The sins and the virtues of the fathers

From all accounts Brian Neeson was a much-admired and thoroughly competent National member of parliament. He represented a number of West Auckland electorates. In 1993 he successfully contested the Waitakere seat and in 1996 was elected MP for Waipareira and then in 1999 the Waitakere seat once again. In the 2002 elections he sought the National Party nomination for the new seat of Helensville, which had absorbed most of the Waitakere...

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Hospitals are not always havens

According to an article in Time magazine nearly twenty per cent of people admitted to US hospitals acquire an infection while they are there and most of these infections are transmitted from one patient to another by doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers. These infections cause nearly 90,000 deaths a year and cost about $4.5 billion to treat. Lack of hand-washing by medical staff is a major cause of this calamity claimed the prestigious...

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Fonterra have got it all sorted

Last Thursday I went down to Wellington and got stuck behind a logging truck on the Rimutakas. On the way home, I got stuck behind a logging truck on the Rimutakas. Sounds a bit like Ground Hog Day only this was on the same day and on each occasion I was traveling in a different direction. The worst trucks you can get behind are the logging trucks, particularly since statistics show that they have an alarming propensity to topple...

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At last - a final solution

There was a degree of irony when on about the same day that an inebriated Invercargill man made some despicable racist comments to a Pakistani taxi-driver the embattled leader of the Labour Party, David Shearer, announced his party’s housing policy which precluded anyone who wasn’t either a New Zealander or an Australian from buying a home in “Godzone.” Although ethnic groups were not spelt out specifically, it was pretty clear that...

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A complex parable for our times

I once got into a scrap in the school playground. I was actually coming to the aid of a friend who was being attacked by three bullies. This was quite out of character for me. I am not the aggressive type and my puny primary schoolboy frame was hardly conducive to defending someone who, as it happened, was as puny as I was. Death or at least severe maiming for us both was imminent, when out of left field came a man on a white horse...

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