Russell Fairbrother… we rest our caseNapier’s unelected Labour list MP Russell Fairbrother must be about the only allegedly thinking person in this country who doesn’t know that the election campaign has already begun. It’s been running for weeks, if not months.
So when he spotted billboards promoting National’s Napier MP, Chris Tremain, the lawyer Fairbrother cried [...]
The great English writer Samuel Johnson defined the noble sport of angling as “a hook at one end and a fool at the other.” In New Zealand, we can now redefine the state-of-the-art cellphone user as “a fool at one end and an iPhone at the other.”
Early adopters of new technology are expected to have [...]
It’s half-term time again, and instead of bashing each other to bits in the playground, the little treasures are stuck at home, apparently making life an utter misery for their parents – who much prefer handing over the terrible tots to the cosy confinement of school than having to look after their bored-mindless kids all [...]
In the face of rocketing fuel costs that – if they continue rising for much longer – will have very serious consequences for our economy and population, what does our Government do? It announces a futile public inquiry into petrol prices that will take six weeks and cost another small fortune in taxpayer funds. Commerce [...]
Quite why the Labour Party felt it had to rent a picture of a happy family that actually lives in Washington State, USA to promote its vision of a New Zealand paradise is not hard to understand. After all, at the last election, a photograph of Helen Clark appeared on pledge cards (and at least [...]
The airwaves are packed with commercials made by uncreative, overpaid people who persuade silly clients to spend large amounts of money inflicting baffling ads on innocent viewers who just tuned in to see something interesting. Admittedly, some commercials are better than the programmes they separate, but most of them insult our intelligence.
Here are some recent [...]
Arbuckles is exploiting the case of a prisoner who climbed out of jail using knotted sheets. Good luck to them and the advertising agency who used the escape to promote the rock-bottom bargains you can get in Arbuckles’ latest bed linen sale.
On the one hand, you could take it as a bright idea to make [...]
In New Zealand, there is a grandly named body called the Advertising Standards Authority. New Zealand is fond of creating grandly named but impotent bodies to investigate serious problems, either real or imagined (but usually imagined).
Their highly rewarded members then spend vast amounts of public funds on the final report, but usually achieve little [...]
For listeners to Radio New Zealand National (and doesn’t the doubly inverted, oxymoronic title really brass you off?) the Summer should last forever. Because that’s when our wonderful and eclectic National Radio really comes into its own.
For 11 months of the year, Radio New Zealand National (working in cahoots with politicians and other people who [...]
Farewell and good riddance to 2007, when politicians broke many of their own laws, rewrote others to wipe out past offences, but occasionally got caught and convicted, too. Farewell to a year of widespread silliness, where hardly a day passed without some new travesty or foul-up for us to complain about. Long may this stupidity [...]
