Canary in the Mine

The following extract is from one of the best articles on the question of the new Tolerance that I have read: "Tolerance once meant an attitude of patience and forbearance toward those who failed to live up to social ideals; the new Tolerance means denying the existence of such ideals. Nobody once supposed that tolerance could replace primary virtues such as honesty, fidelity and courage. But exposed to the cultural poisons of recent decades, tolerance has now mutated into something troublingly different. It is now not only one of the primary virtues; it is the primary virtue, the possession of which excuses man, woman and child from the cultivation of any other virtue. This new Tolerance is positively deceptive. It is deceptive in that it elides the difference between tolerance and acceptance, deceptive in that it provides rhetorical cover for the ideological ambitions of those who advance it, deceptive in that it justifies complete intolerance towards any who would frustrate those ambitions, and deceptive in that it hides the intolerably high costs it imposes on society."

Is this what we might see in the National tax cut plan? Tax expert John Shewan has a plan costing just under $2 billion to cut taxes - without needing massive Government spending cuts. The PricewaterhouseCoopers tax partner and New Zealand chairman says savings can still be made by reviewing the bureaucracy. His plan is to cut the 39c personal rate, the 33c personal rate and the 33c company rate all back to 30c. He argues that even after allowing about $2 billion for the Superannuation Fund to partly pre-fund future retirement costs, there is scope for between $1.5 and $2 billion in tax cuts. A 1 per cent rise in economic growth would see $410 million extra tax collected, he says. And it is growth - not redistribution of existing income - that provides better health, education and other services. Finance Minister Michael Cullen says the problem with any across-the-board tax cuts is they deliver the biggest gains to those on the highest incomes. Shewan's tax cut, for example, would deliver just $4 a week to someone on $45,000 but $82 a week to someone on $100,000. Shewan points out that someone on $100,000 pays two or three times the tax of someone on $60,000. So although it looks like people on lower incomes would benefit little from the package, he says it is not as inequitable as it looks as those at the top of the income scale are paying most of the tax.

Parliament will have the opportunity to prove that it believes in marriage when it debates Larry Baldock's private member's bill next Wednesday. Baldock wants the Marriage Act amended to state explicitly that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. The question first arose back in 1997, when three same-sex couples went to the Court of Appeal to have the right to marry, but were turned down. The five judges said man-woman marriage was implicit in the Act, and based on very old common law principles. But the Civil Union debate has shown that this principle may not hold for much longer, and Baldock wants it codified in the law. He's met a negative response from Labour and the Greens, even though David Benson-Pope (the minister who piloted the Civil Union Bill through Parliament) said that marriage should only be between a man and woman. If Labour really believe what they say, they should have no problem supporting the Bill. I wonder, though, whether they are secretly hoping that judges will do what the MPs would like to see happen but dare not say openly.

Both the marriage and divorce rates in the US are dropping while the number of unwed couples living together is rising, according to an annual study of marriage released this week.

Three quarters of all family breakdowns affecting young children now involve unmarried parents, new UK research suggests. The findings indicate that family breakdown is no longer driven by divorce, but by the collapse of unmarried partnerships. An estimated 88,000 children aged under 5 were affected by the separation of their unmarried parents in 2003, compared with about 31,000 children under 5 whose married parents divorced, the research concludes. According to the 2001 census, 59 per cent of households with children are married, 11 per cent are co-habiting and 22 per cent lone parent families.

When Karin Agness, a college senior at the University of Virginia, grew tired of feminist propaganda, she founded the Network of Enlightened Women (N.E.W.) to foster education and leadership and advance conservative principles among university women. “Prior to founding the group, I couldn’t find any other collegiate conservative women’s organizations in existence,” Agness said. “I think it’s important for women to have a network of other like-minded women. I believe that women have to stand up and fight feminism because it is much more effective and persuasive if women are the ones who do it.”

This is the thinking that lost England the Empire. The traditional singing of Land of Hope and Glory may be dropped from a Remembrance Day festival because of its “political connotations”. The patriotic song with its rousing tune by Elgar has long been a staple of concerts and festivals, but councillors in Wolverhampton will today debate whether Rod Stewart’s song Sailing might not be more appropriate and appeal to a younger audience "with memories of more recent wars such as the Falklands." [Rod Stewart replacing Elgar!!! Abandon ship.]

After enduring some frightening banality and sloganeering at a pre-election meeting of MPs last night, I was agonising over how the message of what is going on could be got out to a wider audience. My wife reminded me of the following wonderful song by Tom Jones:

The young new mexican puppeteer
He saw the people all lived in fear
He thought that maybe they’d listen to
A puppet telling them what to do

You know he got some string and he got some wood
He did some carving and he was good
And folks came running so they could hear
The young new mexican puppeteer

First he carved out young Abe Lincoln
Abe will teach ’em civil rights
Then a king named Martin Luther
So they’d recall his peaceful fight

Old Mark Twain, his wit and wisdom
Will surely show them life is fun
But he smiled with satisfaction
When the prince of peace was done

Tail-out: It was a small, red paper clip with about 14 hours of use. Auckland teenager Rhys White put it up for sale on New Zealand's TradeMe Internet auction site during "a boring day at work" - and sold it for $173.
Reminds me of a touching joke circulated my kids: "When I was young we couldn't afford a pet. All I had was Silver Beauty, my beloved paper clip."