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AFTER AMERICA:
ARMAGEDDON
Buy tinned beans, guns and a lifestyle block – Mark Steyn’s new book warns Obama is presiding over the collapse of America, and no corner of New Zealand will be safe when the West goes to hell in a handcart
Outspoken MP:
Consign Treaty to History ‘Disband the Waitangi Tribunal, hang the Treaty up in a museum’
Scare Con
Why NZ’s decision to ditch the Kyoto Protocol was the only sensible option
One Ring To Rule Them
Helen Clark channels Sauron in UNDP global governance speech
Dec 2012/Jan 2013, $8.60
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Dec 2012/Jan 2013
12
ARMAGEDDON
Mark Steyn’s devastating new book suggests America is passing the point of no return on its journey to rapid civilisational collapse, and he warns even New Zealand will not be a safe bolt-hole when it happens. IAN WISHART reports
20
SCARE CON
They keep telling us climate change is getting ‘worse than ever’, but the evidence keeps on saying otherwise
26
UNHOLY WAR
Read the real roots of the Israel/Palestine conflict, in this backgrounder from the last uprising a decade ago
IN HERS GARDASIL SHOCK
20
New studies suggest the cervical cancer vaccine might not even work, and the company behind it has faced criminal fines in the US. IAN WISHART has this developing story
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OPINION EDITOR
4
COMMUNIQUES
6
EYES RIGHT
8
STEYNPOST
10
Speaks for itself, really Your say
Richard Prosser Mark Steyn
ACTION INVEST
Peter Hensley on money
SCIENCE
How to beat jet lag
MUSIC
Julie Andrews new role
30 38 40
MOVIES
James Bond & Lincoln, both four stars
44
GADGETS
44
The latest toys The Mall Big screen smartphones Cyberwar
36
MINDFUEL BOOKCASE
42
CONSIDER THIS
46
THE QUESTION
48
Michael Morrissey’s summer reads Amy Brooke
48
32
32 33 34 36
William Dembski
50%
Lower printing cost vs coLour Laser*
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Editor
Crying over spilt milk The news this month that China was rejecting shipments of NZ made infant formula for failing quality checks should be a serious warning to cheerleaders of absolutely unregulated business with Beijing. There are many in New Zealand politics, and also the news media, who see free trade with China as highly beneficial, and particularly in the area of Chinese investment in New Zealand infrastructure like the dairy industry. They forget, however, that China is more than capable of destroying New Zealand’s reputation in a heartbeat if given the opportunity. Case in point: milk formula. New Zealand is recognised as having the best dairy brand in the world. We have worked hard to achieve that, our quality control has been light years ahead of China’s. The melamine scandal of 2008 is a perfect example of what happens when you do business with a culture where cutting corners and corruption is more widespread than here. However, by allowing Chinese businesses to set up in New Zealand, purchase strategic assets and then export under the aegis of “Brand New Zealand”, we may as well be hacking our feet off with a blunt pocketknife.
We have no real control, at this stage, on the quality of Chinese exports from New Zealand. That doesn’t matter if its TV sets or clothing, where we don’t have a world leading reputation, but it matters hugely when it comes to our strategic brands like dairy. In October, 26 tonnes of Chinese branded NZ milk formula was prevented from entering China on the grounds of low iodine content. That news was reported in the Asian press. Media reports suggest the blame may partly lie in different testing standards between New Zealand and Chinese government agencies, but one would have to ask why: with so much at risk, New Zealand can’t afford to let these issues fall between the cracks. Another Chinese baby formula company operating in New Zealand has been found using a false address and company details here, while in China itself around twenty infant formula companies have in turn been falsely marketing Chinese milk powder as “New Zealand made”.
However, by allowing Chinese businesses to set up in New Zealand, purchase strategic assets and then export under the aegis of “Brand New Zealand”, we may as well be hacking our feet off with a blunt pocketknife 4 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Dec 2012/Jan 2013
At the moment, regulatory agencies in New Zealand appear to be treating these sorts of issues as a minor inconvenience – just another cost of doing business with China. They are not, of course. If we have no quality control over what Chinese companies who invest in this country are really doing here, and no supervision to prevent them cutting quality corners, we could wake up one morning to another fatal melamine-type scandal where dozens of Chinese babies are dead, and a New Zealand-branded and manufactured product is the culprit. Where then our hard-won reputation for quality? The Dairy Board model, transferred to Fonterra which replaced it, was a good one. With the dairy farmers all shareholders of Fonterra, they all had a common interest in not cutting corners. Fonterra, of course, has its own quality control procedures to back that up. Chinese conglomerates trading off our brand have no such vested interest. The problems emerging from Chinese involvement in our dairy trade once again throw issues of foreign ownership of strategic assets into sharp relief.
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Communiques DEAR MR GOVERNMENT I put a few thoughts to paper this morning .... a little light reading :) Rayelene Comins
Volume 10, Issue 135, ISSN 1175-1290 [Print] Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart NZ EDITION Advertising Josephine Martin 09 373-3676 sales@investigatemagazine.com Contributing Writers: Hal Colebatch, Amy Brooke, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Morrow, James Morrow, Len Restall, Laura Wilson, and the worldwide resources of MCTribune Group, UPI and Newscom Art Direction Heidi Wishart Design & Layout Bozidar Jokanovic Tel: +64 9 373 3676 Fax: +64 9 373 3667 Investigate Magazine, PO Box 188, Kaukapakapa, Auckland 0843, NEW ZEALAND AUSTRALIAN EDITION Editor Ian Wishart Advertising sales@investigatemagazine.com Tel/Fax: 1-800 123 983 SUBSCRIPTIONS Online: www.investigatemagazine.com By Phone: Australia 1-800 123 983 NZ 09 373 3676 By Post: To the PO Box NZ Edition: $85; AU Edition: A$96 Email: editorial@investigatemagazine.com, ian@investigatemagazine.com, australia@investigatemagazine.com, sales@investigatemagazine.com, helpdesk@investigatemagazine.tv All content in this magazine is copyright, and may not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions of advertisers or contributors are not necessarily those of the magazine, and no liability is accepted. We take no responsibility for unsolicited material sent to us. Please enclose a stamped, SAE envelope. Inquiries in the first instance should be made via email or fax. Investigate magazine Australasia is published by HATM Magazines Ltd
Dear Mr Government Please help … I am raising children … I try to teach them not to live in drunkenness, to be of sober mind … you lower the drinking age I try to teach them to work hard and not to be indebted to anyone … you offer them student loans I try to teach them to respect life for it is a precious gift … you legalise abortion I try to teach them that chastity is a gift to be treasured and given to that someone ‘special’ … you tell them in school that its OK to have sex as long as they take precautions. I try to teach them they are valuable as women … you make prostitution legal I try to teach them to eat healthily … you bring in the Food Bill and make it more difficult and costly to buy foods that are not doused in poisonous sprays, then you allow cheap foods filled with chemicals and dangerous additives to fill our supermarkets I try to teach them that they should study hard and get top marks … you change the NZQA system so they need not bother I try to teach them that they have an awesome Creator, Who watches lovingly over them every moment of their lives … you say God must not be mentioned in schools I try to teach them that family is important and that Mothers have a valuable and crucial role in the lives of their children … you give them incentives to go out to work and place their children in day-care I try to teach them that their choices have consequences … you make it illegal to discipline them with smacking and you make punishments for crime pathetically light Please Mr Government … what do you want me to teach them? You are placed in a position of great trust and power … please do not abuse it.
Vitamin D COVER: NEWSCOM/MAXPPP
After hearing Ian speaking with Leigh-
6 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Dec 2012/Jan 2013
ton Smith I got so alarmed realising that after the dreadful weather we had I was probably depleted of Vitamin D. I immediately went and had a blood test that revealed I have 12 nmol/L. (It should be about 100). I the bought the book and skimmed through it trying to work out the best way to escalate my levels as quick as possible. I do know from the book that taking supplements and eating specific foods is not a hugely efficient way of getting adequate doses of Vitamin D. What I should be doing immediately before summer and higher sunshine hours make it easier to do what you advocate in the book? Jenni P, via email
Wishart responds: At these levels, you need an immediate prescription from your doctor. They will find out whether there is an underlying medical cause of your low levels, and how best to treat it.
Poetry Remembering They’re lovely at this age, aren’t they…? he said: later on they don›t want to know you. And in his worn face I read as he half-turned, a smile, a page of the past with the hurt not gone. Two tiny girls smiled goodbye, long climbing the steps of the plane. And I thought how very sad, when true. One more visit… will many still remain as he, like we, waved goodbye to you each on our life›s short journey? Once in a while, yearning his mind returns to where a little one pulled a young Dad, tugging at his hand anxious to show, knowing he›d understand the drawings so carefully done, such earnest mazes of criss-crossed lines, their meaning long well lost over half a century ago… But now? They don›t want to know you, he’d said, chin lifted, gallantly I thought, life unfair to so many whom memory will not let go. Whatever they did, forgive them. Oh do, do at least this Christmas…remembering remembering that they loved you. Jenifer Foster
Dec 2012/Jan 2013 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 7
Richard Prosser
Corridors of Paua My first year as a Member of Parliament is drawing to a close. Almost 12 months ago, on the evening of my daughter’s second birthday, You the People recalled Winston Peters from the wilderness of political penance, and sent him back to the Halls of Power along with Yours Truly and six other fine patriots. It has been an eye-opening orbit around the sun, I don’t mind reporting. People ask me if it was what I was expecting; in truth I didn’t really know what to expect, other than what I had observed from the outside, and the one thing which is certain is that it’s been nothing like that. Every new job is a bit of a learning curve, and this one is no different in that regard, except that for the newbies of the NZ First caucus, hitting the ground running was probably a slightly bigger undertaking than that demanded of our fellow first-timers from the other Parties. We had no institutional memory of the 49th Parliament, and no background on the many Bills which we were required to form policy positions and begin speaking on, most of them already at second and third reading. But you can’t keep a good team down, and now that we’ve settled in,
learned the ropes, found where the dunnies are, and got a handle on the practices, procedures, and protocols of the Parliament – as well as the policies of the Government – there’ll be no stopping us. And some of those policies are disturbing at best, and becoming more so. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not dismissing the National Party’s agenda out of hand in its entirety. We oppose asset sales, we oppose school closures and amalgamations, we oppose throwing genuine welfare cases on the scrap heap without there being real jobs for them to go to and decent houses for them to live in. But there is plenty that we do agree with the Nats on, just as there is plenty we agree with Labour about, and in a couple of years’ time it’s highly likely that we will be working with one or the other of them, in some shape or another, to form the next Government.
It is time that the Gravy Train was derailed, the Waitangi Tribunal disbanded, the Treaty removed from legislation and hung up in a museum; time for us all to go forward as one nation. Nothing else is sustainable 8 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM | Dec 2012/Jan 2013
But one thing we cannot, do not, and will not support this Government in, is its relentless march towards Māori separatism. For reasons this writer simply cannot fathom, National appears hellbent on splitting this country down the middle, creating apartheid where once there was harmony, and entrenching for generations to come a mentality of antagonism and division which carves New Zealand up along racial lines, with privilege based on ethnicity, and massive handouts of public wealth to an elite few possessed of an ever-dwindling percentage of Māori blood. Whānau Ora was born of a desire to build a separate Māori welfare system, funded primarily by middle class white taxpayers, but available only to poor or unemployed working-class brown people. As I sit and type, an unwanted and unwarranted Constitutional Review proceeds behind closed doors, convened of separatist part-Māori and their sickly-white-liberal apologists, which is unashamedly driven by a desire to author a Constitution based on the Treaty of Waitangi, and then impose it uncontested upon an unwitting and unconsulted country which never asked for it and which doesn’t want any such thing. And through it all, the Gravy Train rolls on; fuelled by bitterness and resentment, piloted by greed and cyni-
cism, plunging headlong down a track towards national oblivion and leaving a trail of re-written history in its wake. Hard on the heels of the long-expected (if little accepted) top-up payments to both Ngāi Tahu and Tainui, giving those two iwi cash payments of $68.5 million and $70 million respectively in order to keep their Treaty settlements “fair”, comes the news that in five years’ time, they will be entitled to yet another topup! The concept of ‘full and final’ settlements is nothing but a mirage, it would seem. We are destined to crawl ever nearer to this mythical oasis, shimmering tantalizingly close in the distance, but never managing to actually reach it. The first two settlements are guaranteed a value, reaching ever onwards into the future, of 16.1% and 17% of whatever the total might eventually prove to be, if indeed any eventuality is ever allowed to be arrived at. Settlement, it would appear, has little to do with what may or may not have been lost or taken, with what that might have been worth, with what value, recompense and reconciliation has been agreed upon; no, it all comes down to “he’s got more than me, I want some more as well!” The paradoxical irony of Ngāi Tahu and Tainui receiving additional compensation based on whatever other iwi are awarded by way of Waitangi settlements, is that both those tribes negotiated their original payouts entirely outside the framework of the Waitangi Tribunal; Tainui because there was never one unified Tainui Nation which signed the Treaty either individually or as a whole, and Ngāi Tahu because, as I have discussed before, the Treaty never applied to the South Island. The Mainland and Stewart Island were both annexed to the Colony of New South Wales by declaration, on the basis of Cook’s claim of possession and the precept of terra nullis. Well I say enough. This madness has to stop. We cannot, we will not, go forward as a nation while this weeping sore is allowed to continue to fester. Ordinary middle New Zealand, white and brown alike, have had about a gutsful of the separatist agenda of this and previous Governments, and that of their cynical and greedy co-
conspirators within the professional grievance industry. Ordinary brown and white middle New Zealanders have just about come to the end of their rope where the racist elitists of the Gravy Train are concerned; the academics, the sycophants, the half-caste and part-caste and 1/64th part “Māori” who claim colonial oppression is to blame for them smoking dope and beating their children to death, while standing with their hands out for never-ending compensation for wrongs never suffered, from those who never committed any wrongs. Ordinary Māori want warm dry homes and secure decent-paying jobs and good schools and health care for their kids, same as everyone else wants. They don’t particularly care about compensation for the re-naming of some mountain or another which may or may not have been sacred to some of their ancestors, who may or may not have owned it for very long before it was taken by force by the tribe next door. They certainly don’t care about compensation when they themselves never get to see a cent of it, when the millions handed over by the Crown are spirited away and locked up by a tiny “tribal” elite whose share of the ances-
tors’ DNA is almost always even less than that of the modern day descendants whom they claim to represent. Neither ordinary Māori nor ordinary white people want a New Zealand where there are two systems, two sets of laws, two standards of citizenship. No-one wants a racially separate, segregated New Zealand. Almost two centuries of intermarriage have made us one people whether the bitter and twisted racists of the Gravy Train like it or not, and it is high time the National Party leadership got that message through its individual and collective heads. Pandering to a tiny elite in the way that they are, partly to satiate the racist Māori Party on whose votes they rely, and alienating the bulk of middle New Zealand in the process, is no way to ensure political stability; and it is no way to pave the road to the future for our children and grandchildren either. It is time that the Gravy Train was derailed, the Waitangi Tribunal disbanded, the Treaty removed from legislation and hung up in a museum; time for us all to go forward as one nation. Nothing else is sustainable. Richard Prosser
Dec 2012/Jan 2013 | INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM 9