John McLean
Citizen typist patriot
On 23 April 2026, National Party Associate Health Minister Matt Doocey announced an advertising campaign by Health New Zealand.
The false pretense of the campaign, which will run until the end of this month of September, is to reduce alleged widespread stigma and discrimination against New Zealanders infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). HIV is a virus that, without effective medical treatment using antiretroviral drugs, usually results in death from HIV’s advanced stage, AIDS.
Doocey’s announcement is typical of the nonsense that pours out of this pitifully poor politician (and best friend of Luxo), on whom I’ve previously poured scorn:
DICEY DOOCEYJohn McLean 29 April 2024
The campaign’s catchcry is “The ’80s Calling”. The protagonists in the video/TV advertisement are “David” who notices “Sarah” hugging another man at a social function and asks an unnamed woman, “Didn’t Sarah have, um...” Unnamed girl boss woman completes David’s sentence, “HIV”, and hands Dopey Dave an oversized ’80’s brick phone to answer a call time travelling forward from that decade.
David is delighted to inform the ’80s that hugging, kissing and sharing food with a person with HIV is “all good” and, with the right treatment, people with HIV can stay well and can’t pass HIV on to sexual partners, so there’s no need to “freak out”. You can (hopefully) view the video, and hear the radio advertisement, on this link:
The invented reason for the advertising campaign, repeated like a mantra, is that “Research shows that around three-quarters of New Zealanders still hold onto HIV-related stigma and discrimination, fueled by fear-based myth.” There is obviously no such research.
(Are we honestly supposed to believe that ¾ of the men, women and children in New Zealand stigmatize people with HIV? Outside of one’s immediate friends and family, how could anyone even know that someone else is HIV-positive?)
The whole premise of the campaign is therefore a complete and blatant lie.
There are bucket loads more bollocks in the campaign. Back in the ’80s, with no medical treatments available for HIV, there was every reason (despite “David’s” back-in-time reassurances) to “freak out” about the prospect of unprotected sex with an HIV-positive “partner”. Even today, the best available antiretroviral drugs cannot eliminate HIV from a person’s body and the drugs themselves can have significant adverse side effects. It’s therefore still risky (if you don’t already have HIV) to have unprotected sex – especially anal sex – with someone who’s HIV-positive.
The whole campaign is rife with other distortions and half-truths. For example, it’s misrepresentative for the HIV-afflicted person to be a woman (“Sarah”), given at least 85 per cent of New Zealanders who’ve ever contracted HIV have done so because they are (or were) men who had penetrative sex with men.
I made an Official Information Act request for the costs of Health NZ’s HIV-stigma-removal advertising campaign and was pleased to receive the following timely response (usually government agencies either ignore OIA requests or unlawfully decline them or delay).
You’ll see that the cost to Health NZ of the campaign is budgeted to be well over a million dollars (plus GST?). That’s money that could otherwise be spent on medicines, including antiretroviral drugs. The quoted cost excludes the cost and time of Health NZ staff involvement.
This idea of removing “stigma” is common. In 2024, Hedwig Eisenbarth, an Associate Professor at Wellington’s Victoria University, together with “researcher” Courtney Spiller, conducted a study titled, “Testing the Effect of Educational Modules for Reducing Stigma Towards People with a Sexual Attraction to Children”. The study’s main aim was to bolster the mental wellbeing of people who are sexually attracted to children, by reducing stigma faced by such pedophiles. Yikes.
So, what sort of cultural and political factors are at play here?
The campaign is a product of a public “service” culture of unaccountable waste and profligacy in which activists are at liberty to waste the citizenry’s hard-earned money in pursuit of their own ideological goals. All those involved in the campaign will have New Zealanders believe that New Zealand is chocker block with bigots prejudiced against sufferers of HIV and crazy germaphobes.
According to Health NZ, the “community leaders” with which Health NZ collaborated on the campaign include the Burnett Foundation. Until 2023 known as the “New Zealand AIDS Foundation”, on its change of name to “Burnett Foundation Aotearoa” the foundation completely jumped the shark and began to preach all the crazy contemporary crap (humans can swap their biological sex etc.).
Grateful recipients of Health NZ’s campaign $$$ include TVNZ, TV Three, SKY, Māori TV, Newstalk ZB, Stuff and MediaWorks. And there’s not-so-subtle messaging here – vote for a Labour-led government at the next election and the publicly funded advertising valve will be opened to inundate lamestream media channels with public largesse, on myriad deranged advertising campaigns. Dedicated followers of state-sponsored advertising under the last Labour regime will recall the infantile Waka Kotahi “Road to Zero” advertising campaign.
The messaging for Health NZ staff and other public servants is clear – vote for a Labour-led government and the public “service” sheltered workshops wastage will balloon.
We mustn’t underestimate the insidious roles that advertising agencies and their enablers play in all this plundering of the public purse. The advertising agency for Health NZ’s HIV campaign is VML Auckland. The “production company” is Australian firm Good Oil (how dreadfully carbon unsound).
Lurking in the shadows of “The ’80s Calling” campaign is a global outfit known as Little Black Book. LBB describes itself as “a global community for companies and professionals involved in advertising and creativity”.
Similar to LBB is the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). Organisations like LBB and WFA advise advertisers and advertising agencies on “brand safety” and steer them towards politically/culturally “correct” media channels, i.e., channels that are Woke or at least Woke adjacent/compatible. The LBB/WFAs of the murky world of advertising act as ideological commissars directing where advertising budgets can “safely” be spent, and ostracizing “unsound” media outlets.
In the final analysis, the derisory “The ’80s Calling” HIV campaign is just more of the same cancer that plagues New Zealand… Identify easily pilfered public money, couch the theft in Woke garb and fill your pockets. New Zealand remains blighted by Free Sh*t Junkies:
FREE SH*T JUNKIESJohn McLean 11 May 2025
Meanwhile, the POST continues to push profligacy, with this puff opinion piece last Saturday from Wellington Mayor and King of Easy Other Peoples’ Money, Andrew Little:
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
