Category Archives: Fruit

Bananas, Constitution, Easy Listening, Governor-General, National Party, Sheeple, The Crown

Banana republicans

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Republicans are bananas!

New Zealand Republic is the website for the Republican Movement of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Let’s check out the case for a New Zealand republic.

(But first, check out the Republican Movement’s logo above. What is it? A stylised letter ‘R’? A misshapen black nodule? Or a badly drawn smiling frog-face? Whatever it is, our people do not want it disgracing our national flag.)

The case for a New Zealand republic sets out the main arguments for why New Zealand should become a republic. They fall into three categories:

Independence — New Zealand should have a New Zealander as the head of state;
Nationhood — the constitution and head of state of New Zealand should reflect New Zealand’s national identity, culture and heritage;
Democracy — New Zealand should have a democratic and accountable head of state.

In this post, I’ll take a look at the Republicans’ argument that we need a New Zealander as the head of State, under the heading “Independence”.

Independence

New Zealand will not be fully independent until we have a New Zealander as head of state. New Zealand likes to think of itself as an independent country. However, it cannot objectively be argued New Zealand’s current head of state represents this.

Never mind the head of state. New Zealand will not be fully independent while half of its citizens are dependent on state welfare. That’s a much bigger problem to address.

As the United Kingdom’s one-time head of state, Margaret Thatcher, once said, “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour.” How are we to look after our neighbour when we, ourselves, are reliant on government largesse? New Zealand society will never be independent until such time as its men and women and families are no longer reliant on state welfare handouts and “tax breaks”.

Add to this the fact that the New Zealand’s external debt is the vicinity of $90 billion dollars. We have a long way to go before we can declare our financial independence from foreign lenders.

A republic means a New Zealander as head of state

“Is New Zealand to continue to have an appointed Governor-General… or should we move to an elected president? This will not happen because of any lack of affection or love for our Queen in London, but because the tide of history is moving in one direction.” – former Prime Minster Jim Bolger.

Do we really want someone like Jim Bolger as our head of state? Or Margaret Thatcher? Or John Key?

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I’m not a stalwart royalist like my mum, but I’m more than happy with the Queen. Next to spending time with my family, Her Majesty’s message is the highlight of my Xmas Day. (BTW, Happy Birthday Your Majesty!)

Our current head of state is not a New Zealander and does not represent New Zealand. When the Queen travels overseas, she does so in order to represent Great Britain.

The Queen works to strengthen British economic and political ties, and does whatever the British Government asks of her. In fact, whenever “our” head of state visits New Zealand, the Queen has to ask for permission from the British Government to leave Britain.

You have got to be kidding. She’s the Queen! Her subjects answer to her, she doesn’t answer to them!

If the Queen wanted to be a citizen of New Zealand, she would not meet the legal requirements to become a citizen. The Citizenship Act 1977 requires an applicant for New Zealand citizenship to have been resident in New Zealand for five years before citizenship is granted. The Queen has spent a total of no more than six months in New Zealand.

The Governor-General is not a proper head of state. While the Governor-General may increasingly act in ways that befit a head of state, the reality is that New Zealand is still not regarded as being fully independent of Great Britain. Appointing the Queen’s representative in New Zealand is inadequate. A New Zealand head of state will make it clear that New Zealand is an independent country. It will signal New Zealand’s independence and maturity to the world.

I’ll be honest. I don’t actually know who the current Governor-General is. And that’s exactly how it should be. A head of state so off the radar that only Wikipedia knows his or her true identity.

Deciding the rules for ourselves

In recent years, the British Parliament has attempted to amend the succession law. The problem is the Statute of Westminster 1931, the law which granted independence to Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Oops! Looks like the Republicans just shot themselves in the foot. By their own admission, New Zealand has already been granted independence!

The Statute requires “consultation” on changes to the succession before any changes to the succession law. While this provision is not binding, it is still an important constitutional convention. The most recent attempt in 2008 failed for this reason: the British Government did not want to have to consult with all the parliaments of the Commonwealth realms. New Zealand’s Parliament could change the law of succession unilaterally, but that would go against the convention established by the Statute of Westminster. Change can only be enacted if the governments of all the 15 Commonwealth realms are consulted, probably by Britain. In a republic, the rules governing New Zealand’s head of state will be made solely by the New Zealand Parliament. They will change as New Zealanders decide they need to, not because of events in Great Britain.

Er, well, that’s it. Pretty lame, huh. (Part 1 of 3.) So far, I’m fully not convinced that New Zealand needs to become a republic. And, as I commented on Facebook yesterday

Why do we need “a New Zealand republic with an independent head of State.” I can’t think of a good reason. Change? Why change? Haven’t you people got more pressing concerns?

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.

Bananas, Green Party, Jihad on Drugs™

Unethical bananas

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This picture reminds me of one of my father’s favourite jokes.
(Mojo Mathers is New Zealand’s first deaf MP.)

The Green Party has far too many list MPs, so it’s good when they actually do something slightly useful. It looks like Mojo Mathers is following in Sue Kedgley’s footsteps, by keeping us all informed about our foods. Today she issued a press release.

Green Party asks Commission to investigate so-called “ethical” bananas

Dole should peel off their stickers claiming their bananas are an ethical choice until the Commerce Commission investigates their claim, the Green Party said today.

Today Green Party food spokesperson Mojo Mathers wrote to the Commerce Commission requesting they investigate Dole’s claim that they sell ethical bananas. Ms Mathers’ request was sparked by an Oxfam report which suggested Dole’s claims may be false and misleading.

“Oxfam’s report into Dole bananas suggests that Dole’s ethical choice claims may be entirely misleading,” Ms Mathers said.

The Oxfam report, The Labour and Environmental Situation in Philippine Banana Plantations Exporting to New Zealand, documents

children 15 years old and under working eight to 12 hours a day, harassment of workers for joining a union, aerial pesticide spraying while workers are on the plantations, and environmental damage.

Dole was quick to respond.

Dole ditches Ethical Choice banana label

Banana importer Dole is to stop using Ethical Choice stickers on its fruit after criticism that the labels could mislead consumers.

This week humanitarian group Oxfam released a report claiming that child labourers exposed to toxic chemicals were used to harvest Dole bananas in the Philippines for supply to New Zealand.

Last year Dole was put on notice by the Commerce Commission that its Ethical Choice brand risked breaching the Fair Trading Act.

Among the concerns was whether consumers might think the stickers were certified by a third party and make Dole appear more ethical than its competitors.

Today the company announced that it would discontinue the use of the Ethical Choice label on all future fruit shipments.

What with dairies selling K2 to school kids and now this, it’s been a bad month for business ethics.

Go grab yourselves some Dole “ethical choice” bananas and some K2 “takes you higher” smoke while you still can!

Birds, Bugs, Cats, Dinosaurs, Dogs, Evolutionism, Fish, Fruit, Muppets

Why can’t you show me evidence?

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This is the very latest meme from an Evolutionist friend on Facebook.

It seems to me that both Dawkins and his interlocutor miss the point entirely.

Yes, DNA and fossils are evidence for the theory of evolution! But …

According to Creationism

(1) All living things are DNA-based. We’re carbon-based life-forms. One theoretical reason for this is that we’re all creatures of the same Creator. One practical reason for this is that predators need nutritious prey. Silicon-based prey, say, would be indigestible to a carbon-based predator.

(2) When living things die, their remains (or the remains of the thing that ate them and then later died) end up in the ground, to be dug up millennia later by archaeologists.

JesusFishEatingDarwinFish

So, there is an astonishing amount of evidence for Creationism. You can see it in the DNA and fossils that we found which are in the museums right now …

In one sense, DNA and fossils are evidence for both Evolutionism and Creationism. In another sense, DNA and fossils are evidence for neither, since their mere existence does not help us to determine which is the correct explanation for life on Earth as we know it.

What Dawkins interlocutor seeks is that which Dawkins fails to show, viz., evidence that militates in favour of Evolutionism over Creationism.

Christian Libertarianism, Consciousness, Easy Listening, Faith, Fruit, Heroism, Hope, King James Bible, Love, Merciful Grace, Salvation, Self-sacrifice, There is a God!

Charity Never Faileth! An appeal to Christian Action, and Libertarian Altruistic Heroism.

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Little Madison is battling for her life.
Her Mummy needs finacial help to get her the opperation she needs to survive!
They are a long way away from the $200 000 that they are hoping to raise.
Please do what you can to help them.


3 year old Maddie in Starship hospital.

Visit the website … MadisonMerrick.org.nz. Here:

Make a payment… $200.00, $300.00, $500.00 +
Can you ignore this?

You say you need a new Smart phone?, to upgrade your laptop?
Do you really think thats more important than helping this little darling?
Its time for some altruist self sacrifice!
Do it!
Do what you would hope and pray that others might do for your child if you found yourself in their shoes!
Care enough to make a personal sacrifice.

Be a Guardain Angel for this Family!
Come on Christian Brothers and Sisters!
We are the Body of Christ!
God’s Hands and feet.
He works through our love of humanity and faithfulness.
Show the World the love of Christ.

Rise up ye Libertarians!
You say Socialism is evil because it uses coersion.
You say that you dont need to be forced to do what is right.
Now is the time to prove it!
Let’s help get this little girl the medical care she needs!

Fish, Fruit, Property, Regulation

Killing Whales To Save Them (Part 2)

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Killing Whales To Save Them (Part 1), was about animal welfare. Part 2 is about conservation. It’s about not depleting our ocean fisheries of fish. And it’s about not driving species (such as whales) to the verge of extinction.

Today’s post was partly triggered by TVNZ 7: Freedom has a Price, a recent post by atheist Mark Hubbard on his blog Life Behind the IRon Drape. Damien Grant has it exactly right in his comments on Mark’s post. Since he’s pretty much pre-empted what I was going to say, I’ll copy and paste.

But I like fish!

I do not want them to die and I have no faith that fisherman will act in their own best interests.

Save the Flake! Regulate! (repeat)

If the fish had an owner they would not be farmed to extinction. The solution is simple, they need an owner.

It does[n’t] really matter who, but if there is an owner the market can work. If there is no owner you get the tragedy of the commons.

Getting the fish an owner may require some impure statist intervention, but all property, historically, has been acquired … with some impure statist intervention.

Once done you … have fish and freedom!

Well said, Damien. If the price of freedom is no fish, then freedom is unaffordable! Mark says that no fish might, indeed, be the price of freedom, but, thankfully, he’s wrong. And Damien is wrong about the statist intervention being “impure,” for reasons I briefly alluded to.

We need privatisation.

… ocean fish are not the products of men’s minds. But they’re scarce. Scarcity, not production, is the basis of property rights.

I’ll spell this out explicitly … after lunch.

So, yeah. Scarcity, not production, is the basis of property rights. (There are more than two theories of property and property rights, and variations of each, and hybrid theories, but this is a blog post, not a doctoral dissertation.) Let’s compare the scarcity theory of property with the production theory of property.

The production theory of property says that if you produce something, or add value to something, it’s yours. The scarcity theory says that if it’s a scarce commodity, and the prevailing social convention says it yours, it’s yours.

If you’re shipwrecked and find yourself alone on a tropical desert island, the production theory of property says that the mangoes you pick from the tree, or the fallen mangoes you pick up off the ground, are your property, but the mangoes you leave on the tree or leave on the ground are not your property. The scarcity theory of property says that none of the mangoes is your property, simply because there is no need for a social convention to allocate mangoes.

The scarcity theory of property, you see, is the answer to a pressing question, viz., how do we allocate scarce resources in a free society? Whereas, the production theory of property is not the answer to anything. It says that if you produce something, or add value to it, then it’s your property, whether you like it or not. I don’t know about you, but if I found myself alone on a desert island, I would eat mangoes. It wouldn’t worry me, or anyone else, in the slightest that they either were or weren’t my mangoes. (Actually, it would worry me if they were my mangoes. I’d be asking myself, why on earth are these my mangoes? And then I’d eat them. To ease my metaphysical anxiety.)

But let’s get back to fish … before I get the urge to pop across to the supermarket for some mangoes.

So, yeah. Two common types of property are tangible goods and land. Both are in scarce supply. The scarcity theory of property handles both types of property. The production theory of property, however, struggles with land. Either it relies on “improvements” to the land to make it property, or it relies on an ad hoc “finders keepers” add-on to the theory. Elegance is an epistemic virtue, and either version of the production theory applied to real estate is inelegant, don’t you think?

Now let’s go to the fish. Ocean fish are not the products of men’s minds. Someone who subscribes to the production theory of property plus the “finders keepers” add-on can say that ocean fish become property as soon as they’re caught. They can say that the fish belong to no one until such time as they’re caught. But this way of thinking leads quickly to the tragedy of the commons. Like a gold rush, there’s a fish rush. And, soon, there are next to no fish left. Casting a net for fish becomes like panning for gold. There’s an occasional fish here or there in a net full of nothing. Seemingly, only the heavy hand of statist intervention can rectify the situation and save the fisheries. And libertarianism is severely compromised.

It need not be so! The scarcity theory of property tells us that ocean fish are a scarce commodity and should, therefore, be privatised! How this privatisation is implemented is not as important as the privatisation itself. Allocating quotas, or particular species, or geographic areas of ocean, to interested parties who apply for commercial fishing licences solves the problem of the tragedy of the commons which is the natural outcome of applying the production theory of property to ocean fish. A Ministry of Fisheries (albeit, a very small one) is a legitimate arm of government.

Privatise the whales, too! This can be done by literally tagging whales, there’s so few of them left. And privatise kiwis! If private enterprise was permitted to farm kiwis for food the kiwi would no longer be an endangered species. (Imagine what a hit real kiwiburgers would be with the tourists!) It’s all so common sensical it’s no wonder the government hasn’t seriously considered the proposal.