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This Week’s Issue

Looking back on Community and the Helen Clark Foundation

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Written by

Malcolm Campbell

Published on

June 17, 2025

You cannot expect the people who created the problem to solve the problem.

One Issue of the Informer carried a reference to Communities in general and asked the leading question ‘Are communities in New Zealand Fraying?’ Asking the question was former Prime Minister Helen Clark with economist Shamubeel Eaqub and associate Rosie Collins and all of this under the mantle of the ‘Helen Clark Foundation’.

Digressing a little, Auckland University Professor, Natasha Hamilton–Hart making a submission on the notorious Waitangi Bill, made a remark which really hit home when she said New Zealand had vastly changed direction in 1980. This remark is totally correct; it signalled the virtual end of ‘private enterprise’ when successive governments ushered in ‘centralised planning.’

The Muldoon Government began the process with a revamped Town and Country Planning Act in 1980 an Act that only lasted nine years, before replacement, effectively with the even more prescriptive RMA. Geoffrey Palmer brought the RMA forward. However, the Labour Government was defeated and National was elected.

Simon Upton ushered the RMA through Parliament, the change of government having no effect on the direction successive governments were steering New Zealanders and the economy. For example, prior to 1980 if you wished to build a home, you bought a section and contacted a builder. That simple!

Once the RMA was cemented into place, your property now became the plaything of council staff, consultants, lawyers and even the Environment Court. Just look at the circus taking place over New Chums Beach. Now prior to 1980, we did have Communities.

In the district where I spent my younger year’s, people worked together. If the local hall needed repairs, locals did the repairs. They laid down tennis courts, cut unwanted trees in the school grounds. In fact, whatever needed doing, the ‘community’ did it. Working together, where pay or rewards were not even thought of, brought people together, created friendships.

Where heavy work was involved, the menfolk pitched in often with their own equipment, the women folk with refreshments (just stating fact, no gender aspersions) Effectively, successive governments have destroyed ‘Communities’. As thousands of people have discovered, nothing is possible now without Council permission, so there is no place for any Community to put their heads together and proceed with a popular project, not even filling a hole in the foreshore at Whitianga.

They are simply not permitted to do so. It is that simple. The Helen Clark Foundation is part of the parliamentary parties that engineered the collapse of the communities. Let’s leave the last words to Albert Einstein, ‘You cannot expect the people who created the problem to solve the problem.’