White, male, Christian, middle-class, gainfully employed and married, Edward Persimmon is going nowhere fast on the left’s Pyramid of Victimhood. He attends a traditional church. Persimmon's interests
When the Prime Minister closed down New Zealand’s oil and gas industry in order to signal her environmentalist credentials and prove commitment to her comrades at the Socialist International, she did so against murmurs of discontent which eventually came to nothing. When she did the same thing to tourism
It seems odd that people are leaving quarantine hotels, otherwise known as Managed Isolation Facilities, with COVID-19. Speaking as someone currently interned in one, it is also very disturbing. In any western liberal democracy, quarantine hotels are a gross outrage. It is beyond the pale that a socialist government which
Four weeks ago I escaped from prison ship New Zealand through a deserted Auckland airport, where the shops are boarded up and almost all signs of life and of commerce have been erased. Standing alone in the eerie quiet of the departures hall in a midday twilight felt akin to
It’s that time of year when the Auckland CBD homeless return from their baches in the Coromandel to live another year of gluttony and excess on the streets of our fair city. The last time I encountered them, one bloke, who is roughly the size of a small car,
As a regular visitor to the Middle East over the past twenty or so years I thought I had seen it all. I include in this assessment the (so-called) Arab Spring and the widely-held celebrations continuing after 9/11. But what I saw when passing through Dubai airport in the
Western democracy, on life support for quite some time, finally died this week when supporters of US President Donald Trump “stormed” the Capitol in Washington, DC. We know it is dead, not because of the actions of President Trump or his supporters, but because reaction against them has finally borne
Britain was once famously hailed as a nation of shopkeepers, perhaps not by Napoleon himself, but certainly by the classical liberal Adam Smith, who published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and laid the foundations for free-market economic theory. By the eighteenth century, the United Kingdom was an essentially commercial
Victimhood is a powerful tool which has long been harnessed by the left, both to garner support and to drive its agenda forward. The victim mentality is an acquired personality trait in which a person tends to recognize or consider him or herself a victim of circumstances caused by others
As a vehicle for global transformation, and from the viewpoint of ‘progressives’, COVID is the gift that keeps on giving. We are constantly being reminded that we are on a ‘war footing’, and so have entered a political form of ‘long COVID’, set to last for years, in which the
Although most people are blind to it, Ardern has demonstrated an unreserved willingness to run New Zealand along the same lines as the People’s Republic of China. To understand the realpolitik behind this, one needs to be able to, in the words of one of our esteemed leader, ‘read
When the shop girl who works in A-Z Fashions tested positive for COVID-19 last week, the first the other tenants knew of it was when the TV cameras parked up outside on High Street, with reporters asking how they felt about sharing facilities, such as bathrooms, with a person who
Putting aside the issue of voter fraud, it’s obvious that postal voting favours the left. It is much easier to cast a vote for ChlÖe Swarbrick from your living room, where you don’t have to wait in line or look others in the eye, or if you are
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Isaiah 5:20 A commenter wrote of my previous article on the influence of Marxism – cultural, academic and otherwise – on New Zealand
Just as the 1980s were taking their final gasp of breath a family friend, a Christian, a lady of advancing years and a farmer’s wife from the back blocks, told my parents in all seriousness: you should not send your son to university in Wellington, because there they are
Jacinda Ardern’s politics is the politics of optics. That is to say, from the outside at least, it is principally concerned with the way in which an event or course of action is perceived. It is also an aesthetic politics, meaning that words are conveyed as objects of desire
When the forces behind that vile man Anthony Blair seemed unstoppable and his rise to pre-eminence inevitable, the long-running satirical television programme Spitting Image ran out of steam and ceased production. The apparent reason was that there was nothing left to satirise. The three-dimensionality of Thatcher, Foot, Kinnock, Hattersley and
