All prayers this morning, please direct to the unfortunate flailing reporter required to write something upbeat about the government bench ‘re-shuffle’ which achieved the admirable outcome of replacing a hand containing a pair of three’s with ditto two’s. (Don’t sneer, that’s not easy to do).
Trying to say something positive fell to Henry Cooke at Stuff, poor bugger, who offered the following bait: “She [Woods] has the luxury of designing a new version of KiwiBuild that is actually doable with the help of many officials and a relatively clean slate, something both Twyford and King did not enjoy. She’s written a PhD thesis on New Zealand urbanisation and housing between 1942 and 1969.”
Crikey! A thesis! A thesis on housing and urbanisation nonetheless. I was impressed; I wondered why, given her remarkable knowledge, she didn’t get the job in the first place. So I decided to track the thesis down to see what Labour had been missing but, I gotta’ tell ya’, it wasn’t easy. I called on parliament’s search engine and got a result on ‘PhD’:
Voila! Housing shortage! Vision! Trade training scheme! The subject of my PhD thesis! Benefits to the nation! Well-built houses!
Now, I just had to have the document. Good, golly [probably racist] gosh. I found it using my remarkable, some would say alternative, skill within the search box:
There it was…”Integrating the nation: Gendering Maori urbanisation and integration, 1942-1969″, by Megan C Woods. We learn that…
This thesis examines the mid-twentieth century attempts to create integrated and therefore “…‘ideal’ Maori citizens“[…] …and “I argue that the creation of both integrated citizens and the integrated nation were gendered processes. In particular, this thesis focuses on the role of women.”
Hang on a minute, Ms. Woods.
You told parliament and all New Zealand, in your maiden speech, that your expertise was in the halcyon days of house construction and ownership, building and hammers, “skilled tradespeople”, four-by-twos and 6-inch nails, but instead we get:
In specially tailored beauty advice for Maori women, the beauty expert advised the use of the “yellow based colours” for lipsticks and rouges, as blue based lipsticks turned “very purple on Maoris”. The effect of these blue-based colours, according to Wislang, resembled the “effect of the ancient pukepoto”, and could be avoided through using rich reds such as Innoxa Poppy or Flamboyant or Three Flowers’ Carmen Crimson and American Beauty.”
OMG; Jacinda…what have you done? No wonder Woods is taking three weeks out before speaking in her new portfolio. She needs all that time to work out which end to hold a hammer.
