When a Maori academic predicted there would be ‘civil war’ if the Government’s seabed and foreshore legislation was passed, a book idea was born.

Politically, racially, economically and morally the nation has found itself divided by a variety of issues – Maori property rights, the Treaty ‘industry’, the Maori Party, prostitution reform, civil unions and ‘gay marriage’, foreign ownership and immigration, GE versus organics, environmental protection versus economic growth . . .

Here we test the various doomsday scenarios put forward by vested interests: Will there be bloodshed on the beaches? Is the family under threat from permissiveness and the ‘gay agenda’? Is New Zealand now little more than a foreign owned and controlled lifestyle block in the South Pacific? In short, which way are we heading – up or down?

Provocative, lively, perceptive and filled with the voices of thinking New Zealanders pondering the biggest question of all: who are we?

See "http://www.penguin.co.nz/nf/Book/BookDispl..."