Place your bets

I’m not usually a betting man, apart from my weekly Lotto ticket. And even that should be called a donation rather than a gamble, because up to this point it seems to be an entirely one-way street; I buy a ticket and am lucky if even one of my numbers comes up. The result is of course a donation to the Lotteries Commission. I don’t know why I don’t just set up an automatic payment and save the time of purchasing the ticket, as well as the weekly disappointment around 8pm each Saturday.

However this week, I am fired up with a few tips I have and think I should at least share some of these ‘sure things’ with those of you kind and patient enough to be reading these ramblings.

Now I should preface this with the advisory that you might not be able to get terribly good odds on some of these tips at the TAB. In fact some you might not be able to get any odds at all, unless you count the odd looks you get when you ask to place a bet on them. However, I believe life is for living and who cares what the boring people think? Life is for living and having fun.

My first tips are for the Rugby World Cup 2011:

1.      New Zealand will win the cup and I believe they will do better than the 1987 team. To do this they need to win by 21 or more points. At the time of writing this was a fairly good bet considering the All Blacks’ dominance at $3.30.

2.      Wales will beat Australia in the third and fourth place final. I think it will be fairly close which is a shame because if they win by 13 or more they will pay $6, whereas at under 13 they are paying $3.20

3.      The Rugby World Cup 2015 will be a very different beast to the 2011 one. Look out for changes to the turnaround time during pool play and a change at the top of the IRB.

4.      My long shot bet here would be the SANZAR countries, Argentina and the Pacific Islands leading a breakaway movement that will see the entire cup re-jigged and something like the mess that happened with the Packer circus emerging as the IRB lick their wounds in the aftermath of 2011.

My next bets centre on the Rena or RENA as I prefer to think of her (Really Environmentally Nasty Atrocity).

1.      The ship will break up before all the oil has been removed. I know that is hardly Nostradamus territory, but I just thought I should record it since so many with a vested interest in happy outcomes prior to a general election keep defending the inactivity of Maritime NZ and making out they have taken the best approach, which clearly they have not.

2.      The effects on wildlife in the Bay of Plenty will be measured in months at the very least, and quite conceivably in years. This is NOT a five minute wonder.

3.      The Rena skipper and his 2IC will get a pissy fine of a few thousand measly dollars that will disappear into that black whole known as the Consolidated Fund. Once the sentence has been passed the offenders will be smartly repatriated to their homelands before you can say oil slick.

4.      We, the taxpayers, and especially those of us unfortunate enough to be Tauranga ratepayers will be stumping up several times over to cover the full costs of this disaster.

5.      If re-elected, (see political predictions below) the National Disgrace Party will cite this disaster as a reason for their continued financial mismanagement.

And then there are the really political tips.

1.      National Disgrace will pitch themselves as saviours of the nation in the final run-up to the election, citing their ‘magnificent handling of the Pike River Mining Disaster 2010, the Christchurch shake festival 2010/11, and the Rena Obscener fiasco’ as examples of their ‘steady hands on the tiller – as opposed to sticky hands in the till, which is probably nearer the truth as more dodgy contracts emerge from the rubble of Christchurch. They will also claim credit for winning the RWC and say nothing about their mismanagement of the event.

2.      New Winston First will trip over their shoelaces at the start of the race and quite possibly (we live in hope), never be heard of again.

3.      The Ancient Codgers Together Party are so old with a collective age, I believe of about 98 that they might well have a couple fall off the perch before the election is over.

4.      Despite Hatfield making a lot of noise and insulting as many people as he can in a bid to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most obnoxious arsehole in the most pointless party in the world, they will be lucky to retain any of their deposits. That’s always providing they stump them up in the first place. Don’t laugh; they managed to get a member (and that’s a good name for him) into the wasp nest without even being properly registered, so anything is possible. However if and when they do come up with nada, expect Shonkey to spit the dummy big time and accuse all and sundry of electoral malpractices.

5.      Finally – unless the National Disgrace gets caught in a major scandal (and it would probably need to be something as bad as an active kiddie porn ring in their caucus), they will unfortunately win the election and we will have to live with the mantra: Three more years.

All of the above are to a greater or lesser extent, risky bets, but I do have one dead cert for you; Muammar Gaddafi.

RWCRWCRWC and you can’t sue me – there I said it!

There are times when the attitude of some people towards money leaves me absolutely speechless. Well, no actually I guess it doesn’t do that so much as leave me grasping for words that do justice to their utterly stomach turning greed.

Who am I talking about in this case? Well there are plenty of candidates right now, and no, this is not a bitch about the rich from an impecunious writer. Instead it is a bitch about the extremely greedy (who also happen to be rich) by an impecunious writer.

My targets today are...(drum roll or cheese roll if you prefer)... the IRB, the NZRFU, and the National Disgrace Government.

My moan is about the upcoming Rugby World Cup and the ridiculous measures being taken to protect the interests of the official sponsors.

I can understand that sponsors who have paid the equivalent of the GDP of a mid-sized European nation to be associated with the event would not want their competitors to piggy-back onto their advertising without stumping up any dosh of their own. That’s fair enough and anyone from a rival company trying to get their advertising into the stadium deserves to get their ears clipped. But the trouble is that it doesn’t just stop there; these corporate gluttons want nobody within a whale’s sonar range of each game from advertising their company or products and services. In some cases it will be an offence if the advertising can simply be seen from the ‘clean zone’ they have defined around each venue.

Another of the most obvious and silly measures is that even some of the stadia have had to change their names because they have the names of sponsors not associated with the event. The cake tin will be known as Wellington Regional Stadium to spare the feelings of ANZ Bank who is an official sponsor.

But these multi-nationals have extremely high-level help to protect their interests. They have pressured the New Zealand Government to pass legislation to protect them. But unlike the laws they pass to (allegedly) protect you and me against home invasions, street bashings and drunk drivers, these laws will actually be enforced and probably to the fullest extent of the very severe penalties provided within them.

To the best of my knowledge our Government has two Acts of Parliament and one set of regulations currently in force to protect these already far too powerful people. The first of these is the Major Events Management Act 2007 (MEMA) and subsequently the Rugby World Cup 2011 (Empowering) Act 2010 and the Rugby World Cup (Empowering) Regulations 2010 have passed into the anus of our history.

What these laws have done apart from restricting our freedom of expression in some rather bizarre ways, is they have made officers of the New Zealand Government servants of these multi-nationals, but servants paid for by you and I. This is because enforcement of these pieces of legislation will be carried out by the Ministry of Economic Development. According to the Fairfax website this week they designated 40 staff members to ‘police stadiums (sic) throughout the country’ and to look out for ‘deliberate or malicious advertising attempts’.

Now this is serious stuff because for two months or more these 40 people who are being paid by you and I will be unavailable to do any work on our behalf and the cost won’t stop there because any prosecutions brought will also be paid for by us.

So am I making a mountain out of a slag heap? I don’t think so. The legislation provides for penalties of up to $150,000 and the indication is that for once something close to this will be sought for maters which should really be dealt with in the civil courts by litigants who are more than capable of funding such prosecutions themselves.

And some of the banned activities are just so stupid. For example I found in MEMA that a B&B cannot put an advert on their website offering special Rugby World Cup packages. Now packages like that have been offered by accommodation providers for ever and I doubt that anyone has believed those places were in any way associated with the event. It’s just a way of offering a special rate during a major event. But according to the official guide to MEMA the local B&B would only be allowed to advise they had vacancies or a special rate during September and October without mentioning the event that is the reason people are seeking accommodation.

 In another equally stupid example a bar can have a sign outside advertising ‘Team A v Team B Live On The Big Screen Tonight’ but they cannot say ‘Joe’s Bar Presents Team A v Team B Live On The Big Screen Tonight’ despite the fact they haven’t even mentioned the words Rugby World Cup 2011 (wash my mouth out). I note also that you cannot have a printed Rugby World Cup Guide brought to you by blah blah. Which means we won’t be able to get a cheap one in the newspaper unless they remove all advertising by non RWC sponsors for eight pages either side of it (sorry I just made that bit up).

Don’t get me wrong I am very pleased the RWC has come to New Zealand; although I’m pretty pissed off I couldn’t afford to get any tickets. However I will be watching it and I will be backing the ABs and I hope like hell they don’t pick any injured players this time.

I just think it’s plain wrong, however that we are dancing so frenetically to the diabolical piper’s tune.