A fine petishun for the gullybull

Russell Abnormal was particularly pleased with himself and so too was his co-leader Metaphor Two-rear. Ms Two-rear was grinning like a Cheshire cat; the post-persons had defied attacks by magpies and delivered the bright orange envelopes into the letter boxes of an anxious public no doubt desirous to have their say.

The bicycle express had got through.

They were going to put it up Don Key’s followers in a big way. How dare he opt to sell 49 per cent of the country’s crown jewels, a move which they and their constituents so avidly opposed? So what if the referendum cost $30 million. They were convinced that close to 100 per cent of the hoi-polloi were certain to vote “No” to the question: “Should the gu’mmint be allowed to sell shares in state-owned assets to their rich mates?”

Heck, the county didn’t need the money. Just because we are borrowing massive sums from the gnomes of Bay-Jing on a weekly basis, we can’t be too hard up, thought Metaphor. After all didn’t the Higher Celery Commission just give them all a generous pay rise?

Abnormal leant back on his leather recliner clasped his hands behind his head and thought what an inspired decision he’d made some years back when he left behind the self-imposed impoverishment of the Horse-tralian Komyounist party and set sail for Ayer-tayer-rower. Despite his falsetto voice the land of the wrong white crowd had fallen for his vexatious brand of pollyticks and he fully expected to hold the balance of power in less than a year.

Kevin Dudd would live to regret that he was never schooled by him.

Meanwhile Wonton Peters, just finishing a Chinese takeaway, straightened his tie and combed his hair for the umpteenth time as he contemplated an afternoon at the racetrack. He still had the sign with “NO” on it that he’d held up to TV journalists when they queried whether Onerous Glen had given him $100,000 to pay his legal fees. It reminded him that he was going to say “No” to the question posed in the orange envelope, despite at one stage promising to support the Prime Misery over the issue, only to have his offer spurned.

But David Cunningness was keeping shtum. What if the public recalled that Layber privatised Ayer Knew Zeeland in 1989, selling it lock, stock and barrel to Sing-a-poor owned Briar-lee investments and Sing-a-poor Ayer Lines? He remembered Layber had bought back eighty per cent of it in 2001. And then in 2002 Herr Klark, operating out of her Wasp-hive office in Helengrad, tried to sell 22.5% to Kwantas. Don Key has just sold 20% to Knew Zeelanders whereas Herr Klark had tried to sell 22.5% to those pesky Horse-tralians and in the process would have destroyed trans-Tazmin competition.

Wouldn’t the public recognise the sheer hypocrisy, Cunningness worried?

                                                      **********************

David Cunliffe may well have scored a political point with the same people who will have forgotten Labour’s record of selling off state-owned assets when he said a Labour government would instruct Treasury to pay the $3.5 million which is currently owed to the Pike River families by way of a court-ordered reparation for health and safety failings at the mine.

He said he would then use all the means at his disposal once he became Prime Minister to ensure Treasury got the money back in full from the shareholders of companies like NZ Oil and Gas and other businesses and individuals who had a stake in Pike River Coal before the firm went into receivership. “For too long,” he said, “These people have ignored their moral obligations.”

Bill English however makes the point that ACC had already paid out $5 million to the families of Pike River on the same basis of any family that suffers a work-place accident. The full support from ACC would amount to $20 million when paid.

Other commentators have said that NZ Oil and Gas has paid out $25 million since the disaster for salaries, creditors and tunnel recovery. A resolution at its annual meeting in October to pay more was lost.

It could be reasonably argued that there are few companies that would voluntarily pay $25 million when there was no legal requirement for them to do so.

Apology:

A few columns back I inferred that half of our politicians are idiots. I now withdraw that statement.

Half of our politicians are not idiots.

“I am offended by political jokes. Too often they get elected.” - Will Rogers

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Analysing a community in crisis

I’m now going to wade in where angels fear to tread; the ‘letters to the editor’ department may swell as a result.

It’s all about this Roast Busters saga. I just can’t get my head around it. For instance what is the meaning of the phrase “Roast Busters?” A play-upon-words from Ghost Busters, but what is the tie-up with the activities of the group?

Is there a teenage language out there that I am blissfully unaware of?

I Googled the lyrics of Lorde’s universal hit Royals and have concluded that the young do now speak in a dialect quite different from the rest of us.

But the Roast Busters?

First off it seems the dastardly deeds took place a couple of years ago. Back then the young men in question would have been fifteen; the girls we are told were thirteen. We were informed recently that Family Planning want condoms to be supplied to girls as young as thirteen due to the alarming number of teenage pregnancies that are occurring.

The same press release said that 14 year-olds are being taught how to put condoms on plastic penis’s as part of the secondary school curriculum.

I’m blushing as I am writing this.

So lovemaking at that level is commonplace, but the Roast Busters were ensuring success by first getting their young victims inebriated. That trick has been going on since time immemorial, but we are reliably told that in this case the sex was taking place without the consent of the young women.

In America, having sex with an underage girl is called statutory rape. In this country it has the less dramatic title of unlawful carnal knowledge. The age of consent in New Zealand is sixteen, but it varies worldwide. I note that in Spain it is thirteen, in Brazil it is fourteen, and in France fifteen.

I remember as teenagers we used to regularly buy the Truth newspaper which came out weekly on a Tuesday. Apart from the page three girls we would pour over the salacious reports of the court hearings which inevitably featured a number of young men being charged with having “unlawful carnal knowledge.”

I haven’t seen a report like that for years.

If there are vast numbers of thirteen-year-old girls getting pregnant then there must be an identical number of young men committing this crime, yet getting off scot free.

I asked a member of the judiciary some time ago why this once-regularly-reported criminal act now seemed to have disappeared of the court lists and he told me that it was not really considered a crime these days, particularly if the perpetrator was of a similar age as the defendant.

The Truth newspaper isn’t around anymore; it has of course been superseded. Teenagers can apparently find all manner of salaciousness in the form of hard-core pornography on their computers. The page three girls would have been tame by comparison.

And it’s no good me trying to defend the Roast Busters. A young lady named Amy, who said she was a Roast Buster victim, rang Radio Live where Willie Jackson and John Tamihere dared to ask her what was she wearing and was she sure she hadn’t consented. They both subsequently lost their jobs. Their first question was totally unacceptable, but isn’t it entirely possible that a young girl who has consumed too much alcohol may be incapable of saying no?

Now there is no doubt that being raped is an indescribably traumatic event for a woman. For most it is a life sentence of ongoing anguish. And yet the police person who interviewed the three complainants - and remember she was a female - found there was not enough evidence to bring the perpetrators in for questioning.

To some extent the stupid young men are a product of the times. They will have no doubt watched pornography that makes women appear like sex objects and even though the girls were under age, there was virtually no risk of them being charged.

And so we reap what we sow. Young people now have easy access to alcohol with the world’s most liberal drinking laws, and are part of a society that all but encourages sex amongst school age children and then makes no effort to charge anyone who breaks the age-of-consent laws.

If the Roast Busters hadn’t boasted on Facebook about their disgraceful behaviour, they’d still be laughing.

“Man is always much worse and much better than is expected of him. The fields of good are just as limitless as the wastelands of evil.” - Abram Tertz

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Where the emperor has no clothes

A letter to the editor and a number of personal letters and phone calls criticised a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago challenging the efficacy of global warming. I guess my trouble is that over many years I have seen “cry wolf” so many times that I've become a sceptic.

Set aside the claim the world was freezing over as postulated in the 1960’s. Next up was the Club of Rome, a group of distinguished academics and scientists who in the 1970’s claimed that the world would run out of oil before the new millennium with dire consequences for civilisation.

Greenpeace, a wealthy American multi-national and another great doomsayer recently said that the world was now awash with oil and therefore the Russians have no need to drill in the Arctic Circle for more. Some of their dopey advocates attempted to hijack the giant oil rig and are now languishing in a Soviet gulag complaining of the cold and the fact that their captors don’t speak English.

Last week the International Panel on Climate Change said that starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, wars and disease will worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change.

I recall back in 1986 the Wairarapa Catchment Board, the forerunner to the regional council, calculated that due to global warming the sea at Riversdale Beach was encroaching towards the land at a rate of a metre a year. The Masterton District Council panicked and put a hazard zone restriction on most of the beachfront houses. 27 years later the waves still lap the shore exactly where they always have.

I also remember being taught at secondary school that the low-lying Pacific atolls would soon be under water and uninhabitable. I’d hate to admit to you how far back that was.

But the doozey of all doom and gloom merchants was undoubtedly Paul Ehrlich who scared the living

daylights out of us all back in 1968 with his alarmist book The Population Bomb which sold in millions. Ehrlich is currently in New Zealand for a lecture tour with his new scare-the-pants-off-you tome Avoiding Global Collapse. The usual sycophants will fawn over the author and his book, conveniently forgetting that his predictions in 1968 were so far off the mark that in hindsight they look like the ravings of a man with serious mental problems.

The battle to feed all of humanity he wrote in The Population Bomb is over. “In the 1970’s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. We need to rapidly bring the world population under control,” he warned, “Reducing the growth to zero or making it negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved.”

Ehrlich even floated the idea of adding “temporary sterilants” to the water supply or staple foods and expressed support for government mandated sterilization of Indian males with three or more children.

I’m thinking the Politburo in China must have bought the Chinese translation and this was their catalyst for the one child per couple policy. Apart from the words cousins, aunties and uncles disappearing from the vernacular as a result, the Chinese are now discovering that there are not sufficient young people coming along to create enough wealth for their ageing population in retirement.

Let’s just examine Ehrlich’s other predictions. In 1970 he forewarned that in ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of the coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

Well at least we were going to have a coastline, which will have surprised the boffins at the Catchment Board.

In a speech in1971 Ehrlich predicted that by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people. “If I was a gambler,” he said, “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

“When you reach a point where you realise further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left. That point for me,” he said, “Is 1972.”

And so Ehrlich is back in New Zealand peddling more of this nonsense and I’ll bet he’ll find a willing audience morbidly hanging on his every word and subsequently criticising the rest of us for not preparing for the worst.

His latest rant is that Earth has too many people consuming too many things and imposing far too much stress on land and water and that only unprecedented cultural change provides any hope of averting a catastrophe.

Sounds like The Population Bomb all over again.

If I had my way I’d put him in a Russian jail.

“When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.” 
- Winston Churchill 

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Not a book for the faint-of-heart

My young friend Paul Henry has written a new book. It’s called Outraged and I suspect many who read it will themselves be outraged. In typical Henry fashion Paul pulls no punches and systematically slaughters all the sacred cows you could possibly think of and some of which you probably haven’t. Labour supporters, and those of the green persuasion are quite likely to organise book burning sessions and even those on the centre-right are sure to find something to enrage them.

My sensitivities were bruised with the language and I told Paul that I would have deleted the expletives. He was also critical of church goers and hybrid car owners. Last time I saw Paul I took him for a short drive in my Hybrid from where we were to where we were going. His literary agent was with us and she was amazed he would lower himself, literally, to get in it. On the journey, which was mercifully short, he found endless fault with the car, mostly unjustified.

In the book you will discover that he has an unrelenting fetish for cars and boats. Some years ago he rang me from Auckland and asked if I would go and check out a Rolls-Royce that Majestic Motors had for sale. “Take it for a test drive and let me know if you think I should buy it” he instructed. I was delighted with the commission. I had never ever been in a Rolls-Royce, let alone driven one, so I did as I was instructed. What expertise I was supposed to have in the field of Rolls-Royce appraisals I wouldn’t know, but I reported back positively and he subsequently bought it.

Last week he emailed me to say that he had just taken delivery of   Dodge Challenger SRT8 new from the States. It has a 6.4 litre Hemi V8 motor that would eat Hybrids he reckoned.

And yet he spends at least two pages of his new book complaining about the price of petrol!

The back cover of the book explains a lot about where he’s been and where his future lies so I’ll quote verbatim: “Since being kicked off TV in New Zealand, among many  other things I have written a best seller, been kicked of TV in Australia, filmed a movie in Hollywood about myself, been offered what could have been the best show on TV and turned it down, turned down a political advance that would certainly have seen me enter politics, and spent a small fortune on both boats and cars. Luckily I have never been in such demand, so obviously I hunted down a network that had just gone into receivership and immediately signed on with them.”

The network in receivership of course is TV3 and The Paul Henry Show starts in the New Year screening at 10.30 each week night replacing Nightline. Cameron Slater, in his  incredibly popular Whale Oil blog says: “At last we’ll have a reason to turn the TV back on.”

The book is embellished with drawings by his ageing mother Olive. Olive would know as much about illustrating a book as I would know about Rolls-Royce’s. However Paul reckons that as she ages her masterpieces, far from deteriorating in technique, have taken on a more Dali-esque quality. This is largely due, he says, to her failing eyesight, a crumbling mind, arthritis and a potpourri of medication.

The book is punctuated by Paul with afterthoughts using the same thick-nibbed felt pen Olive used for her artwork. The felt pen is also used for the page numbers which adds to the uniqueness of the publication.

Among other things in Outraged Paul tells us that Seven Sharp was ill-conceived and badly executed, that homosexuals should understand that they are not special just because they are gay, that Maori activists are ungrateful fools sabotaging a nation, that there are too many disability car-parks, that Sky City Convention Centre critics “queer the pitch” by misrepresenting the negatives and overlooking the positives, that we have too many tertiary time-wasters who are racking up bills at our expense and will spend decades trying to avoid repaying, that Muslims show little tolerance for other religions but are playing the long game of breed and infiltrate which will eventually bring success, and admits not all Asians are bad drivers, just most.

Something in it then for everybody to be outraged about, but I predict it will become another Paul Henry best seller bought by his critics as well as his admirers.

It was not that long ago that he was voted by the New Zealand viewing public as this country’s most popular TV personality and his outrageous speech at the award ceremony went viral worldwide on U-tube.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge in that comparatively short time.

He is coming Masterton to promote the book next Wednesday and I will be interviewing him in a local bookshop endeavouring to flesh out the mystique behind the book.

But hang on; there’s no mystique behind the book, it’s just Paul Henry being Paul Henry.

“I’ve never had a humble opinion. If you’ve got an opinion, why be humble about it.”                                                                                                                         -Joan Baez

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The left and right of global warming

Two opposing events clouded the global warming issue last week. The Blue Mountain bushfires certainly caused concern in the Lucky Country. Tony Abbott’s new administration is rich in climate change sceptics, and opponents blamed the fires and Sydney’s soaring temperatures on global warming accusing the Liberal/National coalition of having its head in the sand.

Abbott has already closed the government’s climate change department and the state funded Climate Commission which advised on the effects of climate change and is soon to dump the unpopular carbon tax introduced by the now much-despised Julia Gillard led regime.

Meanwhile NASA last week announced new record growth of sea ice saying that the ice in the Antarctica has extended over an area of 19.47 million square metres at the end of September. This is the highest since measurements began in 1979. This puts paid to those gruesome pictures and claims that the polar regions are melting and rising tides will soon swamp us all.

Lines seem to be drawn between capitalists and socialists as to the verisimilitude of global warming. I guess those tensions will always be with us.

Karl Marx reckoned capitalism would make the rich richer and the poor poorer. If someone was to gain, someone else had to lose in the free market, he surmised. The middle class, he wrote, would become the proletarians and the proletarians would starve. But the industrial revolution gave freedom to innovate, produce and to trade and the proletariat became the middle class and the middle class began to live like the upper class. And the most liberal country - England - led the way. According to trends in mankind, until then it would take 2000 years to double the average income, but in the mid-19th century the British did it in 30 years. When Marx died in 1883 the average Englishman was three time richer than when Marx was born in 1818.

Despite their obvious flaws Marx’s ideas were eventually taken up, but prominent modern socialist Robert Heilbroner in 1989 famously admitted: “Less than 75 years after the contest between capitalism and socialism began, it is over: capitalism has won. The tumultuous changes taking place in the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organises the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.”

But Heilbroner did not make peace with capitalism. Someone he concluded would have to pay for its success. He decided it would have to be the heavy cost to the environment. After having been opposed to capitalism because it would create waste, inefficiency and poverty, a socialist could now be opposed to capitalism because it was too efficient and created too much wealth, and that it would destroy nature.

Johan Norborg, head of the political ideas at Swedish think tank, Timbro, says this argument is as popular as it is false. First of all the worst environmental problems in the world are not smokestacks. Much worse is that so many people burn wood, coal, crop waste and dung indoors for heating and cooking. Respiratory diseases kill about 1.6 million people every year. Undoubtedly the modern production of energy creates environmental problems, but it doesn’t kill someone every 20 seconds as this killer in the kitchens of the third world does.

And diseases transmitted by water kills about another 5 million people every year. Just the number of people who die from these two environmental problems is 300 times the number of dead in war every year. These diseases also happen to have been eliminated in every industrialised nation on earth.

Norborg goes on to say that people in western societies live longer lives, with better access to goods and technology, and with bigger opportunities than the kings in Marx’s day.

Oh well, said Marx’s evil apprentice Lenin, we might have got that wrong, but the working class in the West could only become richer because they are bribed by the capitalists. Someone else would have to pay for that bribe – poor countries. Lenin meant that imperialism was the next natural step of capitalism, whereby poor countries had to give up their resources to feed the West.

The problem with this argument, continues Norborg, is that all continents became wealthier, albeit at different speeds. The average Western European or American is 19 times richer than in 1820, but a Latin American is 9 times richer, an Asian 6 times richer and an African 3 times richer. So from whom was the wealth stolen?

In this country we worry about most of the goods we buy being sourced from China. It’s true that a New Zealand manufacturing worker might lose his or her job because of this, but there are other mitigating effects. A Chinese worker gets a job of course and his new income means he can spend his money on luxury goods which to him may mean a Fonterra milk product. New Zealand consumers get cheaper prices and when they do they can spend the extra purchasing power on new goods and services and so an unemployed New Zealander can get a job in a newly created sector.

Socialists tend to be atheists; Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses destined to keep downtrodden workers in their place as they waited for their rewards in paradise. Capitalists however probably believe that God has “got the whole world in His hands” and we are all safe and sound.

Is it possible then that global warming is just a new tool that died-in-the-wool-socialists are using in their centuries-old effort to discredit capitalism?

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamouring to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H. L. Mencken.

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