 If Reality Check Radio enriches your day in life, support us to keep bringing you the content, voices, perspectives and the dose of reality you won't get anywhere else. Visit www.realitycheck.radio forward slash donate. Shane Jones is back on the crunch. A lot has happened since his last appearance including Ratana, Waitangi and of course stuff attacking ministers like Shane for daring to engage with Reality Check Radio. Shane will undoubtedly deliver some good zingers which will keep all our social media team busy making shareables. Shane's on the line from the beehive now. Welcome back to the crunch Shane Jones. Good to have you back here again. I think the last time we spoke was just before Christmas wasn't it? Yes, no. You've got me here in Wellington. Today the house will be sitting and it's a pleasure to engage here yet again. Well it's interesting because Tuesday morning Glenn McConnell the stuff reporter wrote an article about this shock horror ministers of the government are engaging and being interviewed by Reality Check Radio. It's got some sort of grand conspiracy. What are your thoughts on his little episode and rant? Well look, my attention was directed towards it. It must be a slow news day. It ought not to be a matter of news weirdness when a politician talks to a whole host of media orientated athletes. I mean people are consuming their information in such different ways today but there's a narrative that's alive and well and kicking and it's driven in many respects by wokeism and I'll give you one small example. The notion that my colleague Casey Costello should hold back on prosecuting the legislation through the house to overturn those awkward and totally unnecessary and quite destructive changes to smoking law driven by the Labour Party over the last couple of years and that should be put on the Tai Ho until such time the Waitangi Tribunal feasts at the trough of judicial activism. Now I was really disappointed that that narrative has been perpetuated by the media, the Waitangi Tribunal is a recommendatory body and we had a mandate given to us by the electorate to change smoking laws. Laws I might say have never ever actually been implemented. So that's a tiny example where we feel that there are no shortage of people trying to lecture what we conceive to be our democratic mandate to get certain things changed and underway. It's like the mainstream media, I mean they were bleeding to the politicians a couple of weeks ago about how dreadful it is that they've got competition and it's awful and please can you regulate the space and tilt the playing field in their favour. Again that's another piece of Labour legislation that Willie Jackson who should know better about media matters has been pushing through. Yeah, yeah, yeah and I saw that they were at the select committee. Well look, in terms of the overarching approach to New Zealand first, no one has articulated it more lucidly than Winston Peters in terms of the ups and downs and the disappointments and the frustrations that we've had during the three year period that we were banished from Parliament and the scant coverage that our party received from so said the Fourth Estate. Particularly Stuff and Glenn McConnell. He seems to have a running battle with Winston. I'm not sure he's ever going to win that battle with Winston. Winston's far too cunning to do that. Yeah, over the years I've watched heaps of genoes square up against Winston and obviously my loyalty is with my leader and he knows how to deal with the different verbal sword plays that emerge from time to time when he's dealing with the media. The thrust though seems to be from Glenn McConnell's article is how dare ministers speak to other media other than us. It's rather arrogant of a moment. Reality check radio is grateful to Stuff for promoting the station and that ministers come on like yourself and talk to us. So I thought David Seymour's comment about he talks to anybody, even niche players like Stuff was hilarious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I've learned to my cost, mate. If you get to hung up on the personality of the geno, then that becomes somewhat obsessive. I just I've just shrugged my shoulders. It is what it is. And as you know, I've come off second best in various blows with people in the Fourth Estate, but the market and the landscape is an ordinately different than when I first washed up in politics in 2005. But then as you know, mate, I was already active as the chairman of the Māori Fisheries Commission, along with Satipine O'Regan have our big blows way back then. So no, no, I'll leave the young fella to his own peregrinations. And I know that Angatira Winston Peters is more than capable of looking after himself. Exactly. That is touching on that smoking legislation. They seem to be saying that it's harmful to marry that you've changed the legislation. The logical extension of that, the absurd logical extension is that of that, because I understand a couple of them are thinking of taking the case to the Waitangi Tribunal about it, about the detrimental effects of smoking on Māori, is that they're almost wanting you to say, well, if you're Māori, no cigarettes for you. Yeah, look, this thing gathered a lot of steam and momentum in the days of Tātianatūdia. And I think you'll find that there probably already is an action that's been advanced to the Waitangi Tribunal. But we can't overlook the fact that Māori smoking rates have dropped markedly in the more recent period of our history. And there are some good things that did flow from helping people beat the habit. But at the end of the day, there's a thing called human agency as well. And I just don't think that you can ever strip Māori, Pākehā, Asian, Black, Blue, Brindle, whatever group you want to focus on, mate. There's a thing called free will, and that goes right back to the stories about humanity in the Bible. And there's no way our party is ever going to agree with some sort of blanket regulation. We make, if you have Māori deceit, you make smoking illegal. Anyway, these rules that we're changing, it would have led for the gangs being in control of the cigarette industry in here. Well, totally. I mean, you've got a situation now, you know, laughably, where tobacco is actually more expensive than cannabis. Oh, right. OK. You know, and so you're always saying to the gangs, hey, guys, transition out of cannabis and into tobacco. You know, and, you know, I remember giving a presentation to a select committee back in Hone Harrow, where his day, he actually threatened to thump me at the select committee meeting. It was held at Alexandra Park. And I was talking about back then the numbers of smokers that we had. And we'd had 10 years of a huge amount of money spent on smoking cessation programs. And I asked the committee, how many smokers were there 10 years ago? And how many were there now? And the answer was almost exactly the same within rounding figures. And I said, well, why have we spent all that money? Well, what has it achieved? Right. And I said, you're running the risk of heading down the path of Bhutan, which increased taxation on cigarettes to such an extent that it became very, very lucrative to import black market tobacco. And it leapt out of control. And, you know, we're seeing that now in New Zealand, where the taxes are so extreme on tobacco products that it's it's worth your while to try and slip a few containers through some of the less renowned ports in New Zealand and import, you know, duty free, essentially, tax evasion of cigarettes. And then they sell them to the poorest people in New Zealand. You know, on the question of the gangs, obviously, our colleague, the Minister of Police is bringing forward a bill to make it illegal for the public exposure of gang patches. And part of it, I presume, is based on the West Australian experience. It's going to take a while for that type of regime to bed in. And there were some predictable, combustible responses from a portakey where one bloke about my age threatened it would lead to war, which is an absolute overreaction and nonsense. But the in areas where we hail from, not very far from Kaikohe and my mum lives in Awanui, not far from Kaitaia. The real problem we're dealing with is that there is a subculture in each of the generations, and it's getting harder and more and transagent to break into. That is at one level, very anti-community, anti-social, but it's doing no end of harm to both the children and the wives of that gang subculture group. So that's the reason why New Zealand First has always been an enthusiast for policies of this nature. Now, we know that the majority of the people can come into the world of light and we need some disruptiveness. And I just wonder if too many of the gang related people got let out of prison or given an option to serve their sentence in the community. And they've continued to, I don't know, mobilise, recruit because gang members membership has gone up. It's not exclusively in my area in the Ngāpuhi and Nui Tuanui area. It's amongst the PI community and other elements. And I'm sure that within the ethnic communities, there's gang formation as well. But we're solidly behind what the Minister of Police is rolling out and in trying to do there, right? But you've got to try and do something. I mean, the previous government seemed to have a policy of cuddling up to particularly the mongrel mob. But you can see the impact of this crime in society because even at Waitangi Day, amongst members of the various Haka parties that were performing, there was a plethora of ankle bracelets and it's a tragedy. You know, there's all these people that are out there with ankle bracelets on for committing crimes. OK, they're participating in cultural activities and those sorts of things. But they've still got this bracelet on their ankle that everyone can see. It's also an embarrassment, really, that we've got this situation. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's disproportionately prevalent in profits of the community that I'm in regular contact with. I would say, you know, what does a community do? You really want to get people to accept their consequences for your actions, but come back into the world of light. That's an agency discussion that we were having earlier, isn't it? There's no way of getting away from that. And at the end of the day, it's not only by the sweat of thy brow, but it's free will as well. So look, the parties had a hard line in that regard. Derek Ball, currently the manager of the leaders office. He was previously an MP. He drove that rode that horse really hard. And in an earlier time, Winston and I came up with various policies to get these men with their coming out of prison straight into work. And in vast majority of the cases, it worked. But there's always going to be a small element that are backsliders. And we need to ensure that the consequence of those actions visited upon them, which is not pleasant for their kids or wives. But it's very corrosive for the broader community, unless we draw the line and say, sorry, bro, you go over that line, you're off to the Hinaki. And Hinaki, by the way, is the Maori word for jail, but it's also the word for the eel pot. The eel goes in, but the eel never gets out until the door is open. See, that's the thing is that most people in society actually believe that you commit a crime, you should go to prison. And it's not about rehabilitation. It's about removing them from society. And particularly violent criminals. But petty crime leads to other crimes over and over. And the evidence is clear there. I'll tell you a challenge that we've got going up more spots. I mean, it's the state highway. Is how long it takes in New Zealand to damn well get things done. That's terrible. I mean, it's it's an indictment. And we meant to, well, we are First World Nation and long may that prevail. But in order for that status to continue to be bequeathed by my generation to another generation or our generation to future generations, we need to be raising our economic surplus at each and every step of the journey. And I'm horrified how the people that are dominating the climate change agenda seem to have disconnected their demands for reform from the capacity of the economy to bear the costs of reform. Now, I don't want to sound too pointy-headed, but if you continue to gut the $85 billion worth of export revenue that comes from predominantly our commodities in our primary industry, where's the income going to come from? And how come we don't even see in many cases or hear in many cases the business leadership themselves pointing out that there's a cost to imbibing the, you know, the green climate change woke Kool-Aid if you haven't got an economic plan as to how you're going to meet the costs of this transition. So I tend to be pretty dismissive of a lot of our business leaders who start to wobble on in that regard when they themselves privately know that a business and a firm in an economy can only change at a certain pace or you're going to destroy the capacity of the economy to yield and generate the revenue that the society needs to afford first world accoutrements. Yeah, and then there's the allegations that are most frequently hurled at people like yourself in New Zealand first. And I see Bryce Edwards is on a bandwagon again, as are most of the media talking about what they call dark money in politics, third party advertising during elections and things like that. And the words they use make it sound like it's subversive and awful. And then all the examples they use tend to be business related lobbying that's going on. But forget that the CTU, for example, was the third largest third party lobbyist or advertiser in the last election. It's again, I think you never hear these discussions when there's a Labour government in. But as soon as you get a centre right government in, that's challenging wokeism and all these things. They all of a sudden say, oh, it's the dark money of the Atlas Network or it's the dark money of the cigarette big tobacco, the dark money of big food. And they go on and on and on about dark money. It's not really an issue, is it? Yeah, well, I mean, I attracted about ninety five odd thousand dollars in donations, which all of which were disclosed. And much of which, the vast majority of which got used in order to meet the costs associated with our party, because an individual candidate can only spend something between twenty seven and thirty K, some bigger like. But that type of coverage causes people to lose courage and want to donate to campaigns or donate to individuals. And it doesn't. And if you don't come from stupendous wealth, it doesn't make it very difficult to run and sustain the costs of a campaign. So, I mean, I'm incredibly respectful of the people who have shown generosity to have met the costs associated with us coming back into power. Our party will never agree with the green approach, which is to get the taxpayers to pay for the costs of political parties running campaigns. That will cause our party and other parties to be to fall under the predatory gaze of the bureaucracy. And that's something we just knew we were going to do. So we are reduced to being innovative and identifying people or interests who are willing to back the narrative of our party, all of which is all of which is legal, right? And that needs to be constantly reinforced. And that's the thing. It is legal. The systems have been set up and passed by MPs. And the system is behaving as it was intended to. We've got political disclosure. We've got donations that are disclosed. We've got all of these sorts of things happening. I remember having a discussion with Mike Williams, the former president of the Labour Party, the man who spent a whole lot of money going over to Australia to dig dirt on John Key with the HV, telling me that he was lobbying as hard and as loud as he could for taxpayer funding of political parties, because then he didn't have to go and do fundraising. And I thought, well, that says it all. Oh, yeah. Well, there, I mean, more recently, I think it's James. But I mean, the Green Party have suffered a few blows. And I mean, obviously, it's a tragic event with the official columns. The festival himself, however, never really made his mark in parliament. He made his mark up in the community on the sidewalks and in the hard to enter places in South Auckland and all power to his arm. But that aside, there have been some big changes in the Green Party and Labour's got a hell of a challenge in front of us because it will bleed some boat as Chloe weaves her magic amongst a younger generation. But more importantly, Labour and it's not my it's not my wish that they succeed, but they've got to redefine why they exist. What's the purpose of their political movement? And they've long since departed from the interests of blue collar working families and much of the support that Winston attracted in our recent campaign. It wasn't just from my generation up and I'm born in 1959 to do the math yourself, but it was also from working families who feel that they no longer have a voice because their voices are not refined by work politics, identity politics. They just don't live like that and they don't have that level of it's a type of political sophistication. If you work in that, if you live in that sort of glitterati world, they're just bulk standard Kiwis getting on with life and want to make sure that someone's going to address the day to day burdens that they grind away with trying to live with. It's the problem, isn't it, with the Labour Party in particular, but also the Green Party is they've become a liberal elite driven by this ESG. Everyone, every little microcosm of society has to be looked after. We've got rainbow ticks, we've got all this sort of nonsense. I always go back to when I was running a bit of a roading crew in the old Manukau City and we had a new guy came in. He was a pakea, the other three guys that were working in the roading crew were Maori and he was being a little bit untoward. And the boss of the of the roading gang came up to me, says, mate, this is getting untenable. What should we do about it? And I said, well, how do you want to sort it out? He says, I want to give them the end of the pick handle. I said, well, maybe the pick handle is probably not appropriate. But how about you sorted out out on the job today and then give me a report back? Well, it was sorted out at the back of the truck in time on and fashion between blokes. And that was the end of the problem these days. You know, you'd have all sorts of reports that had to be filled in and health and safety stuff and just be ridiculous. And we've kind of got moved away from all of that robust Kiwi way of dealing with things and gone to this woke, as you say, wokeism method of dealing with things, which doesn't actually solve any problems. Yep. Well, on the question of moving on and retaining my earthy qualities, I've got to check out, buddy. No, that's right. It was always going to be a sort of a road ahead into my office and said, Matua Shane, you're running late. So we'll have a court or again in the near future and Kia kaha to all your listeners and great to engage. See you later. Thank you for your time, Shane. All right, kakete. Told you there'd be some zingers. Shane Jones sure isn't backing down and neither is Winston Peters in their war on woke and dodgy media. Shane's promised to check in regularly, if only to annoy Glenn McConnell at stuff. Tell me your thoughts on what Shane had to say by emailing inbox at realitycheck.radio or text to 2057. Thank you for tuning into RCR, Reality Check Radio. If you like what you're listening to or dislike what you're listening to, either way, we want to hear from you. Get in touch with us now. You can text us with your message to 2057. 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