems to have. And he just didn't care. When the reporter came to him and said, what the heck is going on?
You know, very basic questions. It's illegal to do this with charitable donations. What you've done here, he just says, I don't have to answer to you. And it's just like nothing happens. It's just the most.
This guy really is like the king of New Zealand.
[00:36:22] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good way to describe it, at least when it comes to the media and government departments. Incredibly powerful figure. And we'll see if he is brought down. Definitely. When I spoke with Jaimo Ana Gray, who used to work with him, he said that he needs to go, Tamahiri needs to go, the fiefdom needs to be broken up. All of these organizations need to be made truly independent, and the Tamahiris pay themselves half a million dollars a year or more for the work that they do. Incredibly wealthy family and incredibly well connected. I think John Tamahiri's daughter is married to the leader of the Mori party as well. So, yeah, it's good in a sense. They're following their traditions and cultural customs of having a strong tribe with a powerful chief at the top. But it's probably not a good thing for New Zealand as a whole.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: Well, no, and not tepati mori either, I would have thought, because it's the sort of thing that he goes and they go down with him potentially, if it all explodes. So not really in their best interests either.
[00:37:25] Speaker C: No, no, it's not. But, yeah, I think the academics, the media, the whole situation around indigenous rights so strong they can't afford. If this domino falls, then they lose a lot more. So this is one of the pillars of progressivism that's kind of holding their house up. We could call it card, if it's a house of cards there. It's like a little card at the bottom that if you pull it out, the whole thing comes down.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: And on that note, I think what we're going to do, Dewa, we were going to talk about another issue to wrap up with what's been going on in New Caledonia, but we're actually going to talk about in the next patrons only episode, because I think, yeah, you've done well tonight. We've hit time. We've gone over our allotted time budget, so we're going to be really strict tonight, folks, and so that Dewa doesn't get stuck here too long. And if you're a patron, well, you will be able to hear us talk about the crisis in New Caledonia. And we're also going to be talking about Trump's indictment, or Trump's, sorry, his conviction. Is Europe going far? Right, and maybe other things if we get time as well. But in order to hear that episode, you have to become a five dollar monthly patron. So that's less than the cup of a cost, sorry, of a cup of coffee. Each month, we'll get you an exclusive daily episode of the Dispatches, just for our patrons, our $5 monthly patrons. And next Monday, you will be able to hear the exclusive patrons only episode with Dewa Dewa. Tell everyone just before we go, those who are about to tune out and not come back. Tell everyone where they can follow your work and where they can tune into your other commentary.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: Well, they should start by making sure they become a Patreon subscriber for you because then they can come back and listen to the second half. A good place to start.
[00:39:10] Speaker A: I second then.
[00:39:11] Speaker C: And then, as usual, I've mentioned my RCR show Friday afternoons. Now, I was in the mornings, but I've been replaced by Simon O'Connor.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: Oh no, the big dog isn't down.
[00:39:26] Speaker C: I know, I know. So I got pushed further along. I don't mind. I'm not complaining. Happy to follow on from one of the big names in New Zealand. That's great. It's really great to be on the same station on the same day as someone like Simon O'Connor, who spent a lot of years in parliament.
And so I'm in the afternoon, 01:00 p.m. to about 03:00 p.m. and go and listen to that on Friday afternoons. And then Twitter, writeminds NZ and same thing on Telegram. If you want to get in touch with me directly. Those are the places to go. Or writeminds NZ for my articles. I'm a little bit behind, but if I do any kind of writing, it eventually ends up there.
[00:40:08] Speaker A: Alrighty, folks, that's another free to air episode of the Dispatches with Dewa. If you are a $5 monthly patron, we will see you on Monday. If you're not, then go to patreon.com leftfootmedia and sign up. Or perhaps you could check the link that is in today's show notes or Tata and we will see you next Friday on the free to air. Thanks once again for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the dispatches.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: When I was young, my daddy said, gotta keep one eye opening your bed. Cause there's a time coming when I never gonna come for you so much.
Run out la, gotta run on. Keep on running till the sun goes down. Run out la. Better run on, run all day till you can't be found. Run out, la, gotta run on. Keep on running till the sun goes down.
You can outrun the devil, but you ain't gonna outrun me.
