Last year I wrote an article on political gifts (bribes) being offered in order to gain power. Then after gaining power the politicians get a well paid job and the power to give away government assets to settle the promises they gave to secure the job. It's appalling and a complete breach of fiduciary duty.
The Foreshore/Seabed deal between the National and the Maori Party is a serious example of that.
When I have asked politicians what mistakes their political parties have made they refuse to answer. They ignore transparency and accountability.
I remain convinced we can only move forward when we understand where we went wrong. Our politicians are like a sports team who never turn up for training and lose game after game and just don't care.
Our politician's are mostly focused on gaining votes and climbing the political ladder. Yet a fiduciary is meant to be a professional who is intelligent, diligent, operating their job with a duty of care and selfless in the service to those entrusting them, their care. We confer that power to them when we vote.
Decline of the West
Most western countries are now crippled by red tape. That's why Asia is winning and buying us out.
Red tape is not only harming/destroying our enterprise, but also hospitals, schools and all social services.
Our nations are now at the hands of lawyers milking every movement under the watch of blissfully ignorant politicians.
The most successful business growth I can point to in the last 25 years has been the legal industry who have latched onto virtually everything that moves through legislation passed by puppet politicians who fail to realise the harm.
So now we suffer with a major problem of accessing common sense and justice because of the remorseless mercantilisation of legal practice and the law industry monopoly on regulatory control and fiduciary failing politicians.
Although politician’s job is fiduciary, they operate under old rules of immunity that mean; "The King can do no wrong in the service of the people" But Kings and leaders do fail. The immunity laws must go because with it in place we are attracting the wrong type of people to the task of managing our nation.
Nations Need to Develop Fiduciary Law and perhaps-
* Establishing a registered education charity- 'The Centre for Modernising Democracy'
* To produce legal reports showing how we can remove immunity and incorporate fiduciary law into political and judicial management
* Draft Fiduciary Law Legislation
* Social science experts to report on all aspects of selling this campaign to the public
* Hold public workshops with multi media presentations for the project 'Modernising Democracy'
Interesting analogy about the sports team. We have a government that has given up on beating Australia and is content to be 38th in the world.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, in the sports we care about, NZ is 1st in the world at rugby (Australia 2nd), 1st at rugby sevens (Australia 6th), 1st at women's rugby (Australia ?), 1st at rugby league (Australia 2nd), 1st at netball (Australia 2nd).
To that, we could cheekily add cricket, where NZ finished ahead of Australia in this World Cup, and football, where we were the only unbeaten team at the World Cup and the Aussies were beaten.
And let's not forget the America's Cup, where NZ sailors dominate the top teams (including the winningest skipper in history), and the last Australian yacht to enter sank.
So given the track record of other Kiwis, there's no excuse for such defeatism by our politicians.
By way of excuses, they say Australia is too big and too rich in minerals - in which case, what's our excuse for being 1/3 as rich as Singapore (especially as we used to be 3 times richer than them 50 years ago)?
And it's worse than that. I did a study on where we would rank if we were a state of a hypothetical United States of Australasia, America, Canada, UK and Ireland.
Such a United Anglo World would contain 82 states, provinces, territories and countries. For population, New Zealand at 4.3 million would be 39th - about average, alongside Colorado, British Columbia and Queensland.
But for income per head, we'd be 81st - above only Wales.
And that was before Christchurch.
As Roger Douglas pointed out in a recent speech, Singapore is going gangbusters despite being a pimple on the chin of Malaysia with no minerals and no water. Its only resources are human.
ReplyDeleteHow do they do it? They persuade the brightest people in the country to serve in the cabinet, pay them over a million dollars a year, and index their pay to GDP growth.
And what was Singapore's GDP growth last year? 14.7%. (Ours: 1.1%.)
For the last 50 years, their GDP growth has averaged 7% compared with our 1%.
The difference is they have professional, selfless leaders with high integrity and long-term vision, while we have dishonest amateur politicians who are ambitious only for themselves.
Sir Roger, for whom I'm proud to work, is one of the very few exceptions, yet the media only have eyes for crooks like Clark and lily-livered promise-breakers like Key.
Very good post John. Yes the Singapore model is a perfect example of political leadership actually thinking about solutions and acting on that. NZ must do the same.
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