KEY POINTS:
The New Year is into only its fourth day and already the portents for it are anything but reassuring for a nation already suffering adversely from its Government's insatiable appetite for interfering in the private lives of citizens.
While most of us are concentrating on enjoying ourselves over the holiday break and doing our best not to have a care in the world, the Government has been flying kites right, left and centre, hoping, no doubt, that we're too much in holiday mode to notice.
A ban on fireworks and a new way to milk motorists are among them, but the most sinister was launched by the Prime Minister, for some reason only hours before she and her husband took off for an overseas holiday.
What Helen Clark announced, in effect, is that the Government, not satisfied with doing its damnedest to modify our family life to conform to its socialist image, is about to start interfering in our religious life.
She told this newspaper she has ordered greater Government activity on religious and cultural diversity issues to avoid New Zealand developing the sort of extremism seen in immigrant communities in Britain.
"What is very obvious in some places offshore is that you are getting extremism in second and third generations and that is very worrying to societies concerned.
"Now we haven't generated that and we don't want to generate that. It is a huge concern in Britain and there is a lot of thought at Government level as to what could be done to decrease that feeling of alienation."
I didn't have to read more to know that the whole idea is shonky, since the entire population of New Zealand would fit comfortably into a few suburbs of any major British city or French or Dutch or German for that matter.
Nor do we have a common border with any other country or open and passport-free borders which allow the unchecked flow of people from one to another.
There are only two ways to get into New Zealand - by air or by sea - and we can, if we provide the resources, police those easily enough.
Nor do we have the teeming masses, the unemployment, the slums or any of the other European social phenomena that provide a breeding ground for disaffection, hatred, terrorism, riots and general lawlessness.
So we are about as likely to develop the sort of extremism problems of Britain or France or the Netherlands or Germany as we are to develop a taste for bowler hats or berets, clogs or lederhosen.
One has to wonder what really is at the bottom of the Prime Minister's sudden interest in alleged migrant-focused religious tensions which so far don't exist and have no reason to develop.
Sure there has been minor controversy about wearing burqas, about the way some Muslim men treat their womenfolk and about female circumcision.
But that is no reason to engage the resources of four Government agencies - Social Development (whatever that means), Foreign Affairs, Human Rights and Ethnic Affairs - which surely have more important things to do without chasing spectres.
In fact, if the Government would only concentrate on the things that really matter - poverty, health, law and order, justice and education, for instance - there would be even less need to fear the sort of tensions Helen Clark's imagination has thrown up.
She can safely leave it to the religionists to sort out things for themselves since there has been interfaith dialogue going on between Christians, Jews, Muslims and others for yonks.
Ms Clark has said there will be widespread consultation on whatever the Government agencies come up with, but there is no reassurance in that. Time and again after public consultation the Government has ignored it and done what it wanted anyway.
In any case, there is no way in the world you can legislate against bigotry, intolerance, fundamentalism or radicalism and all religions have their share of those.
Nor is there any way to persuade people to accept without comment religious and ethnic practices which they deplore, dislike or fear. As the 17th-century English poet Samuel Butler put it so succinctly: "He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still."
The whole thing would seem to me to be just another Government red herring to divert our minds from the real problems afflicting our society.
Except for this statement from Helen Clark, which just might give a clue as to where this thing is heading.
She said: "There is a capacity for tensions generated offshore ... to be reflected back into one's own country if one isn't proactive about promoting inclusion and acceptance across faiths.
"So for example, one wouldn't want what is seen by a lot of people in the Islamic world in the Middle East to be an issue of Islam versus Western Christianity to be reflected back into our own community ..."
I just hope that doesn't indicate that Christians and Muslims are to be singled out for special attention by irreligious bureaucrats and politicians who have absolutely no idea what they're dealing with.
And that those bureaucrats and politicians take note of the timely words of the veteran Herald letter-writer C.W.N. Stanbridge, who wrote: "Inclusion and acceptance of religious and ethnic groups into our society does not mean giving away long-established authority, tradition, custom and beliefs in an attempt to buy goodwill. It merely leads to ever more strident demands."
