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Opinion
You gotta love Mosgiel; my home town. It has had its fair share of characters over the years; even the founder of the town – Arthur Burns – was an oddball sort of chap (all that poetry, puritanism, and blanket manufacturing). Fortunately, the occasional world war cropped up and various “characters” headed overseas never to return which means that today everybody in town manages to live next door to everyone else and get along; it all comes out in the wash.
Or it did until a couple of decades back when a certain “colourful sporting identity” moved to town, built a vulgar house, and spent an extraordinary amount of time, including a bizarre TV interview, unnecessarily avowing his heterosexuality.
To asseverate on matters which haven’t crossed anybody’s mind when you haven’t been accused of anything isn’t necessarily the right course of action.
In the last day or so our old friends in the ACT party have once again fallen into the same trap. First David Seymour undertook an interview with Maori TV last night and started whining about political opponents criticising him, before rattling off a list of failed government agencies he apparently supports (“…I support kohanga reo, I support Whanau Ora…”) – no doubt raising eyebrows amongst his supporters as a result. After all, what’s a couple of dozen more dead Maori children compared with closing down the agency responsible, right folks?
If that weren’t perplexing enough, this week’s edition of Free Press has taken ACT party asseveration into new territory, possibly (and let’s face it; most of the ACT people are pretty thick) under an ever so slight misapprehension as to which direction Julius Caesar was travelling when he crossed the Rubicon and did his “Alea iacta est” routine. For the benefit of our (ahem) ‘friends’, Caesar was travelling south towards Rome and proceeded to scare the [living daylights] out of the powers that be. Like David Seymour yesterday, if Julius Caesar had had even half a brain it may have occurred to him to stay in Gaul and enjoy a long and happy life rather than pissing everyone off.
According to Free Press the ACT party gets a lot of folk who do all the work, keep the NZ economy pottering along, and pay all the taxes while asking why we don’t have a $20,000 tax free threshold as they do in Australia. To me, you, and all men with gumption it’s a marvellous idea – we can just declare our income as $19,999 per year and pay nothing (as most Aussie millionaires do) and put the entire family on the payroll at a similar salary also paying nothing.
But no, oh no; no sireeee – ACT has to give a soporific dissertation as to why that is a bad idea.
Instead of dealing with the morality of income tax (hint: bad), and of paying nothing (hint: a moral imperative!), they seek to prove why taxation isn’t bad (because they don’t want to be called names on Facebook by Willie); it’s just the rates are too high.
To say the behaviour of the ACT party in the last 24 hours has been troubling is an understatement.
Is anyone else noticing how often they leave people who believe in freedom and capitalism feeling distinctly “uneasy”?
Who knows, perhaps David Seymour will also end up as a Sky Sports host one day…
