I’m free. (actually I’m much older and wiser than that).

Do I look that stupid? Don’t answer that on the grounds I might have to clip you around the ear for being cheeky.

Apparently a Washington based think tank (has there ever been a better oxymoron?) seems to think so.

The curiously named Social Progress Imperative has just ‘published’ or rather a compliant and gullible New Zealand media has just published for them, a survey that proudly announces I and my fellow Kiwis are the freest people in the known world.

Now if that was actually true it might be something to be grateful for given the appalling conditions that exist in some countries. But much as I don’t want rain on anyone’s parade – oh alright I do sometimes enjoy damping down some of the more ridiculous shows of misplaced enthusiasm – I feel it is important to take issue with this survey/report/PR exercise.

The first thing that strikes me about such a report is that I wonder what criteria went into assessing whatever ‘data’ they might have collected. Closer inspection reveals that basically 12 ‘categories’ were assessed and given scores, which obviously would have to be subjective guesses (educated or otherwise) by those compiling the report. As that much is really a no-brainer it becomes obvious that placing much reliance upon such a document would be foolish in the extreme. After all one man’s freedom is another man’s bondage and any assessment of this type can only be arrived at in the context of one’s own experiences.

So now that I have rubbished the credence of this report, I find myself turning my thoughts to the purpose of it.

Why would somebody want to produce a report like this, apart from the fact that they managed to get paid squillions of dollars to do so? Somebody commissioned/ordered this report to be done otherwise it would not have happened.

My first reaction is to notice that the report has its origins in the USA. This is a country that churns out many millions of reports each year that they then feed to a keen or compliant press most of whom are owned lock stock and gun barrel by large multi-nationals and who have the resources and the infrastructure to disseminate these pearls of wisdom all over the ‘free world’ in less time than it took me to type the last sentence.

My guess is that this was commissioned (openly or otherwise) by a group of multi-national bodies corporate. Anyone even vaguely familiar with human psychology will know that one of the best ways to get people on your side or sympathetic to you is to flatter them and make them feel good about themselves. Success is almost guaranteed if they are aware that your flattery is based upon some sort of ‘scientific data’ that ‘proves’ to them that they are as fabulous as you have been telling them.

The US Government has been a world leader in propaganda for an extremely long time and their influence stretches far and wide. Countries like New Zealand have regarded them as major allies all along and this is even more apparent when the treasury benches are occupied by those from the right of the political spectrum. It is a rare thing indeed for New Zealand to ever oppose anything the USA does and we so often fall over backwards trying to accommodate them with their intelligence gathering activities and by supporting them either physically or morally in their military endeavours. We also ‘enjoy’ a favourable trade relationship with them – although it doesn’t take a genius to work out who actually gets the most favours from that.

Now don’t get me wrong, any of my American readers; it’s not the American people I am talking about here it is the pond-life that occupy their corridors of power. The fact is that much of our own pond-life thinks the sun shines out of their algae encrusted bums.

So what really is the deal here with this report? Why has it come out now?

I think there are two obvious reasons for this report being released now and my diseased and conspiracy addled brain says the timing of this is no coincidence. This is election year and who stands to benefit from a report that screams in headlines that we have never been so free?

Why that must be our benevolent Government of course; the very same one that has expended so much time and energy stoutly defending our right to privacy, freedom of speech and democracy. Now what exactly have they done to move our freedom forward?

Oh yes, that’s right when more than two thirds of those who voted against asset sales in a referendum last year opposed asset sales they publicly announced even before the results that they would ignore our views if they clashed with their own. The there have been the breaches of the rights of the Tuhoe people and Kim Dotcom, the protection of coalition partners who cross the line on matters of trust and then keeping a Minster in power who has created an apparent conflict of interest during a Ministerial overseas junket. And that is just the tip of an iceberg far larger than any encountered by the Titanic.

Of course this is a potentially good election year present for the current Government who coincidentally (thank heavens for co-incidence) sycophantically adores of the US administration.

But it is also a great distraction. It distracts the attention of the masses from more important matters such as that horrendously disempowering document the TPPA which our (same) Government is so keen to sign up to and which the US administration wants us to sign up to as well (more coincidence).

So while we are busy celebrating our new found status as the bastions of freedom our Government is busy trying to sell those freedoms off to multi-nationals via this cheerily entitled Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement which will have us reduced to minor partners in our own resources. This agreement will allow these corporates to dictate what we do in what used to be our country, although even that particular ownership must be under a cloud now. That is because the toothless OIC seems keen to sell up endless tracts of land to off-shore investors while the Government assists morally unsuitable migrants to gain citizenship and buy up properties at ridiculous prices thus making property unaffordable for the locals and the Government keeps selling NZ assets by the pound. The latter is the biggest lie of all when they say they will only sell the majority of shares to Kiwis but then later have to revise that because not enough Kiwis have the dough to buy them.

Oh yes. That sounds like freedom, doesn’t it?

And before I close I should mention that closer examination of the SPI (or spy?) report reveals that all is not quite as good as the screaming headlines might suggest. Our health system is going down the toilet along with our general health and our high suicide statistics and our eco system sustainability is shot to pieces. But we are ‘free’ to experience all that, so it must be alright.

It’s time more people in Godzone woke up and smelled the rat in mi kitchen Come September let’s fix dat rat. 

I don’t want us to be number one

Well congratulations to us. New Zealand has had shameful placings in so many world tables lately, such as child poverty, the gap between rich and poor and youth suicide statistics. But now we have the chance to be winners again – and so soon after the RWC too.

So what are we winning? Well I think we are in the running for several trophies at the moment.

First of all our government should win the award for the most cynically rigged election since the last fiasco in Russia where Vlad the Imputin arranged for his mate to caretake the Presidency while he slid into the PM’s chair for a term so he can then jump back into the seat his mate has kept warm for him until next year. The National Disgrace Party started the fiasco by hand-picking the candidates of their potential coalition partners to ensure they were all on the same page. What the book was, we can only speculate, but it will have had something to do with silencing dissenting views and enriching themselves at our expense.

Because of the fact we have no written constitution to fall back on it would seem the party in power can do whatever they like. For example they are able to choose the date of the election, which obviously means they can arrange for it to be held at a time that is convenient to them.

This year they were able to play an absolute blinder in that regard by beginning the campaign straight after the RWC. This meant the whole thing was rushed through while everyone was still enjoying the ABs’ win and were probably still a little light-headed. It also meant that policy releases could be timed to perfection; that is to say they could be released at the last possible moment so nobody had enough time to check them out properly before they had to cast their vote.  

Then Jianqi decided he was too important to debate the issues with anyone other than Phil Goshisthatthetime. Phil foolishly took his cue from Jianqi and said well I won’t if he won’t. Television for some unfathomable reason also decided to get onto that particular bandwagon and gave the two twats what they wanted instead of giving the public what they wanted; namely a debate between all the major party leaders. The channels should have invited all the major party members to the debates and made a point of ridiculing anyone too pussy to turn up.

But once again – our political system allows this sort of nonsense, where candidates like STP (Simon the Pixie) and Toenail Vile can refuse to front candidates meetings in their own electorates and instead hold their own little bullshit fests with all the party faithful cuddled up close and cosy. Dissenting views are not what these people want at THEIR meetings. Heavens above if you allowed that, the entire fabric of their smug and selfish society would unravel and some of that poor underclass might turn up and stink the place out.

Then of course there was the teapot saga where Jianqi mobilised the force of the law to gag the press, sent the solicitor-general to ‘guide’ the High Court and goodness only knows what or who was sent to ‘advise’ the Ombudsman that his role has now changed overnight to that of Protector-of-things-the-government-doesn’t-want-you-to- know.

As you might have guessed our other table topping achievements also spring from this so-called election. The first of these is the neutered state of our press. In 2009 the freedom of our press was judged to be one of the best in the entire world. The annual international survey by Freedom House ranked our press freedom at a score of 14 where 1 is the top and 100 the bottom. The highest ranking in that survey was 10 shared by (not surprisingly) Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Only nine nations did better than us in that survey. We beat countries such as Ireland, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and USA. But that was before the Samovar incident. It was bad enough for Jianqi to threaten and intimidate our press over that matter, but it was far worse that they listened to him. What a bunch of nutless wonders. They just rolled over like big pussies to have their tummies rubbed instead of scratching the little shit’s face. November 2011 – the day the NZ Press committed sideways.

Finally the biggest trophy we will probably cart off will be decided this Saturday November 26. If my guess is right and so is the government we elect, then we will qualify for the dumbest nation on the planet.

Jianqi was publicly caught out in the following lies:

Standard & Poors have said they will downgrade our credit rating if there is a change of government

I didn’t lie about GST or Kiwisaver – it’s a dynamic environment

I can’t recall what was said in my meeting with John Banks followed by There’s nothing on that tape that is important and then It’s nothing to do with me what the police do (about the tape)

I have treasury advice that we can keep the asset shares in Kiwi hands

We have no plans to hold back on police recruiting

If the country returns this slimeball and his ragtag bag of greedies to the treasury benches then it rightly deserves the title of the most stupid nation in the world.

I can only hope that Kiwis wake up and the NZ press discover they only suffered severe bruising and still actually have everything intact and lift their game to ensure his ride is a very brief and bumpy one.

Freedom tastes of reality, but this just makes me sick

Freedom is a word that is bandied about a lot in this country and we are constantly told how free we are in New Zealand. And for the most part that is correct, although we need a little context here.

Obviously we have more freedom than, for instance the poor sods unlucky enough to have been born in Kazakhstan. As if it wasn’t enough having Sacha Baron Cohen making a mockery of them, they are not allowed to do any mocking themselves; at least not if it involves mocking their glorious President, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Not only has this man held elections recently in which he claims to have captured (good word under the circumstances) 95 percent of the vote, but he has also had critics dispatched very swiftly. One opposition leader recently allegedly shot himself in the back of the head....twice! Presumably his first shot didn’t do the job properly and he still had the presence of mind (even if his brains had just been blown out) to try again.

And just in case any other upstarts decide to make any less than flattering remarks about President ‘Nursie’, he has passed a ‘Father of the Nation’ law which makes it a criminal offence to publicly question the honour and dignity of the president. Although how this mad despot can possess any dignity or honour to impugn in the first place beats me.

So to return to my point; we don’t have to contend with that sort of crap. But that is still no reason for us to drop our guard because many of our freedoms are being eroded on an ongoing basis.

Take for example the suggestion from our own glorious pres, er Prime Minister JiangQi who wants to send the cops, navy and air force in to deal with the Greenpeace protesters who quite reasonably don’t want Brazilians carrying out seismic surveys with a view to sucking oil out of our coastline.

Hey Johnny, last time I looked it wasn’t against the law to protest, and anyway why is it always left up to members of the public to do this stuff because our no ‘nads pollies are too fixated on feathering their own already considerable financial nests?   

Another freedom that’s being eroded in New Zealand is our freedom of speech. Just last weekend singer Tiki Taane was arrested and chucked in the cells in Tauranga for singing an (admittedly stupid) song by NWA called Fuck The Cops during his set in the Illuminati Club, ironically. He was singing it when the cops came in to check the place out, and they obviously took it pretty personally. Not Tiki’s smartest move, but nonetheless it wasn’t hurting anybody and the actions of the cops will just encourage more youngsters to become alienated from the boys and girls in blue. The dimwits who carried out the arrest are bound to lose the case and will have negatively impacted upon police and youth relations.

But what the Tauranga plods did was just small potatoes to what Justice Hammond has just done to publisher Vincent Siemer. Siemer is the man who has been accused of and jailed for allegedly defaming Vector director and Korda Mentha boss Michael Stiassny. Now from my observations, Mr Siemer might be a little reckless, although if I was in his position and had lost a bundle through what he claims are the actions of Stiassny, I might be a bit touchy too.

However what really bothers me about this case is the fact that Hammond was allowed to sit in judgement upon it. It is clear that he had serious conflicts of interest as he knows Stiassny well and even Stiassny is alleged to have boasted about what a good friend of his Hammond is.  When challenged by Siemer about his suitability to sit in judgement in a case where Staissny was the plaintiff, Hammond claimed he had no previous involvement with him. But when it was able to be proven that he actually had been working with him for ­­seven months in an earlier case the Supreme Court via justices Blanchard, Tipping and McGrath issued a minute saying the judge had “not accurately recollected the Paragon litigation in which he had been involved as a High Court Judge when he said that it was before Mr Stiassny became involved.” They concluded it was fanciful to suggest the judge should be embarrassed by this or that he should not be allowed to sit on the case.

Now call me a cynic, (and no doubt many will), but that just sounds to me like weasel words issued from three members of the brotherhood to protect the arse of another member of the brotherhood.

But the rot doesn’t stop there. Hammond also refused to allow Siemer to conduct his own defence and he was refused leave to appeal the court’s decision finding him guilty of libel and fining him $920,000; a decision the court reached in a ‘closed’ hearing.

Siemer laid a complaint with the Judicial Conduct Commission over his allegation Hammond had a conflict of interest, but that has apparently gone nowhere for the last two years.

Justice? I don’t think so. And you’d have to say our freedoms are looking decidedly less than we’d like to think they are.