Dialogue: A nation of sheep without shepherd

By GARTH GEORGE

The All Blacks lose - again - after a series of errors that would have disgraced a high school first XV.

And when the members of that first XV leave school or go on to university, a significant proportion of them won't be able to read, write or spell proficiently because our education system, in the hands of blind ideologues for decades, has let them down.

Our economy is in disarray, our dollar is worth peanuts internationally, our stock exchange is slowly sinking, any profits are being spirited away to multinational shareholders overseas, and our biggest company chooses a name for itself that might have been last seen on the stern of a Spanish galleon.

Tens of thousands of us are condemned to a life of pain and disability because our health system is collapsing and we're not even on one of the endless hospital waiting lists for surgery or else the Government won't subsidise the drugs we need because penny-pinching Pharmac says they're too expensive.

There is more and deeper poverty than at any time in our history, particularly among Maori and Pacific Islanders. Hundreds of children go to school hungry, ill-clad and ill-shod yet we spend hundreds of millions on "the arts" and Maori TV.

We have run down our defence forces to the detriment not just of ourselves but our historic friends and allies, and created an unwelcome and unhealthy interservice rivalry.

We have so starved our forces of law and order of money and people that they can't do their job.

We pay billions of dollars a year in domestic purposes benefits to solo mothers - some of whom make a career out of child-bearing - and pursue fathers to get some of it back while at the same time putting every possible stumbling block in the way of those men who want to be part of their children's upbringing.

We allow more than 15,000 prospective citizens to be torn from their mothers' wombs every year at public expense while at the same time complaining that our nation is underpopulated and trying to encourage every Tom, Dick and Harriet from anywhere at all to immigrate here.

But we can take 150 opportunists from Afghanistan and other suchlike hellholes, who have invested thousands of dollars towards infiltrating Australia. They include one man who admits deserting his wife and kids to get a better life for himself.

Listen to Helen Clark, as reported in the Herald on Monday: "New Zealand was taking 45 women and 22 children, the men associated with them and other men as needed to make up the 150 people."

What does that tell you about the attitudes and agenda of Clark and, no doubt, her feminist ugly sisters in the cabinet and Labour Party?

No wonder the self-righteous Sandra Lee is hot on the trail of alleged sexism in the Department of Conservation. She says a survey shows that women "have had to put up with" offensive comments from men in the workplace.

No, they haven't. All they had to do was stand up for themselves, slap the odd face, deliver the odd well-aimed kick and the problem would quickly have solved itself. That has worked for women since time began; why should it be any different now?

So how come this nation - God's Own Country, richly blessed by the Creator in both its land and its people - has reached this state of confusion and, for many, day-by-day misery?

The answer is simple: we have lost our way. We don't know where we are, we've forgotten (or deliberately ignored) where we came from, and we don't know where we're going.

The traditions, the morals, the ethics, the values, the virtues that made us a nation to be admired, even imitated, have been subtly, surreptitiously and sometimes even blatantly undermined, not just by liberal legislation but by that most pernicious and sinister of all modern-day fads and fancies, political correctness.

Thus a nation that once fielded the finest fighting troops in the world on land, at sea and in the air, whose sportsmen and women stood tall among the world's best, whose agriculturists, educationists and scientists were universally acclaimed and whose care for its people set an international standard is reduced to a shadow of its former self.

And that shadow is shortening as the sun goes down and our prospects become darker and darker.

We are, indeed, sheep without a shepherd. Our moral fibre has unravelled to such an extent that it hangs by a thread. And unless we are prepared to return to our roots, which were firmly planted in a morality tried and tested over centuries, our descent into the hell of importunate Third World insignificance will continue.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz