Monday 29 December 2014

Be careful what you ask for

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I was surprised at the speed in which the Masterton District Councillors dismissed the Local Government Commission’s (LGC) recommendation that Wairarapa join a Wellington Super City. It was apparently an acrimonious debate which saw those councillors preferring a Wairarapa Unitary Authority win the argument by six votes to four.

There were suggestions that the supporters of a Unitary Authority had not read the draft proposals thoroughly and that councillors should be careful not to paint themselves into a corner before having a dialogue with their community. I suspect however those opposing were sensing that there was no mood for a Super City amongst the rank and file who inhabit the town.

I wonder though if it has been carefully thought through. The LGC believe that Wairarapa can’t afford to go it alone and that stance has a good deal of credibility. Many people don’t realise that for the Wairarapa Council’s to combine and take over the role of the regional council would come at a huge cost for the 40,000 dear hearts and gentle people who live and love in the Wairarapa.

If the rest of the councils in the Wellington region go kicking and screaming into the proposed super city then in effect the Greater Wellington Regional Council ceases to exist and Wairarapa, out on a limb, will have to pay for its own flood protection measures, catchment and pest control, environmental issues and more importantly the trains that take many of our residents to and from the capital city.

This is the very same city where many find employment, go to for sports and entertainment events and occasionally shop in, but apparently don’t want to join.

I do have some sympathy for this view. I suspect one of the reasons we are wary of being part of a Super City is our belief that it is not working well for Auckland. In fact it may be working perfectly well in Auckland, but we’ll never know because to judge it against the old deeply divided City of Sails is almost impossible. And it doesn’t help that Mayor Len Brown is universally unpopular for reasons of his own doing and for some beyond his control.

Anyway the LGC say they have learnt from Auckland’s mistakes and their proposal identifies where Auckland went wrong and makes adjustments accordingly.

We are all working on the assumption that for the Wairarapa there are just two options. We either join the Super City or combine the three Wairarapa councils and form a unitary authority.

In fact there is a third option and that is the status quo.

We know the two Hutt’s, Upper and Lower, have no appetite for the Super City concept and neither does Kapiti. Only Porirua has signalled that it would happily buy into the deal, but that enthusiasm is coming from feisty mayor Nick Leggat, with little support I suspect from his constituents.

So the councillors of all these districts need only to get together and say they don’t want a bar of the proposal and it will be dead in the water.

Combining the three Wairarapa councils would be a nightmare. Parochialism is just as alive and well in the Wairarapa as it is in the Upper and Lower Hutt’s and other areas like for instance Tawa and Porirua.

Where, you might ask, would the main council office for the Wairarapa be? The Wairarapa’s fastest growing town Carterton has always believed it should be the centre of the Wairarapa and has thought so right from its formation when it planted itself midway between Greytown and Masterton back in the nineteenth century. So it’s not hard to imagine that they would want the centre of local government to be within their environs and have built a splendid new events centre and repaved and reformed Holloway Street to allow for that eventuality.

Conversely Greytown might consider that they are the centre of the region geographically and argue that their quaint village should play host to the combined entity. 

Masterton’s grand town hall, which has only just been branded so that photographs taken from the picturesque new town square can be recognised nationally and internationally, is starting to look redundant by the minute.


I’ve been trying to think of future use for it and I wonder if it might become a Charter School.

And the mayor? Well Masterton has the voter grunt, but given that Carterton and the South Wairarapa folk don’t hold much truck with their big brother to the north they could promote just one candidate and ensure that their representation is intact.

A council centre in Carterton and a mayor from Martinborough might be the answer to overcoming parochialism.

But Masterton has spent a small fortune on its mostly underground infrastructure of late and may be reluctant to have to help pay for the other Wairarapa towns upcoming works in this category. It can also work the other way. Masterton has spent $50 million on a new sewerage scheme, but still pours treated effluent into the Ruamahunga River. New CEO Pim Borren said recently that we should have spent $100 million and done the job properly.

Ratepayers contemplating those figures could cause our sewerage facilities to go into overdrive.

And then of course there would be a shortfall amounting to millions of dollars that the regional council would not be spending in our precincts. That council is still paying off our reasonably new train-sets; I wonder if these repayments will be passed over to us?

I was on the Greater Wellington Regional Council for three terms and was amazed and gratified at the money that was spent in the Wairarapa - far in excess of the rates we paid - from the generous Wellingtonians, most of whom I suspect didn’t realise how generous they were.

If it ain’t broke, why fix it? If our representatives can’t handle a Super City then they should join with their brethren in the south and west and demand the status quo.

Otherwise the Masterton councillors will start to look like turkeys who voted for an early Christmas.

“If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.” – Charles Caleb Colton

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Wednesday 17 December 2014

The fall and rise of consumerism

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I have never read Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, though I may have been instructed to do so at some stage during my secondary school years. Therefore it is only anecdotally that I am led to believe that the fall was due to widespread immoral behaviour.

A few years ago however it was thought that if the empirical grouping of the Western democracies ever declines and falls it would likely be due to shopping. The buzz word at the time was “shopocalypse” which was coined by an anti-shopping evangelist in New York who called himself the “Reverend Billy”. He headed The Church of Stop Shopping and featured in a documentary called: What would Jesus Buy?

The Reverend Billy – real name William Talen – toured shopping malls with a gospel choir who sang cynical anti-shopping songs while the good reverend cast out demons of consumerism and exorcized credit cards.


He wasn’t a real reverend of course, but he dressed in a smart white suit and was deadly serious about his evangelical performances. He sincerely believed that Christmas had turned into a jingle hell of bloated consumerism that wasn’t merely soul-destroying, but economy destroying and even planet destroying.

William Talen disappeared from consciousness in September 2008 when the global financial crisis hit the world stage and it was revealed that the real culprit of the decline and fall of the western democracies was in fact international financiers, especially the irrationally exuberant Anglo-Saxon sort who thought they had found a way to banish risk when in fact they had simply lost track of it.

The great moderation years of low inflation and stable growth fostered complacency in the hallowed halls of the money-men. A savings glut in Asia pushed down interest rates and borrowers were encouraged to buy houses priced way above their true value and in the process inherited crippling mortgage repayments.

Much of world is still affected by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a sprawling global bank, but sound stewardship by the Key government has meant that consumerism is getting back on track in our country although retailers now face the added competition of website sales that in most cases don’t attract the added burden of GST.

Huge distribution centres in far off lands that are hooked up to fast-flying freight planes and then on to couriers allows goods to land on your doorstep within a few days of placing an order.

Supermarkets in the main don’t suffer from the ignominy of their customers sourcing goods from overseas and I imagine their cash flows are eye-watering. There are constant queues at the checkout counters and they offer up a choice of merchandise that would astonish our forebears.

I recall my mother’s modest brown cardboard box of groceries delivered to our door each Wednesday afternoon which lasted our family of four until the following Wednesday, apart from a few minor top-ups from the corner shop along the road.

But we’ve moved on since then and the end result is mounting credit card debt and a stressed society struggling with repayments on a diet of alcohol and anti-depressants.

Recently in a $2 shop an item that caught my eye was a plastic brush and shovel on sale for $1.45. Made in China of course and I studied the product looking for flaws, but found none.

I can’t for the life of me understand how it could be manufactured, warehoused, delivered to the port, shipped, warehoused again, then trucked to the shop, unpacked, labelled, placed on the shelf and sold to the consumer by a reasonably well-paid shop assistant, allowing all those in the chain to make a profit along the way.

The western world is totally dependent on lowly paid third-world workers to sustain us in our consumer heaven at prices that keeps inflation in check. We now live in a society that, apart from the agricultural sector, hardly produces anything of real value and we rely on incomes from service industries and paper-shuffling businesses.

It looks like a house of cards with the Chinese being the dealers.

And I suspect in this environment some retailers resort to trickery. I was mystified as to how a well-known retail giant manages to stay solvent given the company promotes back-to-back sales with thirty to sixty per cent off most items.

So I did some sleuthing. I went to the store in question and chose a well-known brand of a regular household appliance and checked out the price: $219.99. However a large attached card announced: “40 per cent off.” Using my iPhone calculator I determined that this would attract a rebate of $88.00 meaning at the checkout the item would cost $132.00. Seemed like a bargain. But I went to a shop just down the road and found exactly the same item, with the same model number, on the shelf for $130.00

I’m not sure what Jesus would buy, but I would advise him to shop around.

“Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity” – Don Cupitt

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Wednesday 10 December 2014

The modern day gossip columnist

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One of this country’s abiding mysteries is how one man can capture the attention of the news media and even the House of Representatives so often and for such a prolonged period. Such a man is Cameron Slater, son of a past president of the National Party and a thorn in the side of many members of parliament, mostly from the left, but who is not averse to using his acerbic pen to berate politicians and persons of prominence of all persuasions.

It was pointed out that he was mentioned over 100 times over three sittings of parliament recently; he probably has his own button on the Hansard recorders. These days you can’t turn on the radio, or read news stories without being bombarded with negatives about Cameron Slater. Many are vying to convince the rank and file that this is some kind of anti-Christ that has come to live amongst us.

So what is it that he actually does?

He runs a blog.

To be fair, not just any blog.

He manages to attract about 240,000 readers a day which probably makes him one of the biggest “newspapers” in the country. In April of this year he won the Canon Media award for being New Zealand’s best blogger and just last month he won Netguide’s prize for “Best Blog of the Year.”

I have been a regular reader of Slater’s Whale Oil Beef Hooked. The site is most entertaining; habitually outrageous and more often than not over the top with its iconoclastic claims.

His is not the only blog I frequently visit. I also peruse The Daily Blog which is as vitriolic towards the right as “Whale Oil” is of the left and is edited by Slater’s nemesis Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury. David Farrar’s Kiwiblog is also a good read, undoubtedly right leaning, and I balance this by accessing a blog titled Slightly Left of Centre.


And then there is ex-Dominion editor Karl du Fresne’s blog, awash with common sense utterances to round off a day of thoroughly good reading.

Just like newspapers, blogs are merely a form of entertainment, but the pen is said to be mightier than the sword, hence the disquiet.

Slater first came to national prominence and attracted a whole coterie of potential readers when he exposed the dastardly dalliances of Auckland mayor Len Brown. He already had a large following at that stage, but his audience doubled during the period and has hardly diminished since.

Nicky Hager tried to bring him down with his book Dirty Politics, but like the Len Brown saga, it simply increased his devotees.

Writing in last Saturday’s Dominion-Post journalist Tracy Watkins said: “John Key is badly tainted by his association with Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater whose brand is repugnant to most voters.”

Slater responded by publishing a most unflattering photo of Ms Watkins and said his “repugnant brand” was continuing to build to an ever increasing audience.

Ms Watkins seems to have missed the point that the Prime Minister’s association with Mr Slater was well documented before the election, but appeared not to have affected his constituency.

Slater is of course just a 21st century version of the gossip columnists of old. Nobody would admit to ever reading them, but they were syndicated internationally and helped sell newspapers and periodicals over a long period.

Names that spring to mind are Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and Walter Winchell. In more modern times we’ve had Matt Drudge, David Hartnell and Metro magazines Felicity Ferret.

“The Ferret” was unceremoniously retired in 2010. She was described as being daring, embarrassing, crass, irreverent, funny and just a little bit mean.

Sounds a bit like a feminine version of Cameron Slater. “The Ferret” however was said to be the social adventures of Metro staff, although Auckland cafĂ© queen Judith Baragwanath was suspected of being the central contributor.

Slater is now threatening a new web-based media outlet he will call Freed. This will be a counter-punch to Dirty Politics he says and is likely to embarrass many of New Zealand’s mainstream-media journalists.

He was recently taken to court by someone who believed they had been wronged and subsequently faced substantial court costs and legal fees as a result. His staff made a plea to readers to help by contributing towards the expenses. I didn’t respond, but many must have because the fund was over-subscribed in just a few days.

A faithful readership that is generous as well; seems like a good recipe for continued success.

But Mr Slater ought not to forget the adage: “In the case of scandal, as in that of a robbery, the receiver is always thought as bad as the thief.”

“The blogs, mad and bad as they are, add richness and diversity to the political debate.” - Rodney Hide

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Wednesday 3 December 2014

What is happening to my world?

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Many years ago an old family friend said to me: “I feel sorry for you young guys today; I reckon your father and I have lived through the best of times.” I expressed surprise at the claim. I reminded him that he and dad had lived through two world wars and a depression, how on earth could they be described as the best of times?

I’m not certain what prompted his remark. Thinking back it might have been when we were going through the so-called first oil shock, circa 1973, when the OPEC countries banded together to raise the price of oil from $3 a barrel to $12. Or perhaps it was the second oil shock in 1979 when our government panicked, believing the doomsayers’ warnings that oil would soon run out, and introduced carless days to reduce demand.

Those two events triggered severe recessions, but thirty-five years on we now know the world is still awash with oil to such an extent that in America petrol is less than three dollars a gallon.

Nevertheless today we might well be facing the worst of times.

For instance there is a life and death struggle going on to ensure a large section of the African continent doesn’t succumb to Ebola.

Meanwhile Mr Putin is perilously close to initiating a European war and potentially a third world war with his foray into the Ukraine with a downed passenger airliner already a casualty.


I do have some sympathy for his stance. The democratically elected president of Ukraine, who was pro-Russian, was overthrown by a street mob that was tacitly encouraged by the West. In previous decades we saw America’s reaction when right wing dictators in South America, financed into office by Uncle Sam, were overthrown by the rank and file. It was swift and ruthless, not unlike Mr Putin’s.

Western interests also encouraged others to topple their rulers during the “Arab Spring.” Egypt is now under military rule after its disastrous coup, Iraq has never recovered from America and its “coalition of the willing” pursuing its strong-man leader and in Syria a rebellious section of the populous, supplied with western weaponry, spawned ISIS which is now challenging world peace with frightening brutality.

Our hypocrisy over who we support and don’t support is breath-taking.

We recently put out a red carpet for the Chinese Premier conveniently forgetting that their human rights practices don’t sit well with twenty-first century ethos. For instance they execute thousands of murderers and drug dealers every year.

The brief Brazilian tourist Philip Traynor-Smith can thank his lucky stars he’s not domiciled in China.

But the worst human rights practices are undoubtedly being displayed by those fundamentalist Muslims assembled under various nomenclatures such as The Taliban, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Isis. Their very existence threatens us all and their terrorist tentacles have the propensity to reach into the uttermost ends of the earth.

Many of their Imams and clerics have apparently declared a holy jihad against the “infidels of the world” and their followers are told that by killing an infidel they are assured a place in heaven.

Incidentally an “Infidel” is a non-believer.

The contrast between Islam and Christianity is stark. My conversation with a fundamentalist Muslim might go something like this: “Does Allah really ask you to kill me in order for you to go to heaven while Jesus tells me to love you because I am going to heaven and he wants you to be there with me?”

But there are no onward Christian soldiers to fight the good fight. We have mortally mitigated the strength we once had. Our churches are rendered almost powerless by a population who have largely chosen the wide path to bypass them. Even the Pope has had to water down some of the tenets of his faith to maintain momentum.

And don’t look for any sustenance from our leaders. Our great cornerstone religion is under further assault. The latest incursion in to its very existence is coming from the New Zealand’s legislative chamber. The Speaker of the house is proposing that in future, prayers are only offered up to Almighty God.

Every religion, every civilisation, believes in God or a god.

Only Christianity believes in Christ.

Not daring to offend anybody, the Speaker wants Jesus name expunged.

If they can eliminate the founder of Christianity from the prayers in parliament, where will He be removed from next, Christmas and Easter?

“Go in through the narrow gate, because the gate to hell is wide and the road that leads to it is easy, and there are many who travel it. But the gate to life is narrow and the way that leads to it is hard, and there are few people who find it.” – Matthew 7:13-14

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Wednesday 26 November 2014

The mere males Archillies heal

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It seems the CERA boss may have skillfully trivialized the complaint made by one of his female staff. In a carefully staged press conference he shed tears and admitted that perhaps sometimes his jokes were a shade bawdy, that he should refrain from calling his colleagues “sweetie” and “honey” and maybe even pull back from hugging people, despite this being something he has always done.

It has subsequently been revealed that there was more to the accusation, but the real story might not ever surface due to a confidentiality clause that only one side appears to have kept.

The male of the species was in all sorts of hot water last week and perhaps David Cunliffe’s apology for being a man has some validity. In the northern hemisphere the once much-loved African-American comedian Bill Cosby is facing serious allegations which could well mean he will die in disgrace like once-equally-loved Rolf Harris.

Perhaps both of them while incarcerated.

Obviously Harris’s proven criminality and Cosby’s alleged misbehavior and to a lesser extent Roger Suttons actions were beyond the pale, but recently a New York feminist videoed men admiring the upper middle regions of her torso and then accused them, on camera, of sexual harassment. I started to feel a bit unsettled. Was admiring a women’s figure really sexual harassment?

I may be headed for a long prison sentence.

I decided to take a household survey; only two members were at home at the time, wife and daughter. Daughter agreed with the feminist. I didn’t actually seek any more information, but she offered it anyway. She said she had watched me for years observing women in an inappropriate manner. She even said that as I got older the gap between the ‘ogler’ and the ‘oglee’ was widening and was not a pretty sight.

It’s amazing how we men go through the pain of childbirth, in my case on four separate occasions, only to have our offspring needlessly exposing previously unidentified shortcomings.

My wife was more kind; that’s why I married her. She agreed I spent an inordinate amount of time, when in the company of females, observing their curvatures, but she thought I did so with a degree of sensitivity. ‘Furtive’ she thought, as opposed to ogle.

I heaved a sigh of relief. A lonely death is a cold cell was not something I was contemplating as a retiree.

I will get this next one off my chest while I’m still conscious. To the heterosexual man quietly admiring the upper half of the female torso is surely one of life’s great pleasures. It’s not as though I hadn’t checked all this out before I began my lifelong study.

I vividly remember during my mid-teens sitting on the beach at Riversdale with a group of friends, male and female, discussing this very subject. Did the girls, we asked, mind us admiring their figures? 

With only one exception, they all admitted they enjoyed the attention. The exception had rather large breasts, and said she was embarrassed by them. We men - boys actually, acne and all - gallantly told her that these were not a disadvantage, and her self-consciousness was misplaced. She said we wouldn’t say that if we saw them in the flesh.

I’ll resile from further comment here and avoid the risk of appearing prurient.

Famous American publisher Bennett Cerf, in his book “Try and Stop Me” told an amusing anecdote about a prank The New York Times, a conservative newspaper, played on its readers back in the 1940’s. They published a picture of a pair of breasts on their front page. This was way before the ‘page three girl’ regularly appeared in the racier tabloids. The photo was uncaptioned, but a flood of letters came into the paper, complaining about the picture, mostly from conservative, matronly women - Cerf called them “dowagers”- who were furious that The Times had stooped to such depths.

The next day the newspaper, which had set its readers up, apologised for the lack of captioning, and said that the breasts belonged to Johnny Weissmuller, at the time America’s greatest swimmer/turned movie actor who played the lead role in the Tarzan series.


Game, set, and match to The New York Times.

I read recently of a man who had grown breasts, apparently from eating hormone-induced chickens. His doctor told him to take poultry off his diet. He did so and the breasts disappeared. A message here surely for those contemplating expensive silicone surgery.

But isn’t that the irony of it all? Millions of women worldwide have had breast implants, presumably to attract admiring glances, the majority of these from males, one would assume. How is a bloke to know what to do?

Roger Sutton is now on “garden leave” while his wife Jo Malcolm and her sister, well-known actress Robyn Malcolm, stand stoically behind him.

I’m not entirely sure that my wife and daughter would do the same for me.

“My wife had plastic surgery. I cut up all her credit cards.” - Henry Youngman.

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Wednesday 19 November 2014

Cars, shoes and other distractions

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In England in 1995 I espied a pair of casual shoes that appealed to me in a London shoe shop window. I found a perfect fit, but was disappointed in the price which seemed unreasonably high. The shop assistant informed me they were made in France as though the trip across the channel, which is so insignificant that hundreds of people have actually swum it, somehow allowed for the high price tag. My wife however remarked that no one ever regretted buying quality, so I flashed my credit card and somewhat reluctantly made the purchase.

Incidentally the ‘no one ever regretted buying quality’ catch phrase reminded me of a slogan I used to use when advertising my meat wares in the distant past. My by-line was “The quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.” The word “long”, for obvious reasons, was expressed either in capitals or italics.

I wore my new shoes intermittently for the first ten years, but over the last nine years I have worn them virtually every day. Try as I might I can’t seem to wear them out. I don’t know if they were in fashion in 1995 or are in fashion 19 years later. It’s entirely possible they went in and out of fashion at different times over this rather lengthy period. All I know is they are hardly showing any signs of wear and tear and are just as comfortable today as they were when I bought them in the closing stages of the last century.

Another surprising feature is that they still have the same laces which play a prominent part in the whole appearance of the shoe. It’s just as well; I’m not sure that I would be able to buy laces of a similar colour, length and strength down here in the antipodes.

The name of the manufacturer is still clearly shown on a sturdily attached label: Mephisto. I looked up their website and learnt that the company was established in France in 1965 which means they had 30 years of practice before they made my shoes. I scrolled down to their 2014 line of casual footwear and found nothing in the range that looked anything like my 1995 model. It could be that the company would welcome mine back to display in their archives.

So I’ve never regretted buying quality, but over the years I confess I have regularly been persuaded to unnecessarily upgrade one particular item for the newer model. I have unwittingly become a follower of fashion and on reflection this will have been a costly exercise.


For instance in the mid-1960s I bought a second-hand Wolseley Four 44. This black car was a classic in its day and was regularly seen on our grainy black and white TV screens in UK crime dramas as the police car of choice for the British constabulary. The Four-44 had a big brother, the Wolseley Six-80, which was probably the chief inspectors car.

Despite being second-hand the Four-44 had still maintained the glorious smell of the luxurious leather upholstery and the walnut burr dashboard and door trim make todays plastic versions look positively tacky.

Its only fault was that it was a tad underpowered, but I saw a Four-44 that had been lovingly maintained recently and nostalgia and more than a touch of sheer envy swept over me. I tried not to think of the tens of thousands of dollars I would have spent over the intervening year’s purchasing the latest models of whatever marque took my fancy.

The world’s car makers of course are past masters at continually adding so-called improvements to their new models which then allow the slick sales people to convince you that you desperately need to trade up or somehow live less fruitfully.

They will claim, perhaps with some justification, that some of this new gadgetry is potentially life-saving. ABS braking and front and side air bags spring to mind, but the gimmickry of a GPS navigation system where a lady of indeterminate age sits somewhere within your plasticised dashboard and demands you “make a U-turn if possible” after you’ve strayed down a lane which is not part of the circuitous route she has planned for you, is probably a distraction you could well do without.

If only I’d stuck with my Wolseley Four-44 as I have done with my Mephisto shoes the money I would have potentially saved might have meant my second car was a Rolls Royce Phantom.

Leather upholstery, walnut burr et al.

“The people recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split level home, kitchen equipment.” - Herbert Marcuse

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Wednesday 5 November 2014

On driving me to distraction

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When I was a kid the lady over the road from where we lived had a chauffeur. Mrs Mawley was a wealthy widow who lived in a grand residence called “Sway Place” on the corner of Opaki Road and Oxford Street. Later this became the home of general practitioner Dr. Blair Harvey and then The Golden Shears Motor Inn and latterly a retirement village, or as Dame Edna Everidge would unkindly say, a home for the bewildered.

Mrs Mawley’s chauffeur was a Mr Gordon who kept her Plymouth limousine in immaculate condition which, as I recall, she used infrequently. He would park the car at her disposal at the front entrance gate facing on to Oxford Street and she would emerge to alight the splendid vehicle invariably dressed in black, looking not unlike Rose Kennedy - though of course back then we’d never heard of the Kennedy family or their matriarch.

Mrs Mawley had previously gifted a large section of her vast property to the Borough Council to use as a camping ground.

As far as I am aware, in this day and age no one in our environs has a chauffeur, though it is rumoured that Sir Peter Jackson gets flown in a helicopter from the capital to his mansion at Matahiwi from time to time.

Some years ago when I was a Wairarapa representative on the Greater Wellington Regional Council I was to have a one-on-one meeting with the then Minister for the Environment Marion Hobbs. This was set down for 9.30 in the morning and I left Masterton at 7.30 to arrive on time at the council’s multi-storeyed glass tower in Wakefield Street. Miss Hobbs was a few minutes late and as I looked down from our sixth-storey meeting room I saw her white Ford chauffeur-driven limousine drop her off at the front door.

I chided her for arriving at the venue in such grandeur. I reminded her that I had driven myself down from Masterton and she had to merely come across a small section of town. I told her that I would have thought that a modern socialist government claiming to represent the working class would immediately sell off the limousine fleet and drive themselves like the rest of the proletariat are obliged to do.

I was well acquainted with Marion Hobbs and knew she had a great sense of humour and she gave back as good as she got and reminded me that ours was not the only meeting she had to attend that day. She added that it was very helpful to be driven from venue to venue without having to find parking spaces for what was to be a very busy morning. I wanted to suggest that taxis would have been just as convenient and far less costly, but decided to leave well alone as I was asking a favour for our district.

Obviously my concerns were never passed on.

Not long after my conversation with Miss Hobbs, the socialist government, still claiming to represent the hoi polloi, sold off the Fords and purchased the even more luxurious BMW’s which are about to be upgraded for the third time.

The nutty Greens, besides petitioning the United Nations advocating homeopathy to cure Ebola, suggested that the current government should be investing in electric cars which apparently are even more expensive than the BMW’s.

It’s hard to change the perquisites of politicians of all persuasions - both national and local body. I recall a conversation around the regional council board table where it was considered our vehicle fleet should be of the hybrid kind to save fuel and set an example to the rest of our constituents. Our chairman’s self-drive car was due for renewal and chairperson at the time Margaret Shields insisted the Ford Falcon be replaced with a hybrid Toyota Prius. I was about to change my car, at my own expense of course, so to maintain the trend I bought the slightly less expensive Honda hybrid. The next vehicle that was due for replacement was the CEO’s. He opted for a four wheel drive SUV with a 3.4 V6 motor.


No more hybrid cars were purchased by either the council or the councillors.

There is nothing that smacks of elitism more than to see our cabinet ministers swanning around in chauffeur driven cars while every other citizen in this egalitarian country go about their business driving themselves. But then again what other behaviour could you expect from a dubiously chosen group of men and women who accept and revel in the title “the honourable.”

They can come up with all the excuses they like about convenience and having time to be briefed on the meetings they are about to attend, but Winston seems to have survived with or without this bogus “baubles of office” benefit.

In fact changing gears is probably the only real exercise he gets.

In her day, like most women of the time, Mrs Mawley would probably never have learnt to drive. But this is the twenty-first century; for many people times are tough and any savings that can be made by our elected representatives should be grasped with both hands.


Cabinet ministers should have both those hands on the wheel.


“There are no such things as good politicians and bad politicians. There are only politicians, which is to say, they all have personal axes to grind, and all too rarely are they honed for the public good.” - Barbara Hower

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Wednesday 29 October 2014

Trying to make sense of dress

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I was at the Palmerston North Plaza shopping centre a couple of weeks ago looking at the directory sign that describes the shops and their location. The premises are colour coded and I counted the womenswear outlets and there were nineteen.

There were just three menswear shops.

So nineteen to three is apparently the ratio of importance the genders place on their outward appearance.

I noticed however that department stores were separately coded. The Farmers store in the Plaza is huge. As you walk in the door you encounter a gleaming white tiled floor that announces the makeup, perfumes and jewellery section. The goddesses behind the counters with redder than red lipstick and blushed cheeks smell and look gorgeous.

You hurry past them in case your own dowdiness presents too great a contrast.

The women’s clothing section takes up most of the rest of the vast store with a wee corner set aside for apparel for the mere male; so you can alter that ratio to twenty and three and a half.

The women’s underwear section in The Farmers has to be seen to be believed. Now I don’t want to paint the wrong picture here. I am in this area traipsing behind my wife and my daughter carefully averting my eyes away from the racks and racks and rows and rows of women’s bras and other undergarments in various sizes, shapes, colours and designs. Lace in its element and then there’s the exotic and erotic lingerie section with raiment of shimmering transparency.

I am eternally embarrassed when the female section of my family repair to the changing rooms and I am left the only male within a thousand square metres. I look around desperately for another member of my gender, but there are none.

Of course these are not the only shops set aside for female exclusivity. There are hair salons and manicurists and fashionable shoe shops where women can acquire high heels that look agonisingly difficult to wear, but admittedly enhance the appearance of the wearer.

The chemist shops compete with The Farmers and have a myriad of shelves devoted to makeup and perfumes and there are now shops that sell a product that was virtually unheard of a decade or so ago called “bling.”

Women feel obliged to be dedicated followers of fashion and yet on some occasions it works against them.

In an interview with Susan Wood on Q and A last week Australia’s immediate-past Prime Minister Julia Gillard talked of the misogyny she encountered in Australian politics and the news media’s concentration on what she wore and her hair style rather than the substance of what she was saying and doing. Her male counterparts, she said, have a constant uniform that never changes and attracts neither comment nor criticism.

So have our womenfolk fallen hook, line and sinker for the clever marketing ploys of the fashion designers?

Do the skeletal models that walk the catwalks of the western world have the rest of the sisterhood under such a spell that regular wardrobe upgrades are mandatory?

Have our fairer sex in fact made a rod for their own backs?

I was still standing by the directory when I endeavoured to envisage a shopping mall in a male-dominated Islamic country. I imagined just one dress shop with racks and racks of dull blue/grey burka’s purportedly designed to diminish the desire of the menfolk. No need for a hair salon, but a shoe shop with a modest range of sensible sandals - and that’s about it really.

Surprisingly, Islamic women appear to willingly accept these enforced dress codes and when westerners have sought to overturn these seemingly repressive customs those under apparent subjugation have spurned their succour.


This alien society would also be devoid of any liquor stores and so retailing would hardly play a part in their economy. Shopping malls I presume would be few and far between.

Julia Gillard in a burka perhaps?

No worse I suppose than Tony Abbott in speedos.

“I love to shop after a bad relationship. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. Sometimes when I see a really great outfit, I’ll break up with someone on purpose.” – Rita Rudner

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Wednesday 22 October 2014

A majestic house with memories

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The grand old two-storey brick and reinforced concrete Prior homestead and one-time doctors’ surgery in Perry Street is no more. In its place, almost as a complete about-face to the days of old, is a modern single-storey office block purpose-built for a computer software company.

The Prior family have produced generations of doctor’s for our town, but the imposing dwelling hadn’t been in the Prior family hands for some time.

I think Stan Lane will have purchased the property perhaps in the late 1950s. It was directly behind his Lincoln Road car parts business and no doubt he saw an advantage in ownership by being able to step across the back fence to go to work.

Stan was one of natures’ gentlemen. He was a devoutly religious man, an elder in the Seventh Day Adventist Church and a non-drinker. His business involved dismantling cars that had either passed their used-by date or had been written-off after an accident. The parts were carefully removed to be used again in those halcyon days when we didn’t waste a thing and hub caps, carburettors, distributors, bumpers and the like were made available at a modest price for vehicles where one or more of these parts had failed.

These businesses have been replaced today by the likes of Repco and Super Cheap Autos where we can buy new parts probably more cheaply than it would cost to remove them from a wreck. Meanwhile abandoned cars are stacked one on top of another in a mountainous pile in Ngaumutawa Road, having been bought as scrap metal.

We call this progress.

Stan Lane was extremely community-minded and was at one stage president of the Riversdale Surf Lifesaving Club and was the inaugural chairman of Greater Masterton Incorporated. Greater Masterton had morphed from the Twenty Thousand Club and was itself morphed in to Go Wairarapa and then eventually Destination Wairarapa.

In the early 1960s Greater Masterton came up with a cunning plan to raise some money. They invited arguably the world’s most popular pianist at the time to come to Masterton and perform in the Regent Theatre. Winifred Atwell was on an Australasian tour and was intending to appear only at the main centres. However, somewhat surprisingly, she accepted the invitation.

Miss Atwell was born in Trinidad, but moved to London where she gained a place at The Royal Academy of Music. She signed a contract with Decca records and had a string of hits including The Black and White Rag which started a craze for the honky-tonk style of playing.

She was selling around 30,000 discs a week and was the first black artist in the UK to sell a million records. On one occasion she performed at a private party for the Queen and Prince Phillip and was called back for an encore by the monarch herself.

Masterton’s Regent Theatre which seated 1080 people was booked out weeks before the show and Stan Lane decided that after her performance she should be invited around to the Perry Street home for a cup of tea and some supper.

Back then chemist friend Wayne Snowsill and I used to do a comedy routine at local cabarets and dances based around miming Stan Freberg’s musical parodies; specifically The Great Pretender, The Banana Boat Song and A Dear John and Marsha Letter. Stan Lane insisted that we come around to his home after the Atwell concert and perform for the great lady herself.

He invited two other local characters, twins Clive and Colin Thorne. These two, better known as ace topdressing pilots, also did a comedy act where one of them told a story, quite lengthy and a shade risqué, while his twin brother stood behind him, put his arms through under his armpits and did the gesticulations; straightening his brothers tie, picking his nose and scratching his head etc.


It was a hilarious routine, but I have no doubt that Miss Atwell would have regularly seen far more sophisticated and humorous performances than what we four were offering up.

Now Stan was not a wealthy man and not to put too finer point on it his furnishings were not flash. In fact the word that comes to mind is “quaint.” So here was a world renowned artiste, sitting in an unpretentious parlour in an ageing dwelling in Perry Street having tea and cucumber sandwiches and being entertained by a butcher, a chemist and two daredevil aviators.

She was gracious enough to pretend she enjoyed the interlude though I note she didn’t suggest we make the Royal Variety Performance our next goal.

As far as I can recall Winifred Atwell was the first and only international celebrity entertainer to ever appear in Masterton. She only had a small entourage with her; she needed just a piano and a stage to perform.

Local developer David Borman has used some of the bricks carefully dismantled from the once grand old home to construct wall sections and a splendid fence around the perimeter of the replacement property. Those bricks will hold many pleasant memories, for me anyway. However I suspect Winifred Atwell would have forgotten all about the place even before she left the confines of perhaps one of the smallest towns she had ever performed in.

“The crowds cheered me as I passed by, but they would be just as noisy if they were going to see me hanged.” - Oliver Cromwell

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Wednesday 15 October 2014

Facing up to the inevitable

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Having passed my allotted three score years and ten I self-consciously realise I am now a continual liability on the long-suffering taxpayer and may potentially become a burden on the health system. Retirees tend to believe that having paid taxes all their lives they deserve to live off the fat of the land - or at least the lean pickings that the state allows.

The pension is no doubt an encumbrance on the treasury coffers, but is hardly generous enough to allow superannuitants to live in the kind of comfort they may have experienced during their working lives. As one dear old lady expressed it, “Retirement means twice as much husband on half as much money.”

The truth of the matter is that successive governments never did put aside a percentage of our taxes to pay back out to us when we reached retirement. They frivolously spent every penny they received on ongoing projects and now have to borrow from frugal overseas moneylenders to pay the unemployment benefits, the DPB and old-age pensions.

Dear old Winston, observing his own greying hair, did come up with the Gold Card granting recipients the use of public transport in off-peak hours. This allows elderly locals to take a train to Wellington, have a few minutes to stride along windswept Lambton Quay, a few more minutes to sit on the world’s coldest railway platform and then come home. Aucklander’s are slightly better off. Apparently they can get to Waiheke Island and back and experience seasickness.


When I first started earning we understood that one and sixpence out of every pound we paid in tax was put aside to pay our pensions. Social Security it was called. Back then we were encouraged to retire at sixty.

Such prudence was halted in1975 when Mr Muldoon scrapped Labour’s contributory scheme based on Singapore’s Central Provident Plan and introduced his National Superannuation Fund, assuring us that there would always be enough money in the kitty to pay out old-age pensions.

He hadn’t factored in advances in medical science and the canny drug companies subsequent surfeit of expensive elixirs that the government is reluctantly obliged to pay for to extend our lives.

Talk about Catch 22.

Benjamin Franklin once said that in this world nothing can be certain except death and taxes. So having paid the taxes apparently we now can only look forward to death.

It’s a sobering fact that at Masterton’s Men’s Shed, where male retirees regularly gather to learn or enhance their carpentry skills during their golden years, some are building their own coffins.

And then nightly on primetime TV either Gary McCormick or Keith Quinn plead with me in the nicest possible way to take out insurance to pay for my funeral. I suspect my children are hoping I will heed their advice, but I intend my will to be one of the shortest: “Being of sound mind, I spent all my money.”

As we approach the inevitable there are all manner of alternatives open to us; not all of course of our own choosing. I’m hoping to die of old age. I want to live to 120 and by then I reckon the government will have paid me back all the taxes I begrudgingly paid them.

The least desirable option is death by a terminal illness. There are a number of maladies in this category and we recently added Ebola to that sordid list. During my working life I handled lots of pork and poultry, skilfully avoiding swine flu and bird flu. But I have got aids; fortunately of the hearing variety and not HIV, so hopefully I’ll hear of any external danger that may creep up on me. Mr Key has warned us of the possibility of beheadings and given the inexplicably high price of hearing devices my severed head may be quite valuable.

An English academic writing in a medical journal said last week that climate change is a bigger threat to humanity than the Ebola virus. I’m glad I live in an inland town so rising sea levels won’t engulf me and I intend limiting my visits to the coast. I will also discard my speedos to ensure I don’t die from over-exposure to the sun’s rays.

I can’t think of any other precautions I should take to maintain my longevity in the face of an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere; though in the thirty years since we were first warned of the danger of global warming I’m not aware of any widespread fatalities.

But I’ve really only skimmed the surface on ways we can die.

There was this fellow who was a karate expert, then he joined the army. The first time he saluted, he killed himself.

“We’ve seen them all on street corners, many of them smoking, many of them on drugs: they’ve got no jobs to go to and once a week we see them queuing for state hand-outs - or pensions as we call them.” - Harry Hill

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Wednesday 8 October 2014

Thoughts on earning a living

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Last week a New Zealand Herald front page article revealed that after dipping briefly following the global financial crisis the average pay of New Zealand’s top executives is rising once again. The bosses of the country’s largest firms received an average total remuneration - including base salary and incentive payments - of $1.4 million in the 2013 financial year, a 4 percent increase on 2012.

Our highest paid chief executive last year was ANZ’s David Hisco, on $4.1 million, a 14 per cent rise on 2012.

Nice money if you can get it.

The reaction from the Herald readers was swift and vicious and a branch of the ANZ staff, who were in pay talks, threatened strike action. Understandable; I was angry myself when I first read it, particularly when it has been reported of late that thousands of New Zealand children are going to school without breakfast. I remembered too that economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said: “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”

These hitherto undreamed of salaries are the preserve of the favoured few, but for the rest of us, perhaps we are our own worst enemies.

I think our problems probably start with all the clichĂ©s we’ve been told about money.

As kids we were taught that money is the root of all evil. What the Bible actually says is that the love of money is the root of all evil. And we were told money isn’t everything and that money won’t buy you happiness. In fact to emphasise that belief someone once said: “There is nothing in the world more reassuring than an unhappy lottery winner.”

I’ve often wondered whether these statements weren’t circulated by people who have money, to keep those that haven’t, in their place.

The truth is that money is a warm home and healthy children; its birthday presents and a university education; it’s a trip overseas and the means to help older people and the less fortunate.

There is little doubt that education is the answer to our money woes. In our society, a highly skilled person is worth more money than someone who is not highly skilled and can easily be replaced.

American motivational speaker Earl Nightingale would often quote the disparity of incomes between a janitor and a heart surgeon. He was not suggesting that one person is any better or more important than any other person. The amount of money each will earn will be proportional to the demand for what they do, their ability to do what they do and the difficulty of replacing them.

In a few weeks a person can be trained to clean and maintain a building and replacing that person is not difficult. Meanwhile a heart surgeon spends many years learning his profession, often at great personal sacrifice, and at an extremely high cost, and he cannot easily be replaced. As a result the surgeon might earn as much money in a week as a janitor might earn in a year.

Of course this example is an extreme case, but it shows the relationship of income to demand, skill and supply. You will inevitably find that a person’s income will be in exact proportion to the demand of what that person does, the ability to do the task and the difficulty of being replaced.

In a year a top jockey will earn a great deal of money, which will represent about 5 per cent of the winnings of the horses he or she rides. You might say riding a racehorse serves no useful purpose, but, useful or not, the demand is there. It’s the same with stars in show business like Dolly Parton or sports stars like the All Blacks. Their income will very accurately reflect the demand for what they do.

While this may sound elementary, you’d be amazed at the number of people who want more money, but don’t want to take the time and trouble to qualify for it. And until they qualify for it, there’s no way on earth for them to earn it. It’s like the person who wants a good-looking figure, but doesn’t want to change their eating habits.

When I was a kid there was a poem that in part said: “I bargained with life for a penny, and life would pay no more.” And that’s it in a nutshell. The world will pay you exactly what you bargain for - exactly what you honestly earn - and not a penny more.


People who refuse to do more than they’re being paid for will seldom be paid for more than they’re doing. You may have heard someone say “Why should I knock myself out for the money I’m getting?” It’s this attitude, more than anything else that keeps people at the bottom of the economic pile.

We must however keep money in its proper place. It’s a servant, nothing more.

It’s a tool with which we can live better, see more of the world; it’s the means to a happy, carefree retirement in later years and it allows us to give our children the education they need and a good start in life, but we need to keep it in perspective.

You need only so much food to maintain good health and you really need only so much money to live comfortably, securely and well. Too much emphasis on money reverses the whole picture; then you become the servant and the money becomes the master.

It’s good to have money and the things money can buy, but it’s good too, to check up once in a while, to make sure you haven’t lost the things that money can’t buy.

“We couldn’t afford a proper bath. We just had a pan of water and we’d wash down as far as possible and we’d wash up as far as possible. Then, when somebody’d clear the room, we’d wash possible.” - Dolly Parton.

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Wednesday 1 October 2014

An analysis of what went right

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It seems implausible that due to our questionable electoral system a party that was only able to capture 48 per cent of the popular vote gets a win that is described as a “landslide.”

You could express it differently of course. 76 per cent of the electorate did not favour Labour, 90 percent wouldn’t have a bar of the Greens, and 91 per cent didn’t want New Zealand First despite Winston being the darling of the aged and infirm.

In the process Internet-Mana lost its mana and Colin Craig sunk a sizable portion of his large personal fortune into his fledgling Conservative Party only to miss representation by one percentage point.

Much of the blame of the unfortunate outcome for some has perhaps been justifiably foisted upon poor old David Cunliffe.

I know him, not well, but he attended a number of licensing trust conferences over the years and I had dinner with him and his wife one night at Solway Park when he opened a national conference here in Masterton. They were a pleasant couple and I enjoyed their company, but a leader of the people he is not.

His problem started when he needed to court the unions to gain enough support to win selection as Labour leader as his caucus in the main despised him. The unions who almost destroyed this country in the 70’s and 80’ were themselves destroyed by the Employment Contracts Act introduced by National in 1990.

These “bully boys” have never been missed by the general populace.

Cunliffe had to promise a sharp left turn to gain their support and Matt McCarten was brought in to set up a “war room” and maintain the direction set. None of this was going to sit well with the electorate.

Large fortunes were thrown around everywhere and Kim Schmitz - aka Dotcom - was lavish with his own. This is where the news media let the country down badly. Night after boring night the portly German invaded our TV screens and our daily papers did their level best to emulate the adoration. They foolishly built up the momentum to his “Moment of Truth” stage show which turned out to be a moment of “strewth”.

In an effort to destroy his nemesis John Key the German fraudster managed to con Hone Harawira and the Waaka-jumping Laila Harre to join him in his wretched crusade.

They then ill-advisedly added Pam Corkery and John Minto to the mix causing the vast majority of the voting public to sense a radicalisation that went way beyond acceptable limits.

Schmitz brought in Glenn Greenwald, a “Pulitzer-prize-winning” journalist from “America” to tell us our government was spying on all of us. I have put inverted commas around Pulitzer-prize-winning and America because neither of these statements is true.

Greenwald actually lives in Rio de Janeiro with his husband; same sex marriages are illegal in the US. He has never won a Pulitzer Prize; the paper he worked for did, but it was a community award for the whole paper where Greenwald worked as a journalist. If Greenwald could claim he was a Pulitzer-Prize-winner under those circumstances then presumably so too could the janitor and the tea lady.

When the fawning media finally woke up to this towards the end of his visit they began describing him as an “award-winning” journalist.

Fair enough, he did indeed win a Polk Prize for journalism.

On the Monday night before the election the Auckland Town Hall was full of the city’s malcontents who cheered the big screen images of Julian Assange wanted for sexual offences in Sweden and Edward Snowden wanted for espionage in America. These two fugitives from justice and the German fraudster were the toast of the evening. Schmitz however failed to present any evidence that proved John Key was a liar and despite the rapturous applause after each utterance from the top table, when the attendees woke up the next morning they would have realised they had been thoroughly duped.

And anyway, by some quirk of fate the messages from Assange, Snowden and Greenwald were completely nullified when on the Wednesday we found out that Australian-based Islamic terrorists were going to take an innocent citizen off a Sydney street decapitate him or her and show an accompanying video to the world. With potential atrocities being committed so close to home most New Zealand citizens were hoping the GCSB were monitoring us to the extent that Snowden, Assange and Greenwald said they were.

Meanwhile Nicky Hager’s claims of dirty politics didn’t gain much traction particularly when it was clear whose billboards were getting defaced.

And yet despite all the evidence to the contrary the miscalculating political journalists assured us that we were heading for a hung parliament and our fate would be decided by wily Winston who was likely to go fishing for a week or two before deciding who he’d coalesce with.


Worse than that, Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, grinning like a couple of Cheshire cats, promised us that they were going to be our co-deputy-prime-ministers.

That awful thought, for most people anyway, may well have been the straw that broke the camel’s
back.

“Under Helen Clark the Labour party was captured by academics, feminists, gays and tertiary educated leaders of a union movement that never worked a shop floor.” - John Tamihere

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Wednesday 24 September 2014

A cheerful chuckling chappie

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Back in 1995 my wife and I visited Northern Ireland. We spent a weekend in Belfast, hardly a tourist mecca, but then again, not as bleak a city as it is often painted. Anyway its people not places that make a destination and the Irish overwhelm you with their unrelenting hospitality in both the north and the south of this enchanting country.

But for all that, Belfast was a bit different. It was incongruous for instance to hear people tell you in a broad Irish accent that they were “British to the core,” and yet that is what so many were like in Northern Ireland. Not all of course, hence the aggravation, but those who were pro-British tended to flaunt their stance. Many flew the Union Jack above their homes. Some residents painted the kerbs outside their dwellings red, white and blue; sometimes whole streets were so adorned.

And back then they had these ridiculous marches. While we were there the Apprentice Boys marched. I assumed this would be a group of young lads marching to celebrate that they were employed in a worthwhile trade. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The “boys” were well into their seventies, and were marching to celebrate some remote victory, Protestant over Catholic, that had occurred centuries ago. They teasingly marched into Catholic areas to taunt and provoke. These areas were totally devoid of Union Jacks or painted kerbs I might add. Tensions would mount and sometimes overflow into violence. It all seemed so unnecessary.

On Saturday afternoon we drove our rental car to nearby Antrim and, sitting in a park by a lake, we struck up a conversation with an Irishman who told us in no uncertain terms that he was “pro-British.” He was a bit critical of New Zealand because of our Catholic, pro-republican prime minister at the time, Jim Bolger, but he was an amusing conversationalist and we enjoyed our interlude with him. It soon became clear that his great hero was Dr. Ian Paisley. I expressed interest so he asked me if I would like to meet the reverend gentleman in person. Now I’d never had much time for Paisley, but the opportunity to meet a world figure was compelling, so I agreed that I would. Our man said all we needed to do was to go to Paisley’s church in the heart of Belfast the next morning and we could see and meet the great man in the flesh. He said he would inform the church elders that we were coming.


The church was the Free Presbyterian Church of Ireland and the service was to start at eleven. We arrived at about a quarter to eleven and were immediately conspicuous by our attire. Without exception all the women were wearing frocks and hats, and the men, suits and ties. In stark contrast Marion and I had open neck tops, casual slacks and sneakers. For all that we were made very welcome and ushered to very good seats in this large modern church.

I had expected that the area around the church would be surrounded by British army personnel and that Paisley would arrive in an armoured car; but this was not the case. Everything was calm and peaceful and there was not a soldier in sight. At the stroke of eleven Paisley strode up to the pulpit and warmly welcomed visitors to his church, particularly the couple from “Noo Zealand.”

His service, which he virtually conducted single-handedly, was apolitical, and fundamental in structure. He was a charismatic figure, and with a booming voice that needed no amplification. The sermon was edifying, the singing inspiring, and the hour passed quickly.

After the service I sought him out, introduced myself, and told him that I was the visitor he had welcomed. He extended his hand and with a friendly smile said, “And how’s Noo Zealand?” I had the perfect answer, “The harvest is many,” I said, “but the labourers are few.” “Same here in Ireland,” he retorted “Same here in Ireland,” and for about five minutes we chatted and laughed together; actually I laughed and he chuckled. He had a most pleasant personality.

Eventually I was led to tell him that it seemed to me that he had been misrepresented in the press. I had, in the space of an hour of corporate acquaintance and a few minutes of personal appraisal, decided this man was not the ogre the world’s media had painted him. He chuckled and said that he was used to this distortion, and that it did not unduly worry him.

Soon he was to wish us both “Godspeed” as we went on our journey and I began to wonder if Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot mightn’t have been bad blokes on a one to one basis too. Grossly unfair to lump Paisley with that group, but you know what I mean.

The divisive Protestant firebrand and Democratic Unionist Party leader died a couple of weeks ago; he was 88. Throughout Northern Ireland’s three decades of civil strife he was the most polarizing of politicians, his blistering oratory often blamed for fueling the bloodshed that claimed 3700 lives.

Yet in 2007, at the height of his peace-wrecking power, he stunned the world by delivering the country’s first stable unity government between its “British” Protestants and its Irish Catholics. “Dr. No” as he was widely known finally said yes and his powerful U-turn cemented a peace process that he had previously done so much to frustrate.

Paisley relished his new role as Northern Ireland’s first minister with a relaxed demeanor, most strikingly evident when working alongside his government co-leader, former IRA commander Martin McGuiness. The two men surprisingly formed a genuine, mutually respectful relationship. Joking together at events they were dubbed “The Chuckle Brothers” by a disbelieving press.

“Chuckle” is a hard word to accurately describe, but it’s the one aspect of my meeting with Paisley that remains firmly fixed in my memory.

“Not men and women in an Irish street,
But Catholics and Protestants that you meet.” - William Allingham

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Wednesday 17 September 2014

The Pinocchio component in politics

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In the film Liar, Liar lawyer Fletcher Reede, played by Jim Carrey, falls victim to his son Max’s wish that his dad won’t be able to tell a lie for 24 hours. For the sake of the plot, the wish comes true. The moral of the story is that we all lie constantly, and not to do so and be brutally honest instead, would get us into a lot of hot water.


And so we have seen politicians of all persuasions tell porkies over the last few weeks which the electorate appear to reluctantly accept, but I’m going to try and sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Have we really got 287,000 starving kids in this country? One in four we are told. Even one child going hungry in this land of relative plenty is one too many, but 287,000, if true, is surely a catastrophe. Assuming that parents would feed their kids first before they fed themselves that means we have upwards of 574,000 starving adults. And yet obesity is one of the biggest problems facing our health services.

I wonder if the counts are taken from some of Auckland’s poorer areas, where it is said, perhaps with equal exaggeration, that one in four shops is a liquor store. Suburbs where English is often a second language, and where drug abuse is rife. It could be that this distressing but selective situation is extrapolated to encompass the whole nation.

Then we have David Cunliffe saying that research from America has shown that raising the minimum wage has no effect on unemployment. First off, I doubt if there has been any “research from America.” If there was, it is flawed. When the Labour government abolished youth rates some years back, unemployment among our school leavers went through the roof.

This should be no surprise. Why would employers take on a kid just out of school if they had to pay him or her the same rate as a more mature and experienced person?

No one in their right mind would argue that increasing the minimum wage from $14.25 to $25 an hour would not create more unemployment. Going from $14.25 to $14.75 an hour probably wouldn’t, but going to $18.80 an hour most certainly would.

Any employer worth their salt would want to pay their staff the highest wages possible, but small business owners have to contend with rapidly rising costs and falling business activity due to competition from GST-devoid internet stores and offshore wage structures where our hourly rate can look like their weekly take home pay.

The NZ minimum wage is already the highest in the OECD compared to the median wage. Increases beyond the 66 per cent level which it’s currently at would undoubtedly have a negative impact on employment.

And then we move on to the environment. Ex-Aussie, righteous Russell Norman, wants the world to know that our clean green image is a crock and our rivers are the dirtiest in the world and are getting worse. And yet a summary of fresh water river conditions issued by the Ministry of the Environment in July 2013 stated: “Of the parameters we monitor, all our rivers are either stable or improving in most monitored sites. Four of our parameters show stable or improving trends in 90 per cent of sites.”

NIWA’s Dr Davies-Colley had this to say about our improving water quality: “The fact that some of our heavily polluted rivers – mostly in dairying areas – have turned the corner in recent years gives us cause for optimism for the future.”

Meanwhile a recent OECD survey measured the major rivers that flow through farmland in OECD countries. Out of 98 rivers surveyed worldwide for cleanliness the Clutha came in first, Waitaki was second and the Waikato was fourth.

And yet on TV 3s current affairs programme The Nation last Saturday the Green co-leader said “John Key will just accelerate the pollution of our rivers.”

Dare I say liar, liar Dr. Norman.

Fibs and straight out untruths are considered fair game during elections, but what long-term affect might they have on our way of life? The Greens have said they want to cap dairy farming at its current level, despite the fact that this industry is the country’s biggest earner and the loss of precious export income would not allow us to afford better hospitals, better schools and a cleaner environment.

Farmers have already fenced off 45,000 kilometres of rivers and streams and are doing more fencing and planting all the time. There are river care and land care groups on all the main rivers and many of our smaller rivers and streams across New Zealand. They are spending millions of dollars to improve water quality. They include farmers, Fonterra, Dairy NZ, NZ Beef and Lamb, Landcare NZ, Federated Farmers, iwi, fertiliser companies, universities and regional councils.

By loudly exaggerating problems with our “Pure” marketing brand the Greens have wittingly sabotaged New Zealand’s international reputation. What voters need to remember is that farmers made us a rich country, not the state.

Pinocchio had a big nose because he lied too much.

I was born with mine.

“Our environment is being sold down the river” - David Cunliffe

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Wednesday 10 September 2014

Will CGT sink Labour's boat?

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Labour’s much-vaunted Capital Gains Tax is starting to look like the old much-despised death duties in disguise. When Labour introduced GST back in 1986 they sensibly resisted calls to exclude certain items of food from the tax. This would be an “administrative nightmare” they quite rightly said at the time. They are not heeding their own advice when on this occasion they have promised to exclude the family home from the new property tax.

John Key made a hit of “show us the money” proportions when he asked David Cunliffe in The Press leader’s debate in Christchurch, “Did the tax apply to those people who have put their home into a family trust?” Cunliffe was unable to answer on the spot, but later, after taking advice, assured voters that it didn’t.

This opened a whole can of worms about the tax and questions were subsequently asked as to when it did and when it did not apply. For instance: When your parents passed on, did the inherited family home attract the tax? The architect of the tax three years ago, David Cunliffe, when he was the shadow finance of minister under Phil Goff, said it would not apply as long as you sold your parents’ home within a month.

Within a month?

Imagine squabbling siblings deciding on a programme of marketing and selling the family home within a month. And could the real estate agent guarantee a quick sale without pricing the property at well below market value?

Later David Parker admitted Mr Cunliffe had got it wrong; a panel would be set up to decide how long you had to sell your parents’ home before the insidious tax would apply.

Let’s say your parents bought their home in the 1960’s for $10,000. It’s now worth $400,000. You would apparently pay a 15% tax on the $390,000 capital gain which amounts to $58,500.

Makes the old death duties look like small change.

Kinda brings tears to your eyes, doesn’t it?

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If you think claims that newspapers show unfair bias is itself unfair then consider this. Last Friday Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater took Fairfax Media, the NZ Herald and TV3 to court endeavouring to take out an injunction to stop them from leaking his private emails, hacked by an individual calling himself Rawshark and published under the by-line Whaledump.


Basically the judge agreed; no more new material could be published. Last Saturday’s NZ Herald headline said: Commission rejects bloggers claims, the Wairarapa Times-Age headline read: Court blocks Slater’s bid to gag the media while the Dominion-Post reported: Court injunction plugs Whaledump leaks.

Is the Dom-Post the only honest communicator?

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I was walking behind two teenage girls in Queen Street recently and I was listening to them talk. Every third or fourth word was an obscenity, and the thing that struck me as odd was that the conversation didn’t strike me as being particularly odd. The girls weren’t angry or excited. They were just talking in a conversational tone. They apparently didn’t think there was anything wrong with the way they sounded. And in a way they were right. Obscenity, the open use of which used to be the mark of lower social strata, has somehow become acceptable in everyday conversation for everyday people.

And yet I am offended - not out of a sense of morality or of prudishness - but because foul language used casually in public comes close to the idea of a violation of privacy.

I know there are some around who feel assaulted by hearing it. I choose that word very carefully; but certain language is an assault on the senses. Those who disagree are probably saying, “After all, it’s only words.” But words are vehicles; they convey messages and to some people the message of profanity is a message of ugliness and aggressiveness and disrespect for civil behaviour.

Obscenity can now be heard in some popular music, on TV, radio - and even magazines and newspapers have begun to print language that would have been unthinkable when I was growing up. The practice is usually defended under the name of “freedom,” but whose freedom is it?

If the language of ugliness becomes so much part of our society that it is impossible to escape, no matter where you turn, then who is free and who isn’t?

“It is not right that any matters of sexual immorality or indecency or greed should even be mentioned among you. Nor is it fitting for you to use language which is obscene, profane or vulgar.” - Ephesians 5:3

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Wednesday 3 September 2014

What is happening to my country?

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Oh how I yearn for the good old days of the wooden ships and the iron men when governments were decided like horse races - first past the post. Surely everyone’s political leanings were satisfied with Labour and National, just like the Americans are happy with Democrats and Republicans and the United Kingdom with Labour and Conservatives. But no, we had to go and throw out a perfectly good system of governance and now look what we’ve let out of the bag.

Despite bring a dyed-in the-wool conservative I’ve never really minded whether I was ruled by Labour or National, but some of these newer entrants scare the living daylights out of me.

Take the Greens - actually I wish somebody would - here is a disparate cabal of wannabes led by the most unlikely pair you could ever imagine appealing to the New Zealand public.

Metiria Turei, formally a member of the Random Trollops performance troupe, first entered politics as a candidate for the McGillicuddy Serious Party in 1993. In 1996 she jumped ship to stand for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party. Again unsuccessful, but determined to become an MP, she teamed up with the Greens in 2002. Not winning a seat – no Green candidate ever has – she came in on the list and became the co-leader in 2009.

The other half of the dubious duo is Russell Norman whose foray into politics started when he joined the Socialist Workers Party in Brisbane. The Socialist Workers Party is described as a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist organisation. We despise communists and don’t like being bossed by Australians, and yet we are arguably on the cusp of electing a coalition government made up of the Greens and Labour with Mr Norman likely to demand the Minister of Finance portfolio.

Green voters are generally decent folk who care for the environment, but caring for the environment is a two-edged sword. Mother Nature has a toxic side and we have battled over many centuries to keep her tamed.

Green-style policies have often had disastrous outcomes. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring written in 1962 caused environmentalists to rise up and ban the use of the pesticide DDT. It is now believed that this caused the deaths of millions of people worldwide because DDT was used extensively to kill the malaria-carrying mosquito.

Modern environmentalists now want us to ban 1080 despite the fact that it has been declared perfectly safe by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment after extensive peer-reviewed studies. The widespread use of 1080 has all but rid the country of bovine TB and has hastened the return of our native birds.

Concerns over poisonous substances used to preserve our wood used in timber framed buildings were raised by environmental interests and as a result New Zealand houses were built for more than a decade with untreated timber. The resulting leaky homes saga has cost the government and local bodies over $12 billion to date with many more claims in the pipeline.


Even scarier is the Internet-Mana party. Hone Harawira is a racist who wouldn’t want his daughter to marry a Pakeha, Kim Dotcom is a German fraudster who hoards Hitler memorabilia and by his own admission once hacked the German Prime Minister’s computer and caused him to lose his credit rating and Laila Harre has jumped more ships than Metiria Turei. Add foul-mouthed Pam Corkery to this mix with John Minto hovering in the wings and honestly, what is there to like?

Back in March Hone wanted the purveyors of legal highs to be executed; now the Internet division of his party want to decriminalise cannabis. We also find out that one of the major backers of Kim Dotcoms Mega website was apparently using laundered drug money to buy the shares. Don’t tell Winston, but this man is an Asian.

Winston of course intends to be the king maker. He will be looking for the baubles of office and will accede to the highest bidder. His party has never paid back the $158,000 they owe us taxpayers from two elections back, but that doesn’t worry Winston, nor it seems the electorate.

Words fail me to explain the reaction to Nicholas Hager’s book. Rupert Murdoch’s people at the News of the World have quite rightly been hung, drawn and quartered for publishing information illegally gained by hacking into people’s private emails and phone calls and yet here in New Zealand the news media are Hager’s willing tools and are wreaking havoc.

This will change the whole gamut of how we communicate in the future and NZ Post should be rethinking their downsizing plans as I suspect letter writing will once more become fashionable.

To be perfectly Frankenstein first past the post didn’t always mean we only had a two-party system. There was the rather oddball Social Creditors led by Bruce Beetham and Bob Jones formed the New Zealand Party intending to and succeeding in getting rid of Rob Muldoon whom he considered to be a closet socialist. The end result of that exercise was that David Lange’s Labour government was elected in 1984 and ushered in the most right-wing economic reforms ever embarked upon.

Back in the 1950s a worker’s chant was: “Joe for King and a protestant Pope.” “Joe” was Joseph Stalin.

I suppose politics have always been a bit weird.

“But suppose there are two mobs?” suggested Mr Snodgrass. “Shout with the largest,” replied Mr Pickwick. – Charles Dickens

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Wednesday 27 August 2014

Prosperity is where the mouth is

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A young part-Maori woman quit her job at the Whangarei branch of KiwiYo last week because the manager of the shop would not allow her to greet customers with “Kia Ora” insisting instead that she say “Hello” as prescribed in the company manual. The usual rent-a-protest crowd assembled outside the company store chanting and displaying placards and the KiwiYo’s franchise owner was forced to capitulate and apologise, suggesting his manager may have interpreted the rules too rigidly.

Uncharacteristically I have some sympathy with the 17-year-old shop assistant, Monet-Mei Clarke. When we go to English-speaking Hawaii we don’t have any difficulty with being greeted with “Aloha” particularly when it is expressed by a captivating young native-Hawaiian female at the airport as she seductively places a fresh flower lei around your craning neck.


We use Maori cultural ceremonies when and where it suits us to make us look attractively bi-cultural and we have a sense of great pride when the All Blacks do the Haka, particularly at overseas arenas.

But at other times we are a shade petulant.

Recently there was a call to make teaching Te Reo Maori compulsory in schools. However, perhaps sensibly, this suggestion was considered a step too far by both major political parties.

Sir Robert Jones, writing in the Wanganui Chronicle, had even stronger views. He was utterly opposed to the promotion of everyone learning to speak Maori which he said we are wrongly told is part of our cultural heritage. He reckoned that millions of dollars of taxpayer’s money had already been spent, with abysmal results.

“Even the Maori King can’t speak Maori,” claimed Sir Robert.

“The sole purpose of language is communication and romanticising obtuse virtues about it is pretentious nonsense. Artistic expression such as poetry and prose is not about individual words which in themselves have no special merit, but instead their placement. The Welsh endured this foolishness by their zealots and vast sums were spent promoting their redundant language, all pointlessly as the Welsh sensibly ignored these efforts,” Jones wrote.

In his 2006 book How the Language Works the noted Welsh linguistics Professor David Crystal observed that linguistic nationalism invariably promoted separatist political demands, causing resentment and an unnecessarily divided community. This sounds frighteningly familiar.

Whereas most languages can number their words at around 200,000 the Maori dictionary only contains somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 words. Contrast this with the English language which has more than a million words and is still growing. English literature from Chaucer to Elliot, from Shakespeare to Hemingway is the richest and most extensive on earth.

So when you’re studying English, you’re studying one of the world’s greatest languages and the most interesting subjects.

There is no doubt that from the earliest times the favoured group of people has always been the educated class. They can make themselves recognised instantly, anywhere, by the simple expedient of speaking a few words. In can be argued that our language, more than anything else, determines which rung we position ourselves on life’s ladder of success.

Many years ago a graduating class of a large American university was given an examination in English vocabulary. The test scores were graded into groups of 5 per cent – the top 5 per cent and so on to the bottom. At regular intervals during the next 20 years, questionnaires were sent out to the surviving graduates asking them their occupations and their incomes. Without a single exception those who had the highest score on the vocabulary test were among the top income group, while those who had scored lowest were in the bottom income group.

A person may dress in the latest fashion and present a very attractive appearance. So far, so good, but the minute they open their mouths and begin to speak they proclaim to the world the level of their potential competency. George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which was later adapted into the musical comedy My Fair Lady is an extreme example of this.

Our use of our language is the one thing we can’t hide.

To learn a second language, be it Maori or Mandarin, will be a satisfying, mind-expanding experience. Ms Clarke says that Maori is spoken constantly at home.

If her family takes English just as seriously I have no doubt she will soon move on to a vocation more fulfilling that selling frozen yoghurt cones.

Haere ra.

“If one cannot discriminate between grammar and solecism, sequence and incoherency, sense and nonsense, one has no protection against falsehood, and believes all lies one is told.” - A. E. Housman

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