New Party will shake up self-serving Members of Parliament
Like a South Seas version of Donald Trump New Zealand economist–philanthropist and family man Gareth Morgan has launched himself into the firmament of Oceania politics astride his own freshly minted political party and has done so with the same purpose which is to introduce a new order to replace the current one in which he sees Members of Parliament primarily fixated on becoming MPs. Then remaining MPs.
Mr Morgan proclaims that he intends to “light a fuse” under the existing order and thus break the stranglehold that he claims “career” politicians have on the nation of under five million people.
Igniting his “fuse,” in the form of his Opportunities Party on the eve of Guy Fawkes, he does not object to being compared to Donald Trump in terms of Trump’s determination to smash the status quo.
The Opportunities Party will start issuing segments of its manifesto soon.
Mr Morgan’s decision to launch his own political vehicle comes as no surprise. The Welsh-born economist was a household business name before his family began and then spectacularly sold its version of Ebay.
The family’s TradeMe online site which replaced newspaper classified advertising was sold to the Australian-based Fairfax media chain for $700,000,000. This was approximately the same amount that News Corporation paid at the same time for Myspace which was at the same time one of the world’s busiest social networking sites. When additional management contracts were taken into account the sum is considered to have been in the region of NZD1 billion.
The problem for the new acquirer, Fairfax, was that TradeMe which retained its saturation in New Zealand had mixed results in market penetration internationally, notably in Australia.
In addition to his family’s wealth, Mr Morgan fills the other side of the equation for being admired in New Zealand which is that he is a sportsman being, with his wife, a big capacity motorbike traveler across the world’s most demanding terrains.
It is unlikely that Mr Morgan will have any problems in acquiring the 500 members required in New Zealand for his new party to obtain official recognition.
Mr Morgan is likely to enjoy from the wider voter spectrum approval for lighting the blue touchpaper under the seats of “career” politicians, an unknown species in New Zealand until the 1980s.
Until that time Members of Parliament were drawn from those who had served as farmers, businessmen or commercial lawyers (National Party) or trade unionists, educationalists or advocacy lawyers (Labour Party.)
From the 1980s onward the trend became defined for candidates to start aiming for election at an early age and to bring with them, if successful, no previously acquired practical or applied experience beyond that of campaigning and boondoggling to become an MP.
It remains uncertain if Mr Morgan will offer himself as a candidate for his new party. A problem for him will remain that in spite of proportional representation being well installed in New Zealand, it has not propagated the same diversity of splinter parties which it has done, for example in Latin nations where it has long been standard.
The two monolithic parties continue to dominate. Though with a degree of permutation and combination with smaller parties, notably Greens and Maori, and the Winston Peters New Zealand First.
However, Mr Morgan’s move will act to crystallise disquiet about the general numbers, terms and conditions, especially those relating to emoluments of New Zealand’s sitting MPs. There are 120 of them, and they are rather better paid than their 650 counterparts in Westminster.
He will tap too into electorate disquiet about the ease with which their pay increases enjoy easy legislative passage at a time when everyone else is being urged to tighten their belts. Similarly with the seemingly infinite career duration of certain members along with the perennial matter of MPs long-tail entitlements.
New Zealand Herald Triumvirate
National Press Club Lifetime Achievement laureate Graham Stewart (pictured at the presentation) was on hand to greet the young Mike Robson when he signed on as cub sports reporter. Mr Stewart’s award was for his constant career in photo-journalism characterised in the second half of his career by his presence as a leading independent book publisher specialising in documentary subjects, notably transport. In this entrepreneurial role Mr Stewart was cited for his effort in generating employment for journalists. Also a presence at the Herald in that era was Sir Terry McLean who Mike Robson always described as one of his enduring mentors. Sir Terry was an inaugural laureate of the National Press Club’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Pictures below
1. Peter Bush, Toby Robson, Marjie Robson
2. Krystina Tomaszyk and in background National Press Club Life Member and INL editor Paul Cavanagh, and Barry Durrant
Out of Favour
Editor Richard Long
Set up Boss’ Golf
Encounter With
Bill Clinton
Out of FavourFormer editor of The Dominion Richard Long,(pictured) a long-time colleague of Mike Robson’s presented the gathering with an insight into his boss’ sense of fair play. As editor of The Dominion, he recounted, he had one day pounced on the fact that his morning newspaper in circulation terms had nudged The Evening Post out of its customary stop-selling slot. Unable to resist the opportunity he had had published in his own newspaper The Dominion a few paragraphs to this effect.
Mike Robson had made it clear to Long that this was not the kind of skiting he welcomed pitting as it did, one group daily against another. He, Robson, was not impressed.
Anxious to get back in his chief’s good books, Long now twisted and turned seeking an opportunity to redeem himself. It was now that salvation appeared in the avuncular form of United States ambassador Josiah Beeman. The ambassador had an approval problem too. He was still looking for a suitable golf partner in New Zealand for his own boss, visiting United States President and golf buff Bill Clinton.
It was now that Long saw his own game opening up. Mike Robson was the obvious partner, he advocated. Diplomatic and tactful in terms of ensuring parity between his own swings and those of the President. A natural partner. And so it was that Mike Robson found himself teeing off at Millbrook with Bill Clinton.
Sometime afterward and by now feeling a certain glow of managing directorial favour re-radiating in his direction, Long delicately took up the matter of how the presidential game had actually gone?
Clinton, responded Robson, had been a predictably tough competitor fighting over every swing and claiming at every opportunity the presidential mulligan or no-count fluffed shot. For his part Robson felt that he had maintained an easy focus in spite of there being as part of the presidential entourage someone with a golf bag that in fact contained an armament designed to disable any low flying and thus threatening light aircraft.
The only unforeseen element came at the conclusion of the 18 holes, explained Robson.
Oh, what was that? Asked Long
Clinton wanted to do the 18 holes again “now.” At that moment .
Rendezvous with
Le Monde cartoonist
Jean Plantureux
In a surprise encounter National Press Club president Peter Isaac crossed paths with Jean Plantureux the cartoonist for Le Monde and who is universally known as Plantu. It was in 2007 that Plantu spoke to the club at a meeting in the New Zealand Parliament.
In recent years the cartoonist, a national figure in France, has become dedicated to promoting his cause, jointly founded in 2006 with UN Secretary general Kofi Annan, which is known as Cartooning for Peace.
Cartooning for Peace was behind the feature film The Caricaturists which includes Plantu along with a global gathering of cartoonists from around the world, notably from such hot spots for practitioners as Russia, Mexico, Venezuela, China, the Gaza Strip, and Tunisia.
Isaac said he was surprised to find Plantu at the gathering in what appeared to be the routine care of at least six police and he ascribed this to the cartoonist’s insistence that the film be publicly screened in homage to the victims of the religious fanaticism attack on the Paris satirical cartoon newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
The Caricaturists film also includes Plantu’s own role in the Middle East weaving between such protagonists as Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres.
Isaac said that Plantu (at right, above) recalled vividly his visit to New Zealand and his meetings with local cartoonists.
Dr Liam Fox MP: Shire party members will decide next British Prime Minister
GP MP has had two runs at becoming leader of the Conservatives.
Napier, MSCNewsWire, Monday 11 July 2016 - British Conservative Member of Parliament and Brexiteer Dr Liam Fox was matter of fact when several years ago he reminded a Wellington audience that leaders of the Conservative Party were chosen by “135,000 party members, most of them resident in the shires.”
Dr Fox (pictured) who put himself again this year in the running for Conservative Party leader, and thus this time also Prime Minister, has found himself dealt out of the pack prior to this decisive demonstration of grass roots party power.
The party members will now decide the result in the final run-off between contestants and joint finalists Theresa May MP and Andrea Leadsom MP.
Dr Fox, an engaging speaker responded in connection with party leadership contests in New Zealand involving National (caucus) and Labour (caucus and union). He was talking to a National Press Club meeting.
Dr Fox was then in New Zealand as shadow foreign secretary as well as Conservative Party chairman a post from which he sought initially and unsuccessfully in that era to launch himself into the full Tory leadership.
General practitioner Dr Fox has been dogged by British Parliamentary expenses revelations which were a factor in 2011 for his standing down as secretary of state for defence.
Meanwhile the party’s membership now said to be 150,000 can vote for Theresa May MP or Andrea Leadsom MP– with the result announced by 9 September. The result will be announced then in time for the Conservative party conference on 2 October, the date David Cameron gave for his successor to be in place when he resigned after the vote to leave the EU.
The Labour Party exists
only to help poor declared
Glenda Jackson MP
“The Labour Party exist for just one purpose,” British Labour MP Glenda Jackson told a National Press Club meeting. “It is to help the poor.”
Her comment came in the aftermath of the introduction of New Zealand to globalisation by the David Lange-led Labour government.
Miss Jackson (pictured at the time of her visit to New Zealand) was one of the very few Labour Party MPs of this era in the Westminster sphere who had sprung from an authentically working class background and having started her own career as a shopgirl.
Britain’s membership of the EU has had the unanticipated effect of being a multiplier of Britain’s intra party rifts especially within the Conservative Party.
Now though the EU in a wrenching display of the power of reverse leverage is pulling apart the British Labour Party as it strips away the layers of tarpaulin camouflage that has tenuously held it together.
Starkly revealed now are it components. There are the real poor who are those in the old rust-belts and fishing towns. Then on the other side of the Labour equation are those who have never been poor, do not intend to be, and who, in the words of UKIP’s Nigel Farage, have never held down “a proper job in their lives.”
It is this last category, mostly based within the London commuter belt, who now stand exposed. They are like the people swimming without togs when the tide goes out.
They are the ones thrilled to their marrows by the concept of Europe, especially the Latin zone such as France with its gauche de la gauche political parties and even a fully-fledged Communist Party.
It is here that an old field revolutionary such as Che Guevara cohort Regis Debray can saunter around between academia and far left political convocations expounding their views on how we live now.
Until just a few days ago the Labour Party could glue together its quite opposing components in the form of the workers and those who were not workers, quite the opposite in fact.
Now this flimsy coalition has burst apart . The non workers especially those who make up most of Labour’s parliamentary wing, were explained away by the notion that they were idealistically-driven. That they intended to use their privilege to serve Glenda Jackson’s poor.
Now though they have been revealed in the eyes of those poor to have been actively working against them.
The have been seen in plain sight to have been encouraging the very wholesale immigration that adds up to cheap labour and thus depressed earnings.
They have been exposed to have been in fact conspiring against Glenda Jackson’s constituency by handing over much of Britain’s fishing grounds to the EU and by seeking to encourage and enable the very immigration that acted counter to the livelihoods of workers.
The game of pretence which has endured since the 1960s has finally ended.
Jeremy Corbyn, himself from a professional class background, has become quite literally its first martyr. The elastic would ultimately only stretch so far. He was unable to reconcile the irreconcilable. He had to step into the light and so did his Labour Party.
New Zealand trophies
On Display at
the Washington
National Press Club
The New Zealand National Press Club’s plaque and accompanying silver salver commemorating the presentation of its Lifetime Achievement Award to long time Dean of the White House Press Corps Connie Lawn are now in the lobby of the Washington National Press Club.
Miss Lawn was for a generation the Washington reporter for Radio New Zealand, a tour of duty featured in her autobiography You Wake Me Each Morning.
Miss Lawn was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 by Hon Steve Maharey the Minister of Broadcasting at a ceremony in New Zealand’s Parliament .
She was appointed an Honorary Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth in 2012.
Miss Lawn has presented her New Zealand National Press Club trophies to the Washington National Press Club’s permanent exhibition collection.
President of the Washington National Press Club Thomas Burr and executive director Bill McCarren, are photographed (below) with Miss Lawn’s plaque and silver salver from the New Zealand club.
Founded in 1908, every U.S. president since Theodore Roosevelt has visited the Washington Press Club (pictured), and all since Warren Harding all have become members.
Yes, New Zealand Judges are Above Criticism
But their Judgments are Not
Napier, MSCNewsWire, Wednesday 18 May 2016 - In the entire sphere of jurisprudence in New Zealand nothing is quite so obscured or subject to so much ambivalence, tautology or sheer confusion as the matter of the right of citizens to censure members of the judiciary who in this matter give the impression of being as bemused on the topic as the public at large.
In the English speaking world the problem appears peculiar to New Zealand in the same way that otherwise learned and cultivated people describe here a collective of females as a group of “woman.”
The very simplicity seems to render it beyond any comprehensible analysis and thus definition.
This confusion visibly vexed Law Lord Leslie Scarman who, at a conference here, said, and we quote....
“I am going to speak to this only one more time.....It is this........You may criticise the judgment. But you many not criticise the judge.”
This succinct appraisal by Lord Scarman (pictured at the time of his visit to New Zealand) evidently fell on deaf years. So we will now paraphrase the rest of Lord Scarman’s discourse as his audience insisted on further clarification on this issue which has now entered such a fevered phase.....................
Judge John Doe, as we will call him, delivered a mild custodial sentence to an individual who painstakingly plotted the death of an innocent person going about their daily business. The individual thus sentenced, it transpired, had a criminal past and in the eyes of reasonable persons might sensibly be regarded as presenting an enduring menace to society.
Following their release after their relatively brief time in prison the individual in fact became a lethal menace to society.
A reasonable person might now reasonably cause to say or to be published words to the effect that the judgment was wrong , and misguided, and might be deemed to have even caused the death of an innocent person.
So far so good. The judgment is being criticised. Not the judge.
What cannot be said or caused to be published is that Judge John Doe came to the judgment because he, Judge John Doe, was:-
* A drunkard
* Of impaired mental powers
* Knew or was otherwise acquainted with the accused
This type of criticism of a trial judge technically triggers extremely severe repercussions on those who utter them or cause them to be otherwise broadcast or published.
In New Zealand though such commentaries have been allowed to pass by, especially the one centred on the trial judge having some sympathy with the accused through acquaintance or some other common interest.
The current and demonstrable confusion on this matter and exhibited all levels of society including the judiciary itself must now be clarified and done so using the concise definition provided by Lord Scarman.
Fairfax –APN New Zealand Merger Must Focus on Unified Christchurch Print Hub
Up up and away from Auckland (and Wellington)
Napier, MSCNewsWire, 17 May 2016 - Airfreight will determine the cost-efficiency and thus the success of the pending merger of the New Zealand subsidiaries of the Australian Fairfax and APN media chains which must now look to the skies for the mechanical economies of scale they know they must now find.
As it is the sparsely populated New Zealand is host to the two chains’ scattered printing plants strung out in a line between Auckland and Dunedin.
The opportunity exists for a forwarder to present the merging group with a scheme that would allow it to consolidate all its mechanical activities into one site.
A case for Christchurch would be the forwarder’s master stroke.
A problem for the two chains is the constant pre-occupation with three dimensional mechanical production issues at the expense of the idea ones, the ones that do not require capital investment, and which are central to success in the internet age.
In the event much of the Auckland and Wellington dailies are early material anyway with their sports updates, soft-peddle business re-hashes, generic environmental stories, and columns by local celebrities usually talk-back types presenting their glimpses of the blindingly obvious, along with political activists. Their vehicle, travel and property supplements meanwhile are hardly of hold the front page grade urgency.
A problem for the two subsidiaries is that in the past they have found it hard to cooperate and this curiously has become more evident in a shrinking market.
There was their failure to cooperate in the matter of the TradeMe acquisition. Indeed a suitable study for one of their question-marked “investigative” pieces might be entitled – What has the Newspaper Proprietors Association Been Doing?
In fact the NPA, as it is known, was the victim of its own success in the matter of cashing in at the height of the market on its collective shareholding in Reuters.
The old family proprietors trousered their winnings and sensibly left the field to the two Australian chains.
Enter now the problem of representatives around the NPA table who were several steps removed from the real decision-making which of course now took place in Australia. They were in the position of being policy implementers rather than policy makers.
There began to emerge a distracting preoccupation with things such as scholarships and also with an increasingly proliferating and bizarre swathe of awards.
Curiously, too, the emphasis went on makeup hubs at a time when subeditors and other process journalists can efficiently work from their own kitchen tables.
The Christchurch Press Johns Road printery adjacent to the South Island’s international-grade airport indicates that such an eventuality may have been anticipated.
But experience indicates localised pre-occupations with mechanical processes of the type that have become near-irrelevancies in the compoundingly disruptive internet age.
Seriousness of Purpose is Club's Priority - President
This past year again saw the National Press Club adhering to the times and more specifically to an era in which the mainstream media pre-occupation adheres to contemporary culture rather than with the club’s mainstay of politics and hard news.
Even so our event earlier this year in handing back the green parrot artefact to the Green Parrot restaurant displayed a certain whimsicality on our behalf, admitted National Press Club president Peter Isaac in his annual report tabled at the annual general meeting in May.
The restoration event commemorated the era in which people from diverse occupations and callings were able to take up the role of newspapermen.
"Thanks to the wisdom of successive committees the club has refused to be panicked by the blend so evident today of the accelerating confluence of technical and sociological currents."
Instead the policy had been to conserve the club’s resources in order that they be deployed with an underpinning seriousness of purpose, he emphasised.
The club retains and develops numerous affiliations with other national press clubs and these "permit us to be engaged in the major ethical events of the era with www.nationalpressclub.org. routinely remaining at the very top ranking of these national sites."
One of the reasons for this was the club's new operational affiliations with the Napier-based news service MSCNewswire and the Washington-based EINPresswire service.
MSCNewswire he noted now has claims to being the pre-eminent dedicated internet news service in New Zealand and with its emphasis on commercial news is the one with the major international pick-up.
Touching upon membership issues Isaac noted that it was with deep regret that he had to report that Lifetime Achievement Award holder Connie Lawn remains severely stricken with Parkinson’s Disease. Two veterans of World War 2 also battled the effects of the passing years - Life Member Denis Adam and long time stalwart Mick Bienowski.
More...
Green Parrot Jug returned to South Seas Longest-Operating Restaurant by VP Peter Bush, Australasia’s longest-practising journalist
MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, Napier, 30 March 2016 - Australasia’s longest-practising journalist Peter Bush returned to Australasia’s longest continuously-operating restaurant which is Wellington’s Green Parrot its signature and founding artefact, a green parrot ceramic jug made in Japan.
Mr Bush’s career as a photojournalist and war correspondent began in 1946, 20 years after the founding of the Green Parrot restaurant which also on this occasion celebrated its 90th birthday.
Mr Bush is vice president of the National Press Club which staged the ceremony. In fact the green parrot jug had lain unrecognised in the memorabilia of the club for many years. It had originally come into the club’s possession via an early stalwart, Tony Poynton.
He had intervened at a tense moment during the club’s post war years when it served as a de facto or curb exchange, most notably among scrap metal dealers such as Mr Poynton then was. A commanding presence, Mr Poynton’s intervention earned him the gratitude of the proprietor who stood to lose their trading licence if found to have conducted an unruly house.
The then proprietor gave the late Mr Poynton the signature jug which Mr Poynton, by now a newspaperman himself, had donated to the club to adorn any future premises.
The restoration event was emceed by National Press Club treasurer Bryan Weyburne, pictured above with Peter Bush at centre and Green Parrot proprietor Chris Sakoufakis.
Speakers noted that the occasion would in future years be viewed as recording also the transition turning point from the colourful heyday of print journalism to the present technology-pressured one.
It was noted that someone such as Mr Poynton could in those earlier days switch from metals trading to newspapers and in the process bring with them a variety of new approaches and ideas along with real-world experience.
The timing of the ceremony, it was said, also saw the era approaching of the 40 year envelope from the advent of a technology on the consumer market, in this case the internet and associated technologies, to the point at which it became pervasive and thus fully transformational.
Electricity and automobiles were quoted as two earlier examples of this 40 year take up phenomenon.
The Green Parrot restaurant was begun in 1926 by a United States merchant seaman paid off in Wellington who had acquired the jug at Yokohama and who then named his new restaurant after the fashionable ceramic ornamental piece of kitchenware.
Event seen as Line in the Sand between Old & New Eras
Kay Poynton, Tony’s sister with Yvonne Weyburne
Richard Laurenson, Hamish Hancock, Gordon Stewart, Stephen Underwood
Carol Armstrong and Luba Perry
George Westermayer and Mark Dunajtschik
Ian and Adrienne Stewart
Anne Stewart and Barry Durrant
Connie Lawn is First to Talk to
NZ Washington Ambassador Tim Groser
Greatest farm surplus ever is the
prime problem for the career trade negotiator
MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, NAPIER, 14 March 2016 - After a lifetime massaging trade deals as an official and then as a Minister of the Crown, Tim Groser finds himself negotiating his trickiest mercantilist tightrope to date. As his country’s freshly installed ambassador to Washington the urbane yet wily bureaucrat must bed down his country’s role in the TPPA which he last year described as “New Zealand’s biggest ever free trade deal.”
His problem? How to get value from the Trans Pacific arrangement for an agrarian nation at a time when parties to the arrangement, along with the rest of the developed world, enter the era of hyper farm surplus?
Nothing unusual in this, even though the surplus is of greater magnitude than anything that has gone before.
In the past, trans Pacific parties such as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand have shared a simple solution. This was to ship the surplus to the always hungry Soviet Union, or Russia as we would describe it now.
This is no longer possible due to the US invoked and vigorously policed embargo on sending anything to this old disposal market.
Neither does the vast North American market offer much hope. Nobody is more conscious than Mr Groser of the surgical delicacy required in persuading Canada to sign up to the TPPA in the face of the opposition from its French-speaking dairy farmers, the most protected anywhere on the globe.
Should Mr Groser turn his attention to Europe he can only contemplate still greater surpluses as more farm categories come off the restricted production quota list. Next off the rank, the EU sugar beet production limits.
And yet...and yet....markets are never static. Mr Groser would never utter it, and may even have disciplined himself never to think it. But daily the odds are increasing in favour of Britain’s exit from the EU.
From his Washington command-post, it is hard to imagine that Mr Groser does not see just one more trade deal, on top of all the other ones to which he has been a party?
As he suavely goes about his official rounds, might not Mr Groser be forgiven if his thoughts are pulled away from a Pacific contemplation to considering now the nearby Atlantic Ocean?
As someone as close to the epicentre of world trade as it is possible for anyone to reach, might he not just be contemplating from time to time, oooh, something like a new Commonwealth Preference regime?
One in which Euro-soured Britons return to the supplier that rescued them until quite recent times from what Mr Groser and his diplomatic colleagues would delicately describe as “food insecurity.”
When the dean of the White House Press Corps and holder of the National Press Club, Lifetime Achievement Award Connie Lawn (pictured with Mr Groser) was first through the embassy doors to discuss events with the the new ambassador, these and other elements of realpolitik became the background tapestry to the official politesse.
The lesson of very recent years, and to which the Russian embargo bears witness, is that not only is the United States run from Washington. But in large measure, so is Europe.
Empire Loyalist Winston Peters MP
is Echoed in Fleet Street
New Zealand First Leader Calls for
Resumption of London-Led Trading Bloc.
MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, NAPIER, 28 February 2016 - London’s Daily Express has given full coverage to the call by Winston Peters MP (pictured) to restore the once dominant Commonwealth trading bloc.
Reported the newspaper: “Winston Peters, who leads a group of MPs in the New Zealand parliament, has urged the UK to view the possibility of exiting the EU later this year as a chance to strengthen ties with those 53 countries that were previously part of the British Empire.”
The Daily Express along with the other middle class British mass-circulation newspaper the Daily Mail is implacably against Britain’s continuing membership of the EU. Both the newspapers have long campaigned for the British exit.
Under its signature proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, the Daily Express maintained a crusade against Britain abandoning the Empire in favour of a European trading bloc alliance.
Reported the Daily Express: “New Zealand’s ex-deputy prime minister told British politicians to use ‘Brexit’ as a way of making amends for ditching Commonwealth countries in favour of joining the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973.
The newspaper quoted Mr Peters as saying that Brexit " is an opportunity for not just New Zealand businesses, products and people.
“It is an excellent opportunity to heal a rift dating back to 1973."
EU Will End This Year
Declares German Head of Oceania Think Tank
Bungling of immigrant emergency
punctures German mystique
and leaves EU rudderless
MSCNewsWire-EIN-National Press Club Service, NAPIER, 18 February 2016 - The European Union during 2016 will cease to exist “as we know it” predicts Oliver Hartwich, the head of the New Zealand Initiative policy group.
The immigrant crisis was one too many emergencies for the EU which he portrays as staggering from one crisis to the next. Among these were member countries with covenant-breaking debt to GDP ratios, the Brexit, and the rise of radical politics in the form of populism and nationalism.
Germany meanwhile was reeling from its handling of the immigrant crisis, which now saw the once EU powerhouse “isolated.”
In addition, the officially-driven cover-up of the Cologne refugee assimilation consequences episode had even raised questions internationally about the nature of German society’s commitment to open government and a free press.
Dr Hartwich speaking at a seminar at the headquarters in Wellington of the New Zealand Initiative sheeted the pending demise of the EU “project” to the decision by its leadership after the fall of the Berlin Wall to embark upon an expansionist phase.
This took two perilous forms, he noted, the currency union and the quest for new members. History proved that instead there should have followed a period of “consolidation.”
The revolving door subsequent crises Dr Hartwich identified as “weakening the structure,” of the EU to the point at which it could only focus on its “own survival.”
The New Zealand Initiative sprang from a number of independent enterprise policy groups, notably the Business Roundtable.
Dr Hartwich,a German-trained lawyer and economist was appointed executive director at its inception, following a tour with Sydney’s Centre for Independent Studies, and as chief economist at London’s Policy Exchange.
He noted that the focus by the EU on member financial bail-outs, was obscuring the rise of radical politics in members such as Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary.
The realpolitik exposition on the EU and its future conducted by Dr Hartwich was consistent with the enterprise group’s focus on cutting through doctrines and ideologies in order to outline events at home and abroad.
The event was attended by a number of National Press Club representatives including Life Member Sir Christopher Harris, pictured (at right) with Dr Hartwich.
In response to a question from a National Press Club representative about the involvement and culpability of the United States in the current series pf EU alarms, Dr Hartwich commented that the US simply saw the EU from its start as a bulwark against Russia, and its policies were centred exclusively around this view.
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