Did I perhaps miss my vocation?

Back in the days when I was single belonging to a sporting club was a necessary adjunct to life given that the pubs closed at six. The clubs adhered to no such closing regime and stayed open till late so you could refresh yourself after a gruelling game of whatever it was you were playing. The police tended to turn a blind eye to after-hours trading most of the time, but had to make a raid on the odd occasion to keep their hands in.

My chosen sport was squash and we often visited other squash clubs to play in weekend competitions and would invariably join them in a social cabaret on the Saturday night of the tournament. One such outing was to occur in Palmerston North and a friend and I and our girlfriends decided to give the tournament itself a miss, but attend the Saturday night function.

The event was to be a fancy dress. No doubt an illegal bar would be in full swing and we thought if we were to arrive dressed as policemen we would cause quite a stir. There were no costume-hire companies in town in those days so on Friday night I went cap-in-hand to the Masterton Police station and asked if I could borrow a couple of uniforms for the following evening.

Back then the tiny police station was on the corner of Lincoln Road and Chapel Street. I think the total complement of police personnel was about seven or eight and the CIB section served the whole Wairarapa. I was politely told by the pleasant gendarmes manning the station that it was illegal for them to lend out uniforms. This was Brian Maude and Geoff Russell and they seemed genuinely sorry they couldn’t help. I was about to walk out when they had a curious change of heart.

Over the road a Wairarapa Car Club rally was leaving from the old H. J. Jones Garage premises and had drawn a crowd of well over a 100 people who were overcrowding the footpath adjacent to where the cars were leaving from. Passers-by were having great difficulty passing by. My two gregarious police persons said I could have the uniforms if I put one on now and went over the road and dispersed the crowd.

It seemed like a fair swap to me, so I donned a navy great-coat (it was raining) put on the helmet and feeling somewhat drunk with power marched over to the madding crowd. “Move on” I said in the best PC Plod manner I could muster and moved the crowd back from the gutters edge allowing those wanting to use the footpath an uninterrupted passage.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

I looked back at the station and saw constables Russell and Maude peeping over the half white frosted windows showing sheer admiration and all would have gone swimmingly to plan if someone hadn’t recognised me.

That someone was my old scoutmaster and he told me later he would not have known it was me except I was wearing shoes with pointed toes. We used to call them winkle pickers, fashionable for young men at the time, but hardly the attire for a policeman on duty.

Using blasphemous language that would have made Lord Baden-Powell blush he blurted out who I was for all to hear and the crowd instantly lost respect for the uniform and swarmed back to their previous untenable positions.

Mob rule returned to the streets.

Sole Times-Age photographer at the time was Norman Daken and he shot a picture as I turned to grin at his greeting. I rushed back to the sanctuary of the police station and found my two policemen in fits of laughter, well pleased with my performance and agreeing wholeheartedly to lend me the two uniforms. 

“By the way,” they wanted to know, “Who was it that took the photo?”

When I told them it was the Times-Age photographer the colour drained visibly from their cheeks. Lending a police uniform was a sackable offence. If the picture was published they could both lose their jobs. I was reminded too that my own role was a hangable felony, or something akin to that.

I was sorry I had placed us all in such a position. They invited me back to the station at nine the next morning to see if the three of us could somehow convince Norm that it would be in everyone’s best interests not to publish the photo. 

By the time I got there the hapless photographer had been interrogated under a powerful white light in a darkened backroom that didn’t really exist and had reluctantly handed over the negative and the print. There were no distinguishing marks on his person to suggest that the photos had been beaten out of him. I suspect he had probably been promised an exclusive scoop on the next major crime in the town as a reward for his co-operation.

This would likely have been someone caught drinking after hours.

Anyway, Norm was his usual cheerful self as he left the station and seemed not too fazed at having lost the opportunity to print the picture.

Messrs. Maude and Russell will have been well-retired by now or perhaps have even gone to that great police station in the sky so I doubt there is any risk of Police Minister Ann Tolley withholding their pensions.

Meanwhile I’m relying on the likelihood that the statute of limitations for being charged with impersonating a police officer will have well passed.

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” 
- Margaret Thatcher.

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On Flagellation and flags

Is it just me or are there other people out there wondering just what it was that Judith Collins did wrong?

Alright, if the cabinet manual says that cabinet ministers shouldn’t be seen promoting business then the cabinet manual is in ass, particularly if the manual doesn’t allow ministers to promote New Zealand-made goods in another country.

What sort of madness is this?

Even better, the Minister of Justice had dinner with a man from customs; hopefully she was able to talk to him about ensuring a smooth ride for New Zealand merchandise past the petulant Chinese border officials.

Oravida is a New Zealand-owned company that exports New Zealand meat, wines, seafood, fruit and dairy products to China. And Judith tried their milk – actually our milk – and praised it.

What was she supposed to do, pull a face and spit it out?
Mrs Collins spouse is a director of the company.
Give her a medal for a great choice of husband.
But not in “tall poppy syndrome” New Zealand.

We’ve always been taught the path to New Zealand’s prosperity is to make commodities we can export. Surely then a major role of all politicians and ministers in particular is to encourage exporters. And anyway isn’t wining and dining with international business executives what Trade Minister Tim Groser does on a regular basis?

That’s what annoys me about the nutty Greens. Their whole role in life it seems is to stifle economic growth hence their opposition to dairying, mining and oil exploration. A host of countries have lifted their living standards dramatically on finding oil and natural gas within their borders and their economic zones; think Great Britain and North Sea oil and the energy stranglehold Russia now has over Europe.

The Greens want multi-million dollar cycle-ways, extended maternity leave and a liveable wage, but offer no way to pay for these except the extra tax revenue from legalising cannabis.

And the Prime Minister was reported as being angry with his Justice Minister; if he really was, then he’s as silly as the Greens. Herr Clark smoothed the way for the free trade agreement with China and the Key government and all of us are reaping the benefit of this, thanks in part to Mrs Collins and her entrepreneurial husband.

Anyway I’m beginning to think the PM is losing the plot. Do we really need a costly referendum to decide if we want a new flag when surveys have clearly shown that the vast majority of us are perfectly happy with the one we’ve got?

We don’t need a new flag, but we could certainly do with a new national anthem.

The words of the current anthem defy rational explanation. They were written for another era and I suspect the lyricist will have even confused his own generation.

Never mind, I have come to the rescue and have the answer.

The government needs to buy the exclusive rights and ownership of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s classic hit The Southern Cross. This will be expensive; about half the cost of the nonsensical and totally unnecessary referendum.

The music is hauntingly beautiful, but the words will need to be altered to suit a national song. You would certainly leave in the heart-stirring line: “When you see the Southern Cross for the first time, you understand now why you came this way.” You could even contemplate using the ensuing lines: “Because the truth you may be running from is so small, but it’s big as the promise, the promise of a coming day.”

I’m happy to re-write the rest of the lyrics, but there are undoubtedly greater pens than mine.

We keep the current flag; the anthem and the flag will become a matching pair.

At international sporting events other country’s athletes will hold back from winning just so they can experience the thrill of hearing the New Zealand national anthem!

By now the Prime Minister will be ecstatic, unless of course it’s not allowed in the cabinet manual.

“All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.” - Edmund Burke

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Examining the high cost of dying

Two of New Zealand’s favourite sons strut the television stage most nights extolling the virtues of taking out an insurance cover for your funeral. With the ageing demographic of the country I suppose it makes good sense. Gary McCormack represents AA Life and says if you take out their cover you’ll get twenty cents per litre off your fuel bill every month for a year and Keith Quinn reckons “a Cigna funeral plan allows you to celebrate the things that really matter” though I don’t think things would have mattered much after you were dead.

Given the propensity for so many of our cherished institutions to die themselves over time it might be a bit risky for say a twenty-year-old to take out funeral insurance cover with these two companies in case when you eventually popped your clogs Cigna and AA Life had ceased to exist.

But we learnt recently that grieving Waikanae pensioner Ken Allen hadn’t heeded Mr McCormack’s or Mr Quinn’s advice and was seriously out of pocket when his 81 year old wife Rona died in November.

The couple’s only asset was $8617 in a joint account and Mr Allen chose a modest version for her funeral which cost $7367. This included the casket, service at the cemetery and a burial plot. He paid Kapiti Coast Funeral Homes $5396 up front and applied to Work and Income for a funeral grant to cover the rest. His application was declined on the ground that his savings were well above the asset limit for the grant.

As of April the 1st last year the grant was only available to those with savings below $1720. It’s probably no coincidence that it was about April last year when Mr McCormack and Mr Quinn started invading our living rooms with their genial hype.

In a strange defence Kapiti Coast Funeral Homes said the average cost of their funerals was around $9000 to $10,000.

I have had some involvement in three funerals recently; one cost $5000 another $7500 and the third $11,000. All three involved cremations and I’m curious to know why the discrepancy. Not all the blame lies with the funeral directors who will tell you that their charges only represent about 40% of the total cost.

Burials are more expensive with the local councils making a small fortune on land they own and would have paid for decades ago.

For instance the Masterton District Council charge $1931 for a funeral plot; this includes digging the hole and filling it in afterwards. That means a casket-size area of ground in Masterton’s least expensive suburb is charged out at about $1200. Not a bad return on land bounding a rubbish dump.

It tends to make Donald Trump look like a novice.

Carterton District Council charge $1000 for the plot and $665 for the internment. At least the rising dead there get to overlook a golf course.

Some of the extra costs for funerals these days have come about by families preferring a funeral home service rather than one in a church. In the good old days, when most people had some religious affiliation, services were almost always held in churches which allowed for unpretentious outcomes. A modest offering to the minister and the organist and the church itself was not charged for, although a donation might be given.

It’s no surprise then that the $5000 funeral was held in a Catholic church in Taupo.

Masterton now boasts three splendid funeral homes and the directors will justifiably require a return on their investments.

The equally splendid churches remain tantalisingly empty.



Trying to avoid my own funeral and its attendant cost I have decided to eat more judiciously. In the weight-gain field sugar has suddenly emerged as public enemy number one. Chocolate has all but disappeared from our pantry and when we heard that breakfast cereals are chock full of sugar we decided to take stock.

There was one brand of muesli we were reliably told that had only the tiniest amount of the demon sweetener. It was called Vogel’s All Good. A quick search on the supermarket shelves and we found the potentially heavenly food which proudly announced on the packet: only 7% sugar. The product looked good through a cellophane peephole on the bottom half of the box and we hastily purchased it imagining svelte bodies in the not too distant future.

We were amazed when we opened it to find the packet inside was only half the size of the box outside. What looked like a one kilo box only had a 500gram packet within. Perhaps the answer to weight loss in this instance is that you can only eat the tiniest amount to remain solvent.

So I’ve decided my best option is to book the church and pay the minister, the organist and the District Council in instalments. The trouble is they’ll all want to know an exact date.

Someone asked me recently, “Have you lived in Masterton all your life?

I said, “Not yet.”

“I want to die peacefully, in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming and terrified like his passengers.” – Stephen Arnott

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My education was sadly lacking

Oh to be young again and know what I know now has been a constant saying over the years, but I’m beginning to think the today’s young probably know more than I do.

Last week it was reported that explicit sex education at a West Coast primary school has sparked a flurry of complaints from shocked parents with at least one family withdrawing their children in protest.

The concerns at Blaketown School centred on the actions of a woman teacher who taught the class of year seven and eight with children apparently aged as young as 11 about some graphic sex topics, going far beyond what the parents had given consent for.

On the first day of the three-day programme she taught pupils about body parts pointing out the pleasure points on women and men. The following day she answered questions the students had put in a “question box” including information about anal and oral sex, “hand jobs,” sexually transmitted diseases and flavoured condoms.

Crikey, in my day we thought oral sex was just talking about it.

Of course in those dim dark ages there was no sex education in schools – or at home for that matter – and by the time we were fully conversant with this aspect of life we were old enough to cope with it.

In another news item we learnt that a parent from a primary school in the leafy Auckland suburb of St Heliers complained to The Human Rights Commission about Bible studies in the classroom.

“Christian-based lessons discriminated against non-Christian families and should not be part of the secular school programme,” said Maheen Mudannayake, a Buddhist, and despite the vast majority of the St. Helier’s parents wanting the religious studies programme to be maintained the school board capitulated, much to Mr Mudannayake’s delight.

“When in Rome do as the Romans do,” might have been my heartless response to the complainant, but then I never have been much of a follower of the politically correct format.

And so religious studies are out and explicit sex education is in. You can’t help but be envious of the today’s younger generation and their liberal school curriculum.

The problem is the outcomes don’t match the good intentions. Teenage pregnancies and abortions increase, a conscience-less group called the Roastbusters emerge, crime is rampant while the churches face declining congregations and we build more prisons.

Masterton has had three police stations in my lifetime. The population has barely risen over time but the police headquarters have got bigger and bigger. The original station was on the corner of Lincoln Road and Chapel Street and was only a fraction of the size of the corrugated-iron-encrusted ANZ bank which now stands on the site. As a kid I was regular visitor there because the head of the CIB at the time was Detective-sergeant Frank Gordon who was a neighbour of ours in Opaki Road and I was good friends with his son Malcolm.

Mr Gordon would often take us out in his Vauxhall as he investigated the major crimes in the area. These could include jay-walking, double-parking or having an overdue library book.

Back then we didn’t lock our vehicles or our houses, we walked to and from school without fear of being run over by a car or molested by a stranger and we came home when it got dark after playing with our friends and our parents had no concerns for our safety or our wellbeing.

The pubs closed at six o’clock and there was full employment because as a rule mums tended not to work and kept the home fires burning.

And it was healthy little town too. I remember when the Borough Council built the new graveyard complex in River Road nobody died. In the end they had to shoot a bloke to get the cemetery started!

The only person who died that year was the undertaker and he died of starvation.

Alright, I admit I’m starting to exaggerate now, but with the benefit of a hindsight that only remembers what it wants to remember, they were good times.

Masterton’s third police station, built to cater for a static population, is three stories high and dwarfs the ANZ bank that stands on the site where the first one stood. The cells have thick plate glass doors dispensing with the need for bars which finally trivialises Richard Lovelace’s poetic intonation: “Stone walls do not a prison make; nor iron bars a cage.”

For my money I’d have left the Bible in the schools, let kids find out for themselves how to procreate, continued closing the pubs at six and left the police station where it was.

I’ve got to go now; I’m going to enrol at the Blaketown primary school and get up to speed.

“I sent a telegram to my friends saying: FLEE AT ONCE – ALL IS DISCOVERED. They all left town immediately.” –Mark Twain

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The overvaluation of plant life

When I was a youngster my parents tried to inspire me to become a gardener. Particularly, as I recall, a vegetable gardener. I suspect this was a cunning ploy to encourage me to eat vegetables; especially green vegetables. I loved potatoes, but was partial to only a few other varieties and these were usually high-priced species. For instance I enjoyed asparagus and corn-on-the-cob, but peas and beans made me nauseous and I agree wholeheartedly with President Bush the elder that broccoli should never have been allowed to be part of the universe.

My long-suffering mother would insist that I eat some form of green vegetable to ward off scurvy, though to this day I have never known anyone who actually had scurvy. I think it was Popeye who influenced me to reluctantly accepting an occasional serving of spinach and its near neighbour silver beet; to this day, apart from asparagus, the only green vegetable I really eat.

As I recall Popeye got his spinach out of a tin. Just like scurvy, I have ever seen tinned spinach.

My stint as a potential gardener was short-lived. You will recall how long it seemed between Christmas’s when you were a kid; well back then the same time frame occurred when you were gardening. From planting the seed until harvest time took so long that you lost interest.

It’s only as I’ve aged that I have realised just how quickly plants grow.

During a rush of blood to the head a few years ago I decided in early October that it would be nice to dig up some new potatoes for Christmas dinner. Actually I had been thinking of doing that for years, but Christmas’s arrived so quickly I never got around to doing the planting.

On this occasion I planted potatoes at Labour weekend. An avid gardener friend had assured me that if seed potatoes were in the ground by then they will produce an edible crop by the 25th of December, providing I chose the right variety. So I enthusiastically planted a number of rows of varying types in the empty section next door and it seemed I had hardly finished planting the last row when the first row popped up out of the ground.

The potatoes we harvested that Christmas were a shade smaller than the cherries in the bowl on the same table, but there is something quite special about eating the fruits of your labours and despite one potato being less than a mouthful the flavour was superb and the experience uplifting.

On a similar theme and at the same time we planted the perimeter of the section next door with a variety of native trees. Assuming a comparable time frame as my childhood gardening experience I imagined that in about ten years I might have created some semblance of privacy and shelter on the land. I found to my amazement that native trees grow nearly as quickly as potatoes. The section was soon completely hidden from the road.

So now knowing that creating a native tree forest is about on a par with growing potatoes I was surprised to see that an Otaki couple, described as “elderly environmentalists” are being taken to court by the officious Kapiti Coast District Council for daring to employ an arborist to come and prune their native trees and cut down a few that were diseased.

Environment Minister Amy Adams called it madness, but the council CEO was staunch. “We have to teach these people a lesson,” he said.

In my dictionary fascism is described as “a restriction on individual freedoms” and at about the same time I was being encouraged to consider market gardening as a career by my nurturing parents, allied armies were battling to rid the world of this sort of tyranny.

I recall a similar case some years ago when a fellow in Auckland dared to cut down a Pohutakawa tree on his property. He was vilified before a public meeting where one dear old lady seriously suggested that he should be shot.

He had to pay $100,000 in reparation and still faced a two year jail sentence.

I reckon he would have wished he was a whale.

Another lady at the vilification meeting said she had stopped to talk to the Pohutakawa tree each day. This is an alarming trend initiated by Prince Charles and I can’t help but wonder if my potatoes might have reached pumpkin size if only I could have thought of a topic of conversation that would have emboldened them.

Amongst the natives we planted we added a couple of gum trees to encourage the Tui’s, but they grew too quickly and looked ungainly. So without recourse to any authority, local or national, we chopped them down.

If Australian-born Green Party co-leader Russell Norman had been in power we would probably have risked facing a firing squad.

“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man; without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks” - Francis Bacon

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The picket fences of gentle people

Shane Jones has initiated a furore over a supermarket chain he alleges have used mafia tactics to improve returns to their shareholders. Jones reckons Countdown is extorting money from suppliers by asking for retrospective payments and threatening banishment from its shelves for those who don’t pay up.

The allegation will probably be shown to have some validity.

In one form or another competitive supermarkets have been doing this for years, probably to the distinct advantage of the consumer. To be fair it does keep prices honest though the suppliers are the ones who suffer the slings and arrows of competition.

I’ve had personal experience with this.

In the 1980s I owned the Wairarapa Bacon Company in Carterton. We produced an excellent product using pork from local producers, but supermarkets wouldn’t let us put our merchandise on their shelves unless we actually bought the shelf space. When supermarkets are under the construction phase they will offer shelf space to potential suppliers provided they actually pay for the fit-out. This is, or at least was, particularly applicable to refrigerated shelving as these are costly plant items for supermarkets to install.

The “Big Boys” got in first and back then this was Hutton’s and Kiwi and a small Carterton producer couldn’t make any headway.

On one occasion I did convince Foodstuffs Central division to take our hams steaks on special. We were given six weeks lead-in time and then on a particular week our hams steaks were to be promoted under the Stevlon brand at an extremely competitive price.

Foodstuffs central division covers all their stores from New Plymouth across to Hawkes Bay and down to Wellington.

We worked tirelessly to stockpile the product during the six week lead-in period and waited for the orders to come pouring in. We got one; a modest order from a New World supermarket in Havelock North. All the others bought their “Stevlon” ham steaks off Hutton’s who deviously offered them at the same generous discount we had negotiated.

Supermarkets by now were almost the exclusive purveyors of bacon and ham and without the capital necessary to buy my way into their stores I had to eventually close the factory.

In the light of the Jones allegations there is now a protest circulating through the social media asking consumers to boycott Countdown supermarkets. It seems plausible, but imagine if this caused the demise of the Countdown brand and left the field wide open to Foodstuffs. The jovial Pak’n’Save stick figure wouldn’t have to proclaim that their aim was to save you money and all your grocery prices would go through the roof.

The sudden dislike of Countdown has been boosted by the fact that Progressive Enterprises allegedly recently asked that all New Zealand made products be taken off their shelves in Australia.

A few years ago I visited a small town in Queensland called Melany, inland from coastal Coloundra where Woolworth’s - Countdown’s owners - had just opened a brand new supermarket. Melany is not much smaller than Masterton and had a fast-growing population and yet had only one other supermarket, an IGA store in the middle of the town centre.

Woolworth’s new Melany store however was almost totally bereft of customers and there were signs on fences all over town proclaiming: “we won’t shop there.”

It seems Woolworths had bought the old saleyards at one end of the main street which was next to a stream that housed among other things, Australia’s prized, but rare, platypus. The locals were aghast that Woolworth’s would construct such a supermarket virtually over a creek and protested vigorously to stop the store from being built. Police reinforcements had to be brought in from Brisbane and the situation had got pretty rugged.

Eventually Woolworth’s won their case in the Environment Court and went ahead with the project, but when we were there the carpark was empty.

Some people even pretended to go and shop there, piling up the trolleys with groceries then leaving them unpaid at the checkout. This was known as the “trolley challenge” and protestors right across Australia were reportedly filling Woolworth’s trolleys, leaving them unpaid with notes showing their support for the Melany stand-off.

Locals I spoke to at the time admitted the whole protest was a bit of a sham. The creek, next to the leaching saleyards was hardly pristine. In fact Woolworths had cleaned up the area and had acted impeccably in their treatment of the environment. But to be seen shopping there meant you risked being ostracised by the more militant members of the green community.

I doubt that we will see “we won’t shop there” signs on fences around Masterton. Sanity will eventually prevail and we mustn't forget that Countdown has a substantial investment in the town and a large staff who will be relying on continuing employment.

It would be a bit mean-spirited to let them down.

“I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated people decently. This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.” - Anita Roddick

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The best and worst in the world

An absorbing Australian television programme Ask the Butcher screens on Choice Television on Thursday evenings at 8.05. Host is Sydney meat retailer Anthony Puharich who takes viewers on a culinary journey from farm gate to dinner plate via his family-owned butchery called Victor Churchill.

A few weeks ago he featured lamb on the programme and said among other things that Australia has the best lamb in the world. Some of the owners of the rural properties he visited reiterated that claim.

I recalled that earlier in the evening TV One screened an advertisement on behalf of Silver Fern Farms that featured a lanky New Zealand farmer escorting a suited city dweller around a well-stocked sheep farm who made the statement: “New Zealand has the best lamb in the world,” as he jumped a barbed-wire fence. 

Now surely they can’t both be right?

Actually, having had some experience with the retailing of meat in both countries, I’d have to concede that Australian lamb is better than ours. However not having critically examined the product further afield I can’t honestly say with any certainty that either of us can necessarily lay claim to having the best lamb in the world.

That accolade could well belong to any number of countries.

But it seems there is something in our makeup, probably because we are so tiny and situated at the bottom of the world that makes us want to proclaim to anyone who will listen that many of our features, good or bad, are “the best in the world.”

I read recently for instance that New Zealand has the biggest number of problem gamblers in the world. We’re also said to have the most teenage suicides, and the highest level of obesity. It is even claimed we have the worst child poverty rates in the OECD.

We blithely accept all these allegations which I suspect are made by people who are pushing their own particular barrows wanting support for what in most cases are justifiable causes.

I thought about this when I read an article in last weeks’ Time magazine on the many veterans returning from the variety of wars that America has got itself involved in who are ending up in prison. Time said there are about 200,000 incarcerated veterans in the US who may have committed crimes due to untreated post-traumatic stress.

In a later unrelated paragraph it said there are 49,000 inmates in Illinois prisons.

Whenever the conservative Sensible Sentencing Trust in New Zealand calls for more of our criminals to be jailed for longer terms, liberal commentators invariably claim that we already incarcerate more people per head of population than any other civilised nation in the world.

So here was a chance to do some comparative research.

First I checked out the population of Illinois; 12.8 million. New Zealand’s population is 4.5 million. So Illinois in population terms is almost three times larger than we are.

To match or exceed Illinois 49,000 prison population would mean we would need to have around 16,000 incarcerated in our penitentiaries. In fact New Zealand has 8618 people in prison, 6764 actually serving a sentence and 1864 remanded in custody. This looks to be about half the population of the US jails.

Now I’m not saying that locking up people for longer is the answer to our crime problems, but I’m simply exposing another statistic that is quoted for effect without having a grain of truth to sustain it.

So I suspect many of our ‘best and worst in the world’ claims wouldn’t survive closer scrutiny.

One interesting statistic about the New Zealand prison population is that only 527 are females. I suspect many of these will be there due to mistreatment by men in the first place.

We are told that in China with their one-child-per-couple policy, baby girls are not particularly welcome and often aborted if the gender is diagnosed in the womb.

Perhaps if we reversed that policy and only accept girl babies here we could eventually breed a law-abiding society.

When Phyllis Diller was asked what the world would be without men she said, “Free of crime and full of fat, happy women.”

Fat, happy women; so now we’ve resurrected the obesity problem.

“There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.” - Maya Angelou

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