How sad, one-eyed and diminished the Maori people now look, thanks to the thoughtless peasant some of them elected. Picture from Dreamstime.com

What has become of this country? We must live in a very bad State, when the Race Relations Commissioner can award certificates to schoolchildren for being “dignified” if a white man offers them some painful adult advice about Maori social problems, yet refuses to act when a Maori Party MP presents disgustingly racist insults to white people.

Had a National Party member described our brown brothers as motherfuckers, Prime Minister John Key, Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres and every minority group under the sun would have been down like a ton of pricks.

But when the unrepentant racist Harawira says virtually the same thing, John Key says meekly that there was just “a tinge of racism” about his comments, and that Harawira is a sideshow from which we should move on. Wrong. Harawira is a bigoted and dangerous clown who runs the biggest show of smoke and mirrors in town. It is a show that nobody wants to confront, let alone dispel, but eventually, we will have to defeat him and his fellow pretenders.

Thankfully, colour-blind John Key doesn’t mix the paint at Resene, or there would be a queue of angry decorators all the way down the street.

Harawira apologises for his obscenities, but not his sentiment. Extremist Maori everywhere have been rushing about, making shrill excuses for the inexcusable Harawira, his half-baked apology and his primitive perception of reality.

Among the worst of them have been former Labour MP Dover Samuels (he of the weak bladder in a hotel corridor), Mana Magazine editor Derek Fox (a man who cannot conceal his disrespect for white folks and has proved to be unelectable by his own people) and Hone’s dishonourable co-member Tariana Turia, who said it would not be fair to comment. Fairness has not previously prevented Turia from opining.

The tragedy is, people like Hone Harawira have only one concept of culture. Anything other than their own is all Greek to them. Picture by Dreamstime.com

Worst of all was Hone’s mother, who stood by her son and said on Radio New Zealand that what he said was perfectly fair and historically accurate, particularly since he had only used the language of the dominant Pakeha. When it comes to errant youngsters, many have long suspected that bad parents are to blame.

There has also been much talk of 19th century colonial atrocities, as if the perpetrators’ descendants (no, in fact, anyone of a white complexion in this country today) must be held eternally responsible and therefore unable to ever fully repay.

The discredited Joris Debris, who says these outrageous comments are merely a free expression of speech (unlike those of Wanganui Mayor Michael Laws), might like to refer to the Act that gave him legitimacy and ask again if what Hone Harakiri said was a breach of it. I am reading the Act properly for the first time, and it appears there may be case against them both.

Under the Act, an offence is committed by a person or body in the performance of any public function, power, or duty conferred or imposed on that person or body by or pursuant to law. That’s pretty clear. Harawira is such a person, commenting crudely and breathtakingly on something that happened to him because of the alleged pursuit (or avoidance) of his job as an elected MP.

For the purposes of this Act, the prohibited grounds of discrimination include sex, which includes pregnancy and childbirth, colour, race, and ethnic or national origins, which includes nationality or citizenship. Harawira may, within a short knee-jerk email, have criminally offended more than one group of victims.

Apart from courteously accepting his qualified apology, all New Zealanders are entitled to ask Harawira this simple question, and demand an answer:

Just exactly what is it that you and “your people” want from us raping bullshitters, Hone?

There are little old white ladies in this country who are convinced that you wish to gain control of the foreshore and seabed, and then push all the Pakeha into the Pacific Ocean.

If the powers-that-be are unwilling or incapable of shutting the ugly mouth of this divisive and incompetent rabble-rouser, it may still be possible to bring a private prosecution against him. The Human Rights Act runs to 150 tedious pages. When we get to the end of it, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, it’s easier to make a complaint than you might think. Just click here:

http://www.hrc.co.nz/home/hrc/enquiriescomplaints/onlinecomplaintsform.php

Eric King-Turner made headlines, but sadly had not nearly enough tight lines on the riverbank

Let us offer up a prayer for the soul of New Zealand’s oldest migrant, 104-year-old Eric King-Turner, a refined English gentleman who died in Nelson without having made use of his new season’s fishing licence but, during his brief time in New Zealand, gave thanks for being here. Then, let us place a thousand curses upon our inhuman, myopic Immigration officials, who have ordered a 28-year-old foreign student to leave Nelson and fly 19,000 kilometres to France – just because she is pregnant.

Mr King-Turner, a retired Royal Navy dental surgeon (who would have probably admitted to a lot more, had he not been so reticent), was 102 when he travelled 12,000 miles in old money to New Zealand, from Titchfield in southern England, with his New Zealand-born wife, Doris, who is a sprightly 90. He suffered a stroke at home in Mapua, and died in Nelson Hospital on November 1.

No, not New Zealand Immigration, but the horribly inverted Immigration New Zealand, where unrefined Jobsworths push pens and buttons... very, very slowly, and often in the wrong direction

Virginie Breuzard will be forced to return to her homeland within three weeks, have her baby, and then be “permitted” to fly 19,000 km back to Nelson to finish her aromatherapy course. No one should be surprised if she declines this offer, because there is a crude and uncivilised stench wafting around her treatment. Ms Breuzard will be forgiven for advising her refined countrymen and women to avoid hostile New Zealand, whose people view pregnant foreigners as repugnant, and for perhaps recommending that the French not allow tax-funded, vulgar Maori such as Hone and Hilda Harawira into Paris, lest they return to NZ with the shock news that The Da Vinci Code “put The Louvre on the map”, and that Europe, like New Zealand, is dominated by white, rapist, bullshitting mother******rs… “but you’d be a fool to miss it, eh”?

The robots at Immigration told Ms Breuzard (who has insurance covering the costs of her confinement) that she did not meet their health requirements.

This was not because she is unwell.

It was because our health service and our Immigration officials are sick.

Pregnant visitors to New Zealand are not considered to have an acceptable standard of health, “as it is likely you will impose significant costs and demands on New Zealand’s health services”. It’s not as if Ms Breuzard was angling for the baby’s NZ citizenship – that orifice was closed long ago.

Virginie says she was always up-front about being pregnant, and was surprised to be indirectly blamed for threatening undue strain on “regional shortages of antenatal care in New Zealand.” If Virginie had been a virgin, fallen off a bike and broken her ankle, ACC and the hospital would have sorted that out, no questions asked. NZ Immigration welcomes uninsured alien lesbians, too, and constantly trumpets how New Zealand is a great country for children. (But only if your Mum’s not a healthy young heterosexual Frog.)

Emigration Minister Jonathan Coleman. An alien in the background appears to be sending a negative message

So here is a guest in our country, paying her own way for education and insurance, being unceremoniously shoved onto an airliner – along with, no doubt, a few young New Zealanders who cannot afford to repay their student loans, can’t get a job and are running away to more prosperous pastures where (if they have any sense) they will stay and not pay.

Heroic old Eric, of course, never posed any challenges to “regional shortages of geriatric care”, because he obviously had enough money, a New Zealand-born spouse, and the good manners to pass away quickly without imposing further budgetary pressure on his already grief-stricken District Health Board. He also provided the heartless bastards at Immigration with lots of positive publicity, while he lasted.

Not that the Poms have much to boast about, when it comes to accepting talented immigrants. It has taken them about 70 years to erect a temporary glass-fibre statue honouring our famous flyer Sir Keith Park, who saved London from the Luftwaffe, and probably Britain from a German invasion.

Virginie would be well advised to become extremely angry at her treatment by the Immigration Department, and develop the highest possible blood pressure within the next few days.

That condition is life-threatening. It is an automatic no-no for air travel during pregnancy.

The ultimate long-drop

National spent nine years as an almost unemployable Opposition. One year into “governing”, it turns out that their minds were blank all the time. After a shaky first few weeks, during which they seemed to recall little of Parliamentary procedure, National stumbled from greasy poles to wobbly logs – with the Dr Worth affair (still unexplained), the Paula Bennett outburst against defenceless beneficiaries, and several other pratfalls. Yet Key and Co still managed to remain more or less upright.

Today, the Government resembles a Russian airliner: a large number of rivets, flying in loose formation, with a cargo of MPs off to see the world at our expense.

With fewer than 750 days to go, the governing partners look like a bunch of dithering infants who cannot stop jollying just because they won one election in a decade. There is little sign of firm action. Instead, we have fudges, focus groups and task forces that should have been engaged by National in Opposition, years ago. And we see a Prime Minister with a rictus grin, mouthing embarrassing jokes written by unfunny Americans on a US talk show, then saying that his performance enhanced New Zealand tourism. If that is the apex of New Zealand diplomacy and holiday promotion, may God defend us.

John Key, now looking all at sea...

Then there was the ludicrous, over-publicised fiasco over Rugby World Cup TV rights, which Key admitted looked like another mistake. This unforced reaction was similar to his surprise at Bill English’s double Dipton expenses claims. Not a good look either, said Key, who is developing a reputation for massive understatement. Blundering Bill seems uncannily like his similarly charisma-free predecessor, Cullen, in that they are fond of quoting history but lack vision. Apart, of course, from the fact that English resorts to offering 50 reasons for pessimism. All the while, he is quietly clawing back the paltry tax cuts National had to deliver to get elected, and stealthily taking some more.

Nick Smith, Multi-Minister and Fall-Guy for All The Awkward Stuff, cannot understand why he should finally shut up and get out of politics. The rest of Key’s caucus (apart, perhaps, from the excited-yet-relaxed Justice Minister Judith Collins) is notable only for obscurity or obfuspeak.

Pre-election, John Key made much of visiting South Auckland, where he made grand statements about the underclass. He has done nothing about it. Poverty, crime, murder and child abuse run rampant. We witness disgusting events such as hordes of children watching an attack on an individual – not intervening, but instead videoing the incident on their mobile phones and then posting it on Facebook or Youtube.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/3017251/Seventy-watch-attack-on-girl

In law and order, there is no sign of radical reform. Justice is further delayed and denied because National has no idea how to modernise the system. A mild gesture is being made to victims. This “compensation” will be funded by a $50 levy on bewildered shoplifters and otherwise honest people caught driving carelessly or committing minor criminal offences. It will not be paid for by serious offenders.

Key’s decision to ignore the anti-smacking referendum result speaks volumes about politicians’ disdain of the electorate, and shows just how far we have moved towards universal lack of interest in democracy. Public apathy towards what amounts to a draconian invasion of privacy under proposed new legislation is further evidence that most New Zealanders are steadfastly asleep.

Nick Smith, a bad accident that just won't go away

In health, we see no improvement. Instead of cutting 21 district health boards to about a useful eight, National will make everything perfect by keeping them all and introducing a new level of bureaucracy. Key plans to combat the P epidemic by penalising everyone (in a slightly North Korean manner) with a ban on common cold remedies. Rather than enlist a task force of experts to abolish ACC, National struggles to maintain it by unfairly increasing levies and decreasing benefits.

In State waste, where we were promised a forensic examination of Labour’s bloated public services, only a few areas are being seriously looked at. National is as scared of the public service as Labour was keen to enlarge its support base of policy analysts and spin doctors.

English. If you can find a party offering more reasons to commit suicide, Bill will beat it by 15 percent

In environment, we have a fudge on emissions trading that will allow no one to breathe easier, and a thinly-veiled threat to move into hitherto semi-protected areas and “only find out” where exploitable treasures may lie. Labour sought to delay economic activity through the RMA (unless it involved an SOE that would blight your landscape with a wind factory), but National conspires to mine, undermine the public interest, ruin your neighbourhood and despoil our common heritage.

In education, there’s no sign of men returning to the classroom, because they are still too afraid of political correctness. Under National’s watch, school principals continue to refine their “mission statements” and indoctrinate (rather than teach) the kids. Education Minister Anne Tolley has done nothing to resolve the catastrophic student loans scheme ($300 million overdue for often useless courses, and a haemorrhage of students to foreign parts). National destroyed adult education courses at one stroke, saving $16 million – not quite enough to save the economy.

In transport, there is nothing but fog. Regions have suddenly been deprived of State roading funds and councils accuse the Government of starving them in favour of Auckland, where National must justify its super-council. Transport Minister Steven Joyce claims an extra 17% of funding is budgeted over three years for local projects. Those on the ground know he is hairpin-bending the truth. Having obscenely overpaid to buy back our national train set, thanks to one-track-minded Cullen, voters are still wondering what’s to be done with it – while passengers are left stranded on the platform or wander along railway lines when their clapped-out train breaks down.

In defence, we just might have sold the Skyhawk fighter squadron, after decades of wasting $100,000 a month on mothballs. The Government should have put the planes on TradeMe. As NATO seriously considers defeat in Afghanistan, Key sends offensive troops there and tells the Taliban where to find them. In foreign policy, Key cannot get an official meeting with Obama, but instead struts around, tut-tutting impotently about Fiji.

Rodney Hide: He appeared to prefer political suicide to ministerial martyrdom, then saw the sense of staying alive

Our electoral system may have been designed to permit maximum democracy on voting day. But – as anyone can see from all the above – MMP cannot serve a modern democratic nation when the time comes to govern. Nowhere else could you imagine someone like the discredited Winston Peters leading a resuscitated Alzheimers’ First Party back towards a trough that’s being greedily scoffed by electoral nonentities such as Hone Harawira, Jim Anderton and Peter Dunne.

As for the partners, Pita Sharples has played a shrewd game. His major achievement has been in buttoning co-leader Tariana Turia’s lip, but he couldn’t control the loose cannon Hone Harawira, a thick, foul-mouthed and blatant racist who single-handedly illustrates why he and Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres should be sacked immediately, Maori seats should be abolished and race-based parties banned. ACT’s Rodney Hide got “carried away” in every sense of the two words, and exploited a perfectly legal travel expenses system that he once disapproved of. Having lost at least half of his credibility in the blink of an eye, Hide regained his senses and repaid taxpayers for his globe-trotting holidays. For this, Rodney deserves credit.

MMP is solely responsible for this walking disaster. The Maori Party's Hone Harawira, who sent an email about his and partner Hilda's misguided travels, saying: Do you believe that white man bullshit, too, do you? White motherfuckers have been raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries and all of a sudden you want me to play along with their puritanical bullshit.

As for Labour, it’s clear that Helen Clark and her acolytes had no eye on tomorrow, other than promoting their personal futures. Dismasted, rudderless and skippered by a well-meaning bore, Labour is becalmed and reduced to conducting telephone opinion polls using false names.

The naïve Greens, who take a macro approach to global warming and a micro approach to child abuse, possums and bicycle helmets, thankfully consigned themselves to the political desert. Long may they remain there.

Unless Key can get a grip and produce a bold plan, he’ll be dimly recalled as a got-rich-quick populist who didn’t have much above a fixed grin.

He should remember that National did not win the last election.

An idea-free Labour lost it.

In contrast to those insufferable happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.

While cheerfulness fosters creativity, gloominess breeds attentiveness and careful thinking, Professor Joe Forgas told Australian Science Magazine.

The University of New South Wales researcher says a grumpy person can cope with more demanding situations than a happy one because of the way the brain “promotes information processing strategies”.

He asked volunteers to watch films and dwell on positive or negative events in their life, in a plan designed to put them in either a good or bad mood. Then he asked them to deal with a series of tasks, including judging the truth of urban myths and providing eyewitness accounts of events.

Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly – they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators. (There you go. We were right all the time. How many years have we been moaning on about this, and nobody listened?)

Chin-down, Victor... with a bit of luck, things could get even worse

Professor Forgas said: “Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.” Almost without exception, the world’s greatest communicators have been terminally grumpy. Take Adolf Hitler, for example. The rare pictures of him smiling are truly the stuff of nightmares. Or President John Kennedy, whose affliction with shagger’s back rendered him permanently cross. However, the prof may be wrong in claiming that happy people are the most creative. Spike Milligan, funniest man of the 20th Century, was a manic depressive who took his grumpiness to the grave. His tombstone is inscribed: “I told you I was ill”.

The study also found (hooray!) that sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Forgas said showed that a “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style”. (So that’s where it comes from… 10% inspiration, and 90% exasperation.)

His earlier work shows the weather has a similar impact on us – wet, dreary days sharpen memory, while bright sunny spells make people forgetful.

All this is, of course, music to the ears of grumpies everywhere. The trouble is, it might put us in a good mood. And that would be very bad.

The Sunday Star Times: A complete waste of space

Down at the National Institute for Waffle and Astrology, chief executive John Morgan sits in a plush office counting his $130,000, 31% pay rise, while his under-employed colleagues at the cold front are rumoured to be moonlighting by writing horoscopes for the daily papers. This is not such a great departure from their proper “job”, and is necessary because (like all other State sector workers) they are enduring a pay freeze.

Mr Morgan’s salary has risen to more than $550,000, making him one of the highest paid New Zealand public servants on record. A NIWA spokesman confirmed that part of the rise was related to performance. Does this mean he managed to produce more weather forecasts with fewer staff? How is a productivity bonus calculated, in climatic terms?

It’s obviously not measured according to how much of the forecast you get right. They often can’t get it right for tomorrow and for New Zealand, surrounded by an enormous mass of water, the forecast is mostly guesswork.

So how can these people take themselves seriously by issuing a three-month forecast?

There being a never-ending supply of weather, the climate scientists at NIWA have a job for life. The tricky bit is putting it into some kind of order and, rather than take a risk, weather boffins have resorted to “averages”. The fact that any forecast covering more than one day, by definition, produces an average seems to have escaped them.

And so, in a long and inconsequential three-month forecast reported in the credulous Sunday Star Times, we learn that all the weather from November to January will be, well, average. “Outlook for Christmas: Fine time outdoors”, declared its daft headline. It’s hardly likely to be “Fine time indoors”, is it? That’s as fatuous as forecasting a sunny day – whoever heard of a sunny night?

NIWA fails to put its mouth where its money is; it states unequivocally that the probability rate of average or below average rainfall and temperatures in each of our regions is… 50% (or in other words, average). The 11 words that the Sunday Star Times took 11 repetitive paragraphs to say are: Throughout New Zealand, there is a 50% chance of average weather. Rather like the Woman’s Weekly horoscope, everything applies to everyone (Saturday is a good day to catch up with old friends / This week you will meet a blonde woman who may affect your life / You must look after your health) – or at best to one twelfth of the population.

Whatever they forecast, it'll all turn to custard on Christmas Day

Confusingly, over at MetService, the ridiculously titled Weather Ambassador Bob McDavitt says that our old friend El Nino has “paused”, and we can expect periods of enhanced westerly wind for the next few months. During these periods, NZ will be divided into three zones: western /southern zone with wetter than normal conditions, an eastern zone with warm dry conditions, and an in-between zone that will be near normal. If you can locate the in-between zone, go there for Christmas.

Of course, over a three-month period, you will always end up with temperatures near average, rainfall normal and probability rate of 50%. If you toss a coin, the probability rate of heads coming up is 50% and, remarkably, the probability rate of tails is also 50%.

You almost wish they’d fill the papers with even more ads.

As technology made it easier to move type, the lazier the press became. Picture by SAX at Dreamstime.com

Once upon a time, there was an ailing daily paper in England’s West Country. It had a circulation of 12,000, and hardly any journalists. A ruthless editor took over and – leaving a trail of inadequate hacks in his fearsome wake – built a strong team of journalists. Under his leadership, they raised the circulation to 80,000. His name was Eric Price, and he became a legend.

That was back in the late 1960s and 70s. Price’s achievement is unmatched, and I was privileged to be part of an inspired, perspiring crew that at some point also included playwright Tom Stoppard. In those days, the Western Daily Press and its sister the Evening Post were family-owned. The papers, not the council, were the focus of the community. Today, the WDP (now part of a large and faceless ‘group’) is a mere shadow. Its circulation has shrunk to 38,000, the staff has been slashed by 25 percent, regional editions have been stopped, advertising revenue has fallen off a cliff, and there is even talk of turning it into a weekly paper.

Susie Weldon, the journalists’ union convenor, says: “The only way to build a loyal readership is to give people lively, interesting, vibrant coverage of the stories and issues they are interested in. This should have been done a long time ago. My fear is it is too late and the papers are now in such a serious financial crisis that there is no money to invest in staff.”

Eric Price, now in his nineties but as feisty as ever, was interviewed a couple of weeks ago. He mildly advised youngsters to avoid a career in journalism and pointed out that these days, newspapers are controlled by accountants, not visionaries. Instead of being content with a profit of around six percent, they look for more like 30, he said, sniffily.

Does all this sound familiar?

Price’s opinion of the New Zealand press more than 40 years ago was that it was the world’s worst. He was right. To avoid an early grave, he must not be allowed to see a copy of anything produced here today. A recent Weekend Dominion Post contained 94 pages, of which more than 70 were occupied by low-grade advertising. The ad/ed ratio is now so grotesquely distorted that the DomPost’s $2.50 weekend cover price is nothing less than daylight robbery. This is not a newspaper. It is a thinly disguised catalogue.

And the standard of journalism is execrable. The paper – just like many others – is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, examples of poor news sense, and downright bad writing. Section A contained only 24 main news stories, and a lot of inadequately detailed “shorts”, presumably an attempt to portray widespread coverage of events. The lack of pride and journalistic staff is self-evident, and The Dominion Post, which swallowed the Evening Post and yet lost weight, long ago forgot the meaning of a scoop. There is virtually no investigative journalism in New Zealand newspapers, simply because they possess neither the budget nor the expertise to do what was once a newspaper’s main job. In New Zealand, newspapers do not say how many copies they print. They instead use an equation to claim “readership”, and the result is probably a work of fiction.

No doubt the accountants at Fairfax, which owns The Dominion Post and other now-shabby organs in New Zealand and Australia, also seek a 30 percent margin. This would account for the paucity of news and the massive volume of advertising. However, it’s clear that this is a flawed business model, because Fairfax lost $800 million last year, and shed about 1000 employees. Its smaller local papers are also in dire straits, having lost the small ads to Trade Me (for which it then overpaid a ridiculous $700 million).

They will wail and tear their raiments, and claim that it’s all the fault of the internet and the recession. But the situation was not that much different when Price took over the Western Daily Press in the early 1960s. Television was confidently predicted to destroy newspapers and Britain was hardly ever out of recession. Price concentrated on strongly campaigning over local issues, as well as providing the breaking news that beat Fleet Street to the local letterbox. He gave people a good read that they couldn’t get elsewhere.

The Evening Standard: Once 50p, now free. Once 250,000 copies, now 600,000

Today, particularly in New Zealand, the emphasis should be on editionalised local small-talk in detail, far more space for reader opinion, and truly in-depth analysis of national issues. New Zealand-based TV is utterly incapable of covering any of this, and you can get all the breaking headlines you need on the net or satellite television. The bean-counters at Fairfax might like to watch what’s happening at London’s 182-year-old Evening Standard, where its new Russian billionaire owner Alexander Lebedev (who bought the paper lock, stock and barrels of ink for £1), has dropped the price from 50p to nothing. The circulation will soar from 250,000 to 600,000, giving him some scope to increase the advertising rates, and claw back the loss of small and classified ads.

All this is more important that you might think. Quite apart from announcing who has been hatched, matched and dispatched, local papers play a unique and vital democratic role. At their best, they hold politicians to account, expose incompetence and wrongdoing, air important issues and give vent to public opinion – all of which our local radio and TV fail to do.

J B Priestley, who knew how important newspapers are to freedom

When the author J B Priestley visited the West Country in 1933, he wrote: “It is good that there should be a real independent provincial press. People ought to read national newspapers, but they also ought to read local newspapers too, for England, even now, is still a country of local government, local politics, strong local interests…”

That ought to ring bells very loudly around here. In the absence of a national press, the future of what little remains of our fragmented newspapers, now run by the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, is even more vital to New Zealanders.

Joris de Bres and his inky friends. Note the absence of the teacher who put them up to it. Cutting from The Dominion Post

So a group of Otaki schoolgirls has been “honoured” by Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres for “acting with dignity in dealing with criticism from Wanganui Mayor Michael Laws”. De Bres presented them with bits of paper, and said in broken English: “Your message to stand up for yourself is clear. You acted with real dignity and calm and quietly stood up for what you thought when dealing with such rubbish from Wanganui’s mayor.” The six girls from one small school, who allegedly wrote completely independently to Michael Laws, saying that they were angry at his opposition to inserting an H in Wanganui, received a short and sharp rebuff from Laws. He suggested that they might make better use of their time by addressing Maori problems such as ethnic child abuse and murder. Michael Laws had a valid point and he raised it in his usual robust manner.

No surprise then, that this response did not result in an invitation to debate. Instead, it received the traditional knee-jerk reaction from the oh-so-easily bruised Children of Victimhood: Ouch! We demand an apology!

Quite why six little kids in Otaki (population about 5000) should, all on their own and entirely separately, take such an initiative about Wanganui always seemed odd. Why were children in Levin (pop. about 19,000), Whoxton (pop. 4600), Whunterville, Taihape, Palmerston North (pop.72,000) or even Whanganui (pop. 40,000) not similarly energised?

The clues, of course, lay in the writing. All the letters bore stark similarities, and there were no spelling mistakes! Teacher must have had a role here, we suspected. This was a clear case of scoring a big publicity Hit, thanks to Miss.

The unwelcome intervention of Joris de Bres (who speaks as well as today’s newspaper reporters can write) has annoyingly distracted GoG from our soon-to-be-announced campaign to remove Hs from town names, starting with Upper and Lower Utt. Joris – an unelected, taxpayer-supported nuisance who has always strayed well beyond his brief – told the girls: “There has been a huge response from around the country for what you did. I hope the minister in charge of this issue will decide to correct the spelling.”

Wrong on both counts. Nobody has been deafened by any response to this obviously teacher-inspired outburst and the H-bombshell is an insoluble puzzle where no side can be proved correct. The wandering willies of our Geographic Board, who insist on exploring new paths and becoming hopelessly lost, are solely to blame for this futile conflict. In refusing to acknowledge these basic truths, and by positively discriminating in favour of his blurry vision of Maoridom, Joris de Bres exposes his underlying prejudice.

No doubt the girls are proud of their certificates. We hope they were printed in Te Reo Maori, which was first put into written form by some of the now-despised white trash generation that built Wanganui.

Joris de Bres (who is outstanding for saying almost nothing about ethnic child abuse and infanticide) belongs to a fossilised, race-obsessed mindset that is well past its throw-away date. Its adherents thrive on discord, in precisely the same way as does the National Front. The reasonable rest of us are trying to move on and rid ourselves of the clinging, victimhood-obsessed ideology that such people encourage. Foremost among the new thinkers are Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples and his close friend, the Prime Minister.

How a town’s name is spelt should be no business of the unbalanced Geographic Board, disgruntled tribespeople, schoolchildren, teachers or Joris de Bres, who has no mandate to interfere – but by so doing, provokes racial disharmony. The decision can only be made by the democratic vote of those who live there.

And this from Martin Purdy:

I recently recalled (to my horror) that about 30 years ago, students of German at high school in darkest Levin, and doubtless elsewhere in the country, were encouraged to write short essays to practise their developing knowledge of that language on subjects such as homosexuality and abortion. These were topics that probably would never have got a look-in in English class or Social Studies, but would have been considered “topical” on the home front by the German educational authorities.

Today, we see the occasional burst of letters in our national and local press from children, suspiciously all of about the same age and from the same schools, expressing their uninformed views on the repeal of Section 59 of the Crimes Act, for instance, or exercising their skills in Maori to tell the Mayor of a remote city how angry they are with him.

During a mercifully brief period spent before classes of teenagers in France, in the late 1980s, I once thought it would be interesting to canvas the views of the older kids on Glasnost, but was told that it was illegal to discuss politics of any kind in the classroom. Quite apart from the horrendous thought that the French might actually be doing something right where we are not, are we really prepared to continue to sit by and let our children be politicised by their teachers?

When she first shocked the nation – nay, the world – last year, by recommending we kill Rover and Fido and take a rabbit for a walk instead, GoG mocked Brenda and sent her to the doghouse:

http://www.gog.org.nz/2008/09/21/it-was-a-dogs-life-but-he-was-tasty-and-sustainable/

Two owners, taking trusty Pollution for a walk. The lazier Consumption takes up the rear

But now, she’s back like a homing dodo, with Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, co-authored with her partner Robert. They are non-pet-owning architects “who specialise in sustainable living.” Our recommendation: This book is a misnamed turkey and avoid any kennel designed by the Vales. Bob and Brenda say we should only keep pets we can eat, such as chickens or rabbits. Apart from the fact that some Asians and Pacific Islanders delight in dog dinners (thereby making them thoroughly sustainable), the Vales are being culturally insensitive, pet-hostile and are attempting to undermine our canine rights, along with encouraging us to kill the four-legged partners that make this nation great.

According to the Vales, a German Shepherd has a much larger environmental footprint than a big SUV. They say that about 1.1 hectares of land must be used to provide it with food, compared to 0.41 ha for the vehicle. A faithful goldfish, on the other hand, will lay to waste only 0.00034 hectares, which is probably only slightly larger than its bowl.

What’s the decimal point of all this? Should you buy a hybrid car and keep an Irish wolfhound in the boot? Can you persuade a goldfish to sit? Can you train a duck to fetch the dog you just shot? What is the mathematical relationship between an oil well and a paddock? Is this all the intelligent research we can expect, in the grim, Orwellian, unsustainable, pseudo-intellectual world inhabited by Brenda and Bob? Is the media really as stupid and gullible as it portrays itself by publicising this tosh?

Well, it’s all about the Vales, actually – and about selling their half-starved book, which is aimed at “the re-introduction of non-carnivorous pets into urban areas”. Someone should tell the Vales to get out in the fresh air more often. Rabbits and chickens are not popular in urban areas, and nor are omnivorous creatures such as pigs. And the Vale message ignores the countryside, which occupies the majority of our land space and where – guess what – there lives a huge number of exotic creatures, including possums, rats, mice, stoats, ferrets, weasels, sheep, goats, dogs, cats and cattle. They are all gobbling away, and many of them are emitting methane as if there were no tomorrow.

And there can be no tomorrow, if you swallow the tripe emitted by global warmists and Mr and Mrs Vale, whose Latin surname translates as “Goodbye”.

According to them, a medium-sized dog eats 164 kg of meat and 95 kg of cereals every year. This is not true. Our enormous Golden Retriever, Mac, eats precisely 114.4 kg of meat and less than 40 kg of cereals per year, plus all the rabbits and stray chooks he rarely catches, and the vet has told us to put him on a diet. The feral cats we are trying to kill have a local eco-footprint of 6 ha, and they are wreaking havoc on native birds.

A vegan elephant never forgets, unlike The Dominion Post, which forgot the rubbish it published about this in August 2008

It is hard to establish a dog-style relationship with a free-range, lifestyle chicken. She consumes a huge amount of processed waste along with valuable parts of the garden, while returning a negative profit in terms of eggs. Such birds are usually inedible at the end of their useful life. This country has more than enough rabbits, without the encouragement of introduced species such as the Vales. The nutritional value of a rabbit is in inverse proportion to the effort involved in killing, skinning and gutting it. The guts cause a problem for urban refuse collectors and the only known use for two correctly aligned rabbits is to teach children the facts of life, in the absence of responsible parents. We’d love to be flies on the Vales’ wall, when the folk next door bring home some smelly pigs to sustain the neighbourhood.

For Brenda and Bob, we recommend they get a dog and take it for a long walk in the countryside. Out here in the real world, we keep seven vegetarian sheep on four hectares. Some are pets with personalities. All will go to the slaughterhouse, and parts of them will return for us to eat. The rest will be turned into pet food, for Mac.

We didn’t need the Vales to spend so much time and money on measuring our dog’s eco-pawprints.

We clean them up every day, usually from the living room carpet.

A quick vox-pop on Radio New Zealand revealed that these children know zilch about World War 2, when it happened, or who Adolf Hitler was. One pompous little brat, clearly trapped in a time warp, said “we are living in the 20th Century, and we shouldn’t dwell on such things”.

And so the outrage that followed the mock neo-Nazi pranks of some Auckland Grammar (what a misnomer) School pupils in the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and 15 Lincoln University students who partied in Nazi uniforms, would appear to be misplaced. For once, these idiots can be forgiven, on the basis of their 100% pure pig ignorance.

Nazi priests salute Hitler. Gone, and now almost forgotten

Hitler could have done with the help of NZ teachers

This stuff is fertile territory for further research, reaching out until the end of time as we know it.

The Large Hadron Collider - much ado about virtually nothing

Or perhaps the Hadron headache shouldn’t have been handed to the folks at CERN in the first place – along with a budget of several billion euros to build this infernal machine, an amazing contraption that is supposed to go quietly ‘boom’ and produce a Higgs boson. Who is Higgs and what is a boson? No, don’t try to explain. It’s already getting dark.

The whole shebang may be doomed to failure anyway, according to two physicists who, one suspects, were not invited to the CERN party. Their mathematical calculations indicate that the collider’s problems are – wait for it – not a coincidence. [Cue spooky music]

Their theory is that the creation of the boson would ripple back through time to put a stop to whatever created it in the first place. Nothing new there, then. Anyone who has ever taken an interest in sci-fi will be familiar with this scenario.

The more immediate problem concerns those who live in the real world, on the French-Swiss border where the Great Collider is buried. If the machine spins into action this Northern winter, they could find themselves running short of electricity and ski-fields, and instead have lunch with their squillion-year-old ancestors who, researchers claim, could pick up a fag-end without bending down, run at 40 miles an hour, and leap tall buildings with one bound (if there had been any buildings about).

The locals would be well advised to buy some candles and a camp cooker, in case ‘back to the future’ becomes ‘fast forward to the past’. It’s the stuff of nightmares, and it just doesn’t bear thinking about.