10 April 2005

Newman Online - Weekly commentary by Dr Muriel Newman MP

Fractious Factions Within Labour

This week Newman Online looks at how John Tamihere did the full monty and gave us a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the Clark Labour Government.

Labour MP and former Cabinet Minister, John Tamihere's interview with Investigate Magazine has exposed the Labour Government, not as the strong and united team they have tried to portray, but as fractious factions squabbling and competing for power and control: "In this outfit it's all 'rosy' on the outside, not the inside".

He claims that unions and single-issue interest groups wield an unhealthy influence, with the latter groups of feminists, homosexuals and Maori rights activists preoccupying themselves - and the country - with their social engineering agenda.

The Labour Party was established by the union movement, which according to Mr Tamihere, was founded on the fundamental belief that "all bosses were bad bosses".

He explained how, during the eighties, the union leaders "were all running around in their bloody Falcons and were on $55,000 those years, which was bloody good money. And what did they do? Nothing! Now some of them are politicians".

In fact 20 of Labour's 51 Members of Parliament are former union officials, with their newest member, Lesley Soper, who was sworn in this week to replace the former Speaker Jonathan Hunt, proudly proclaiming in her maiden speech that not only is she a unionist, but a socialist and a feminist as well!

John Tamihere described the union movement's operating protocols as being based on "threats and intimidation". His anecdote: "One dude said to me, 'Look, I've got fifty paid organisers in our union, that can lock up against you, if I wanted them to'", shows that nothing has changed!

The new powers that Labour has given to the union movement means that their tactics today mirror those of the eighties. In fact this morning on radio, a union official explained that today's strike of 3,700 banking industry workers is the first in two decades. Their demand is pay parity with workers in Australia. It seems to have escaped the union's notice that Australia has a standard of living that is 30 percent higher than ours. But then the union movement has never been big on being reasonable in the past, so with the power and status bestowed on them by the Labour Government, why should they start now!

When asked in the interview about the influence of the unions in the Labour Party, Mr Tamihere replied: "When you look at the list, the union movement have got four new members coming in, end of story. And so they've done extraordinarily well at reasserting themselves. They don't deserve that level of influence". And on the effect of the 2004 amendments to the Employment Relations Act, "I think we f...ked up! I think it's very silly, a number of things that we did then, merely to give unions greater organisational ability".

The union movement and the Labour Party are effectively one and the same. The Labour Party has, as Mr Tamihere puts it, "a fully paid organisation called the union movement, who can co-opt fully paid coordinators. These people just never sleep". With an army of fully paid political activists relentlessly pushing Labour's left-wing anti- business propaganda into the nation's workplaces - along with a generous funding stream from union dues - it is little wonder that the voice of small business increasingly falls on deaf ears.

However, when asked what "the most powerful network in the Labour executive is", Mr Tamihere confirmed what many New Zealanders have long suspected: "The Labour Party 'Wimmins' Division" with its "anti-men agenda. It's run by prime ministerial dictate, fullstop".

The political influence of Labour's feminists is deep. They are the reason why we still have in place legislative failures like the Domestic Purposes Benefit, which marginalises fathers and creates a powerful incentive to undermine the family. This benefit now urgently needs abolishing in favour of an unemployment benefit for single parents, but there is no hope of making that sort of change with Labour in power.

The feminist influence has tilted the balance so far against men, that boys are now regularly under-achieving with rarely an eyebrow being raised.

Further, to cement the strong feminist 'sisterhood' influence of the Prime Minister, she has put her female mates into all the other top jobs: Governor General, Chief Justice and now Speaker.

It is not just the feminist influence that worries so many New Zealanders, but the homosexual agenda, as well.

Again, as John Tamihere puts it: "Helen has been brutalised by people who have called her lesbian, no children and all the rest of it. Her key advisor Heather Simpson ... a very dangerous woman ... is butch, and a lot of her support systems are, Maryann Street and so on, and she's very comfortable in that world and comfortable with it.

They don't have families. They've got nothing but the ability to plot". Asked about the nature of the 'machine' that runs the country, Mr Tamihere replied: "there's definitely a machine there all right. It's formidable. It's got apparatus and activists in everything from the PPTA all the way through.

It's actually even built a counterweight to the Business Roundtable - Businesses for Social Responsibility". "The current machine wants to become, in all ways, the natural party of government, and just have us vote different coalition partners on the fringes".

And this is where the comments about the Deputy Prime Minister and chief Labour coalition negotiator, Michael Cullen, become so disturbing: "You've got Cullen - we wouldn't survive without Cullen - he can cut a deal on a piece of legislation without those other bastards (coalition partners) knowing about it, and it melts down everything they wanted but still they get to think they got their clause in". Is this the sort of party we want to trust to continue running the country, I ask?

ENDS

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