A little mystery rippled across Wellington last week. Some public-spirited soul attached a stainless-steel plaque to an Aro St retaining wall commemorating the incident from 1974 when senior public servant and Soviet spy Bill Sutch was apprehended while passing a dossier of documents to KGB officer Dimitri Razgovorov. The plaque
I don’t care about the “no-one knows who Muller is” pile-on. I don’t care if he’s endorsed by the poison touch of Bolger. I don’t care that he “compromised” with the green zealots over climate change regulation. I see someone who was prepared do something, to
In a remarkable, if unseemly exhibition yesterday, New Zealand’s largest news outlet lowered its standards to its ankles and threw them out on the political stage, hoping, begging perhaps, to be noticed by the star attraction amongst the many others braying for her attention. Good grief NZ Herald: “Fisherman’
A little over two months ago, in early March, 50 infectious disease experts signed off an editorial published in the New Zealand Medical Journal calling on politicians to “avoid scaremongering” over the impending COVID invasion of this country. Some of their colleagues had been beavering away for the best part
Two articles in yesterday’s Sunday Star Times broached the sensitive topic of mass-media survival. Both had some points more relevant to a decade ago than today, such has the landscape changed in the period. One piece noted that the government had failed to ‘front up’ with a media survival
Information Satire And it came to pass that lepers approached the land, threatening Prosperiddy, for great are the woes lepers bringith, and the people became afraid, saying unto Queen Toofy: what shall we do? And the queen counselled not her brightest, nor her best, but unto her imbeciles she searched
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): I don’t believe for a moment that this country went hard and fast. It is a typical communications phrase that is being seeded into just about every speech, every conversation from a Government MP. Hon Member: Prove it. Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I can prove
As the “princess” Jacinda Ardern prepares to remove her glass-slippered foot from our collective throat (if we promise to be good that is), it’s well to remember, and be grateful for, how she saved our lives by going hard and early: to Ratana, that is, then Fiji. At that
Possibly drunk on dandelion wine after celebrating new-car sales plummeting 90% during COVID lock-up and imagining a brave new world of bicycles, tangerine trees and marmalade skies, did Julie Anne Genter accidentally leak the 2020 budget priorities in a curious re-tweet almost immediately deleted? We won’t know till later
Unfettered by anything approaching accountability or the rule of law, we have seen during this crisis the underbelly of ‘kind’. Kindness speaks of morals and empathy but has been actioned through the suspension of liberty, democracy, and individual opportunity. The kindness-enforcer has stopped me visiting my mum in hospital today.
In the ‘Health Responses’ section of the released documents, we see daily, or sometimes twice-daily, updates and reports, and why wouldn’t we, it was a developing health emergency, then suddenly – nothing, nothing at all between March 11th and 16th. How could that possibly be so? What was happening that
A National Geographic article “New Zealand has ‘effectively eliminated’ coronavirus” available online 1 May had some lefties in a bit of a tizzy on twitcom. Rest assured it was a puff-piece lauding our lady leader, but what upset the cry-babies was an excellent piece of research from the NatGeo journos,
I’m especially worried after reading Grant Robertson‘s pre-budget speech; what a lot of nonsense, interspersed only with sloganeering and hyperbole. Good grief, what else to make of such rubbish as this forewarning of next week’s announcements: “It is a Budget delivered in the shadow of one-in-100-years shock
Information Satire Good morning; kittens. This is your queen; On March 23rd, 2020, I announced to the nation that I would be destroying New Zealand’s enviable and hard-won economic stability by moving into glorious lock-down. Some of the wags among you suggest it should in fact be called a
We used to have a democracy, long ago, with institutions robust and whose advice, although not always reliable, was reasoned and open to scrutiny. We had excellent epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists carefully preparing reports displaying methods, workings and conclusions, citing references numerous. One such example was “Potential Health Impacts
I hurt myself this morning, my own fault of course. Any of you people, much smarter than me, will have said ‘don’t do it.’ You may in hindsight stretch to an entirely unsympathetic ‘what did you expect?’, and you would be right, but I went ahead and did it
