The Maori Affairs select committee report tabled in Parliament today is a devastating indictment of the Government’s confusion over closing the gaps, ACT leader Richard Prebble says.

“While the Prime Minister finds it convenient to forget she ever had a Closing The Gaps policy, the Maori Affairs committee certainly has not forgotten.

“Helen Clark would have us believe she has canned the racially-divisive Closing the Gaps policy, whereas the committee’s report shows exactly the opposite.

“It reveals that government departments are implementing radical policies which favour Maori and Pacific Islanders instead of what she claims to have told them to do – to drop the policy in favour of social equity moves which would help all people in need, whatever their race.”

Richard Prebble said the select committee, of which he is a member, had enormous difficulty in getting the government to come clean on the status of closing the gaps.

“The committee had to use all the authority of Parliament in order to get Ministers, officials and departments to admit that the policy is still being implemented by government agencies. Yet the departments are in the awful position of not having agreed targets and no system of measuring progress.

“The Government should realise that the committee intends to continue to monitor the government’s confusion and lack of progress over closing the gaps, and keeping the public informed,” Richard Prebble said.

ENDS

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Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>