Information Opinion If there is one thing I dislike about New Zealand politicians, it is cultural cringe: a disease that is seemingly universal and invariably leads to embarrassing behaviour. The most obvious signs of this affliction is the feeling of ‘Big Time’, of having ‘Made It’. Unfortunately when a politician
Information Opinion In the 1890s the US Supreme Court entrenched what was known as the “Separate But Equal” doctrine, bypassing the concept of everybody being equal under the law. This meant that segregation and discrimination along racial lines was legal so long as services were available to each race. For
Information Opinion The sickening behaviour of Jacinda Ardern in March 2019 after the murder of dozens of people at Christchurch mosques (and her bad syntax, They Are Us, or something), was bad enough. A year later she followed it up pretending to be Winston Churchill in 1940 with an unnecessary
Information Opinion A couple of days ago the Independent Police Complaints Authority released a report that criticised Police for taking a large number of photographs “with no clear and lawful purpose”. There is also a claim of racial bias, as 53 per cent of those photographed were Maori. The response
Warning Satire Recently we have been ‘farm sitting’ for a friend in mid-Canterbury who’s on holiday in Queensland. I got a bit bored (as there’s nothing to do) and decided to fill in the time. Later this month the biggest scam in New Zealand, the twaddle known as
Information Opinion On August 21st, 2015 Donald Trump held a rally in Mobile, Alabama where he – to universal astonishment! – filled the local sports stadium, which has a capacity of 33,000 people. At the best of times, it is difficult to imagine the people of somewhere like Mobile having much
Information Opinion Liz Truss is now the Prime Minister of Great Britain after comfortably beating Sunak in the ballot of Tory party members. She quickly ejected from the Cabinet a lot of dead wood who stabbed Boris in the back, hoping to personally benefit from doing so, and has accordingly
After WW2 an enterprising building firm called Levitt and Sons developed a system of mass producing houses and creating suburbs in double quick time. The first example of this was Levittown, New York, and the way they did it was to do basically the opposite of the current government and
Information Opinion As Trevor Mallard slinks out the back door of parliament in a few weeks, it would be fascinating to know what his superannuation is. According to the Remuneration Authority website, Mallard (and everyone else) received 16 per cent of his salary as an ‘employer’ contribution from 1993, rising
Warning This article is for information purposes only and should not be construed as financial, or other, advice. Information Opinion In New Zealand there is a long history of investment in various types of real estate. Many BFD readers undertake this activity for investment purposes and have probably done rather
Yesterday marked the end of the political career of Trevor Mallard, Speaker of Parliament, in order to commence a diplomatic sinecure in Eire. The 1984 intake of MPs was a curious bunch. The seven new chums in the National party all had rather long and/or successful careers in Parliament
In 1867 and again in 1884 the British Parliament enacted “Reform Acts” which expanded who was entitled to vote. There were property, income, and rent requirements so only “respectable working class” men could vote, and the scummy underclass continued to be excluded. One of the reasons for this was a
Information Opinion Events of the last couple of weeks in politics have certainly been a bit bizarre; allegations of bullying made against MPs in both major parties and the subsequent fallout have dominated the news, giving the rest of us hours of entertainment as chickens come home to roost. At
In October 1893 a teenaged boy, Calogero Sciara, arrived in New York city from Sicily. He found a room in a ‘Little Italy’ slum tenement and employment with the Department of Sanitation shoveling horse manure off the streets at a wage of 10 cents per hour. Like most Sicilians at
In 1979 there was a famous criminal trial in Britain where the former leader of the Liberal party, Jeremy Thorpe, was accused of conspiracy to murder (and a few other things). Some years earlier he – [may or may not have] – had a homosexual relationship with a chap called Norman Scott.
Full disclosure: I stand to make a (tax free!) killing if this goes ahead. We only bought the land to take friends fishing and hunting as the land is of such a low quality it isn’t even worth farming. It is difficult to convey how remote that neck of
