More than half a century later, welcome to the 1/72 scale model country: New Zealand.

Handouts to failed investors are economically idiotic, morally questionable and - eventually - futile

Thanks to Auntie Clark and Uncle Cullen, we have our very own adult train set called KiwiRail. Uncle Mike bought it third-hand, and squandered about $1.5 billion of our pocket money on the pressie. Rusting, and often as off-the-rails as Uncle Mike, it’s just another of those expensive toys that he was so fond of wasting other people’s money on in order to please us.

Uncle Mike was never very good with cash. He had an almost endless supply, which he would fritter away on hip-hop tours, wananga and State servants, and when he offered us a piggy bank, it turned out that he’d stolen our pocket money to fill it. KiwiSaver might – as self-appointed advisor Mary Holm tediously and continually tells us every week in The New Zealand Herald, and at least four books on the subject – be a tax handout, but you’re only being “given back” your own cash in return for putting even more of it in the hands of people with a dubious reputation for financial management.

For nine years, Uncle Mike and Auntie Helen told their flock that it was OK to beg, borrow and spend (after all, that had been their lifetimes’ political experience) and everyone felt really happy for a while. But behind every cloud there is a thunderstorm, and when great big grown-up countries started to get into trouble, and local piggy banks lost their executive pigs to Hawaii or the South of France, Mike thought it would be a good idea to print lots more money, and promise to pay back people whose savings had been stolen by the naughty rich pricks who ran finance companies.

We haven’t heard much from the rellies lately. Little is known of Uncle Mike. He’s probably spending more time with his whanau, and Auntie Helen was deported.

Mum and Dad are stuck here, pondering the wanton destruction of their meagre savings. Where grown-up countries had “financial instruments” and sub-prime mortgages, we had low-level finance companies and toxic loans to used car dealers and flaky property speculators. The only thing we had in common with richer, more advanced countries was that the financial experts who knew what was going on said nothing, all along.

Now South Canterbury Finance – vaunted only a couple of years ago by some financial journalists as the only secure finance company in the country – is in tatters, down for another $1.7 billion (and if you believe the Government’s estimated bill of $600 million, rather than the more realistic $1.2 billion, you’ll also believe its unemployment figures). Minutes before the final collapse, one of these so-called experts – Rod Oram – fretted that “uncertainty” about SCF might worry international financiers (as if anyone outside these shores had even heard of the cowboys’ outfit, or gave a damn).

These experts simply cannot bring themselves to state the obvious: Allied Farmers and its associates are next for the axe.

And so much for all those well-meaning supporters who claimed SCF’s Allan Hubbard was just a nice guy who was being cruelly mistreated. Grandpa Hubbard’s mistakes probably amounted to over-generosity, over-optimism and a reluctance to exchange his fountain pen for a computer system. He’ll get the blame for keeping handwritten post-it notes, while the receivers justify their horrendous charges by saying there was just too much real paperwork to deal with.

The fact is that most New Zealanders are credulous infants when it comes to handling money. We think it grows on trees, sheep, cows, vines or kiwifruit, or The Next Big Thing. Our tax dollars – upwards of a billion – will eventually protect some (but not all) of those who put their faith in South Canterbury Finance. Bridgecorp and Hanover Finance losers, along with the other 19 failed finance companies (out of a total 29 wrecks to date) whose investors were not protected will reflect that with experience comes wisdom, and poverty.

Finance Minister Bill English can print as much money as he likes to “repay” the Mum and Dad winners of SCF. But he will reap a whirlwind of resentment from other unprotected investors, plus the inflation and the economic decline that always results when you defy the rules of capitalism and imagine that infinite riches can be printed, and unearned prosperity is your God-given right.

We haven't the courage to confront suicide, let alone combat it

No one in New Zealand likes to talk about euthanasia either, and that’s good, because otherwise there would be far fewer doctors discreetly administering the lethal dose that terminates an intolerable existence. The instant some distressed friend or relative is found to have used a helpful pillow (and sometimes gets jailed for it), public hands are wrung, priests are up in arms and GPs run for cover.

Yet these issues have nothing to do with publicity. They have everything to do with our society’s strangely distorted morals and our cowardly refusal to confront the truth: that in a genuinely secular democracy, a truly free individual must have the inalienable right to make the greatest possible choices about his or her life and death.

People are also free to murder other people, or to rob liquor stores, or abuse children. They are free to swindle, drink and drive, or become drug addicts. How odd then, that no experts recommend the suppression of crime and accident stories despite the fact that these reports, surely, lead to copy-cat offences?

We can easily lock up killers, robbers and drug users. But New Zealanders lack the guts to confront the reasons why youngsters, in particular, find life in God’s Own Country so impossible to bear, and then do something to help prevent such tragic loss of life. We lack the courage to turn ourselves into a society that respects an individual’s right to plan a dignified departure, preferring instead to remove their freedom of choice and, often without their consent, prolong a hopeless ordeal through the misuse of medications that were originally intended to aid recovery. Our grotesque set of “values” creates as much misery for relatives as the sudden suicide leaves behind, or the lingering death entails. By officially turning a blind eye to suicide, we deny reality and postpone any hope of reversing a worrying trend. As an uncaring society, we have the blood of suicide victims on our hands. Thinking that we will personally live forever, we punish those who have looked a cancer victim in their fading eyes and helped them on their way. Why should such personal, caring choices be hijacked and corrupted by other uninvolved people driven by faiths which, in earlier times, supported torture, burning at the stake and death on a cross – or those who would damn a suicide, yet happily stone a 21st Century adulteress?

In Nelson, in 1973, when Gordon's wife ran away and he ran out of people to grieve on, he killed himself. 37 years later, everyone who knew him still feels guilty

The ostriches who conspire to keep suicide under wraps (and our heads firmly in the sand) also cannot bear to look at the statistics.

According to the World Health Organisation, New Zealand ranks 28th out of 100 countries for suicides, just ahead of welfare-dependent Sweden. The US is 41st and the UK ranks 66th. America and Britain are far less publicity-shy about suicide than New Zealand. Many would argue that people in the grim dis-United Kingdom have more reason to end it all than us lotus-eaters down under…

We stubbornly refuse to accept that anyone in their right mind would want to terminate their time in what we officially claim to be a 100 percent pure paradise. We are happy to send soldiers to war zones, but when a terminally ill person is helped to die, we damn the departed and persecute the survivors. When someone commits suicide, we draw a polite veil over it; if you’re lucky, the insurance company pays out; life and death goes on.

So draw your curtains and burn your incense. Muzzle the media and deny reality. Your problem is that suicide and assisted death won’t go away.

It’s not the bankrupt farmer, the terminally ill or the bullied schoolkids who are sick.

It’s us.

No shirt, no trousers and a hat. If you see this man in New Zealand, we're all stuffed

Fashion experts report that there is a direct link between the depth of the stock market and the height of women’s heels. For every 10 percent fall in the Dow Jones Index, you can expect about an inch increase in the stiletto.

This makes all sorts of sense, apparently. We can extend the field of view to encompass men’s fashions. For example, keep an eye open for blokes wearing brown trousers. They seem to be on the increase and may indicate extreme nervousness about investments, or a complete loss of shirt.

Some history may also be useful. For example, examination of photographs taken around 1928 shows that when the Wall Street Crash occurred, almost all men were wearing hats. It is no accident that since then, hats have almost vanished as times improved. The only notable exception to this trend was during the period from 1939 to 1945, when almost every male wore a hat, usually made of steel.

So forget Mary Holm and Brian Gaynor and all the other financial advisers. If you begin to notice shirtless men wearing brown trousers and hats, sell all your shares immediately and take up cross-dressing.

You have no lifelines. Don't want to talk about death? Final answer?

Picture the scene. You’re lounging in front of the telly with a micro-waved TV dinner, optimistically watching an ancient edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and marvelling at the catastrophic failure of the British education system and the stressful spectacle of somebody who doesn’t even know what the most populated city in Africa is. Host Chris Tarrant always asks his victims what they would do if they won a million. Aspirations run from not eating sausage meat any more to buying designer gear. If I’d been in the hot seat, it would be: buy shares in the Communist Chinese franchise for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

But life’s unfair, and we poverty-stricken New Zealand folk are confined to viewing 10-year-old editions of the show with growing despair, tempered by the faint hope that intelligent life may somehow be found and it might win that elusive million quid. The best TV quiz hope we have locally is something like “Who Wants to Win a Water-blaster from Mitre 10 Mega?” Never mind. Historic episodes of WWTBAM on Prime still beat the socks off the alternatives: One News from TVNZ and Cloned News on 3.

Keith Quinn: He gravely administers the kiss of death to a quiz based on eternal wealth and happiness

All of a sudden, a mouldering old git hobbles out of the screen. He looks overweight, half blind and sick, and he’s sliding into somebody’s obviously upmarket, oak-panelled house like some geriatric burglar. He announces, gloomily:

“Nobody wants to talk about death, but that’s exactly why we should talk about it.”

What? You mean, right this minute?

No way! I haven’t finished my junk food. I want to see some new hopeful half-wit crash and burn on the show because they can’t answer a multiple-choice £100 question about the definition of a moron.

I think this creepy bugger’s name is Keith Quinn. He often enters uninvited, during the show. Clad in Chinese-made, plastic brothel-creepers, he slips from room to oak-panelled room, moaning about what might happen if you were one of the one in seven Kiwis to die before the age of 65 without the means to buy a coffin. He looks wistfully at an unfinished picture of sunflowers, doubtless half-painted by a descendant of Vincent Van Gogh who was carried off too young and without funeral insurance (there are leaves, but he left no flowers). Quinn gazes at family pictures that oddly contain only white persons, and sternly warns that your corpse might fester out in the open for months and months before the $5000 needed to consign your remains to an unmarked pauper’s grave is released by greedy lawyers and bankers. (Looking on the bright side, some local Tibetans could turn up and give you a sky burial, with vultures.)

Keith has a tidy solution. Buy a funeral plan from Stigma Insurance. You wouldn’t want to leave grieving rellies with a debt for burying your mortal coil, would you? They might hate you forever. (Stigma’s website advises that “a little planning for funeral expenses now could save a lot of stress later”. But presumably not for you, personally.)

Keith’s message now completed, he strolls out into a back garden throbbing with young and lively people, and a cholesterol-rich barbie that’s running as hot as Hell.

So call Stigma now. You might drop dead in an unplanned way before Who Wants To Be A Millionaire resumes after this short commercial break. If you’re between 55 and 85, no medical is required and weekly payments start at just $4.55.

Surely terms and conditions must apply? Who’d like to bet that the $4.55 weekly premium applies to an unborn child expected by two 110-year-old Aryan parents with no previous history of illness traceable back five generations?

If you are between 55 and 85, Stigma’s policy will be of particular interest because you’ll have realised that you are not bombproof. Premiums start at $45 a week for the sprightly half-centenarian, and it’s a no-brainer for the 84-and-a-half-year-old, at only $455 a week. Cheap at the price, since it could be only a matter of hours before your grasping rellies find a way to make that claim.

On second thoughts, forget it. Do the sums and save your money. Instead, picture a more realistic scene. A group of debauched old geezers is partying with wild abandon in an oak-panelled mansion, glancing occasionally at pathetic British youngsters on the TV, failing to win Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The room reeks of spirits. One guest says: “My daughter has an MA from Vic. She’s a groupie for that Who Wants To be A Millionaire show in London.” Another says: “That’s nothing. My son runs a P lab in Hamilton. Better than being a gardener in Waimate.” All agree: “Good riddance to them all, and their greedy spawn.” It’s hard enough staying alive when you’re old and can hardly afford an oak-panelled house. The rates are something rotten and the people who run this country are as useless as your own parents were.

Suddenly, an oily apparition looking on the verge of cardiac arrest slides through the front door. He says: “I’m Keith. Nobody likes to talk about death, but that’s exactly why we should talk about it.”

“Who let him in?” “Where’s the rottweiler?”

Keith pleads: “You need Stigma funeral insurance.” Kev says: “Tell that to my son Trev. He wrecked my Triumph Herald in 1976 trying to get into some girl’s knickers, he didn’t have insurance, and now he’s a share dealer in Tokyo.” Norm says: “You need a lip replacement, Keith.”

This is the absolute worst time to talk about popping my clogs...

They stun and then gently raise the tiresome intruder, bearing him beyond the genuine $50 million Van Gogh painting of sunflowers and on to the back garden, where a giant, glowing barbecue is ready for Keith’s Balinese-style cremation. Retired civil engineer Dave has revved up his rusty Dingo to prepare a small plot for Keith’s ashes.

Oh, how we wish…

Shortly, normal service resumes and Margaret from Croydon, facing a £4000 question, cannot say who wrote Hamlet, despite asking the audience, rejecting their 98 percent vote for Shakespeare, doing a 50-50 and refusing to believe the big clue she got when she phoned her friend Dorothy Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon.

“Give Margaret a big hand!” cries Chris. “She goes away with enough to buy a funeral plan.”

As Chris, Keith, Stigma Insurance, Handover Finance and a host of fabulously wealthy people know, there’s one born every minute. Try to rob them before they die. But dear reader, before that happens, check this:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/insurance/news/article.cfm?c_id=234&objectid=10598455

The London Cab, still a transport of delight. Picture from Dreamstime.com

These days, for us who live in the sticks of New Zealand, a taxi ride is rare, expensive but sometimes rewarding. London taxis are the best. You’d climb into one and be regaled by a bloke who knew every cobble on every lane from Gants Hill to Crystal Palace. And he’d had Rod Stewart’s illegitimate great grand-daughter, or Princess Anne, in the back just before you sat there. Or, if it was late at night, perhaps a dodgy politician feeling up a high-class tart in the other bit of the rear seat.

These days, taxi-driving is dangerous unless you run an official London cab, with its barrier between educated driver and civilised passengers. There was a time when the notion of a taxi driver being attacked was unthinkable. But no longer, since almost anyone can be a minicab driver, and passengers have recently often turned into murderous sub-humans.

Yet, have no fear. The National Government cares about taxi drivers, their wives, husbands, partners and children. That’s why, after a series of killings and serious woundings, they plan to introduce cameras in cabs.

This Government also cares deeply about its bottom line, so instead of trying to encourage a civilised society financed by all, it will force taxi-drivers to pay for their own in-car camera protection. If they do not fit the cameras, they face hefty fines; and no doubt the Accident Compensation Commission – a bloated body with a new mandate to find any means not to pay compensation – will meet no claim.

Cabbie Hiren Mohini, done to death for no reason. No on-board camera could have saved him

However, should a drunken jobless passenger accidentally fall from the cab due to not closing the door properly, ACC must compensate and send them the usual letter saying “We are sorry to hear about your accident… blah-blah… the best way of recovery is usually by your returning to work…” and so on.

These taxi cameras will, naturally, be paid for by increased fares tendered to honest, non-bashing and non-thieving passengers. In this way, the Government claims to take care of us, while we pay for the dubious privilege.

Rather than pay the fare, the delinquent passenger will instead make a run for it, hopefully without bashing his or her driver – and will doubtless get away with it. This is good news for the local accident and emergency department, and will reduce the criminal statistics, for which the Government will take credit.

When Auckland cabbie Hiren Mohini was murdered, one of his colleagues told the press: “Every night we go out of the house, we are not sure whether we will be safe or not. We ask for some protection, like some partition between driver and passenger, so that we feel safe.”

The Government could have insisted on a bulletproof barrier between driver and passenger. Transport Minister Steven Joyce could have insisted on card payment machines in the back of the cab and escape-proof doors for those who get truculent and will not pay.

Cabbie Abdulrahman Ikhtiari, slaughtered in Christchurch for no reason

But no. These days, prostitutes have more protection than taxi drivers. Our useless Government (whose primary duty is to protect law-abiding citizens, their property and their means of livelihood) is instead planning to fine taxi drivers or their employers between $2000 and $10,000 for not putting in place the cameras that Joyce says will protect them. Bizarrely, the most serious penalties may be imposed for the misuse of captured images.

Cameras cannot protect any cabbie from attack, any more than they have prevented bank robberies and liquor store raids. They can only provide a record of how the taxi driver suffered his or her injuries, or was put to death. Yet again, the streetwise rest of us will have to pick up and pay for the wreckage.

Queenstown International: Note the alarming lumpy bits...

Mercifully for private pilots in New Zealand, involvement with air traffic control can be kept to a minimum, if you stay out of their range. But this is not so for anyone using Queenstown International Airport, which is an ill-equipped aerodrome in a very challenging place.

Two Pacific Blue pilots have been suspended from duty after apparently breaching Visual Flight Rules by taking off from Queenstown airport “in the dark”.

The media claims – a whole month after the event – that a Boeing 737 aircrew took off too close to dusk and then flew too low, “endangering their passengers”. The Civil Aviation Authority is investigating allegations that the pilots ignored the rules on the June 22 flight, risking the lives of 149 passengers and crew.

The authority’s spokesman, Bill Sommer, says aircraft operating out of Queenstown must depart no later than 30 minutes before twilight as a safety precaution. “If anything does happen, they’ve got sufficient time to return to the airfield and land. The rules down there for the airlines are clear.”

Queenstown harbourmaster Marty Black claimed he saw the flight from his office window. “I heard the flight take off, looked out the window and it was certainly not climbing as high as a normal flight. It did not look good at all because of the height and flying into such a bad weather front.”

Marty is doubtless an expert on the water, but he wouldn’t be the first to misjudge the actions of experienced airline pilots. If the aircraft was “in the dark” as reported, how could Marty see it so clearly from his office and judge its altitude?

The story is long on speculation (mostly from half-trained journalists, half-baked witnesses on the ground who cannot fly, or completely uninformed passengers with a very limited view), but – like so much dished up by our inadequate media – it leaves too many questions unanswered.

Firstly, why wait a month? Wasn’t the story topical enough in June, when it happened?

Remarkably, given the terrain and weather, this airport has no runway lights or radar. That might interest incoming tourists...

Secondly, don’t pilots need air traffic control clearance to depart from Queenstown? Their flight was scheduled to leave at 4:30 but they didn’t go until 5:25, which it is claimed left too close a margin before dusk for a safe return in the event of problems. Surely they weren’t given clearance at 4:30 and then sat around playing cards for 55 minutes before deciding that “now would be a good time”? A lot can change in 55 minutes – weather conditions, other aircraft movements, for example – so we must assume someone in the tower said it was OK for them to go when they were at the holding point, waiting to enter the runway. Who was it – and why, if conditions deteriorated, didn’t they withdraw the clearance? Unless Queenstown’s airport is run by the Dalai Lama or some higher authority, it – and those who seek to fly out of it – are governed by Air Traffic Control, which is controlled by our Civil Aviation Authority. Once off the deck, it’s the captain who runs the aircraft until touchdown.

The “flying too low” claim is suspect. Altitude would have been the pilots’ own choice and responsibility (VFR requires the aircraft to remain clear of cloud and within sight of the ground while within the airport’s control zone). Any investigation into that aspect is understandable, but much of the story so far would appear to be inadequate and misleading.

Prime Minister John Key fretted that this so-called incident might harm New Zealand’s tourist industry. Rather than staring down at the bottom line, he might be better off looking up and asking himself:

Where else in the developed world could you find an international airport, surrounded by high and uncompromising mountains and prone to severe weather, that lacks runway lights or radar and requires commercial jet traffic to use VFR rather than Instrument Flight Rules?

The only difference between Queenstown International Airport and a farm strip appears to be the tar seal and the neighbours.

David Tennant as Casanova. Dr Who must have been quite a come-down

The male Kiwi is world-famous for his total lack of romance and sexual sophistry. Intelligent female Kiwis, faced with such insufferable pests, have been known to migrate up to 12,000 miles to find a decent mate, preferably of the English breed. They know that French, Spanish or Italian Loatharios are overrated, ill-mannered, probably bend both ways and bathe once a year at most.

Little is known about the virtually blind Kiwi male’s mating techniques, which seem to consist of groping about, semi-conscious, in the dark. Scoring seems more by accident than design, unless you are an overpaid rugby player. The female, on the other hand, is refreshingly wide open, occasionally venturing well beyond the point of mere promiscuity, often preferring broad daylight and frequently cavorting with flagrant delight in quite busy public places.

Tragically, one of the best – or worst – examples of the endangered male of the species lives on Auckland’s North Shore. We must call him Mr X because, if identified, his story would inevitably lead to derision at the hands of neighbours and friends.

Imagine that you are Mr X, the middle-aged owner of a boarding house for foreign students. The lead in your pencil, so to speak, wore out long ago. One day, you discover your missus (45) engaged in rampant sexual intercourse with a Latin lover less than half her age. Is Mrs X furthering this student’s education, or has he already passed the exams?

Thus cuckolded, what do you do?

Give the zipper-snapper a good hiding? Challenge him to a duel? Turf the wife, her belongings and the unhelpful family parrot out onto the cold street?

No, of course you don’t. As a white-blooded, lily-livered male Kiwi, you reach for the nearest pencil with lead in it, and you write to the Education Ministry. As a first-class wimp of the Victimhood Society, you have paid your taxes, and it’s your right to ask meekly but nicely if the Ministry would issue guidelines about sex to foreign students. (Since everything that happens to you is someone else’s fault, it may also be wise to examine the prospects of compensation for the shocking violation of your oh-so-silent partner.)

“I’m at a total loss about what to do in such a situation, and I’m bloody angry,” Mr X told The New Zealand Herald. One trembles to imagine what he would do if he became very, very bloody angry, but a horsewhip clearly isn’t part of his weaponry. Neither is a stout weapon, come to think of it…

“We really need to know what we can do in such situations, and I’ve suggested they add it to their pastoral care code,” he moaned on. “Is this something international students should be allowed to get away with?”

Please, Mr X, let’s not bring farm animals into it. We could do without another ugly chapter about fleecing foreigners in Rip-off New Zealand.

The real Casanova... he wouldn't have been seen dead in Auckland

Mr X has already exposed a possible reason why his wife went for a romp with a 19-year-old South American Roger the Lodger. X is obviously not a reliably upright citizen, and he may not have a single red corpuscle in his body.

The ministry has told rodless Mr X that it is also impotent, because the student is legally an adult. It should have added that what adult students get up to with other consenting adults after lessons is entirely their own monkey business.

Po-faced bureaucrat Neil Scotts told the Herald’s dutiful note-taker that his ministry had not received many submissions about students bonking landladies, “but was unable to give exact figures.” Why not? The rest of us, now aroused, demand the exact figures as well as the lurid details.

Poor Mr X. He should have discussed this evidently non-dangerous liaison with Mrs X, who so far has played a non-speaking role in the torrid tale. And he would have been much better off asking the Education Ministry why his own teachers failed to pass on the rock-hard facts of life, so many years ago.

So much for people power, in the face of self-serving politicians.

Gerry Brownlee: When in a hole, keep digging

But when it comes to their own pet projects and ideologies, National – rather than resort to the focus groups so beloved of socialists – has developed a new tactic, based on overkill. The idea is simple: suggest an action that is outrageously extreme, wait for the inevitable backlash, and then backtrack with a watered-down policy (the one intended all along).

“The people have spoken, and the Government has listened,” trumpeted Digger Brownlee, when he announced that a few thousand hectares of Schedule 4 land would, after all, not be opened to miners, after about 48,000 submissions – mostly opposed.

Democracy in action, you might have thought. Apart from the fact that beneath the Schedule 4 smokescreen is a hidden agenda involving the mining of other vast tracts.

The law of unintended consequences strikes again...

What a shame that people’s memories are so short. Otherwise, they might have recalled the Smacking Referendum and its 87 percent majority in favour of scrapping Sue Bradford’s misguided legislation. The people spoke pretty loudly then, and the Government refused to listen.

But National might just discover that the policy of crying wolf can badly backfire. Savvy convicts, facing a total ban on smoking in prisons, may test the theory and try to persuade Judith Collins to water down her draconian idea.

All it would take is one burned-out jail.

Party Central: An artist's impression with added landscape gardening

Compromises usually reek of the lowest common denominator, and in a way it’s a shame that half of Auckland’s Queen’s Wart heritage is going. They and the nearby fuel farm represented a fine snapshot of the carbuncle-style architecture that has made Auckland world-famous as one of the most dysfunctional and dull-looking cities.

Compromises are also the usual consensus of a committee, always producing a camel instead of the intended horse. But in this case, it’s a tin turkey, thanks to – among others – Auckland Regional Council’s leader, the perfectly hindsighted Mike Lee, whose form includes a disastrous foray into circus soccer that cost ratepayers millions, and a strange inability to measure the required length of railway platforms before they are built.

A hastily erected marquee, plus the loosely nailed old wreck, will serve as a lesson to the IRB: There is a new definition of Third World country. Compare what pitiful New Zealand can offer with the basket-case we all thought was hopeless: South Africa and its amazing football World Cup triumph.

Full points to the Government for insisting that only the shed’s ground floor may be used for unrestrained carousing. Given recent experience, we can’t have rugby tourists falling to their deaths from parties held at great heights.

Forget the Eiffel Tower, Bath’s Royal Crescent, the Brandenburg Gate and the Taj Mahal. Our Great Shed stands as a monument to the pioneer spirit of fencing wire, corrugated iron and eternal kludging – in fact, all the things that have made this great nation look rather small and uncultured.

Pathetic native experts have judged the sheds to be of architectural and historical merit. Methinks they live on airfields.

Visitors, on the other hand, will most likely marvel at our banality and obvious lack of cash or imagination. They’ll probably say: Kiwis are world-champion boozers, but they couldn’t organise a piss-up in a potting shed.

Unless, of course, our guests venture beyond Auckland; in which case, they will discover a wonderful world of welcoming folk who cringe with embarrassment because of a pretentious, vulgar sub-city and a fumbling government that, together, couldn’t make a mall out of an unruly scrum.

Maori have as much right to the airwaves as dinosaurs

The invisible “digital dividend” spectrum is expected to be carved into at least two imaginary blocks, one suitable for digital television transmissions and another for 4G cellular and perhaps others for wireless broadband technologies.

Jim Nicholls, deputy chair of the New Zealand Maori Council, one of the cloud-living claimants, said Maori were likely to seek free portions of both blocks, but would not say how much.

Successive dizzy governments have recognised a Maori claim to spectrum suitable for television broadcasting because of its importance in preserving the Maori language, but have resisted recognising any entitlement to higher-frequency spectrum suitable for mobile phone networks and wireless broadband. During all this, politicians of every colour have demonstrated a total ignorance of physics and reality.

The idea that The White Man owns the radio spectrum goes back a long way. It is a myth. The White Man merely discovered radio. More recently, in the UK, a Labour Government made hundreds of millions by selling artificially over-priced frequencies to mobile phone operators, and yet it still ended up bankrupt and out of power (and so did some of the mobile phone operators).

Selling the airwaves is a bit like trading carbon credits on a non-existent market. Nobody knows whether carbon is in excessive demand or is over-supplied, or even what its actual per-tonne cost is. This is left to market makers, who are the only parasites capable of making money out of very thin air. They belong to the same band of robbers who invented derivatives and junk loans that you and I are now paying for.

Cassini satellite detects radio waves from Saturn. Hey, we must own a bit of that, too, eh bro?

But the radio waves existed long before the dinosaurs and even the trilobites. They had no value until German Heinrich Hertz found them, Italian Guglielmo Marconi invented a useful radio and Scotsman John Logie Baird discovered a way to transmit television. During these developments, Maori were notable by their absence. Our radio spectrum stretches out to infinity, and is thus owned by the universe and all its inhabitants, much like the foreshore and seabed belongs to all who live alongside it, wherever they may be. Even in the supermarket, you – the humble shopper – are being bombarded by radio waves from the outer reaches of the universe, some of which may be claimed by Maori. The pressing issue is that there is still no sign of extra-terrestrial life that could beam down more interesting programmes than TV One and the other wastes of airtime. And, in this respect, Maori TV has not been of much help. As we move from analogue towards a digital world of broadcasting, beings in other worlds will no longer be able to view Coronation Street, or Project Runway, or Cottaging with Hugh Fearnly-Pokinghorn. Radio-wave-wise, we’ll become a dark planet. Which is a shame, if you are someone who imagines beyond this world.

Technical marvels and mysteries like radio, TV and the astonishingly liberated internet are only surpassed by the stunning ability of narrow-minded Maori to lay claim to something that simply could not be understood, harvested or exploited when they “owned” New Zealand. Their “Treaty right” to the airwaves makes as much sense as my claiming ownership of the magnetic field that covers our great nation (which Rupert Murdoch and I believe could highlight valuable deposits). Sorry, Pita and Tariana, but we’ve already staked a claim to New Zealand’s magnetic field.

While idiots witter on about who owns the channels of txting or broadcasting, a much more interesting market is emerging on the internet. It’s called .CO

Once upon a time, .CO was the preserve of Colombia, but because CO is such a cleverly simple domain, denoting Company, or Corporation, the people who run the prosperous bits of the internet have bribed Colombia to give it up and offer .CO to the world. Now, a quiet and massive auction is about to erupt, in which the world bids for unique .CO domain names. E.CO has already been auctioned for more than $80,000.

So instead of trying to claim ownership of something created either by God or the Big Bang, Maori should be homing in on something similarly invisible – but much more bankable – by creating their own global domain extensions, such as .iwi, .kai, .winz, .cyf, .mob, .bro or .cuz

Or even .P