New Year's Honours and Mateparae's speech

Government House has a youtube channel and is broadcasting the Governor-General's New Year address - watch it online. The New Year's Honours List has also been announced.

The Herald has listed the recipients and summarises the different awards at the bottom of the list. We are currently re-working our policy on the Honours system as it is not as simple as it might appear. Our main issue to date is that the constitutional role of the monarchy is divisive and that their participation in the New Years Honours politicises the event and works against opponents of the Monarchy. The use of titles is a seperate issue and while the titles Sir and Dame are clearly monarchist in origin they could still exist in a republic. Iceland retained their honours and continue to use Monarchist symbols and nomenclature. The awarding of a Queen's Service Order and Queen's Service Medal needs to be looked at as very obviously no republican is likely to accept or be considered for such awards. The Queen has nothing to do with choosing the recipients so renaming it the the Governor-General's award  until we become a republic would be far more appropriate.

At the moment the whole Honours process is very closed and we are not allowed to know who was nominated, who has been over-looked and who has been turned down. The whole criteria and process for making the awards is not explicit and is therefore at risk of abuse and the subject to far too much speculation. The closed system encourages accusations of nepotism and cronyism. We campaign on that issue because the closed shop limits our ability to monitor the awards more closely.