Charlie Segar revisited

Who the hell is/was Charlie Segar I hear many of you ask? Actually, I don’t, but I’m guessing many of you will when you see this title. I know I would have if I hadn’t done a bit of research.

First of all, I should point out that he is no relation to Bob Seger as far as I know, but there is a vague connection. He was a musician; a blues pianist and occasional singer and he wrote a song that many of you will know. It is called Key To The Highway. My own collection of music includes several versions of this song, which to those who love the blues is regarded as a standard.

So what has got me talking about Charlie Segar?

Well, the answer is contained in the title of that song. I feel it is apt as several people have recently found ways to send a certain Key to the highway – possibly permanently.

I haven’t yet read Nicky Hager’s book,but it would appear to be a can that is spilling worms that are all  diving for cover and claiming deafness as well as blindness for their reluctance to come out into the spotlight.

I think most of us had a suspicion that behaviour of the sort exposed in the extracts we have seen was going on, but prior to this week we had no real evidence of it and so it remained a suspicion. Those of us who suggested out loud that it was going on were often regarded as ‘conspiracy theorists’. This of course is usually used as a pejorative term; but what happens when the conspiracy is revealed and it becomes clear that we have been ruled by a conspiracy after all?

There will still be a lot of people around who will try to avoid the ugly truth and counter that ‘everybody does it’.

Well, do they?

If so; then they all need to be outed and following this book, I imagine there could be a lot more revelations if that is the case. Nobody is saying that one side has a monopoly on dirty tricks, but even if everyone is at it, that would still not make it right (small “r”).

In one respect we should not be too surprised about what Hager has revealed because it is an inevitable consequence of personality politics. For far too long we have focussed on individuals. This is largely because they have presented themselves to us rather than their policies. Often it has been hard to determine what their policies are and even when you could identify what a politician stood for you would find out after they were elected to office that they didn’t really stand for that after all.

In short; our political landscape has taken on the appearance of a post nuclear holocaust, strewn with the detritus of broken promises, failed economic theories and secret agenda. The whole thing has been ramped up even more this year with jackbooted responses by the incumbents to any free expressions of opinion, satirical or otherwise. The over-reaction to the likes of Darren Watson’s extremely accurate and funny  Planet Key single, which it appears the electoral commission are trying to ban from all airplay (and possibly more) is not counter-balanced by any similarly robust attempts to shut up the likes of Mike Hosking.

I don’t want either of them silenced. They each have a right to broadcast their views and how it can be considered that Darren might influence the voters and that condescending prick Hosking won’t is bizarre. Surely everyone who expresses a political opinion in public could potentially influence voters. As long as we all know what their motivation is, then why shouldn’t they?

And if the politicians are wondering why we are seeing rallies chanting, “Fuck John Key” and burning him in effigy, then they need look no further than the contents of Hager’s book. The Government of our country (whichever hue they might be) are supposed to be LEADERS! What they are seen to do rather sets the standard for all those people too weak-willed to know how to behave. Unfortunately that group is probably in the majority. Just as people idolise the flawed egotists that grace our TV screens and the pages of women’s magazines, so too do they follow the lead set by the leaders of industry and politics. This gets even uglier when the leaders in politics start idolising the leaders of industry. Many of those industrialists are even more amoral than the politicians, and when they begin calling the tune and the pollies dance to it, the ordinary voter gets even more of a shafting.

Personally I don’t see any need to burn John Key in effigy; I’m surprised they used an effigy when a fireplace would have done the job better. And as for fucking John Key, I reckon I’ll leave that to others, thank you all the same.

I think the release of Dirty Politics will be a turning point in this election campaign. I will be very surprised if the Nats can paddle their way out of this particular pongy creek. It has now got rapids and I can’t see how their canoe can hope to negotiate all of those without the crew getting a serious dunking and many sinking without a trace.

Even if Simon the Pixie was to pour a whole tanker load of that oil he is so fond of on the waters and they actually managed to avoid most of the rocks and reach the dry land of the treasury benches, there will still be a whole flotilla of investigations to encounter after that. We could find ourselves having to go back at the polls again in 12 months’ time.

So thank you Nicky Hagar you have probably sent John Key to the highway and as the song says, (in an opening verse custom made for Key):                 

I got the key to the highway,
Billed out and bound to go.
I'm gonna leave here running;
Walking is most too slow”

Let’s hope he doesn’t dawdle. 

Power to the people

Congratulations to the Green Party on their excellent proposal to give loans to homeowners to put solar power into their homes. This is an initiative I have personally been advocating for years. Hopefully David Cunliffe and his rather slow moving crowd will jump on board with this as well.

I am not surprised that Jianqi’s government has seen fit to ridicule the whole idea on (FFS) the grounds of expense! For a bloke who is supposed to know about money Jianqi is surprisingly dim when it suits him. Of course he is being ably aided and abetted by Simon the Pixie in his role as Energy Bunny – er I mean Minister.

Russel Norman’s policy involves the government loaning homeowners up to $15,000 to install photovoltaic panels on their houses. I gather that an average house can be set up with an adequate system for about $10,000 so this is a potentially good scheme. The loans would be repayable at the rate of around $900.00 per year via local body rates payments.

The interest rate of 4.1 percent that Russel Norman is proposing is the same as that at which the Government currently borrows money to fund all kinds of wasteful endeavours. The major difference here is that the money would actually be used for something that would bring tangible and worthwhile returns for both the voters and the Government.

Simon the Pixie has argued that the scheme would effectively be a Government subsidy because it involves a lower rate of interest. So what? At least it would be a subsidy which would save the entire country money in the long term.

The Government tells us that solar power is “more expensive than buying power off the grid”. Duhh! Maybe it might be until you have paid for your system, but how about taking a longer term view eh? I would be intrigued to see an argument that showed that over 10 years it did not work out cheaper for a homeowner and then get progressively cheaper to the point where it cost virtually nothing once the loan was paid off.

Simon The Pixie has also said that solar is “not a priority because of the abundance of cheaper renewable energy such as hydro, geothermal and wind”, which is a statement so extraordinary in its stupidity that I can’t believe even he said that.

In the first place hydro involves a lot of messing about with waterways and that can often involve unacceptable disruption to both the land and its natural inhabitants including plants and animals.

Geothermal is fine, but it is not readily available all over the country which means the construction of distribution systems which once again are likely to involve further disruptions to the environment.

Wind is good and even more renewable that the other two, but once again you are dealing with a system that requires distribution on a large scale whereas the very localised nature of solar power makes it much more practical and it poses no major disruption to the environment. Whether your house has an iron roof or a whole lot of solar panels really doesn’t make a lot of difference to the surrounding landscape.

The savings from the scheme the Greens are proposing would begin in the very first year and within a short time they would be providing most of those who took up the offer with free power for most if not all of their needs forever more. So what could possibly be wrong with that?

Well, I think I know ‘what is wrong with that”. It would mean smaller profits for the major energy companies and the industries that support them and ..... oh yes... the shareholders. But not the Mum and Dad investors that Jianqi and his merry men and women told us would buy these power shares, but the people who actually did buy them – those whose annual earnings sit in the top 1 percent of the population, along with major corporations and overseas investors. Boo- bloody hoo. In any case these people are in a position to cope with any loss of expectations they might suffer because of this and instead buy shares in solar technology companies.

There is also a prediction that this could result in 1000 new jobs although I am a bit more wary about that aspect as in my experience whenever politicians predict more jobs they tend to over-inflate the figures for effect. However it is quite clear from the comments made by those whose business it is to analyse these issues for a living that the basic figures regarding savings do stack up, and if you add in the lack of any environmental impact, then it is easy to see that we must go down this path. We should have started it decades ago, and there is certainly no sensible reason not to do it now.

I see the proposed scheme also involves setting up a system where homeowners would be able to sell their excess power to the grid for a reasonable price. But without legislation to compel the energy companies to honour that I suspect you would see very little movement there. However it would be an opportunity for enterprising folk to set up small scale power companies in various locations around the country to buy up and store that excess power to sell back to local bodies for their infrastructural needs such as street lighting and traffic lights.

I say let's power up. Power to the people and let’s see how many of us can short-circuit the power companies.

NZ Idle – the new series

In the year 2014 our television screens are going to be dominated with much fuss and bother and spin leading up to our biggest ‘reality series’ of the year. This series differs somewhat from the plethora of programmes that fall under that description.

As an aside I find it interesting that the word ‘plethora’ was once used to describe an unhealthy excess and that these days it is often used to denote abundance. I feel that in this context the word should be taken to mean an unhealthy excess especially as i learn that it had a medical connection and was used to describe a condition caused by dilation of superficial blood vessels which was characterised by a reddish face.

However, I digress....

The ‘reality’ series of which I speak differs in that it is a recurring series which takes over our media every three years. Yes; you’ve guessed it. I am speaking of that rag tag bunch of idle self-serving gits who come seeking our approval to keep sucking at the nation’s tit for another three years.

Battle has already commenced with Little Bo Tox and Anne Offhertrolley trying to blow the Greens’ co-leaders house up into a mansion the size of their own dunnies and bitching about how much better she can look in expensive clothes than they both do.

Meanwhile Jianqi is rushing about turning over one stone after another trying to find enough slimy invertebrates to potentially form a coalition with. You’d have to wonder if there are any more possibles left now. Let’s consider those possibilities.  

·         The Acting Party have been pretty much squished out of contention following the demise of their only MP in this current Parliament and it is hard to see how their latest oddball will gain any traction over the next few months. The tea has been chucked out and I suspect that even a case of Red Bull won’t put any wings on that particular slug before November. He isn’t even the party leader so he will have to be operated by remote control from Acting Party headquarters. Mind you that would be less humiliating for him than being operated via Jianqi’s arm up his bum like his predecessor was. Should The Natsis choose to ‘gift’ the Epsom seat to these wallies again, it just might turn out to be the gift that doesn’t even give once never mind the one that keeps on giving.

·         Just what Peter Dung, the man with no real party has in mind this year, I have not heard. I seem to recall he was considering retiring a few months back. Mind you that was when he was still sitting on the naughty step and now that he is being welcomed back into the bosom (can I say that in this column?) of the Natsi Party he might reconsider that. However even if he does, and if the people of Johnsonville and Newlands are still in a coma and he wins; he will be there on his Todd Malone again. Neither of the other party members is likely to get elected and his voter will not be able to vote enough times to get them in on the party vote either.

·         What’s left of the Maori Parting is Te Ururoa Flavell and a couple of spaces where the other two sat. It is more of a comb-over than a parting now. In any case there is no guarantee they would wish to coalesce with the Natsis this time as they have suffered some pretty serious damage through their association with them over the last six years They could only manage to grab three seats after their first term supporting Jianqi and this time they will be starting all over again with a whole new set of candidates to try and support their only leftover from the previous hangi.

·         There has been a lot of talk about the Conservatively Dressed Party and I think that might well be all it turns out to be. These slightly manic types managed to pick up 2.65 percent of the party vote last time, which isn’t all that surprising really when you think about it. There must be at least that percentage of the population with undiagnosed stupidity. Ironically that meagre share of the party vote was still only 0.15 percent short of the combined party vote won by the current three coalition partners. However we must remember that it is still only slightly more than half of what they would need to get a seat unless they could manage to win an electorate seat. As we don’t have any electorates that are comprised of nothing but wacko people I would suggest the chances of that are not terrific. Leader Column Craig is certainly an odd individual and not really the sort who would inspire confidence in most sane people. He has a little of the aura that surrounds that new Acting Party twit. He seems the sort of bloke that might cause babies to cry as soon as they see him and the rest of us panic if we are left alone in a room with him.

·         This then (unless some amazing new party arises and sweeps the political right wingers off their feet) leaves the question of what will Winnie do? Winnie is always a dark horse or a dirty dog depending on how you see him. He plays his cards close to his chest at times like this until he can be absolutely sure which way the wind is going to blow. This way he keeps the door open for a ministerial warrant no matter who is behind that door. If he stays true to his party’s policies he would not be able to form a government with the Natsis without making some demand that would stick in their collective craw. However with the chains of office glinting in the sunlight Winnie could be swayed enough to jump into that big blue waka.

      
      So what of the opposition? It is abundantly clear the Laboured Party will not be able to do it alone. Although many think that is exactly what they have been doing for some time.

      But I digress again. Or is that regress when you do it for a second time?

     

      The point is that Laboured will need some friends in the house if they are to warm the treasury benches again as they have again chosen a useless leader who unfortunately will probably make an even more useless Prime Minotaur should they pull this feat off. He has shown an ability of late to launch himself out of the starting gates with a policy headline before his minders have had a chance to teach him his lines.  

      So who are the friends of the Laboured Party?

      

      I guess the most obvious one is the Greens who have been growing faster than my tomatoes in this climate. They would be the next largest polling party after the Nats and the Labs and a long way ahead of any of the others. Their participation in a Labour led Government goes without saying. The only unknown around them is how many players they would bring to the game.

      

      However this is where it gets interesting. Outside of the Greens; who would Labour be able to form a coalition with? 

      

      Unless Winnie goes with them they would probably not have enough seats to be able to do it. They might of course win the support of the Maori Party this time, but how much use that would be given the current state of that party is another matter. It could conceivably add only one seat to the mix.

      

      There is of course the matter of Hone and his little one-man band. He would never be courted by National and so the possibility exists for him to be asked to be part of a Labour led coalition. However I think he would be the last one picked for the game if he was and I think they would do well to consider what problems he could cause if he became disenchanted or had another of his famous brain explosions.    

     

      To sum up, I think the Laboured lot need to devise a decent strategy now. If I was in charge of that strategy I would be building a bloody great big bridge with the Maori Party and suggesting to them that a widely advertised intention to form a coalition with Labour would give them a better chance of getting more seats in the upcoming viewers’ vote and I would be offering Winnie some very cool robes of office and advising him to follow the same course of action that I had suggested to the Maori Party.

      

      It will be interesting (in an academic sort of way). But jeez it will be sickening for the most part. Stock up on bicarb I say.

I’m all white, Jack

One of the world’s great men passed away last week and he can be proud that he made a difference. I would venture to say that any of us who can go to our graves knowing we have made a difference (for the good that is), then we should be able to rest in peace.

Nelson Mandella is a man who has been celebrated in many different ways during his life and he will no doubt also be celebrated in many more ways in the future. He was a man who showed how it is possible to forgive even some of the most heinous of crimes. His humanity should be an example to all of us.

However (and didn’t you just know I’d have one of them lurking somewhere?) I have to say something about the appalling hypocrisy of the New Zealand Government in regards to Mandella’s funeral and what he stood for in general.

Madiba would probably not be impressed with me getting stuck into these guys over this, but I am a less evolved person than him and I haven’t yet learned to be as forgiving.

I cringe at the make-up of the ‘New Zealand delegation’ that has been ‘chosen’ to attend the funeral in South Africa. Let me dissect it (and them) one by one.

First of all we have little Jianqi. Well I have to grudgingly concede that this greedy little money grubber is the Prime Minister and as such he has ONE qualification for attending. I am however extremely uneasy about the fact that he has managed another of his famous brain-fades regarding where he stood in 1981.

I can tell you where he stood in 1981; in a corner somewhere counting out his money and plotting how he could get even more of the stuff for as little effort as possible. As for his views regarding the Springbok tour, I think I can safely say that he didn’t give it a moment’s though and if he had he would have backed the stance of the Muldoon Government and said that sport and politics don’t mix which was of course the right-wing platitude du jour at the time. If it were otherwise he would be proudly (or in his case, boastfully) proclaiming it from the hilltops for all to hear.

However, be that as it may; he is the leader and should go. I could add that he might want to consider not coming back, but that would be mean. To the South Africans, that is.

Next batter up to the plate is James Brendan Bolger, a former Prime Minister and eternal rider of gravy trains. This pillock was a member of that Muldoon Government in 1981 so he helped facilitate that tour by his lack of vocal opposition to it. I am also worried that his presence might lead to further embarrassment for us all when he attempts to adopt a South African accent for the tour.

Then there is Don McKinnon – he of the permanently upstanding hair and surprised look. Don was also a member of the Muldoon Government in 1981 and he has also been a leech on the public purse ever since riding every gravy train that has come to town. This genius caused something of a stir (and an embarrassment to all good Kiwis) when he proclaimed that economic development and free trade are more important than democracy. Mind you that was at a CHOGM meeting (Chaps Hanging Out on Government Money). I KNOW Nelson Mandella would not have shared that sentiment and would have shuddered at the very thought that money was more important than freedom, but then that is the manifesto of Jianqi isn’t it?

Pita Sharples is going of course and I guess he does have the cred that he opposed the tour, although I think it is fair to say he has long since traded away most of his principles to be a part of the Jianqi Government. This leaves him as a poor candidate and probably a token one since he is the only non-white member of the delegation. He really has developed into an “Uncle Tom’ or a ‘Benedict Arnold’; or perhaps a Faustian clone selling his soul to the devil for a little time holding awe corner of the reins of power. Mandella stood up for moral principles and was prepared to die for them. This wooss wouldn’t know a moral principle if it bit him on the nono.

And speaking of token members; David Cunliffe without the ‘t’ has only been chosen because even Jianqi knows that the leader of the opposition is usually expected to attend such events. He probably has the pedigree for this event and he opposed the tour.

So looking at the delegation it stands out like the proverbial ‘dog’s nuts’ that it is with one solitary exception comprised of old white guys, only one of whom actually stood for what Mandella did and one token Maori who has spent the last two parliamentary terms selling out his people so he could rub shoulders with the latest batch of power brokers.

I don’t necessarily think John Minto should have gone at the nation’s expense although he would have been a better choice than Don McKinnon or Jim Bolger, but I would have thought at least somebody with good Human Rights creds should have been included. It might not have been a bad idea to include a woman as well.

But definitely not our Racist Relations Commissioner who is another lacking any suitable qualifications for the trip or her job for that matter.

And just to make matters worse; the Huffington Post has picked up on Jianqi’s brain-fade as well. Oh the shame of it all!

The madness of pouring money into a hole in the ground

Human beings do some incredibly stupid things as we all know, and the current NZ Government is not immune to this malaise.

At present they seem obsessed with pouring money into all sorts of holes in the ground. In some instances they are doing this literally and in others figuratively. However in all cases the practice makes no sense when the longer view is taken.

Unfortunately when you have a Government that is headed up by a money trader you are going to see policies that are driven by the desire to reap short term gains and to hell with any ‘collateral damage’ that might be caused by chasing those gains.

Under this sort of management anything that doesn’t bring the cash that will enrich the drivers of those policies and their mates is expendable.

This is the philosophy that allows companies such as Anna Dark Knight to plunder the depths of our oceans in search of 20^th Century fuels for the 21^st Century.

We are told by the Government that if we allow these modern day environmental rapists to drill ginormous holes in our seabed we will all get fabulously wealthy and live happily ever after. In true Nelsonian style Jianqi has hoisted his telescope to his squinty little eyes after first sticking a large banknote over the lens which is bad enough, but he wants all of us to look through it as well without removing the distraction of the cash first so that we can see the real picture.

A conspiracy has been hatched to massage the figures so that we are not being made aware of ADK’s track record and the true number of ‘incidents’ that have occurred as a result of their drilling operations. The EPA (Environmental Prostitution Agency) has pimped us to these people based on the directives given to it by the Government. Figures with dozens of zeroes at the end of them have been bandied about in an attempt to dazzle us with their bright shiny nature and imply that we will all get a big share of the dough. This is going to happen via the trickle-down effect which is the system where the earnings all go to the rich who drink up large on their bounty and then piss on the rest of us.

Meanwhile the enormous pachyderm sits in the corner waiting for the day when he inevitably has to take a dump and we end up spending any gains we might as a nation have made trying to mop up somebody else’s shit from our ocean. However that won’t bother Jianqi and his bunch of vagabonds because they will have all made their money and buggered off somewhere else leaving us with the mess to clean up and still not a cent better off.

Some might say our Government is not putting any money into this particular hole and that it is ADK that is pouring money into it instead. But our Government has sold these resources to ADK extremely cheaply when compared with most other countries in the world and when it all goes wrong that is when they will really have to chuck a load of money down a very deep hole.

But not content with chucking millions or possibly billions down into the ocean Jianqi is also feverishly doing the same with large holes in the ground looking for another form of ‘black gold’. The only difference here is the scale f the operations and the fact that this particular product is 19^th Century fuel for the 21^st Century.

Instead of damage to the marine environment we are gearing up for damage to the land, gas explosions, collapses, and further fiascos of the Pike River variety.

Once again the usual suspects will be the only ones who will be enriched and as usual the taxpayers will pick up the tab for the damage when it inevitably occurs.

But I said earlier that money is being also chucked down what I call figurative holes and it is these holes in which you will find the key (geddit) to what is really wrong with this Government.

One of the smaller examples of this earlier this year was the $250,000 they spent on trying to get Grocer Tim a job at the WTO (World Twats Organisation). In the overall scheme of things this is a paltry sum; but try telling that to an NZ Post worker who is about to lose his $30,000 a year job because the Government is hell-bent on running the company down so it can be sold to another of their cronies.

Of much more concern is the money that is being thrown at our farcical attempts to get a spot on the UN (United Nitwits) Security Council is one such example. If ever there was a waste of public money on a grand scale, then this is it. The figure of $25M has been thrown around and although Jianqi doesn’t want to get specific (why not it’s OUR money?) it seems this is probably a bare minimum that will be spent on this programme.

So we don’t have enough money to run our health sector properly but we still have a lazy $25M to waste on trying to get a seat on the world’s most toothless organisation where any one of the permanent members can use their power of veto to stop anything we might want to bring up there. Was there ever anything more pointless upon which to spend $25M?

But this is chicken feed when compared to the costs involved in selling off our assets. $100M was apparently spent on selling 48 percent of Mighty River Power, which the Bill Nospeakada English is claiming as a victory netting 1.6B for the Government. But that is not taking account of the loss of profits from a very large company such as Mighty River. In 2012 the net profits were over $83B and 48 percent of that is nearly $40B. Of course there are other costs to come out of that, but I am sure you get my drift. More money down a very large hole that was spewing money in our direction but instead is now feeding the overfed.

Despite claims that money is tight and ‘we are not out of the woods yet’ our Government is spending truckloads of money on every magic bean it can get it’s grubby little paws on despite the fact that none of them are going to germinate and produce a plant that will nourish the nation.

Meanwhile the greater majority of us are being told to save our money (what money?) and tighten our belts – but we all had to change to braces years ago to hold our increasingly roomy trou up. But the porkers at the public trough cruise along on the largesse of the Remuneration Authority who has kindly given them another pay rise backdated to the middle of the year.

I know what I’d like to throw into a big hole.

The last chance cafe or the last straw?

The Laboured Party has elected their fourth leader since they were last in power. As that was only five years ago, this is not a good look. But have they got it right this time? Somehow I doubt it. Helen Clark was the last good leader they had. Of course she lost her head because she lost the election and that is a pretty common outcome for leaders who lose an election.

She was then replaced by Phil Goffisthatthetime who, nice guy though he is, was not made of sufficiently stern stuff and who surprised nobody (probably including himself) when he lost the next election.

Next up was an equally inappropriate contender in the form of The Shearer; a diplomat cut from a similarly limp bolt of cloth as his predecessor. I have always believed he was the compromise candidate when the party was at loggerheads over whether to elect Cunliffe (without the “t”) or (Nosy) Parker. As with many compromises in life he ended up pleasing nobody except perhaps those warming the treasury benches.

So now we have the recycled version of Cunliffe which to my eye looks very little different to the rather smug and abrasive version that surfaced at the last leadership stoush.

For those who watch NZ politics fairly closely it is no secret that we have a dearth of good leaders among the parties in our parliament. In fact dearth doesn’t really do justice to the situation. An almost complete absence of good leaders would seem to sum it up better.

This might not matter so much were it not for the fact that the party in power at the moment is laying waste to almost everything Kiwis have held dear and a change of government is urgently needed. In order to bring that about one would expect some good leadership would be a pre-requisite for any of the pretenders.

Of course we could all just bumble along and hope that Jianqi accidentally shoots himself in the foot and the Natsis self-destruct. You might think this could happen with their coalition partners are doing their darndest to emulate the leadership cock-ups of the Laboured Party. 

The Maori Party weren’t able to make up their minds how many leaders they needed until someone kicked Sharples in the goolies and he got the point and stepped aside. The Actors went through two leaders until their cunning election plan in 2011 misfired and their leader didn’t get elected and they had to elect a very short man with a very small brain because he was the only one they managed to get into parliament. And of course the No Future Party managed to retain the same leader but lost the entire party for a while.

However through all of this and despite the squinty-eyed little money-man dropping more than his share of passes the Natsis have stayed true to the one leader since 2006. Prior to that they had three leaders within the space of five years and they paid for that by remaining on the opposition benches.

Significantly the current ‘opposition’ parties have managed pretty much to remain stable. Winston First is still all about Winston, Mana is always going to be Hone’s party – he would leave and start another were it to be otherwise – and the Greens have been stable, only changing their leadership due to a death and a retirement.

But these three parties cannot muster enough support to govern without a coalition partner such as the Laboured Party and that is where the plan all turns to shit.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the Laboured Party are a necessary part of any alternative to the NWO/Money worshipping/CIA lapdogs that run this show for now. This presents a big problem for New Zealand. I hate to think what this country will look like if they get a third term.

Unfortunately I can’t see Cunliffe being the one to galvanise the opposition and convince the electorate. He certainly doesn’t convince me. But then I am a picky bugger.

In my opinion Grant Robertson was the obvious choice. He is smart, charismatic and funny. He reminds me of David Lange before he got Rogered by Douglas. Maybe that was what the wider party was worried about. By all accounts the parliamentary party wanted him to lead them and it is that which worries me most about the chances of Cunliffe being able to get them onto the government side of the house.

Of course the unspoken notion is that the wider party was afraid NZ wasn’t ready for their first openly gay PM. I hope that wasn’t their reasoning because I personally believe they were grossly underestimating the electorate if it was. After all this is the country that was among the first to legalise homosexual practices nearly thirty years ago and has recently been one of the first countries in the world to legalise same sex marriage and who was one of the first countries in the world to elect a trans-sexual MP. I think that track record would indicate that the although the average Kiwi bloke or blokes might make jokes about people with different sexual orientation to themselves, they really couldn’t care less what people do in the privacy of their own homes.

It remains to be seen whether Cunliffe remains to be seen still at the helm in October next year. I hope that he does, despite my reservations about him, because a fifth leader in six years would almost certainly be the kiss of death for the Laboured Party and unfortunately for any hope of a coalition to replace the current unholy alliance that is in power now.

Still hope springs eternal, eh and spring is here now so who knows?

Spy vs Spy and other funnies

If it wasn’t for the fact that this is ‘real life’ the antics of Jianqi’s spies would be almost as funny as the Spy vs Spy comic strips in Mad Magazine used to be.

There is certainly an equivalent amount of bungling going on anyway, all of which goes to show that our Minister of Spies couldn’t organise the proverbial piss-up in a brewery.

Call me naive, but I always thought that the point about spying is that nobody knows you are doing it. Stealth and subterfuge are the cornerstones of spying, surely? Spies are often referred to (at least in British TV shows) as ‘the funny people’, except I don’t think that was supposed to mean they act like the Keystone Cops. In this case I think the word funny had the meaning of funny peculiar rather than funny ha-ha.

However it seems that Jianqi’s funny people really are hilarious. Their idea of subterfuge would appear to be closing their eyes and saying, “You can’t see me”.

Of course we now live in the digital age and most of us are aware that we leave a large digital footprint almost everywhere we go, both in the real and cyberworlds. All sorts of people have been spying on us for ages. It’s just that most of them up to now have been comparatively harmless.

Advertisers and marketers have been dredging the cybercanals for a couple of decades trying to find the right fit for each of us so they can deluge us with special offers and products they think we can be convinced to buy. Annoying though this is, it is for the most part, pretty harmless for all of us apart from the truly gullible. But at the end of the day it is impossible to protect the truly stupid from the consequences of their own actions. We shouldn’t even try anyway, because as long as they exist it gives us all a chance to feel a little more secure about ourselves.

So what is likely to come out of this current furore about Jianqi and his funny people snorting up every tiny grain of information they can on everyone they think might pose a problem for them?

Probably not a lot, I am sorry to say, at least not from Parliament. Yes there will be a series of tiresome and expensive inquiries and a few more departmental heads will be dropping into the basket, but unless we are really fortunate it is unlikely that the power behind the drones will be brought to account. We can only hope and pray that the voters make up for that in 2014 – always providing Jianqi is not at this very moment attending the Robert Mugabe School of electoral practices.

If the opposition was sufficiently organised and ACTUALLY WANTED TO they could really make things tough and work on Peter Dung and get him to vote down the GCSB bill which seeks to legalise the illegal acts the Government has been caught out doing.

Sadly when it comes to matters of national security many people are easily captured by scare tactics and seem to think there are shadowy figures out there who might steal away our freedoms if we don’t implement all sorts of regulations and surrender our right to privacy in order to stop them.

Well, hello! There are such people but they ain’t so shadowy. They currently occupy the Government benches of this land and they have already travelled a long way down that path towards Big Brother. Doublespeak has been a feature of their speeches for a very long time.

But whenever a government is questioned about introducing these types of measures their first reaction is to try and justify their lunacy rather than deny the activity is taking place. No better example of that can be found in Jianqi’s rambling nonsense on his favourite (read most compliant and National Party friendly) radio station More FM. He tore a large leaf out of the George Dubbyah book of crowd control by claiming he had to give the GCSB more powers because there were people undergoing terrorist training in Yemen with the implication they were going to return to Godzone, blow us all to pieces and take over the country.

Duhhh! Let’s face it; with the devious lot we have running this country (into the ground) anyone who wanted to take it over would only need to chuck them 30 pieces of silver and it would be theirs. If you don’t believe me just look at how many large multi-national corporations have already picked up the deeds to much of our industry and land with full co-operation from the Government. Several have even had laws changed to suit them.

The other argument that has been put forward to try and justify these intrusions into our freedom is that if we don’t have anything to hide, then we don’t have anything to worry about. The trouble with that one is that not so long ago I can recall a couple of politicians who were apoplectic when they thought their little tete-a-tete had been overheard by a journalist. But surely you had nothing to hide, boys, so where was the harm?

I won’t be holding my breath for the combined opposition to do the damage to Jianqi, although I will be delighted if I am proven wrong about that. But what does give me some hope in all of this is that Jianqi has made one of the most fundamental blunders a polly can make. He has threatened the freedom of the press.

Now I have been very critical of the job the NZ press has been doing in terms of bringing this government to account, and I have suggested in the past that it is because they are poorly trained and lack the mongrel journos once had. I still think that is the case, but I have always known that they hold the principle of freedom of the press very close to their hearts even if they are rather slack about going after the rabbit.

Jianqi has foolishly assumed that because they have let him get away with murder before they won’t have the balls to stand up for themselves when he impinges on this final bastion of their pride. Wrong! Most journos see this sort of intrusion as the equivalent of doing something unspeakable to their mother. They will (and already are) going after him with implements designed to nip off the bits that offended them and they will not stop until something much bigger comes along. Already the papers are full of stories with unflattering pictures and little editorialising comments throughout them. Words like bungling and blunder are being liberally used and it is quite apparent that they are going after him.

There is an unspoken rule in politics which any politician should know. It is that you don’t upset the press because if they take a dislike to you they can and will make you look stupid. You can get away with being rude to them and failing to front for interviews but if you touch the sacred cow of press freedom, then you had better find another career because this one is over.   

Watch your papers and television news programmes over the next few months. The new game in town will be Pin the Tail on the Jianqi and when they’ve finished he won’t want to sit in parliament again.

Here we go with Judith & John or the ABC of NZ politics part 2

Last week I brought you the first half of a leaked document that is being used to train our new MPs. Of course since then there have been denials from the Government that this document is genuine and even suggestions (heaven forbid) that I made the whole thing up.

Clearly this is another case of brain fade from the ruling party and to prove that I publish for you this week part two of the MP’s primer.

Last week we learned the letters from A for amnesia (or had you forgotten that already – John certainly has), to M for mess which is what Judith and John will have to clean up this week after Smaug lashed out over the weekend. Trying to turn Wellywood in Middle Earth wasn’t such a good idea after all, was it Johnny?

N is for noes which is what you pick when you want to vote against a particular bill (in accordance with the party line of course). Lately it has also come to mean Novopay; a pay system developed to ensure teachers don’t get too powerful (or paid). It was teed up by the last Labour Government and its failings are therefore not the fault of the present Government despite being signed off by them in the face of advice from almost every quarter not to do so.

O is for obfuscation, which is an art you will be trained in for important occasions such as answering direct and confrontational questions from the press. (Does anyone in the Press Gallery still do this?). Simply put, it is a technique that involves using at least five words where one would have done. Your speech is delivered in a circular pattern that leads one inevitably back to the start without divulging anything that even vaguely resembles a direct answer. It has been unkindly suggested that “O” also stands for old-boys’ network, a club where your membership entitles you to preferential career advancement and wealth beyond your wildest dreams, but this is merely an ugly rumour perpetuated by the opposition. There is no such thing as an old boys’ network anymore. The name was first changed to old persons’ network and subsequently to ‘senior citizens’ network’, which as everybody knows is another name for Grey Power and nothing sinister at all.  

P is for posturing and populist. These two are a package deal. Posturing is the art of appearing to take a stand on the issue du jour. But the stand you take when posturing is the one in which the most votes lie so this makes it populist. There is no point in taking a stand on an issue that is likely to cost you votes and by implication, your place on the party list. It is important to remember when playing the posturing card to do so via an obfuscating speech (see under “O” above) to ensure you don’t say anything you might later be held accountable for. 

Q is for quisling. A quisling is not a small goose although the parallels with a bird brain are obvious. It is somebody who displays treachery and fails to recite the party mantra and sides with anything that emanates from the opposition benches. It also applies to coalition parties that join up with the opposition to form a government instead of helping the true party rule as they are born to.

R is for redacted. This is the process whereby dangerous information is removed from official documents to protect the press, the public and others from harm From time to time opposition members and media sources will unreasonably demand official documents and sometimes these will contain information that could compromise National’s security. Usually these are in the form of errors where it is incorrectly stated that a Government Minister knew about a certain person or series of events which that Minister has already repeatedly told Parliament they have no recollection of. To avoid humiliation for the compilers of these documents owing to their lack of accuracy the Government removes these damning pieces of evidence before releasing the documents and this is called redacting.

S is for SkyCity.  SkyCity is a philanthropic organisation that has the best interests of the ordinary New Zealander at heart. They are here to help the Government out by building a world class convention centre that will drag our economy out of the red that the Labour Party took it into and into the black of prosperity. The generosity of this great benefactor is so huge that it has agreed to fork out $402M of its own hard earned money to boost our economy by over $90M per year until the end of time. Furthermore they agreed to do this with no strings attached other than asking the Government to (quite reasonably) extend their gambling licence for a mere 35 years and allow a trifling 230 extra pokie machines and 40 extra gambling tables.

T is for taxation. This is the way Government funds all those free lunches free air travel for you and your family and expenses claims that you will have during your term in Parliament. It is collected by a fair process in which everyone except big business, which is the lifeblood of the country, pays their fair share. It is important to remember that big business has big expenses so it must be given big tax breaks to enable it to employ big numbers of people who can in turn pay big slices of their income in taxation to support us all (in Parliament that is).  

U is for unions a.k.a. the Anti-Christ. Unions are devious cults hell-bent on destroying the country. They are doing this in cahoots with the Labour Party and various other Pinkos. They seem to think that everyone is entitled to have a say in their workplace, the right to a fair wage and various other namby pamby rights such as holidays and sick leave.

V is for vertical integration. This is not only a flash term you can wave about like a big willy and confuse the public, but it is also the secret to business efficiency. Big companies get the opportunity to grow even bigger and to move into more diverse business fields through the medium of vertical integration. To understand it better you could think of it as ‘keeping it all in the family’ which after all makes sense since the family that plays together stays together. For example if you were to start a business where you developed seeds for farmers to plant, then it makes sense that you would also develop chemicals to fight off the diseases and pests they might encounter. Then you would start developing drugs to fight off the diseases people will get when they eat the food grown from those seeds and using those chemicals. It’s only logical to have all those businesses under one banner so you can help everyone at the same time as helping yourself.

W is for whitewash. This is another name for an enquiry into scurrilous allegations from the other side of the house. It gained the name because it is a nice clean way of airing your washing and showing that it is all Persil white and not mucky as alleged by the stone throwing hypocrites on the opposition benches.

X is for Xmas. This is the time of the year when Parliament closes down and you get to mumble some meaningless platitudes before taking off for your holiday home in Hawaii while the voters fight over the last tin of baked beans at the City Mission’s Festive spread.  

Y is for Young Turks. This term does not refer to youths from the Dardanelles, although Turkey was at one time ruled by a party of that name. In this context it used to mean a young movement within the National Party that was named after a similar group in the American Republican Party during the 1960s. This term has now fallen out of use as the modern party is just that; i.e. modern. It doesn’t need stroppy little upstarts trying to change party policy which has been very carefully developed with maximum input from the voters – or at least the ones who make the biggest donations to the election fund.

Z is for Zilland as in New Zilland. This is the correct way to pronounce the name of our fine country as demonstrated by our fine leader who has been setting the bar extremely high in the development of New Zilland Inglush.

So there you have it; the unabridged version of the new MP’s training manual. No expense has been expended on this invaluable resource and as you will have noticed, it is bringing obvious returns with the standard of representation we now have.

But maybe with returns like that we should bolt the gates and not let the buggers back in.