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.

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.

Say what?

This week: the great questions of the day are explored; none are satisfactorily answered and life mimics life.

Well there have been a few head-scratching moments over the last few weeks and pretty soon some of us will have dug down to the grey matter – those of us with any left that is.

The fall-out from the Dotcom saga, the fall-out from the Banks fiasco, the fall-out from Jianqi’s ill-timed visit to Hollywood and the fall-out from the Shane Jones/Bill Liu matter and the fall-out from the Quade Cooper brain explosion are making those with any hair left nervously clutch their scalps.

I have often heard it said the Chinese have a proverb that goes, “May we live in interesting times”. I’ve often heard this quoted and misquoted but have never been 100 percent sure it was a Chinese proverb. However my most recent research suggests there could be a Chinese connection and it would seem it was both a proverb and a curse, which makes sense when you think of the wording.  It has certainly been repeated often enough – some of its more famous users have been Bobby Kennedy, Hunter S Thompson and Harry Kim from Star Trek. Actually that would be a good trivia question (what do these three have in common?).

So what does this rather obtuse phrase actually mean? Well I’m buggered if I know what it was supposed to mean when it was first uttered/invented/discovered and it seems silly to even try to discover what such an ambiguous adage could mean.

NEXT!

Another question that has been on everybody’s minds just lately (yes, people were tearing their hair about the Chinese proverb/curse); is, have ANZ Bank dropped the ‘National’ from their name to avoid being associated with the Government’s fall in the polls? Or is it that they didn’t want any Green horning in on their blue hues and diluting their brand? And given their new logo are they now the bank for the ‘paw folks’ or do they just want their customers to sit up and beg?

And from banking to something that rhymes with that – planking - what on earth did you think I was going to say? Wash your mouth out. Has there ever been a sillier five minute wonder than planking? I doubt it. A totally pointless act that appeared to be some kind of desperate attempt by the terminally talentless to achieve some sort of....well I’m stuffed if I know what they achieved apart from silly old Peter Dung of course who managed to himself look more dorky than usual when he ‘took up the challenge’ on Back Benches.  

But the conundrum that has puzzled Kiwis for a number of years now and frustrated the hell out of those concerned with our failing health profile and our rapidly expanding obesity stats is why is milk so expensive and coke so cheap?

It has never been that hard to figure out why coke is so cheap. It is produced in such enormous volumes there are obviously some huge economies of scale involved in the manufacturing stage. Then it contains so much addictive sugar and caffeine that they know they will also be guaranteed bulk repeat sales.

But why is milk which is produced also in huge volumes and from home grown ingredients is on average around twice the price of Coca Cola? In theory it contains no added ingredients, so the only costs involved are those associated with looking after the cows that produce it, extracting it from them and pasteurising it.

I see from Fonterrier’s latest report shows they have cutting back the forecast payout to the farmers again. Notice how the price at the shop never goes down when that happens? Of course the Fonterriermen will tell you that price is affected by the export prices. And that is another thing; Stuff carried out a survey last year and found that hardly anybody else in the world pays as much for their milk as we do in New Zealand. This is even crazier when you consider the stuff is produced so close to the back doors of most of us – so there aren’t many freight costs involved either.

But Fonterrier’s latest report actually carried the real reason why our milk is so expensive if anyone cared to read it. It is all down to the costs of staffing and how many times do you hear employers whinge about those costs? But at Fonterrier this is not about the ordinary folks that do the ordinary jobs that make Fonterrier its money like most similar whines. This is about the costs of one or two (particularly one) members of staff who are paid well beyond anything they are even remotely worth. It would seem $5.1 million dollar salary that former CEO Andrew Ferrier got in his last year with them wasn’t enough to support the poor wee chap and thus the Fonterriers gave him a little something to help him get by. Nothing major you understand; just a spare $8.2M they had lying around.

I don’t believe in the death penalty, but I could just about go along with whichever disgusting capitalist swine that approved that being made to walk the plank. $8.2 fucking million! That is disgusting especially when he has already been paid $5.1M for his final year and gawd knows how many millions for each of the other seven years he was in that job. This kind of obscene generosity is simply rubbing the noses of everyone in New Zealand who is struggling to make ends meet right in the soiled nappies of the 1%.

Now I don’t think I am over-reacting in the slightest here because I have done some number crunching here and I it is no exaggeration to say that 99% of us will never earn as much as that bonus in our entire working lives, never mind all the millions he got in salary over that 8 year gig. I have no problem with skilled people being paid a salary that is commensurate with their skill levels and even a bit more. But this is I have worked out that even if you had a working life of 40 years and averaged $200,000 per annum for that entire time, you would still wind up $100,000 short of that bonus.

Is this that brighter future where tossers like Ferrier have their snouts firmly wedged in a platinum trough while working families struggle to afford a one litre the very product he is earning so much from? 

Break a leg, Johnny ... or yer neck!

Newsflash! Our Prime Minotaur thinks he’s a thespian (a change from the allegations surrounding his predecessor).

So why does JiangQi think he should be treading the boards instead of treading water (or walking the plank)? Well it seems our little showman got the idea some time ago when he sent a fan letter to that man of letters Da-aaavid Letterman asking him to come to New Zealand and sign his autograph book or something. Anyway, our starstruck wannabe decided the best tribute he could pay to his idol and which might guarantee him a close-up and personal moment was to make a video of himself being ‘entertaining’.

Rumours emanating from the National Disgrace HQ say the TV presenter literally fell down in a helpless heap watching the clip. It is unclear exactly what the cause of his mirth was, but the rumour would have it he was so bowled over by Johnny’s talent that he sent out an urgent missive to get him on the programme.

Those of us who finished Primary School felt this was extremely unlikely given that neither Letterman not his ‘people’ probably had any idea where New Zealand was never mind who this lisping little troll with an impending comb-over moment was.

However now some spoil-sport (there always is one, isn’t there?) leaked details of the $10,000 paid out to a PR company by Tourism NZ to get little Johnny his gig. So this was a pay to play type gig. Not very cool Johnny, but hang on a minute – that’s not even YOUR money! So we paid for him to perform and make an even bigger dick of himself and us by implication than he did on Hardtalk in the UK when he tried to argue that there were degrees of 100% pure. Duhhh!

So that’s the UK and the US gigs over. Somebody needs to muzzle this pillock before he makes us a laughing stock in the rest of the world as well. Let’s face it; humour is not his best suit. Although his best suit might be humour – but that’s a whole different fashion gig, I mean gag.

In fact the National Disgrace is pretty light on comedians – apart from the unintentional ones like Jezza Browneye who makes you laugh just watching him trying to get in and out of his limo and Bill Nospeakada English who is really funny when he loses his rag and starts shouting and spitting.

So who are the best comedians in our Parliament? The Laboured Party used to have most of the best comedians in Parliament. It’s just a shame nobody could take any of them seriously enough to vote for them. However there are still some in the chamber who are capable of making the rest of us laugh. Trev (Duck) Mallard can be very amusing (but then he went to the right school); and Catherine Delahunty has performed stand up comedy (she also went to the right school). Peter Dunne has funny hair so perhaps he could develop a Ken Dodd type act, and of course Shonky John Hadfield thinks he’s all things to all people.

But then perhaps it’s not such a bad thing we don’t have too many comics in the House. Let’s face it; what they’ve been doing to the country over the last three years is no laughing matter.

The numbers game

Do you ever feel you are just being treated like a number? I know I do quite often. Most of us get that feeling when you go to see our bank manager and if you’ve ever had to deal with government bureaucracies – those ones that are ‘there to help us’ you will also begin to get that feeling pretty quickly. Election time is another at which we are reminded that as far as those in power are concerned, we are just numbers to get them elected, or numbers they have to overcome to get elected.

However this whole numbers issue goes a lot further and dominates many other areas of our lives. Frequently governments deny funding to services because they claim there is not enough people who will benefit and just this week we have seen more cruel examples of the government’s drug buying agency (doesn’t that have a ring to it?), Pharmac denying treatment to a desperately ill woman because basically as far as they are concerned she is just one and therefore not a large enough number to justify the expense of her treatment. While it is hard to deny the fiscal logic behind such moves it is impossible to avoid the obvious moral issues involved.

But it doesn’t end there; an even more pernicious form of ‘the numbers game’ is being practiced by a body who on the surface of it seem like a jolly good bunch of chaps and chapesses with the well-being of our country in general and its native fauna in particular. What makes this even worse is that this body has gained the backing of a government official who by the very nature of her position carries with her an implied credibility.

The group to which I refer is the Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society of New Zealand Incorporated or Forest & Bird as they are more commonly known. This incorporated society that purports to be keen on preserving our native fauna is a keen supporter of sodium fluoroacetate (FCH2CO2Na) a nasty metabolic poison that is highly toxic to mammals and insects. We more usually know of it as 1080.

Their new cheer leader is the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Jan Wright. Well sorry Ms Wright, but you are very wrong in this case and, just for the record, you are no bloody friend to the environment you are charged with protecting.

But what has this to do with numbers, apart from the name of the death agent? Well it is the old story of scare tactics involving numbers (as they usually do). According to the New Zealand Herald, Ms (Not) Wright says that unless 1080 is used over large areas (numbers again) of the mainland ‘iwi could vanish from unprotected areas within a generation and native birds could disappear from New Zealand's forests.’ Now I’m sure the commissioner actually meant KIWI, but that’s Granny Herald for you – and of course that masterstroke that APN pulled  a while ago by centralising their subbing operations and cutting down on the number of subbies left to do it. It might have been a Freudian slip, but that implies the powers behind APN actually think about these things and that might be stretching it a bit. The scariest thing about that misprint is that it could be true for both kiwi and iwi if they DO keep using 1080.

(Can’t Be) Wright says 1080 is cost-effective and safe (er what part of toxic to insects did you not understand?). Furthermore she claims a moratorium on 1080 would destroy more of the landscape. So if we don’t spread this poison that WILL (not might) kill a whole lot of non-target species all over our land, we will lose ALL of our fauna and flora?

Well have I got news for her! First piece of news that will blow her sweat shop produced socks off is that I have found a point of agreement with that ridiculous looking hairstyle known as Peter Dunne. Ol’ Dunne & Dusted and I are in agreement over the need to stop the use of 1080. Who would have thought it?

And Dunne has pointed out to the Commissioner that 1080 has been used for around 50 years and we are not making any headway at all. We currently spend $100M each year on the stuff and still we have not managed to get on top of the problem. The Hairstyle says we are only spending $2M a year looking for a better way. Now I might not be the brightest financial bulb on the tree but it occurs to me that you could achieve quite a lot of less harmful and better directed possum, mustelid and rat eradication programmes for $102M than you can for just $2M. (Check out those numbers!)

But it’s not just the numbers that are a nonsense here; it is also the entire approach. You see numbers need to be kept in some sort of context to have any real meaning and it is easy to throw around big numbers to tempt people. Too often we choose short-term gains over the bigger picture. For example it is easy get a lot of people to buy cheap sweat shop produced socks that fall apart after a few months than to pay a much higher price for a pair that were made in a safety conscious factory where the workers are valued and well paid. It doesn’t seem to matter much of the time that the initially dearer items will last so much longer they will, actually work out cheaper because they won’t have to be replaced so soon.

Thus it is with issues like control of exotic pests. Nobody wants to do the hard yards and actually put some effort into finding a way to do this without polluting the environment which will be much dearer to put right even if it can be done at all.

We’ve got to stop acting like he old woman who swallowed a fly. I’m sure we can all remember the final line:

I don’t know why she swallowed the fly

Perhaps she’ll die

There’s nothing surer if we don’t stop using these sorts of methods. Forest & Bird should be trapped and released to some remote island and Ms Wright needs some serious corrections.