by Paul Henry
You won’t have picked this up from my views thus far — as I am very careful to keep my politics to myself, for fear that my well-reasoned political opinions might interfere with my impartiality — but I am a right-winger. Flirted with voting ACT on occasion, but they were such a cot-case that I only actually encouraged some family members in Epsom to vote that way for Rodney, then John. And only the constituency vote. Like some other political reporters, I don’t vote for fear that doing so would infect my ability to do my job — that’s shit. Of course I vote. Only a twat wouldn’t vote!
Being impartial is living a lie. Only the completely brain-dead are truly impartial. And, with only a few exceptions, political reporters and commentators are not completely brain-dead. I want to know the views of those who report and are involved in filtering information my way. I don’t want them to allow their views to interrupt or taint the information they cover in most cases, and knowing how they think helps me assess whether or not that is happening. I have given Labour as many plaudits as I have National over the years. In fact I am almost more likely to attack National as they have a greater capacity to disappoint me.
That is actually one of the disadvantages National has over Labour. Its supporters are more likely to be its greatest critics. Labour has (albeit to a lesser extent now than at any other time) a large contingent of blind supporters. For them, not voting Labour would be akin to betraying their first-born. National supporters are much more likely to be fair-weather friends. When times get tough, the smell of blood is in the air. This difference is largely due to mindset: the left are spenders of others’ money; the right are creators of wealth. The left carve the pie; the right grow the pie. The left talk of caring for others; the right fund the caring. The left consider themselves worthy; the right are worthy. The left are wrong; the right are … right.
It is foolish to imagine that right-wingers do not care for the underclass. In my experience there is little if any difference in the world which most fair-minded people want to strive for, whether left or right. The differences are centred on how you achieve the goal. No reasonable person wants people to be uneducated, sick, homeless or dysfunctional. Both sides of politics are aiming in the same direction; they are just travelling along different routes.
THE ‘WHY?’ LIST:
1. Hone Harawira
2. Green’s economic policy
3. Maori Electoral Roll
4. voting New Zealand First
5. co-leaders
6. MMP
7. 121 members
8. list seats
9. 5 per cent threshold
AWARDS:
Knowing when to go, going, and not coming back: Darren Hughes
Never knowing the above: Winston Peters
Capitalising on a questionable mental state: Nick Smith
Holding your lack of talent under the radar long enough to guarantee a handsome pension: Tau Henare (fierce competition)
Right time, right place, right person: Steven Joyce
I just can’t help loving her: Judith Collins
I just can’t help loving him: Trevor Mallard
I just can’t get her out of my fuck’n mind: Metiria Turei
Who the fuck are they and why: Craig Foss (fierce competition)
If Labour want a chance of winning, I need to be leader: David Cunliffe
For the same reason, I need to be deputy: Jacinda Ardern
Biggest embarrassment on the world stage: Helen Clark (Pantsuit-gate!)
Best mispronunciation: Rodney Hyde (cacophony)
Best use of words that don’t exist to construct sentences that make no sense: John Tamihere
Best-turned-out in worst fashion: Tony Ryall
Most statesman-like: Tariana Turia
Cop-out nudist: Keith Locke (body paint, my arse)
Biggest non-event: Maggie Barry (fierce competition)
Best loved by subterranean invertebrates: Peter Dunne
Best battery-chook impersonation: Sue Kedgley
Best holder of liquor: John Banks (teetotal)
Worst holder of liquor: Photo finish (such fierce competition)
Know when to say no: Helen Clark
Entertainer of others: David Lange
Entertainer of self: Shane Jones
Best reintegration to civilian life: Alamein Kopu
Worst reintegration to civilian life: Donna Awatere Huata
Most extraordinary reintegration: Chris Carter
Most useful transexual MP: (not awarded)
OUR LEADERS IN A LINE:
BILL ROWLING (1974–1975): First PM I have a recollection of. Disaster, but nice guy.
ROBERT MULDOON (1975–1984): Great opposition leader, perhaps the best. Dangerous tyrant with drinking issue. Very impressive in very short bursts. Not such a nice guy.
DAVID LANGE (1984–1989): Intellectual. Deserved better than he got from his deputies. They were the best of times, they were the worst of times. Ultimately, a disaster.
GEOFFREY PALMER (1989–1990): Who? Did he ever want to be leader? No! Had no idea how to stand in front of a country. Disaster.
MIKE MOORE (1990–1990): Fifty-nine days of madness with the last man standing. Great after-dinner speaker. Don’t expect him to wash up.
JIM BOLGER (1990–1997): Lucky buffoon with just enough mongrel to survive. Not clever enough to be truly dangerous. Not quite stupid enough to be a complete disaster. Wonderful wife!
JENNY SHIPLEY (1997–1999): She was never going to last. Capable, but out of step with the country. Everything you saw — and you saw quite a bit — was everything there was!
HELEN CLARK (1999–2008): Genius politician. Hardworking. Smarter than necessarily good for a PM. Increasingly disappointed by those around her — and, let’s face it, with good reason! Arrogance got her in the end, as it often does.
JOHN KEY (2008–long may he reign!): Not interested in being a genius politician. Very capable. Works smart. Best person for the job by a country mile. Surrounded by Machiavellian wannabes and opportunists that won’t get the chance to call his number!
COMMENT:
What? No Winston Peters on the list? Just shows you can only fool all of the people some of the time!
SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF THREE:
JULIA GILLARD: Very capable, but not at politics. Come over for coffee one day … soon.
KEVIN RUDD: Cunning and politically savvy. Wouldn’t trust him or want him over for coffee … ever.
TONY ABBOTT: Very smart, but largely a social incompetent. Australia’s newest PM. Gets credit for not falling over. God — he’s here for coffee!
MONEY
Having money. Making money. Being rewarded with money. These are all good things. If you have only negative thoughts about money and associate it entirely with greed, corruption and poor outcomes, it says much more about you than it does about money, or those fortunate or clever enough to have lots of it. People who are offended by money offend me.
If you are passing your negativity on to impressionable children, you are doing them a great disservice, and potentially saddling them with your prejudice and despair. Locking them into your life of dissatisfaction and envy. You would be much better off concentrating your efforts on improving your own financial situation than criticising that of others.
A Bank of New Zealand television and multi-media campaign started in late 2012. I hoped it would be a short run, given it is hopelessly inaccurate, badly produced and yet another example of a large organisation being duped by advertising and marketing agents.
This campaign states: ‘Money is neither good nor bad — it’s what you do with it.’ Not a particularly snappy line.
Their CMO (chief marketing officer) says that the campaign is designed to start a conversation about money. He says that New Zealanders aren’t usually comfortable talking about money. Interestingly, neither are the BNZ — he wouldn’t say how much the campaign had cost!
The bank needs to know this: money is only good. The
BNZ are wrong. (And when a bank is so badly wrong about a fundamental like money, they must also be stupid! If you are a BNZ customer, alarm bells should be ringing … about now. P.S. Alarm bells are sometimes bad!) If money was neither good nor bad, you wouldn’t need as many banks. People would not desire it as much or want to protect and grow it. Amongst other things, having lots of money gives you even more freedom. That includes the freedom to do bad things, but in no way does that make money bad.
So, if it must use a pithy line, the line the bank should be using is this: ‘People are bad and good, but money is only good.’
NOTE TO THE BNZ:
I had always intended to write about money in this book, so this small chapter is not part of any conversation you have started. It is merely fortuitous that your ill-conceived campaign has given me the opportunity to highlight how bad you are with your money. You see, it is you that is bad; your money is still good. Twats.
SUPPLEMENTARY:
Small-minded people are critical of those with money. John Key is criticised by these people for being successful. They are probably right to criticise in his case. It would, after all, be much better to have someone running a country who was unsuccessful at running their own lives. Twats.
COMPOUNDING SUPPLEMENTARY:
Labour activist Conor Roberts famously compared Prime Minister John Key and rival David Shearer with the now moderately famous line: ‘John Key went overseas and made 50 million dollars; David Shearer went overseas and saved 50 million lives.’
Granted, it’s a snappy line. But once the snappiness wears off, the effectiveness is also gone. Without money, David Shearer would not have been overseas at all. Without the fantastically large sums of money donated to the organisation he was employed by, donated by wealthy nations, he would have saved no lives. That’s none. Zero v 50 million. Not so snappy now, is it? The lives he was saving were those of the poor and dispossessed. And to do it he was using the money of the wealthy and caring.
Money is good.
PERSONAL:
I have lots and lots of money, but not as much as John Key, and perhaps — horror of horrors — not as much as David Shearer.
UPDATE:
This highlights one of the downsides of the printed word versus the electronic word. As predicted, David Shearer has called it a day. The race is on to replace him. Who will it be? How much do you care? Off to print.
SMOKERS
Where the fuck do some smokers get off?
To be fair, I have some sympathy for smokers. They are the product of our sophisticated society. A society that educated us to believe sticking a wrapped-up tube of dried foliage between your lips and setting it on fire was ‘cool’.
The prime responsibility of government is to protect its citizens, and yet here they openly profit from the legal sale of consumable poison to their citizens. I know, you might say they don’t profit, they merely recoup part of the cost of smoking. I don’t care for your pedantacism! (Yes, that is a word in my book!) Governments would say people have become addicted, so to outlaw the production and sale of tobacco would be uncommonly cruel. Much, much crueller in fact than letting them rot from within.
I also have some sympathy for the large tobacco companies. (Who incidentally pay a great deal of tax — I do care for my pedantacism!) Their job is not to protect anyone. It is to make money for themselves. So in lieu of a decisive ruling from government — sell any more and you are going to jail — they must manipulate the climate to prosper. Poor darlings.
With plenty of education out there and graphic pictures of internal haemorrhaging, many choose still to smoke. Why? A desire to die prematurely, bleeding from within, or just a lack of self-control? Whatever, one of the joys of democracy is the ability to destroy yourself. A joy that socialists want to curtail by holding your hand and guiding you through their idea of your life, while simultaneously sucking the life blood out of others. Not to mention bankrupting the country in the process.
Given all that, who are these smokers who outrage me so? They are the smokers who are so offended by their own habit that they smoke at arm’s length, and in doing so thrust their filthy business at me. Clearly the filth they are putting into their bodies must never come close to the plastic receptacle designed specifically for it in their cars. They tap their ash out the window in front of my car. They flick their butts out the window onto my road. Where do you get off, you filthy shit? It’s your habit, not mine. On the street these awful individuals cluster and launch their toxic smog as far from their faces as they can. Presumably so their clothes don’t carry the stench that will belie their disgusting pastime. Listen up, you dirty shit: you choose to smoke, own up to it. Hold your head high and fuck off!
POSSIBLE FACT:
I have been told that as you enter an operating theatre during an operation you can instantly tell if the patient is a smoker. The stench is apparently outrageous. Like an open sewer.
Though, to be fair, part of everyone’s anatomy is actually a sewer, so open it at your peril.
SUPPLEMENTARY POSSIBLE FACT:
One hundred per cent of forest fires are started by smokers.
ANECDOTE:
A few weeks ago I was crawling along the I-10 in LA. My eldest daughter was by my side in the Mustang in about 30 degrees. Windows up, air conditioners on, it was almost gridlock. As I always do, I was monitoring the behaviour of my fellow citizens to be sure I didn’t miss the opportunity to complain about the actions of lesser beings.
The driver’s window opened on the car two up in my lane. A hand came out and the entire contents of a full ashtray was emptied onto the road before me. ‘Fuck’n filthy shits!’ I exclaimed, and applied pressure to the horn. No one seemed to care as I tried in vain to energise my fellow drivers to take up arms against these evil bastards, drag them from their car and set fire to them. Okay, I hadn’t quite worked through a plan of retribution. In fact, I soon became the target of the apathetic. Glares, glances. ‘Who is this spastic?’ I could hear them thinking as they stared at me with their lifeless eyes. At that point I became aware that my daughter had adopted the stance of disassociation.
Eventually I drew alongside the offenders. A car full of trollops in their early twenties. I looked, they looked. My daughter told me to shut the fuck up. And my outrage continued … albeit suppressed deep inside.
OBESITY
Let’s be honest. People are obese because they eat too much.
There are many reasons why people eat too much. There is a grab-bag of contributing factors — lack of exercise, bad lifestyle, poor eating habits and food selection, a genetic predisposition, bad parenting, and so on. There can even be a combination of factors. But one thing is clear: if obese people did not eat as much as they do, they would not be as obese. And maybe if they were to eat much less, eat better food, and exercise, they would not be obese at all.
Our society is set up to blame itself rather than the individual for poor behaviour. For example: Bad parenting is a result of poor services. Child abuse is a result of poverty. Violence is a result of a lack of opportunity. Unemployment is a result of poor governance.
Obesity, therefore, is a result of a lack of education. It is also a result of the marketing of convenience foods, and, in general, society’s fault for putting temptation in the way of people totally incapable of exercising restraint or common sense.
You know what it really is, though: some people put too much food into themselves. If that’s you, stop it. Now. Sorted.
If you are a fattie sympathiser, you will be disgusted by this. Well, I am disgusted by you. Your constant sympathy and excuse-creation scheme are exacerbating the problem.
Fat people don’t actually outrage me. What does outrage me is that, as a successful hardworking person, I have to pick up the tab for the poor decisions of others, and in many cases the care of fat-related health outcomes fits into that category. But picking up the tab for others is the subject of another chapter. And, to be honest, some fat people
are completely incapable of bending over, so picking anything up, particularly a tab, is way beyond them!
It outrages me when, on the very odd occasion I am forced to fly economy, like on a flight from LA to New York last year, a fat person actually occupied half of my seat. The flight attendant apologised at the end of the capacity flight when I asked for at least a partial refund as I was not given access to a full seat. Don’t talk to me about the smell or the fact that liquid was seeping out of the man’s arm and impregnating my clothes. It must have been low-viscosity fat!
I digress. What really outrages me, with regards to obesity, is parents who allow and even promote obesity in their children. This is nothing short of child abuse, and is a real tragedy. I have sympathy for parents trying hard, and at times in vain, to slim their children down. But for those who care not and promote and facilitate bad eating and obesity in their children, I condemn you. As you should rightly be condemned. You don’t deserve to be parents, and should be punished by society, not handed sympathy.
FACT:
Some of the profit from the sale of this book goes to supplying insulin to fat people who, as a direct result of their own stupid, negligent lifestyle decisions, have contracted diabetes. Don’t thank me for it, as I know you were about to. If I was able to stop the flow of money in that direction, I would. Fuck’n outrage!