I would like at first to state my support for Steve Baron's Better Democracy campaign for legally binding referendums. The government of New Zealand, in stonewalling the issue of the 87% vote against the "anti-smacking" law is sending a clear message to the citizens of this country that they are not prepared to have the public at large dictate to the political class how they run the country.
The most important thing for them is to demonstrate to their true masters, the global financial community, that they have the public at large on a tight leash and are able to govern without deference to public opinion. Of course the (Trans-) National (Corporation) Party and their far-right allies would dearly love to dump this piece of limp liberal social engineering in order to show faith with their rank-and-file supporters, but there is no capital to be gained by scoring brownie points over the Labour (Bureaucracy) Party this far away from an election and it is far more important to maintain the stability of the political class as a whole so they can carry on gorging at the trough of their taxpayer funded expense accounts whilst doing the bidding of their unelected overlords at the World Trade Organisation, World Bank and United Nations.
When Corporate interests and the Bureaucratic interests work together in this way to subvert the will of the people, this is the very definition of the word FASCISM.
