Harry Palmer
I sat down on the bench outside Trentham Railway Station this morning and, as usual, contemplated the huge edifice of the Wellington Racing Club’s stadium across the road. The Wellington to Upper Hutt railway was opened in 1876 and proved convenient for those wishing to attend the races at Trentham when new premises opened there 30 years later. The stadium across the road from me was subsequently built and was opened in 1924. Its ivy-clad walls dominate the local suburban skyline.
The racecourse would have been surrounded in its earliest days by open land – apart from the railway line – but a significant acreage must have taken on a great deal of activity when in 1914 New Zealand allied with Great Britain in the war against Germany. As I sat there on the bench, I got to thinking about the army camp on the other side of the racecourse. It was from there that thousands of soldiers entrained for Wellington at the station behind me, and on to the ships that would take those ruddy-faced Kiwi farm boys into the ‘meat grinder’ of a war half a world away and from which many, around 18,000 of them, would not return.
It was a bit of an emotional experience for me a few months ago when, on a guided tour of the ancient lands of Egypt and Israel, I visited Beersheba. Beersheba is on the edge of the Negev Desert, some 100 km south of Tel Aviv and 120 km from Jerusalem. It was there, under the command of British General Allenby and fighting the Ottoman Turks, that 31 New Zealanders of the ANZAC Mounted Division lost their lives. So far from home and their loved ones, who were never to see them again.
When I first came to New Zealand I was often amused to hear locals frequently refer to their island home as ‘Godzone’. I soon came to appreciate why, however. Despite my knowing that Kiwis were hard working and competent in so many areas of farming and industry, and particularly adept at using number eight wire in all sorts of emergency situations, the place had a feeling of being laid back and at peace with itself. A country that returning ANZACs all those years ago, would, I guess, be able to still recognise many years later.
Come the 1980s, however, and with them was blown in the ‘great orator’ (or windbag, whichever you prefer) David Lange, as successor to Mr Muldoon as PM of NZ. Under his direction – skillfully using his booming voice to drown out anyone who opposed him – things soon began to unravel even further from the unsatisfactory situation he’d inherited from Muldoon. Power generation, the railways and many publicly owned assets, including the marine division of the Ministry of Transport (which had served New Zealand for 123 years), were sold off and privatised. The railway was eventually bought back by the NZ Government after it had been asset stripped and run down by our friends across the Pacific. And things – the quality of New Zealand life in general, the love and care its citizens had for each other – began to decline. In recent times this decline has begun to accelerate at an alarming rate.
It was the NZ Government’s decision in 2020 – in connivance with the other major Western nations like the ‘home country’ of the UK, the US and also the countries of the European Union – to arbitrarily ‘imprison’ its population and punish those who defied its edicts about Covid vaccination and testing, masks, distancing and not being able to visit friends and relatives, even those who were dying in hospital, etc, that upped the ante and began our slide into what appears to be an irretrievable downwards journey.
There’s mounting evidence that the so-called Covid ‘vaccine’ is also responsible for many serious injuries, including myocarditis and even sudden death. Yet not only do governments deny even the possibility of such eventualities, but they refuse to even consider the evidence and accuse those who have the audacity to question them and their so-called ‘experts’ of being conspiracy theorists and spreaders of ‘disinformation’. But it doesn’t end there: the supposed leaders of free democratic countries are still insisting on ‘boosting’ with further injections. As winter gets closer in the Northern Hemisphere, many American states are insisting on the wearing of facemasks once again. And of course urging the vaccination against a supposed ‘new variant’ of Covid. The fear among many is that imposed lockdowns are just around the corner again.
I’m an old codger in a retirement home who likes to take a trip overseas occasionally, just to prove to myself that there’s still a big, wide wonderful world out there, but I’m wary that our politicians on a whim – yes, a whim, NOT an apparent whim – will close the border, as they did previously, and prevent my re-entry. And who knows what demands to show vaccination papers, restrictions on travel and otherwise overseas countries might decide to impose on tourists?
Home is where the heart is so I’m not really that upset at not being able to travel overseas, I only mention it to illustrate how much smaller the world has got for everyone in the past handful of years.
The fact that the USA is due a presidential election in 2024 is another risk factor for travellers, and to perhaps a lesser degree for the world. It should be quite obvious by now, that America’s Democratic Party will stop at nothing to keep their death grip on power in their country – if only to keep the lid on the corrupt practices of the Biden family. And, so, there is also speculation about lockdowns and more serious restrictions being introduced leading up to the election – as well as yet more charges being brought against Donald Trump, of course – in order to be able to justify cancelling the election altogether. Or, at the very least, facilitate the introduction of full postal voting, which a certain political party has become adept at manipulating to its advantage.
Michael Joseph Savage said, “Where she (Great Britain) goes, we go; where she stands, we stand,” on 5 September 1939, two days after Great Britain declared war on Germany. It’s probably more accurate these days to say that ‘where America goes, we go’. The American President being called “The Leader of the Free World” is not just an empty phrase. So if they use the coming winter and another artificially created ‘pandemic’ as an excuse for the USA to close down again, we can be sure that NZ will soon follow.
Then there is the multitude of scams associated with so-called ‘global warming’ or whatever the current iteration of that might be. CO2 capture, windmills, massive lithium batteries for power stations, electric vehicles, hydrogen, smart meters, getting rid of gas appliances and boilers, forced installation of heat pumps and home insulation, net zero, farting cattle, veganism, etc.
Other areas of the onslaught include abortion up ’til birth and infanticide after birth, sexuality education for pre-pubescent children, fines and imprisonment for ‘thought crimes’ and ‘hate speech’, forcing us to accept perverted sexuality as normal, euthanasia and unassimilated immigrants from alien countries and backgrounds.
It’s apparent to me that, after the selloff of the ‘family silver’ in the 1980s, New Zealand could have returned to being a reasonable facsimile of the country I first witnessed when I came here; and what those soldiers would have had little trouble in recognising upon returning. NZ could have continued to evolve for the better, in an organic, step-by-step manner. However, through the UN and similar organisations and overseas ‘jollies’ paid for by the NZ taxpayer, NZ politicians have rubbed shoulders with their opposite numbers in other countries and have come to think of themselves as being people of the world – an utterly corrupt world – like their peers from those countries, and that the country that gave them their comfortable lives is now a cultural backwater, and racist and homophobic to boot. So came the big sell-out and, most recently, with no remorse or apology, their joining lockstep with those overseas fiefdoms in imposing their undemocratic demands, restrictions, impositions and lockdowns on a completely unsuspecting population.
How those poor soldiers in Beersheba, and their other 18,000 brethren who gave their lives for this country in that First World War, and all those of them who died in the Second World War, must wonder, while looking down on us with pity from their heavenly home, ‘Did we give our lives for nothing?’
