Will CGT sink Labour's boat?

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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What is happening to my country?

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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Prosperity is where the mouth is

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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Has democracy run its course?

I read that in the 1930s travellers returning from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany praised the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there. They tended to compare them with their own democracies that seemed weak, inefficient and pusillanimous. Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence.

In the 1930s Westerners went to Russia to admire Stalin’s Moscow subway stations; today they go to China to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai. Just as in the 1930s, New Zealander’s now return from China wondering why autocracies’ can build high speed railroad lines seemingly overnight while in Auckland they’ve argued for over 40 years on how to build a commuter rail service and Wellington can’t get permission to build a flyover to skirt the Basin Reserve.

Russia and China are emerging as the world’s two great powers while America sets a dismaying example to its allies and friends. For 200 years its constitutional machinery was widely admired; now in the hands of polarising politicians in Washington it generates paralysis.

America’s democratic discrepancies were starkly demonstrated in a study by Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University in St. Paul.

In the last presidential elections Barack Obama, a community organiser from Chicago before becoming a senator and then president won 19 states against Mitt Romney, a hugely successful businessman and a devout Mormon who won 29.

The square miles won by Obama: 580,000, Romney: 2,247,000. Population of counties won by Obama: 127 million, Romney: 143 million. Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by Obama: 13.2, Romney: 2.1.

Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate the map of the territory Romney won was mostly the land owned by taxpaying citizens of the country. Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens housed in low income tenements and living off various forms of government welfare.”

I thought of this when I saw what you might describe as canaille shouting obscenities at an alcohol-fuelled, Hitler-style rally, punctuated the devils hand-signals and led by a German fraudster with the curious name of Kim Dotcom and I couldn’t help but think: “And these people vote?”

An unfair observation I will concede. Democracy after all allows one vote per person and everyone should have an opportunity to express their views no matter how much they conflict with my own.

But democracy can only work if politics is conducted between respectful adversaries. Right now New Zealand is experiencing a lead-up to the elections that looks like a war between bitter enemies. To emphasise this, Nicky Hager’s book recounts democracies’ grubby underbelly.

Fringe factions who have nothing to lose and everything to gain under our flawed MMP system of governance have thrown up a gaggle of would-be aspirants who under the old first-past-the-post system wouldn’t have had a look in.

These left-leaning minor parties are likely to blur the thinking of many of Labour’s natural constituency and I suspect that if only National and Labour were contesting the forthcoming election Labour might have an odds-on chance of winning. To paraphrase Roger Millar: “New Zealand swings like a pendulum do.”

When conservatives win elections corporate interests often have undue influence. When the progressives win back power they only succeed in making the state more domineering. When the conservatives are restored to office, they cut back. And so it goes on; a continuing dynamic of political alternation, each trying to outdo each other in the popularity stakes and in the process creating a modern, overloaded state that is a real threat to democracy.

The more responsibilities the government assumes the worst it performs them and the angrier people get which only makes them demand more help. Far from reducing inequality you could argue that the modern democratic state is making the problem worse.

Meanwhile both Russia and China still dwell on the humiliations they have received at the hands of the West. Both refuse to accept liberal democracy as a model and both insist that their 20th-century experiences of revolution and civil war necessitates centralised rule with an iron fist. This isn’t communism as such; communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model, state domination is very much alive in The Peoples Republic of China and in Putin’s police state.

Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, reckoned the average age of the world’s greatest civilisations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years these nations always progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; and from dependence back into bondage.

I have therefore reached the inevitable conclusion that what this country needs is a benevolent dictator.

I’m ready and willing and could start next Monday.

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.” - Alexander Tyler.

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Examining the birthday paradox

Last weekend I had a birthday. One of my granddaughters celebrates her birthday on the same day.

Eleanor was fourteen, and I was %#*. My word processor has a direct link to the privacy commission and never discloses information that should not be widely disseminated among the general public. Though to be fair if my father hadn’t been so shy and retiring I’d be two years older than I am now. I’ll give you clue though. About the time I was born Winston Churchill was heard to say: “This is our finest hour” and mum and dad thought he was talking about me!

I refuse to admit I’m as ancient as I am, even though it could tend to make my children appear illegitimate. It’s a sobering thought however that when Mozart was my age he’d been dead for nearly forty years. It is now getting to the stage where a fireman may have to be in attendance when I light my birthday candles.

Suffice it to say I still have most of my hair and none of it has yet turned grey so I may be younger than you think. Despite this, every morning I get up and read the obituary column in the Dominion-Post and if I’m not in it, I shave.

If only I’d known how old I was going to get I would have taken better care of myself.

Now you may think that the chances of my granddaughter having her birthday on the same day as me stretches the bounds of common concurrence, but apparently this is not necessarily so.

Assuming for a moment that birthdays are evenly distributed throughout the year, if you’re sitting in a room with 23 people in it, what are the chances do you think of two of those people having a birthday on the same day?

Ignoring leap years, a reasonably intelligent person might conclude that the odds probably wouldn’t reach a 100 percent unless there are 366 people in the room. Such a person might therefore conclude that the likelihood of two people having a birthday among the 23 would be less than say 5 per cent. In reality, due to the convoluted reasoning behind mathematics, the odds are about 50 per cent according to numerical expert Allan Bellows. This phenomenon is apparently known as the Birthday Paradox.

If the set of people is increased to 60 the odds climb to above 90 per cent. This inconsistency can be offset somewhat because birthdays are not distributed perfectly throughout the year. Most people are born in the springtime, and also, due to the way hospitals operate, more babies are born on Mondays and Tuesdays than on weekends.

So Eleanor and I having the same birthdate is not so paradoxical at all.

So since her coincidental birth I have had to celebrate my birthdays at her parties and I always tried to be one of the gang. I resisted joining them on the trampoline, they tended to ran around the house faster than I could, there were no places big enough for me to secrete myself when it came to playing hide and seek and I always seemed to end up being the donkey they wanted to pin that tail on.

Their music was not really to my taste and I could never fathom how The Wiggles had made such an impact on the young.

We’d sit down to cheerio’s, chippies, crust-less bread and butter adorned with hundreds and thousands, chocolate cake and finally jelly and ice cream. I’d gratefully wash all this down with raspberry cordial and then I’d be ready for bed; and it would only be about four o’clock in the afternoon.

I’d stagger home bloated and exhausted and be eternally grateful that the final care of my delightful grandchildren was in the capable hands of people much younger than me.

Now that Eleanor is a teenager of course she is looking for much more sophisticated fare, amusement and friends. I suspect - though she is far too generous to let on - that grandfathers are becoming a bit of an embarrassment.

Meanwhile I’m actually looking forward to jelly and ice cream.

Yet despite the age boldly emblazoned on the birthday cards that adorn our mantelpiece you don’t feel any older than you did twenty or even thirty years ago. Frustratingly you’re the same person in an aging outer casing; glasses and hearing aids notwithstanding.

I said to my wife, “I don’t look seventy do I?”

“No,” she said, “But you did when you were.”

I don’t know whether to ignore the remark or nominate her for a comedy spot at King Street Live.

“A geriatric is a German cricketer who captures three successive wickets.” - George Coote

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Confessions of a scaredy-cat

They say flying is the way to travel and although I’ve flown from time to time I’ve never been convinced that it is. The incongruity of being hurtled through the air at unimaginable speeds in a flimsy aluminium tube and being totally reliant on engines made in the Rolls-Royce factory by unionised British workers potentially on a Monday causes me a good deal of anxiety.

And I’ve had my share of anxious moments in the air.

The first was when I was about seventeen years old flying from Christchurch to Palmerston North one afternoon in a DC3. We were about ten minutes out from Christchurch when smoke started to ooze out from under the door in the wall that separates the cockpit from the passengers. A white-sleeved arm shot out around the door and the hand attached endeavoured to grab the fire extinguisher that should have been on the wall. It wasn’t; the bracket designed to hold the extinguisher was there, but not the extinguisher. The whole body belonging to the arm and the hand that I assume was the co-pilot then emerged and went running down to the back of the aircraft and found an extinguisher still in its bracket and ran back to the pilot’s enclosure, closing the door behind him.

The plane then banked steeply and headed back to Harewood, losing altitude very quickly. We appeared to be fence-hopping and the passenger sitting in the window seat next to me decided we were going to land in a paddock. I casually told the person sitting in the aisle across from me: “We’re going to land in a paddock.” This unsubstantiated piece of information spread around the cabin like wildfire and although there was no panic as such, I’ll swear I could hear silent prayers being offered up.

In fact we landed back at the airport, albeit at the far end of the runway and were met by two fire engines with their sirens screaming at full amplification. I have often wondered since why they needed to use their sirens; they were hardly going to encounter any traffic on the grass verge alongside the runway.

There was no stairway wheeled in to disembark us and so we jumped on to the tarmac and had to trudge a fair distance back to the terminal. It was only then that we were told we were never in danger; it was just that the radio set had caught fire. I noticed however that the toilets were getting well-used.

I had another frightening experience in a 737, this time flying from Christchurch to Wellington with the gallant pilot attempting to land in a howling southerly. After two aborted attempts we were taken back to Christchurch, put up for the night and then flown to Wellington the next morning when the weather was more clement.

An NAC pilot told my father back in the 1960s when the airline shifted its operations from Paraparaumu to Rongotai that the new Wellington airport was an accident waiting to happen. “Cross winds from the hilly terrain were deadly,” he said. Whenever I’ve needed to fly to Auckland since then I have opted to go via Palmerton North, despite the fact that there has never been an accident at Wellington, but a Dash 8 crashed while coming in to land in Palmerston North, killing a flight attendant and three passengers in 1995.

I had another anxious time in a Dash 8 flying into New Plymouth one winters night in heavy rain with an electrical storm lighting up the sky all around us. The pilot told us he was circling the airport hoping to find a break in the clouds. As my white-knuckled hands gripped the arm-rests it occurred to me if there was no break we may have to stay up there all night. Fortunately he found one.

Without doubt my worse ordeal was flying out from Belem, an equatorial city on the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil. A few days earlier I had been given a couple of sightseeing flights over the rain forest in a six-seater Cessna and had experienced electrical storms that made the New Plymouth incident seem tame by comparison.

I was flying back to New Zealand on my own via Miami. We were in an A300 Airbus owned by Varig Airlines and about an hour out our pilot told us in a voice that reeked of nervousness that there was a problem with one of the engines and that he was heading out to sea to dump the fuel then landing back at Belem. This information was relayed by a man sitting next to me from Mozambique who could speak passable English as well as Portuguese. The only word I had picked up from the pilots pronouncement was “problemo” which was chilling enough.

We were put up for the night in a grotty Belem Motel and then taken back to the terminal next morning and told that the engine had been repaired while we slept and they were ready to fly us to Florida. Some of the passengers were reluctant to board as they had been on the plane where the flight had originated in Rio de Janeiro and reckoned it wasn’t performing properly on that leg. They didn’t believe it could be fixed in a few hours and tried unsuccessfully to get Varig to get us another aeroplane. We were given no choice; the next flight to Miami was a week away so we either took the potentially faulty plane or waited another week. Most of us went on the offered aircraft which got us to our destination without further incident.

We all clapped enthusiastically when the plane landed.

I’m full of admiration for those local investors who are endeavouring to put in place another aluminium tube to fly us to Auckland. However if I need to get to the city of sails I’ll probably take the car. I accept this decision makes no sense if I have safety in mind. In every bend on the road I risk encountering a drunk driver, a tourist, someone talking on a cellphone, a drug addict, a person texting, a speed-freak, someone devoid of sleep or a boy racer.



Flawed thinking I know, but despite potential fatal injuries, at least I’ll be on terra firma.

“There are no atheists on a turbulent aeroplane.” – Erica Jong

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A tale of doctors and dustmen

When I was about 10 years old Hugh Berney took my appendix out. A couple of years later he removed my tonsils and adenoids. Hugh Berney was our family doctor; only we didn’t call him “Hugh.” In deference to his standing in society we invariably referred to him as “Doctor” Berney. These were those halcyon days when doctors were treated with respect and to some degree, awe. After all if they were going to squirt chloroform in your face then cut you open you had to believe in them unconditionally.

Your status in life was quite justifiably based on your exam-tested intellect and although we have become more egalitarian over time, the same still holds today. Top of the class folk went on to be doctors, those who struggled with the formal education became butchers or dustmen.

It was the natural order of the world.

Come to think of it, why did we call the rubbish collectors dustmen? Though some dust will have accumulated in the garbage it hardly constituted their main cargo. At the time I was having my appendix out the community didn’t create nearly as much waste as we do today. Butchers supplied their meat in greaseproof paper, drink bottles were sold back for a penny each, then washed and reused and you took your old newspapers to the fish and chip shops or the greengrocers to use as wrapping material. The plastic’s industry was in its infancy; its forerunner, bakelite, was used sparingly, mainly on car dashboards.

The town had just two dustmen back then who stuck at their job for decades. The borough council had one rubbish truck - Jimmy Kane drove it and Ted Te Huki rode on the back and manually emptied the rubbish tins - and they were made of tin - which everyone had just one of. They managed to clean up the town working just a few hours each morning.

Now back to my body parts. Once these appendages were removed my sister unkindly teased me, saying that now I wasn’t “all there.” In those days this meant you were mentally impaired. Mentally impaired people were sent to Porirua which back then was just a village, with a few houses and a mental hospital. Subsequent revelations about these asylums imply that they were as nightmarish as we imagined.

Meanwhile many scientists now question Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection because of the quite remarkable amounts of information they are finding scattered along the DNA superhighway. And yet my sixty-odd years of relative normality without the appendix, tonsils and adenoids may prove that although I wasn’t “all there” these were unnecessary appendages that never got discarded in the evolutionary process. Perhaps we weren’t created after all.

There’s even a distinct possibility that I might be the missing link.

I don’t know what Hugh Berney did with my abandoned tonsils, adenoids and appendix; I suspect Jimmy Kane and Ted Te Huki took them to the dump which later had an upmarket name-change to “landfill.” When you think about it, it sounds much better to “dump” an appendix than drop it off at a landfill.

Some cultures are a bit precious about surgically removed body parts and I recall a furore some years ago when relatives discovered that their deceased loved ones may have had their hearts and other preserved remains stored in a research facility at an Auckland hospital. They wanted the removed organs returned so they could to be placed in the casket allowing the deceased to go on to the afterlife relatively intact.

Our religious heritage has surely taught us that the body is an earthly vessel discarded at death and our souls go on in their original form to a higher place where doctors and dustmen are treated as equals.

If this wasn’t so, consider the amputees, patients with hip replacements or those who have had cancerous colons, prostates, breasts or other diseased organs surgically removed. Are their bodies any less sacred because, in my sister’s parlance, they are not all there?

I think not.

You can’t have it both ways. Either an entire body is not a prerequisite for a fulfilling after-life or else we must abandon life-saving surgery to ensure purity at death.

At least this would put an end to those hospital waiting lists.

Dr Berney told my parents that he got to my appendix just before it burst and caused potentially fatal peritonitis. It is possible I suppose that within this organ lies a chemical that when released allows the brain to show compassion and understanding for other people’s strange behaviour. Without it I may have become heartless. It’s the best excuse I can come up with for being unable to find even a modicum of sympathy for the Internet-Mana party given Laila Harre’s blatant hypocrisy and fraudster Kim Dotcom’s overt desire to bring down the present government.

And yet I had a lot of sympathy for those dustmen. They weren’t highly paid and they weren’t highly regarded, but in those simpler days they were an integral part of the body of the town.

“That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.” - Aldous Huxley 

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