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.

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.

The NZBU Awards: Much ado about blogger-all. Image from Dreamstime.com

Why does a dog lick its bottom? Because it can. This truism also applies to bloggers. A feature of lonesome serial bloggers is over-inflated egos that are often inversely proportional to their interpersonal skills and literacy. But the internet has freed deluded, introverted scrawlers like us to address an imagined, insomniac audience desperately seeking wisdom.

Yet the truth is: Few bloggers read other people’s blogs and hardly any normal people read blogs (including this one). If you’re seriously nobbed-off, why Google for Whaleoil when it’s easier to call talk-back radio and vent your late-night spleen? The root cause of many blogs is a rejection of Letters to the Editor from writers who are boring, have missed the point, or insist on committing interminable verbosity without due care and attention. No wonder the blogosphere is now clogged and serious devotees face an uphill struggle for recognition – let alone stardom.

The most popular blogs are often the worst-written and the least amusing. The comments beneath such ravings reveal an underclass of foul-mouthed bigots of every colour who, under my government, wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a keyboard, let alone be permitted to expose themselves to semi-literate adults or impressionable youngsters.

How curious, then, to discover the New Zealand Bloggers Union and its 2010 Air New Zealand Bloggers Awards. They called it the Air New Zealand awards because some bloghead thought that was funny and might divert attention from the equally self-centred Qantas media awards. They needn’t have bothered, because both sets of prizes are worthless and hoaxing the Air NZ connection merely showed the fledgling NZBU to be juvenile.

This so-called union seems to consist of a small group of anally-retentive prattlers. The real beef is on TUMEKE!, aka the nzblogosphere, co-authored by two of the four blog judges. Here you find a list of 203 indigenous bloggers along with what looks like a set of qualifying criteria (until you examine it more closely). It claims “a comprehensive list ranking of New Zealand political and news blogs with directory information for the NZ blogosphere community”. It ranks NZ blogs by criteria including the number of hits, but ignores the fact that such stats can be easily manipulated by bloggers, and just because morons who comment on blogs written by cretins may also vote for hanging doesn’t mean that New Zealand blogs are a credible reference point for penal reform. Frequency of blogs is also a yardstick. The last post on NZBU’s site appears to have occurred in September 2009, following a long pause since July 2008…

But, oh dear and tut tut. Gog is not on the NZBU or the nzblogosphere list. What a careless oversight, comrades.

Judging by some of the company they keep, we’re pleased not to be there.

Cactus Kate: A cartoon like this is worth a thousand words

Winner of this year’s inaugural award (and apparently the loser of a job as contributor to the Dominion Post’s Life supplement) is Cactus Kate, a scribbler who, when truly aroused, strives not to write a clever sentence when a F*** or C*** will do. She recently tried to entertain with personal revelations about Whaleoil’s Cameron Slater, who Kate says is a deeply depressed, close friend being slowly murdered by a cruel health insurance company. I once metaphore in the street, and she looked a lot like Kate.

There is a problem with this winner, because Cactus Kate is not a New Zealand blogger. She lives in Hong Kong.

The joint third place winner, Whaleoil’s Slater, also shows scant interest in working on the finer points of English. His humour-free prose serves as a warning to those who imagine that the worldwide web will be the foundation of a new grass-roots democracy. Slater has gained notoriety for revealing court-suppressed names and having a newly-acquired and uncannily detailed knowledge of ministerial credit cards. Rather than being our finest single-handed investigative genius, it is also possible that he’s been spoon-fed by right-wing policemen or politicians who see him as an easy exhaust pipe for leaks, much like Kiwiblog may have unwittingly served before the last election. Few newspaper readers or viewers visit blogs, but you can bet that lazy alleged journalists have their RSS feeds tuned in to such conned-wits.

The Dimpost won Runner-up for its well-written and often imaginative copy. No Right Turn failed because it is deadly serious, honest, well researched and goes on and on and on forever.

Fading star David Farrar of Kiwiblog once admitted on air that he must rise at 4.30 am to find out what’s been going on since 2.30 am. During the last election, he toured the country in an internet-linked bus, posting deathly epistles that hardly anyone read. David’s is a sad case of compulsive obsessive behaviour and he needs help, because almost nothing important (apart from the occasional example of stellar stupidity) happens in New Zealand and eight hours’ sleep for a man of advancing years is essential to health and sanity. Kiwiblog won nothing because the judges felt Farrar had become a nodding blog after his National Party pals won the election. I always worried about his holiday snaps, which detracted from the cut and thrust of an unremittingly dull slog.

The Labour Party’s Red Alert and The Standard also failed to win a dozen cans of Tui as also-rans, because the judges felt political propaganda sites shouldn’t get awards in this premiere of an insignificant back-slapping gongfest, for which – to be considered – you had to nominate yourself.

Kept in the dark, we didn’t. Feedback indicates that a few of the tiny number of clever people who write for (or read) Gog sobbed uncontrollably on the awards night, shocked and dismayed that our breathless, incisive and hugely entertaining prose had fallen beneath the radar of NZBU’s celebrity judges.

But we’re over it, and have resolved not to fail to miss next year’s contest.

The Soccer City Stadium... like a giant cooking pot

England has its Barmy Army. But what should we call our All White supporters, so dedicated to a lost but honourable cause? GoG’s suggestion, on an impromptu Afternoons with Jim Mora contest, was The White Noise. Which might have been appropriate had the World Cup not been staged in South Africa. The idea was quietly dropped in the face of a deafening Black Noise.

It comes from the massed band of the Vuvuzela Players, currently performing in a Johannesburg stadium hilariously described by a BBC commentator as looking “like a giant cooking pot capable of holding 96,000 people”. Somewhere in Hell, Idi Amin was having a chuckle.

Dredged up for the thicker-lipped attending the World Cup, the vuvuzela is a wretched metre-long cone of coloured plastic, producing 115 decibels of harsh monotonous buzzing. That is only slightly less noisy than one jumbo jet engine at maximum thrust. Aimed at the players, the combined effect of 80,000 being blown at once makes verbal communication and robust blaspheming on the field impossible even for the originators to hear.

The referee’s whistle is barely audible above the din and has to be amplified through the public address system. But I love the vuvuzela almost as much as I loathe watching grossly overpaid footpads lashing the ball around and falling over like blubbing diddums in the hope of getting some field advantage.

The vuvuzela, a deadly weapon

I can see the vuvuzela bringing a whole new era in sport support where audiences, galleries, the crowd in general can test a sportsman’s anger management strategies to the limit and perhaps beyond, for our viewing pleasure. McEnroe at his most explosive would be as nothing compared to an athlete reacting to the aural assault of massed vuvuzelas.

Imagine Tiger Woods about to make a critical putt to clinch some tournament when, as he lines up, the gallery draws in its collective breath in glorious anticipation, and he begins to move the putter head. Suddenly, 400 vuvuzelas ranged around him blast forth.

“Quiet please” called out at tennis tourneys, snooker events, in libraries, in opera houses, theatres, and in parliament would become a phrase blown from the language into oblivion by the mighty vuvuzela.

The recently rediscovered Vuvuzela and Child by Scarlatti (1660-1725)

The resulting entertainment value of watching raving, apoplectic sportsmen, actors or politicians (live and in colour) cannot be under-estimated in reawakening the fortunes of today’s ailing commercial broadcasters. A bit like jogging a man’s elbow when he’s holding a full pint, I commend the vuvuzela to the House!

Next year, when New Zealand hosts the Rugby World Cup, it will feature two dangerous imports: the Springboks, and the dreaded Vuvuzela Orchestra.

Postscript

Where will it end? Vuvuzela-powered motorcycle

Was it Martha and the Vuvuzelas? If it wasn’t, it should have been. I can only think of one other word in English that has two ”v’s” an “l”, a “u” and an “a” and I wonder whether this orifice was what the inventor had in mind, in a sick combination with either umbrella or Mandela. Thought originally to be a Zulu horn called a kudu, it was modified and modelled on an imboma, a holy horn devised by the Nazareth Baptist Church, which is now threatening to sue for royalties. Twas ever thus: God moves in wondrous ways. NZ actually won a point.

Chris Carter: He and pal Peter are truly men of the world

Chris Carter’s ministerial office was, by his faulty accounts, a very busy place. So busy in fact, that it was easy for public money to go astray from time to time. Mr Carter, who once subconsciously spent about $25 of your tax on birthday flowers for his partner, Peter, passed the buck to his old public servants, saying: “Small mistakes were perhaps inevitable, but never excusable.”

Some might think that managing to spend a staggering $5500 on limousines during a four-day stay in Adelaide back in 2004 is hardly a small mistake even though, under the rules, it was perfectly legal. Rather than an error, it looks more like a deliberate act of carefree Carter profligacy rivalling the cost of your average US presidential motorcade.

Most common folk will never see the inside of a stretched limo, with its pay-to-view telly

The widely travelled (nay, virtually orbiting) Carter has form, as one of the biggest spenders in New Zealand political history, but with nothing much to show for it. As a minister, between January and June 2008 he is said to have spent almost $211,000 on trains, planes and automobiles. Nevertheless, he remained world famous only in New Zealand and even after he’d been tossed out of government (along with the rest of his disreputable crew), Carter still worked hard to consume another $57,000 going around and around the world in 180 days. (OK, we lied about the trains. Carter probably wouldn’t be seen dead on public transport.)

Last year, Speaker Lockwood Smith said he was confident there had been no abuse of expenses, and that “politicians are making a real effort in the tough economic climate to cut back on spending”. Let’s hope they are, but that apparently wasn’t the case during the times of plenty under Labour.

As a minister, Parekura Horomia owned a large number of portly folios. Now, he is alleged to be taking up a weight-loss challenge with Parliamentary colleagues, but it will be impossible to shake off the burden of heavy spending at certain restaurants while he was in power. One explanation for his remarkable size could be the enormous bottom line on his taxpayer-funded food bills.

Post-prandial Parehura, pictured imitating a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. He always took his job with the utmost somnolentity

Horomia went to Wellington’s Grand Century Chinese restaurant for an official meal, racking up a $750 bill, to be reimbursed by the Education Ministry. Then he spent $463 at the same venue and repaid $195.50 as reimbursement for personal use, which sounds like far more than second helpings. Horomia’s $1816.62 bill for June 2005 included $1613.54 in restaurant expenses. His liking for fast food is not matched by speed in reconciling expenses. For this, he received regular tickings-off from Ministerial Services.

So much for plunder, blunder, slumber and possibly chunder. French culture lover and faux-xenophobe Hone Harawira of the Maori Party was at least partly honest, when asked to explain how he’d spent $80,000 in six months last year. “I think the people of Tai Tokerau will probably say ‘Way to go, you’re doing the bizzo, you’re getting out there, you’re seeing the people, you’re pushing the issues we want you to push’.” Oh, plus getting back some of what the White Incestors had raped and pillaged from his forebores…

John Key: It takes a multi-millionaire who doesn't need the cash to crack down on sleazy money grubbers

A set of golf clubs, long-forgotten pay-to-view movies in foreign hotel rooms after a hard day at the art gallery, mini-bar raids and massages… you name it, they seem to have been at it.

Porn? “I can’t rule it out, and I can’t rule it in…” muttered an unruly and inane Shane Jones when tackled by RNZ’s Sean “The Mangler” Plunket, before the rest of the rabid media joined the scrum. When, a few hours later, Jones came clean, colleague Annette King recommended he “put his head down and his bottom up”. What a nightmare suggestion. We’d already seen quite enough skid-marks for one day. And contrary to Jones apologist Jock Anderson of the National Business Review, speaking on Jim Mora’s RNZ National Panel discussion, the last person we need as leader of the Labour Party – let alone the country – is someone who suffers from short-term memory loss and, despite holding a Harvard University Masters degree in Public Administration, cannot handle more than one credit card at a time.

To err is human, but breaking your own rules more than once should disbar an MP from future political perks. MPs’ misused credit cards often involved paltry sums, but such carelessness (or worse) tells us a lot about the culprits’ reliability when it comes to guarding the public purse. Once again, self-righteous hacks had missed the plot.

Notably absent from the list of claims is one for moat maintenance. But if there was a castle in New Zealand, you can bet that some sly politician would have claimed for it, using his discredit card.

Ancient gender bender, or caveperson

On seeing a reference to Man with a capital M, a woman is unlikely to exclaim “Yes! That’s me!” And thus over the last three decades, the use of the masculine form to supposedly mean everyone has given way to a more inclusive style of language.

While this is on the whole A Good Thing, there are times when a certain amount of flexibility is called for, and never more so than in theatre and film reviews. From time to time, I have puzzled over an evaluation of an actor’s performance, unsure if the actor under study is Arthur or Martha. Indeed, in the more avant-garde type of drama, Arthur may very well become Martha, or vice versa, during the course of the action, or at least be revealed as a transexual.

Nevertheless the cast are all “actors”. However confusing the review is, the dreaded word “actress” must be avoided at all costs, perhaps because at some time in the past it was commonly used as a euphemism for a lady of easy virtue – which in its turn is yet another euphemism for what could be some pretty sordid goings-on.

I once discussed the use of “actress” with a thoroughly modern PC advocate who was unaware of the history aspect but adamant that “actress” was sexist and demeaning, to be ditched along with all the other superfluous words such as manageress and authoress. This led me to wonder aloud about “princess”. (Prince Charles married Prince Diana? Oo-er. How modern.) The earnest lady half-admitted it could be an exception and then quickly moved the conversation on – although not before some stirrer slipped in a brief mention of gods and goddesses.

Recently, a TV One News broadcast, normally so predictable in style and content, sprang a surprise on viewers when it reported the death of the fondly remembered New Zealand actress Dame Pat Evison.

The late actor Marilyn Monroe, with supporting props

Actress! They said actress! Did anyone else sit bolt upright and punch the air? Possibly not. But a celebratory glass of wine was definitely called for, despite the sad circumstances. This could be the first hint of a movement away from the ghastly mangling of the English language we have come to expect at every turn.

Advertising, newspaper and magazine articles, press releases (oh my goddess, especially press releases) are riddled with authors tying themselves up in linguistic knots as they struggle to conform to the PC ideal. It’s a mystery why these wretched people ever got into the writing game when they have no feeling for words, no understanding of grammar, and no ability to construct a well-crafted sentence that avoids the masculine/feminine dilemma.

Here’s hoping that the perpetrator of the following hotchpotch on the Lotto website a few years ago has now moved on to a more suitable occupation: We strongly warn recipients of these emails to not send any information regarding themself or their bank account, and under no circumstances should they send money.

Fabricated banner headline on Page 1... threadbare story inside

The UK political scene has suddenly become important to New Zealand. The Dominion Post has revealed that when Tory leader David Cameron’s wife Samantha entered Number 10 Downing Street “for the first time” (which it wasn’t), she was wearing a dress designed by Emilia Wickstead.

Emilia, said the DomPost, is “a Kiwi girl who grew up spending time on Auckland beaches with friends.” Tanned friends told GoG: “This news really puts Auckland beaches on the map.”

Almost half a lifetime ago, Emilia (now 27) left New Zealand when she was 14, moving to Milan with her mother Angela. As an early teen, Emilia sensed that Whytomato Harbour was not the ideal place to begin a career in haute couture. Drop-dead fashionable Northern Italy beckoned, and then London where, according to the nodding dog that is The Dominion Post, “she has helped Samantha become the best-dressed woman in British politics.”

[NB: Stop cringeing, and kindly pay attention!]

However, only a small fragment of New Zealand’s role in creating Britain’s revolutionary new coalition government was uncovered by The Dominion Post. We can now reveal that when David Cameron walked into No 10, he was wearing at least one sock containing merino wool sourced in New Zealand. It has been traced to Duncan Mackenzie’s station near Kurow. Duncan (67) told GoG: “If true, this really puts Maerewhenua on the map, but it must have been an old sock, because I did a dairy conversion 15 years ago.”

The new Tory logo. It cost £80,000 and is loosely based on the NZ Telecom doodle

Part of the Conservative Party’s new-found popularity is attributed to its new “green” logo, designed by multi-millionaire logo guru Wally Olins (78), who thought up the idea when he spotted an attractive shrub while visiting Olly (66), his second-cousin-twice-removed. Olly grows endangered herbs in the isolated hamlet of Hector on New Zealand’s icy West Coast, sometimes attracting the unwelcome attention of rural broadcasters and police helicopters. A surprised Olly told GoG: “I thought Wally was acting a bit strange when he started hugging a hebe. But unfortunately, this news really puts Hector (175) on the map, eh?”

Yellow tulips were a feature of the Liberal Democrats’ floral campaign, and a bunch of them – flown from Southland’s Tapanui (Tulip Capital Of The World Except For Holland) to Athens – starred on the Cabinet table at No 10 for the first coalition team meeting. New Zealand beat the Netherlands and Kenya to the punch, airfreighting to Greece and then overland via the Orient Express to Waterloo East railway station, meeting the deadline in the face of Iceland’s volcanic ash that had grounded other witless international growers. Tapanui’s Doris and Morris the Florists (54 and 62) said in a joint statement to the Otago Daily Times: “Wow, eh. Yeah, no. This really puts Tapanui on the map.” One disgruntled rival Kenyan grower Skyped GoG to report: “Dis am puttin Nairobi off de map.”

On election night at Tory HQ in Smith Square, the newly anointed Foreign Minister and arch Euro-sceptic 55-year-old William Hague (who also represents The People’s Republic of Yorkshire constituency) was in no mood to roll out the Frogs’ Moet & Chandon champers. Instead, he chose New Zealand’s fearsome, awesome and iconic Lindauer Haute Brute, at a belt-tightening eight quid per bottle. A Lindauer spokesman told GoG: “Going forward, we look forward to ongoing dialogue with William, who clearly knows his way around. He has really put our light industrial estate in Gisborne on the map.”

Over at Labour Party headquarters, Browned-off stalwarts were already regrouping for the next election – some of them desperately seeking valuable links with New Zealand. A few claimed to know formerly useless minister Bryan Gould (born in Hawera, 1939) who, on his exile after being sacked from the UK Labour administration, put Hamilton and Waikato University on Google Earth. One insider said: “We’d like Bryan to come back. He was right all the time. If he’s unsure of his position, we can send him a map.”

Emilia Wickstead... a talent that wasn't home-grown

Emilia Wickstead is a talented designer, who left this country as a pubescent teenager and would never say that New Zealand had anything to do with her remarkable success in fashion.

For The Dominion Post to attempt some patriotic claim on this talent simply because Emilia happened to spend a few early and uninformed years bumming around on beaches in Auckland just goes to show how deeply our impoverished nation’s inferiority complex persists.

Having read thus far, please feel free to cringe.

http://www.emiliawickstead.com/

Peace, and beads, and treaties... and endlessly profitable ethnic misunderstandings. Picture from Dreamstime.com

As the last Waitangi Treaty mega-claim (until the next ground-breaking one that demands back-dated reparation for inflation) gets under way, we are warned that this could be the Really Big Treaty Issue with far-reaching effects on the way our country operates. Already, futile forensic examination is being made of the role of missionaries in the 19th Century alleged robbery of Auckland-based tribes. The claim seems to amount to an ignorant animist people having been swizzled by smarter Victorian Christian invaders, giving their brighter, 21st Century, secular offspring the right to reclaim ownership of hedonist Auckland (to which they are very welcome) but also, more worrying, valuable parts of elsewhere – where most folk live in peace and harmony.

However, popular focus is on whether or not rugby bosses should apologise to Maori for the awful racist behaviour of redneck administrators over visiting Apartheid South Africa during the last century, and Maori being ordered to play the game unfairly.

Most of those who either failed to make the team or were told to lose to the white men are now dead. So are the administrators, and so are almost all those who created or supported apartheid. I experienced some of them, I am still alive, and I thank God that they are not.

South African activist Steve Biko, killed by South African police. When it comes to intolerance, the so-called Maori are primitive beginners

In Mandela’s post-apartheid Rainbow South Africa, they didn’t line up the offenders and either execute them or demand an apology. Instead, they had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that heard the evidence and offered official forgiveness to the culprits, most of whom apologised voluntarily even though they knew they would neither be imprisoned nor shot.

Talk is cheap, and the record of official apologies is not good. Look no further than Australia to see how the Labour Government’s tearful “sorry” to Aboriginals has improved its natives’ fortunes. The very notion of saying sorry is anathema to Americans, despite their atrocious record of near-genocide. They will have no truck with Nanny states and their muddled thinking. Instead, they allowed native Americans to build casinos on their reservations. The redskins’ great unwashed – like most of our own “indigenous” people – remain rotting at the bottom of the socio-economic pile, while the tribal elders do very nicely, thank you. However, much of our Treaty reparations continue to flow back into public coffers in the form of tobacco and alcohol taxes, and a greater rate of early death amongst the beneficiaries, caused by historical addictions for which I may be forced to apologise on behalf of Sir Walter Raleigh and the original distillers of London Gin.

Every one of the pioneer criminals who allegedly stole from the previous occupants of New Zealand is long dead, and today it’s impossible to find a genetically pure Maori. Yet still the racism and recriminations continue and it’s hard to see how it could all be ended by the stroke of some government pen, sometime in 2014. Where is the small voice of forgiveness? The one that says the past is dead, and asks: Can we all just remember it and move forward instead?

Sorry has nothing to do with it. This does. Picture from Dreamstime.com

In the meantime, all non-Maori must be advised to constantly apologise to Maori, provided they can find a real one. Saying sorry is cost-effective in the short term, but we cannot stop the onslaught of wealthy tribal power brokers, some of whose aims are ownership of the foreshore and seabed and regaining the Urewera National Park as a launch-pad for their ethnic republic, the ultimate ambition being subjugation of “non-Maori” property owners and the uncontrolled expansion of gorse and blackberry bushes.

Even if you’re Vietnamese, you really ought to say sorry for simply being here, and for the unwitting role you and your ancestors back home played in forcing poor, brown Aotearoan people and their island relatives to become victims simply by your working harder than they will. Indian and Pakistani operators of corner shops have a lot to answer for; they have no excuse for working all hours, only to be murdered by drunken thieves. We are all to blame for the bizarrely high crime rate and chronic unproductivity of that group called Maori and Islander, and for everything else that’s gone wrong with New Zealand during the last 160 years. OK, you were not to know it, but it is your fault that other, more simple people have failed to keep pace with your progress towards better health, happiness and prosperity.

You should apologise for all this and more, every single morning.

After that, you’d better say your prayers.

Rugby - The Profession is exposed as a load of overpaid bottom-feeders

There being little of significance to discuss, let us turn our attention to matters of no importance. For example, on Page 5’s “In Brief” column of The New Zealand Herald on Thursday or Friday (how time flies when you’re having fun doing something useful instead of reading newspapers), we learned of a minor power outage in Wellington. This caused premature darkness for an hour or two, marooned a few people in lifts, suspended two window cleaners on a high-rise building, and failed to deter parking wardens who continued to issue tickets in the gathering gloom that surrounded powerless trolley buses. It had no effect on the bums occupying the Seat of Government – and no taxpayers noticed. Nobody died.

So, not much to write home about – unless you foolishly bought The Dominion Post, expecting a good read. The DomPost devoted almost all its front page to this faux catastrophe – caused, as it turned out, by an idiot and a piece of broken wire that did no damage to the Dominion Post’s outlying readers. Of course it was a piece of wire, stupid. Everyone knows that Wellington depends on one piece of wire, one electricity sub-station and one railway station – which also regularly grinds to a halt, thanks to a similar lack of investment in infrastructure. That’s why Wellington is so laid back and slack. Or, some suggest, lags behind the times. Other New Zealanders pay dearly for Wellingtonians’ arrogant laziness and wonder about jumped-up elected people who believe a Wallywood sign is more important than dealing with unpleasant vagrants and various other litterati that Wellington freely displays to its visitors. Or installing 21st Century trains and a reliable electricity supply.

Not that The Herald has 20/20 news sense or good timing or unusual energy, either. While relegating the dreadful power outage to Page 5, its lead story was all about a Melbourne rugby league gang that had been over-paying players (and therefore winning all the games) by – wait for it – all of $1.1 million over five years. That’s an average of $220,000 a year. Split evenly across the squad, it hardly covers the burly boys’ expenses in beer and off-field hookers. Yet revelation of the rort caused total meltdown at the club – and a rare chance for the densoids on the media’s sports desks (these people are normally confined to the rear-end of the newsroom) to grab a piece of the front pages.

That $1.1 million hardly stacks up against the billions lost by New Zealanders whose money went into the accounts of finance company high-rollers. The activities of these birth canals over decades were never the subject of such courageous investigative journalism. Even today, our fearless journalists can’t quite bring themselves to reveal who is planning to steal your money.

And who gives a toss about professional sport? The hallowed NZ Rugby Union Corporation’s $15 million loss provides a valuable clue. Most people are sick and tired of rugby – and of the TV and newspaper hacks who take our so-called “obsession with sport” for granted. That’s why rugby is losing money and fans. There is far too much cricket and rugby – and for consumers, most professional sport has become as boring, expensive, corrupt and predictable as politics. By contrast, soccer in New Zealand seems relatively innocent, and we love underdogs and lost causes. Plus, there are much more exciting things to watch, such as Project Runway, America’s Next Top Model, the Living Channel’s Watching Paint Dry Without Feeling Inadequate and Relocation, Relocation Revisited and Grand Designs Revisited with a GPS, which is popular viewing in the waiting rooms of Britain’s divorce and bankruptcy courts.

Fewer than millions of Dunedin International Airport passengers had their flights disrupted by a small Icelandic volcano and an enormous fake bomb. What a disgrace. Somebody must be to blame. RNZ's top evening news presenter Mary Wilson must demand: Who did it, and who will pay?

Is there a flight from Dunedin to Los Angeles or London? If not, Dunedin International Airport is a misnomer. It’s also unqualified for the title, following a bomb hoax that gripped the entire nation, thanks to a gullible media and an incompetent bunch of crisis handlers who delayed a few hundred passengers and caused needless flight disruption by taking five hours to reveal that the bomb was probably just a bar of soap embedded with a couple of wires connected to a dead battery. Blues legend John Mayall (who lives in slightly livelier Los Angeles and has just completed a hugely successful tour of New Zealand) was coolly sanguine, hanging about the airport in 75-year-old shorts and sandals. He must have thought the rumour was true: New Zealand is a place where people wait in desperation for something to happen.

And it almost did, when several suspicious cola cans were found strapped to a Green Island road bridge the very next day. The “art student” responsible said ruefully: “I thought it was all a bit blown up.” The nodding dogs who man and woman our newsdesks reported the false alarm with the usual earnest urgency.

No sooner was this non-drama over than The New Zealand Herald exposed The Bloody Hamburger Scandal on Saturday’s front page, along with a small but gory picture. Dark-hued Timothy Hughley and wife Rachel are outraged that the burger they bought from an outlet in West Auckland came with an added ingredient: human blood from the chef, who cut his hand while wrapping up the burger. Spurning the offer of an apology and vouchers for more burgers, this leading unpaid-up member of Victimhood NZ says he may take legal advice.

For which, all taxpayers will no doubt swallow the costs.

“What would have happened if my wife had bitten it and got hepatitis or Aids?” Timothy bleats.

Well, she didn’t. So shut your greedy mouth, Timothy, find a better restaurant, and move on to a healthier diet.

As for the basket case that is New Zealand journalism: Get some ear protection, try to regain a sense of balance, and stop headlining trivia and time-wasters.

Donut Quote of the Week: After a raid that netted hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen goods, Auckland’s Detective Inspector Greg Cramer said: “The huge variety of goods turned up is probably a clear indication that drug crime, burglary and dishonesty are linked.”

This is unlike our Army, which (in the face of the manufacturer’s loud advice that they would not work in their guns) is selling off about $600,000 worth of dud bullets it bought from FN Herstal, suffering losses of $300,000 – a fair number of Adult Education classes. To misuse a quote from the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo: “I don’t know what the enemy thinks of our troops, but they scare the Hell out of me.”

Gerry Brownlee... Tub of lard says: Let them eat cake

This balls-up has made Defence Minister Wayne Mapp ever so cross. He lined up the feeble brass for a wet-bus-ticking off. It is unlikely to have the slightest effect on a service whose reputation for buying the wrong kit at the wrong time for far too much money is the stuff of military legend.

Meanwhile, Monster Minister Gerry Brownlee – a man described by a witty letter-writer as clearly having personally consumed far too much of the Earth’s resources – dopily remarked that the mining issue over Great Barrier Island was something like a date scone. This led another wit on Radio New Zealand National to say that she knew how many nuts were in that particular fruitcake. For bluff and bluster, Brownlee resembles fellow trencherman and former UK Minister Lord Soames, of whom it was said by a lover that having sex with him was like being hit by a falling wardrobe with the key still in it.

Poor cows - they face a Chinese threat of open-cast milking

Then, no sooner had some shadowy Chinese mining company been revealed as the potential $1.5 billion purchaser of the disgraced Crafars’ dairy farms than up popped another nitwit in the form of Murray Horton, from a fringe outfit called Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (whose acronym would be faintly Kafka-esque, if taken seriously). His Nine to Noon meandering rant against the deal overlooked the fact that right now, New Zealand owes the rest of the world more than $300 billion, half of it by ordinary Kiwi consumers. And a bunch of Chinese miners could probably run a dairy farm better than the Crafars, anyway.

Denise L'Estrange-Corbet: Cravenly insulted someone too important to retaliate

But by a country mile, this week’s Donut Award goes to Auckland “fashion designer” Denise L’Estrange-Corbet, who inexplicably attacked Princess Anne, calling her “as boring as batshit” and with hair like a cottage loaf. (In the UK, double-barrelled surnames indicate rich snobs. In New Zealand, they are usually the sign of a wrecked marriage.) This outburst revealed to the outside world that a nation capable of creating the never-emulated World of Wearable Arts also harbours more than its fair share of unbearable farts.

Ms L’Estrange-Corbet is, according to My Boss (and she knows all about this sort of thing) a ghastly designer. According to my limited experience of Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model, intelligent thought is rarely found among such clitorati. And, according to other commentators, her criticism of the Princess is a bit rich, since she is not exactly an oil painting herself.

Other people’s words can better describe the odium that this vulgar loudmouth has attracted, so let’s pick the choicest of comments about her from The Daily Telegraph’s blog at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/lucyjones/100007203/ouch-princess-annes-cottage-loaf-hair-is-the-latest-victim-of-the-celebrity-put-down/comment-page-1/#comment-100014430

“I was astonished by this article. Who knew New Zealand had any fashion designers?”

“If you care to google Ms Corbet’s image, you will see that she is completely unfit to judge Princess Anne. She is a piggy-faced dollop who puts her name to outstandingly badly designed ‘clothes’.”

http://www.celebspeakers.com/assets/resized/upload/3BAE/denise_L%27estrange_Corbet-0-238-0-0.jpg

“Golly, they don’t come much l’estranger than Miss Corbet. She seems to have acquired her good looks from her brother Ronnie.”

“Anyone unfortunate enough to have visited the dump known as NZ will know that it’s freezing cold most of the time, the houses are damp rusting unheated hovels made of corrugated iron and driftwood and the general population are incomprehensible, workshy, whining, socialist losers, even uglier than their sheep [say no more!] and generally as mad as hatters. The pasty-faced, forty-years-out-of-date manatee in the link above is a fashion designer? What of, might one ask, bell-tents for the grossly obese?”

CAFCA is at http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/