Bishop and Bishopess Tamaki. Nice hair, nice teeth, nice frock, nice suit, nice bank account, nice smiles. But not-so-nice food-bank, according to The New Zealand Herald

When it comes to investing money, there’s one born every minute. Or, in the case of Destiny Church’s ludicrous self-appointed “Bishop”, Brian Tamaki, there’s one Born Again every minute. He is the physical manifestation of God, says his (now suspended) website at www.bishoptamaki.org.nz. While as yet unable to walk on water or share his divine website with us, Brian has the $500,000 yacht to prove he can float – thanks to generous investments from his flock of sheep, who can’t tell the difference between a demi-god and a demagogue.

Meanwhile a committee of the few good brains left in this country has laboured for 18 months to solve the bigger questions: Is there life after theft? And, pray, where can Kiwis safely put their money and, by so doing, return our great nation to First World status? But like the Canadian twits who bought New Zealand’s Yellow Pages for $2 billion (not realising that, if it’s yellow, it is probably a lemon), the committee overlooked some basic truths:

1 New Zealand’s economy is smaller than that of Sydney, Australia. We are insolvent, borrowing millions more with each passing day, and we have no hope of paying our way, despite what dreamy business commentator Rod Oram says about adding value and expertise.

2 New Zealand is a long way from anywhere else and it has a puny stock market that would not interest a parish council in the Orkney Islands (even though such an authority is known to have lost its parishioners’ shirts by speculating in Iceland).

3 New Zealand has virtually nothing to invest in for a serious gain, unless you’re a follower of The Next Big Thing. It could be Allied Farmers, or a gigantic new walnut tree, or… South Basin Oil, or …

4 … you could instead invest in what’s right in front of you. This is most likely to be a house. Notwithstanding the fact that…

5 … New Zealand is an impoverished nation. Most people have nothing in the bank but debt. It is futile to lecture them about saving money for their retirement. They have been reared in a no-blame, welfare-oriented society, and they know that someone else will look after them. But probably not Brian Tamaki, who clearly believes that you can’t take it with you when you go, so give what you have to him, right now.

We are constantly told how rich people only got wealthy by ripping off mums and dads or exploiting tenants and tax loopholes, or the poor. But that’s life – and Bishop Brian preaches that God meant life to be unfair, and it is harder for a rich prick to pass through a camel’s arsehole than for him to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Black hole, formerly known as Hanover Finance, now running under an assumed name

The committee is strong on recommending firmer regulation of financial organisations, and the provision of more-easy-to-read information for the gullible. Hindsight is perfect, but the committee’s memory is selective. This country’s investment scenario resembles America’s 19th Century Wild West, and it could take at least another decade to fully expose and hang out to dry the entire crew of scoundrels who have ripped off Mums and Dads.

In large print for half-blind investors, in front of the House of Hotchin, a multi-million dollar monument to bad taste

Bernie Madoff is currently serving 130 years for stealing billions in the United States. But two notorious characters in New Zealand have lost the savings of countless investors in Handover Finance and – rather than being banged up – are brazenly repeating exactly the same Ponzi scheme, without the slightest chance of punishment.

Late in the day, the investment committee recruited financial adviser Mary Holm, who has been banging on for years about wonderful Kiwisaver. You might have a warm feeling about the tax rebates on your Kiwisaver contributions, but take a moment to check out your fund’s performance. This was another Dr Michael Cullen opportunity that arrived slightly after its bye-bye date, and is proving to be deeply flawed.

It just goes to show how wrong you can be, when you put your faith in a former history professor who became an overnight deputy premier and minister of finance, bought back an overpriced trainset from Australians who had ripped off the former owners (us), could neither define nor deliver his vision of Economic Transformation, and believed that his carbon credits grew on other people’s pine trees.

Sooner or later, the truth will dawn: A country that needs to borrow $250 million a week to bankroll public services is no longer a viable economic entity. We should abandon efforts to harmonise trade and taxation with Australia, and just sign up as the new Australian State of Retirement, where Aussies can come to die in the most comfortable way, and where the indigenous population of fawning minions will make their terminally vulgar patients’ beds while dreaming of a new tomorrow, and its bright, sunlit bedpans.

National has made a promising start, by proposing a new wave of wealthy retired (but extremely healthy) migrants. They’ll also need to be insane, to bring their well-earned money to New Zealand.

I can hit you, but you can't hit me, because I'm smaller than you, and I know my rights. Dreamstime.com

There is nothing quite like the careful application of pain to deter young people from inflicting physical suffering upon others. The best result can be expected when well-intentioned and maturely measured punishment is firmly applied in the early years. After all, having carefully wiped their bottoms for so long, what better place could there be to sharply redirect a bum that might be heading in the wrong direction?

When Nyzylnd Premier John Key and his National-led Government rejected an 87 percent referendum majority in favour of repealing Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking legislation, he promised to watch the pattern of prosecutions and keep the matter under review.

Key, who is fast-emerging as New Zealand’s Maestro of Fudge, completely missed the point.

If we believe police figures, only two successful prosecutions have been made against adults for ‘assaulting’ their children since the legislation came into force. So the law change was a waste of time and money, particularly since serious child abuse has shown no sign of abating.

Poor little innocents - but victimhood is now embedded in their genes. Dreamstime.com

Idealistic fossils such as the not unblemished parent Sue Bradford and her fellow travellers always banged on about the obscenity of adults “assaulting” little children. But now the bootie is on the other foot, because the unsmacked generation of little buggers is now causing a dramatic amount of mayhem in the playground and the classroom, with at least one attack on a teacher every day and an apparently intractable problem with peer-to-peer bullying.

The Dominion Post’s Page 1 revelation about child violence against teachers should have been sent to the inside pages, because it’s not news. It is the natural consequence of misguided liberal ideology that would have you believe children are capable of making life-changing decisions without any previous experience, and which was used to justify the disempowerment of parents and teachers.

They might be small, but they’re smart. Kids understand how to manipulate adults, and now they’re intimidating their own parents and sometimes attacking their teachers – apparently with virtual impunity.

A shocked society reacts with a mixture of bewilderment and blind despair. What could have gone so horribly wrong?

The answer is remarkably plain. Little people are potential ratbags, and they must be made civilised because they cannot do it on their own. Anyone who has witnessed the naked greed and noisy aggression of small children that is a feature of many a birthday party or a morning under the Christmas tree will recall the discomfort of observing the parents’ dismay at the unhappiness they have caused by spending so much money on so many presents, to earn such ingratitude.

Get over it. Those bully girls will become failed politicians, and you'll be a star. Dreamstime.com

If lawmakers deny parents the right to administer a sharp smack on the bottom or the wrist, they increase the risk of some mother’s little treasure going wild and growing up to be a major menace. Advocates of the laissez-faire approach to raising and educating children might like to ask themselves, for example, how many successful pupils of “learn what you like when you can be bothered to turn up” Rudolf Steiner schools came from low-decile areas. They might discover that such private-school prodigies came instead from wealthier, better-educated and more settled family environments, where a smack was a last resort but nevertheless remained a lawful option. The idea that you can negotiate with an infant has no supporting evidence. Little ones are (for very good reasons) born selfish and are unable to debate or decide on, for example, the democratic distribution of jelly beans. That’s why we have parents. And – more importantly – much wiser grandparents.

Which brings us neatly back to the teachers, one of whom has been crippled by a pupil’s attack. He told the Dominion Post: “I think anyone in a job that fronts the public is at risk from nutters in our society, people who lack awareness of the damage they can inflict, or lack conscience.”

This unfortunate victim should pay his very first visit to the School of Life. Virtually everyone in any job “fronts the public”, and no one should be expected to suffer harm from nutters such as our dotty Education Minister, Anne Tolley. She says that attacks on teachers are “completely unacceptable” (well, that’s a given) and hopes that her $45 million assault on truancy will help to solve the problem. Truancy is only a teeny bit higher than it was ten years ago, when Labour wasted fortunes of taxpayers’ money on a failed bid to reduce it. Education ministers who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

According to the Dompost, more than 5000 teachers from low-decile schools will have training in handling children who lash out or misbehave in the classroom. A fat lot of good that will do, because the trainees will be led by the same old myopic educators whose moral code came from their sloppy parents. When it comes to education, the cat is long out of the bag, and the pattern of failure is set.

To change, the first radical lesson to be relearned – and made legitimate – is that if a truculent child hits a teacher, he or she should get an immediate and painful whack. If their dimwitted carers (who, more often than not, also inherited the low values of their deluded parents) turn up to complain, they should be firmly advised that if the little devil does not behave, he or she will be expelled and the parents or guardians or aunties will be made to pay for the damage.

A government that claims to be taking an uncompromising approach to recidivist adult offenders might be better occupied by taking a firm stand on juvenile delinquency, restoring parental responsibility and rights, and reversing the slide towards barbarism. Sadly, there seems little chance of that, given the slovenly way of life that many of our cowardly politicians lead.

The beloved Bakelite telephone. Telecom could handle that... Picture by Dreamstime.com

Another notable feature of New Zealand is its people’s preoccupation with getting everything at the lowest possible cost. You need only study misleading commercials by the likes of “price-beating” Bunnings Warehouse and Mitre 10 to realise that, while we’re hooked on bargains, we’re also led astray by Bunnings and Mitre 10, who put precisely the same products on the shelves, but with different product codes. This provides them with an instant get-out, when it comes to money-grubbing consumers’ disputes.

The result of a genuine “We’ll beat it by 15 percent” promise is that Bunnings and Mitre 10 would disappear up their own checkouts in a to-the-death competitive battle. The only rational conclusion is that they’re conspiring in an elaborate price-fixing arrangement.

Almost every screaming commercial on terrestrial telly focuses on “the lowest price”, and it’s amazing how baffled salespersons can be when you insist that cost is not a problem – and, incredibly, you want to pay top dollar for the very best.

This is clearly not a society that values quality above cost – unlike similarly-sized Finland, which has prospered by concentrating on the Pursuit of Excellence. A country that doesn’t take pride in having (or making) the best is condemned to be a low-achieving, low-wage, badly-educated nation, where the consumption of the cheapest possible by the unspeakably ignorant is a natural consequence.

But why should those who signed up for a penalty-rich contract with Telecom’s out-of-order XT network be faced with costly legal action to prove that the product is not fit for use (even though, if they were brave enough, they could simply challenge Telecom to do its worst – and CEO Doctor Paul Reynolds would cave in and make you love him again by rejecting his non-performance bonus)?

It’s because the legislation that was supposed to protect the owners of mobile phones or leaky homes is as illusory and foggy as the “protection” afforded to finance company investors.

And why’s that?

It’s because, in an immature “she’ll be right” society that believes you can fix almost any problem with a length of wire, the only rule is: Every gender-specific person for him/her/itself.

At no stage during the Telecom fiasco has anyone there explained – even under the withering blast of RNZ’s Mary “Somebody must be to blame” Wilson’s torture – the precise causes of its failures, up to but not including the cessation of 111 emergency services in Auckland. Those who remember the 1998 five-week power outage in central Auckland (seen by the rest of the world as conclusive proof that New Zealand had become a Third World nation) will suspect that, once again, the Shaky Isles’ infrastructure is built on sand, with a rock-bottom budget.

For Telecom to claim a world-class mobile network is a sick joke. Nobody can build anything world-class unless they are prepared to pay for it. Unfortunately, this inconvenient truth entails putting short-term profits – and short-term politics – way down the priority list, and it applies to every aspect of life.

Sadly, the vast majority of New Zealanders know the lowest price of everything, but the value of almost nothing. Until that changes, we’ll remain in the OECD’s lower ranks and we’ll always be taken by surprise whenever something crashes, and we are shocked to discover yet again that form is hardly ever the same as substance.

We’re talking about British Airways, whose fabulous Lakeside HQ near Heathrow boasts a stream running right through the interior and beside the cafeteria. This raised many a visitor’s eyebrows – and the sound of rushing water caused long queues outside the loos.

British Airways is a byword for executive extravagance and corporate incompetence, fuelled by the certain knowledge that it is “too big to fail” and that the Government will always step in to bail it out. (Refer, in our case, to Air New Zealand and BNZ.) Like other similar entities, BA also has a long record of skulduggery when it comes to defending what it believes to be its birthright: a monopoly.

Wherever the dead hand of government is involved in business, disaster is almost certain – and the remnants of that old civil service mentality persist long after so-called privatisation. It becomes part of the culture and is virtually impossible to eradicate.

Michael Cullen: Never very clever with public money

In New Zealand, the list of failed privatisations is as long as a politician’s greedy arm. We have been royally ripped off by power companies (aided and abetted by past and present governments) and there is no genuine competition. Our rickety railway was sold off too cheap, grossly neglected, and then bought back for far too much by Michael Cullen – never a man to be over-careful with other people’s money.

And New Zealand is truly cursed, when it comes to Telecom.

The accident-prone Hamster: He has a knack of walking away from disasters

When we moved out into the sticks seven years ago, we asked Telecom to install broadband. The answer: “It can’t be done.” The reason: Our lines are made of modern optical fibre, and NZ Telecom’s bargain-basement broadband only works on ancient copper wire. So we installed a private wireless broadband link, which was faster than Telecom’s service. Slow forward another five years, and after a series of Telecom landline phone outages – poorly handled by people in a Manila call centre – we threw in the towel and put our phone lines on the wireless service, too. Result: perfect performance, plus fast broadband and 5 Gb of data transfer per month. All for a fraction more than Telecom was charging for two fault-prone phone lines.

Pity the poor subscribers to Telecom’s mobile service. They had to pay for Top Gear’s Richard Hammond and his breathless XT commercials. The Hamster “couldn’t wait to put it to the test”, but he’s strangely absent from the latest Top Gear roadshow’s visit to Auckland. With good reason, because if he came back, he’d be pelted with useless cellphones.

Dr Reynolds: He offers a compensation package that says Take it or leave it

To encourage success, there’s nothing better than the ever-present threat of failure, which may involve unemployment or bankruptcy. Telecom’s boss, Dr Paul Reynolds, is an old hand at working in formerly state-owned businesses, because he used to work for British Telecom, another appalling outfit where failure earns a golden handshake for top people, and the buck stops much lower down.

It might be better to bite the bullet and let dinosaurs like British Airways and NZ Telecom suffer the icy blast of unmitigated competition, without taxpayer involvement, and sink.

Some bright entrepreneur is sure to pick up the remains, and breathe new life into them.

But in all likelihood, by 2050, the bankrupt islands once called New Zealand will be part of the Chinese People’s Autonomous Region of Australasia.

Separate development: This kind of policy is not acceptable in New Zealand, even when it comes from the brown minority

In the meantime, there are genuine social issues facing large sections of our immigrant population. The Government is thought to be studying plans for Pakeha Ora, a revolutionary health and welfare system. The idea sprang from Whanau Ora, a scheme for people in dysfunctional Maori families who suffer from unusual medical and social issues mainly related to over-consumption of unethical food and a disinterest in personal effort; it’s the brainchild of Tatiana “Big is Not Good” Tureena.

Tatiana believes in a staple diet of spoon-feeding that includes State-funded reduction of your stomach if you present at the airport, needing two seats but with only the cash for one. This operation – cleverly adopted by another of “our people” using public funds, before the fraudster spent time losing more weight in jail – should be subsidised by normal people, says Tatiana, because it was not her people’s fault that other people’s people invented the jet engine, or Kentucky Fried Chicken, or TV.

Like Whanau Ora, Pakeha Ora is based on separate development (once known elsewhere as apartheid).

A Government source says: “Pakeha have special problems, including Clenched Buttock Syndrome. One of the symptoms is an inability to pronounce Nyzylnd.” The Government believes that funds must be set aside to deal with these unique issues, which encompass everything from an inability to read or add up, down to bad driving and poor behaviours such as watching too many cooking programmes instead of developing a healthy diet. “We need to broaden our base and reduce the size of our bottoms.”

Pakeha Ora will develop strategies aimed to exclude members of Whanau Ora, even if they are lean and healthy and employed. It will establish Pakeha-only hospitals, dental clinics and psychiatric support units to help disenchanted non-Maori experts who seek to flee the country. If successful, separate funding could be extended to other activities, such as DoC (Fauna and Flora Ora), Forest and Bird (Kea Ora), and broadcasting (Jim Mora’s Ora).

Of course, when the population eventually coalesces, we will need only one:

The Diaspora Ora.

To do very nicely these days, it pays to be poor. Picture from Dreamstime.com

Those who claim to despise wealth are often all too happy to make use of someone else’s, while it’s available for the taking.

In her 1960s heyday, Jean Shrimpton found she had a string of hippie hangers-on who rejected worldly goods but somehow didn’t object to using hers, or her cash; however, when both started running low, they were off in search of another mug. There’s an echo of that in the air today, but the trouble is, if too many high earners take fright, or flight, who’s going to be left for the rest of Society to sponge off?

When I was at school, a fellow pupil kindly took the time to explain why some colleagues picked on me. “They’re jelly,” he said. Once I had worked out that he didn’t mean they were soft and squishy – far from it – it became clear that those who were less academically inclined or who couldn’t be bothered doing the hard yards to succeed were using the only means available to express their jealousy of someone who appeared, superficially at least, to find much of the class-work a doddle. The fact that there was a personal cost – afternoons and evenings indoors, reading books, completing homework, missing out on girlfriends, and so on – seemed have been overlooked.

We have something similar now. It is a form of state-sponsored bullying featuring those who miss out on a lot of free time, working to put money aside for that rainy day, yet (because they are suspected of having cash or assets that others don’t) are either targeted to part with some of it, or the others get a free leg-up to narrow the perceived gap. I run a small business that often means working into the small hours, including weekends. No evenings in front of the TV, sport or hobbies here, unfortunately. I have a small family and have never claimed a cent in benefits (partly because I’m deemed to be too wealthy). I confess to being somewhat peeved at the sight of those with larger families and dead-end, low-paid jobs being given thousands in free top-ups and then putting their feet up in the evening. And when retirement comes, I will doubtless not qualify for a pension – assuming that such a thing will still exist – because I will have brought several million dollars into the country and, after tax, put some of it aside to look after myself and my family.

The moral is that I am a fool. I should have an unpleasant, low-paid job (or no job at all), half a dozen kids, a massive mortgage (or better still, just pay rent and let someone else bear the cost side of home ownership), crash out in front of the telly with a beer or five every night, watch my favourite football team at the weekend, claim every available State hand-out (funded by all those rich, home-owning bastards) and then plead poverty when either retirement or redundancy happens, knowing that Nanny will provide.

The ultimate East German limo - the extended Trabant. A cardboard cut-out of Socialist illusions that went nowhere

But I can’t. And it’s instructive to look at what happened in the former East Germany following reunification in 1990. An “Ossi” told me that, prior to 1989, East Germans were paid peanuts and had no cash to put aside; the upside was that rents were cheap, education and books were all State-subsidised, as was their limited entertainment. That system sort of worked. But now that they have a capitalist economy and the massive teats of the Socialist Nanny State have shrivelled, those who were in the later stages of their working lives back in 1989 are struggling; they never had any capital reserve because (a) it wasn’t available and (b) it wasn’t needed. Now it is, and a generation is stuffed. The younger ones have a slightly better chance, but it will be two or three generations before a balance is restored.

Here in Godzone, we are still being led to believe that Nanny’s teats are swelling, despite growing evidence to the contrary. But what happens when they run dry? Those who have put something aside may be better off for a while, but will probably face punitive taxation to help look after the have-nots and the wasteful, or will be at the mercy of the better-armed and less law-abiding.

So the question is: Enjoy the present, or worry about the future? And which is better: consumer goods bought on the never-never, probably with massive debt, and endless hours to enjoy them, or all the material goods you can afford, with no debt, and hardly any time to enjoy all that elusive leisure?

Everyone admits that it was wrong-headed, except the powerful people who kicked it off

There are few sights uglier than that of a Scottish lawyer on the make, as Tony Blair showed during his six-hour defence of the indefensible before the Chilcott-led Iraq Inquiry. According to Wikipedia, Edinburgh-born Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is descended from the illegitimate son of two actors and the daughter of a butcher. Remarkably, this mediocre lawyer-turned-fake-Socialist and disgraceful ex-Premier now resides in a multi-million pound pad close to the US Embassy in London. How did he get away with it?

Arms expert Dr David Kelly: He allegedly committed suicide after Blair rejected his loudly publicised advice that Saddam Hussein could not attack the West within 45 minutes and had no weapons of mass destruction

Tony Blair is unusually loaded and universally loathed, and at the inquiry he defiantly stared down some of those who have lost relatives in the illegal Blair and Bush war, and called him a liar. Blair, who professes to be a Christian (if true, he probably falls into wife Cherie’s Roman Catholic category of Crusader), stuck to his guns, denied all the evidence and said he’d do it all over again. If ever there was a prisoner of his own history, Tony Blair is the epitome of an auto-biographer who needn’t be locked up.

Those of us who said from the very beginning that the 2003 invasion of Iraq broke international law were roundly condemned by the likes of Sir Max Hastings, the prominent historian and journalist. But after watching Blair’s braggadocio performance on Friday, a shocked and angry Sir Max finally admitted that Lady Hastings was right all the time, he had been misled and that Blair had perpetrated a monstrous parliamentary injustice on the British people and upon Max’s honourable intelligence.

Tony Blair, joint architect of the illegal Iraq invasion, and now the West's wealthy Middle East peace broker

Not to mention the incalculable damage Blair helped to inflict on the Iraqi people, of whom between 300,000 and 600,000 have died because of his involvement in “regime change” on the pretext of “weapons of mass destruction”. When it comes to WMD, Britain and the US are the global experts and compared to them, Saddam Hussein was a peacenik puppy.

Before you nod off, wondering “What has all this to do with lil’ol NZ?” please recall the dramatic photo of Kiwi VC-winner Corporal Willie Apiata, strolling through the rubble in Kabul like a real-life Terminator.

Helen Clark was in many ways a thoroughly rotten prime minister, but her enduring achievement was to do nothing by deciding that New Zealand would not help the USA to re-colonise Iraq. Her quaint belief in this nation’s independence may have led to some daft decisions (such as the abolition of resort to the UK’s Privy Council), but she had the good sense to distance New Zealand from an atrocity that broke international law.

Hard man Willie Apiata, VC. Picture from NZ Army

Apiata is our home-grown, heroic version of the Universal Soldier, and anyone familiar with the song written by Buffy Saint Marie will recall the universal truth that those who send people such as Willie into foreign conflicts also say they believe that God is on their side. The fact that they secretly don’t believe in God (like many a President, Pope, Prime Minister, Imam or Rabbi) is immaterial and always overlooked.

NZ Prime Minister John Key has sent Apiata and his colleagues to Afghanistan “to fight terrorism” and, rather importantly, he did not tell voters about this plan at the last election. Willie and the rest of his SAS cohort are obeying the orders of a government that is quietly cosying up to the US, to support a corrupt government in a civil war against an unbeatable (and abhorrent) bunch of Moslem fundamentalists who want their independence back and foreigners out.

We might not relish the prospect of a Taliban government in Kabul (and particularly what it might do to the women of Afghanistan), but the fact remains that New Zealand is propping up a corrupt and undemocratic administration. It’s little wonder that Taliban insurgents reject unreliable offers of money and jobs to come over to the other side. It didn’t work in Vietnam, and it won’t work in Afghanistan. We don’t like Robert Mugabe or Mahmoud Afterdinnermint, either, but there is no sign of Western eagerness to save Zimbabweans or Iranians from cruel dictatorship.

Dirt-poor Taliban fighters oil their weapons. Picture from scraptv.com

Invading and occupying other people’s sovereign territory and imposing your Aryan, Islamic, Marxist or so-called democratic ideology on the inhabitants is a seriously bad idea (to enjoy a long period of silence, ask the Chinese about Tibet). The next thing you know, your own innocent citizens can easily become targets in wider issues that may have more to do with Palestine than Pukekohe. The real strategic goals, such as access to the world’s largest oil reserves or a route from Russia to the Indian Ocean, or creating a buffer zone, may prove overly expensive.

That’s why brainier people than John Key, Tony Blair and George W Bush laid down laws intended to deter such invasions.

So wipe that macho grin off your face, lads. Say a little prayer that Willie and his warriors get home, alive, by next Christmas – and that their misguided mission won’t end in tears.

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/dec/09/simon-hoggart-sketch-chilcott-inquiry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Blair

Rechnik - wrecked by Russia's nouveau rich

Unfortunately for the peasants, this land – once on the outskirts of the city – is now within commuting distance of central Moscow and worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The city authorities want it back for a “public park” (yeah, right) and they have begun to demolish the houses. The residents have a legal right to occupation, according to human rights lawyer Yevgeny Arkhipov. Here’s hoping Yevgeny wears a bullet-proof vest at all times.

Winging our way westward, we arrive at the inner London suburb of Hackney Wick. This is where, in 1924, philanthropic aristocrat Major Arthur Villiers led the Manor Gardens project to make allotments of land available “in perpetuity” (and the Major could afford good lawyers). On these plots, local slum-dwellers could grow fresh produce to supplement their poor diet.

The slums have gone, but the English people’s love of allotments endures. Allotments produced food that helped the Brits to win World War 2. Major Villiers’ project became a fertile haven where, in recent times, neighbours of various ethnicities have worked together, swapping gardening lore and recipes, and they no doubt helped to inspire the movie Grow Your Own.

Eternity, said Woody Allen, is an awfully long time – especially towards the end. But these days, perpetuity is somewhat shorter.

Manor Gardens, ruined by land-grabbers in the name of sport. Picture by diamondgeezer.blogspot.com

Manor Gardens allotments lay just inside the boundary of the site designated for the 2012 Olympics. The land was compulsorily acquired by the Labour Government’s London Development Authority (desperate to secure the Olympic Games and the next election, and blot out memories of the catastrophic £1 billion-plus Millennium Dome just across the river) although it will only be needed for a few weeks to provide pedestrian access.

Allotment holders came up with an imaginative yet practical alternative design that would have transformed their traditional arrangements (featuring rusty old baths and bits of third-hand corrugated iron). Spectators would have been treated to the unusual experience of strolling to the stadium through attractive, semi-rural surroundings in the heart of London.

Lord Seb Coe, in happier times

It sounded like a reasonable compromise, but sharp suits from the Olympic Delivery Authority – led by sports czar and grasping artificial aristocrat Lord Sebastian Coe – were hostile. In reality, the Olympics are Corporate America in Lycra. Official food and drink sales are strictly licensed by Coe and Co and apparently only supplied by Kraft-owned Cadbury, McDonalds and Coca Cola (for goodly fees). Perhaps the owners of the Olympics feared a nightmare scenario of ordinary walkers pausing on the way to buy a few freshly picked tomatoes, lettuce leaves and basil for their lunchtime salad.

The gardeners were fobbed off with a piece of inferior-quality land somewhat further away, in Marsh Lane – the ancient name may provide a clue as to its condition. This move has upset another community that has lost some of its precious open space, and long-suffering taxpayers have so far forked out well over £1 million for remedial drainage work.

Similar stories crop up with depressing frequency. From China to India, from Africa to the Americas, and all points in-between, small groups struggle to retain ways of life that have evolved to suit the places they inhabit and love – while governments and special interest groups, energised by big money and grandiose ideas, remain blind to the intrinsic value of what is already there. Major Villiers made his fortune at Barings Bank. That bank, established in 1762, was destroyed in 1995 by another opportunistic vandal, Nick Leeson.

Footnote: In 1649, a radical offshoot from Oliver Cromwell’s army declared England’s land to be a common treasury and began to plant fruit and vegetables on common land in south and central England. It was a response to a shortage of food and what the Diggers saw as the misuse of productive land by large landowners. On BBC Radio 4, Alice Roberts meets The New Diggers – groups and individuals across the UK who are determined to tackle the looming food crisis by making wasteland grow.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qbz09

The Olympian rape of East London is described in detail here:

http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Regeneration-Games

Other background information about how dodgy people steal honest people’s property is at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8482837.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manor_Garden_Allotments

http://www.lifeisland.org

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2007/apr/08/features.magazine37

Sue Bradford, who always knew what was good for you

The only favour that never-elected Green MP Sue Bradford did for New Zealanders (before she spat the dummy and threw the teddy) was to prove beyond doubt that when the Green Party suggests or supports or opposes anything, its stand will be wrong and economically or socially harmful.

Take, for example, the Greens’ immediate knee-jerk reaction to plans for intensive dairying in the Mackenzie Country, where initially upwards of 17,000 cows would spend most of their lives in a covered and cosseted environment on a tiny speck of desert that presently sustains only insects and rabbits. They clearly have not thought the idea through.

These vandals should be in a barn

Intensive battery dairying has advantages that dotty environmentalists have been advocating for years. For one thing, you don’t have all those massive animals careering around the countryside, shitting everywhere, causing water pollution and hillside erosion, and costing fortunes in fencing. Instead, you can keep them all in a small shed, and carefully control what happens to everything that goes into and out of their front and back passages. The poos and wees can be tankered away to enrich poor soils and, because the cows are in an enclosed environment, their methane belches and farts can be captured, sequestered well away from our threatened atmosphere and perhaps bottled to provide an alternative to petrol or natural gas. This avoids the unpleasant prospect of interfering with the poor animals’ genetic structure, in ways that the Greens have quietly and sinisterly hinted they might support.

The creatures could be nourished with recycled fish-meal from accidentally netted, over-quota catches that are currently dumped back into the ocean. Over-irrigated, man-made grasslands presently devoted to inefficient, free-range dairying could instead be cultivated for protein-rich crops of soy beans or lentils, or returned to native bush for people to go native in.

Former Green leader Jeanette Fitzsimons. On RNZ National this week, a journalist fan could say nothing about her undoubted talents. She just called her 'amazingly pretty'.

But Greenies simply cannot think in anything except reverse gear. Take tax reform as another example. The Greens support a capital gains tax, despite overwhelming international evidence that it does nothing to lower house prices or prevent property booms. In fact, all the evidence shows that it increases property prices, leads to the most imaginative tax dodges, and employs vast numbers of CGT bureaucrats who – try as they might not (and why bother?) – have never been able to retrieve quite enough tax to cover their salaries and pensions.

The Greens reject an increase in GST, saying that this will harm the poor. This is hard to understand, since GST is a user-pays tax and rich people tend to consume more than poor people (who will naturally be shielded from gross financial injustice by governments that are invariably scared stiff of their revolting electors).

The Greens reject a lowering of the top tax rates, not saying that the only reason for this is that they dislike wealthy people, have a well-developed sense of envy, and cannot see why anyone should be allowed to prefer Porsche or Prada to a rusty Lada and the local op-shop, where they traditionally buy their recycled haute couture.

Reasonable people, on the other hand, know that intensive animal husbandry is unhealthy for humans and that the real issue (unaddressed for decades by the limp-wristed Greens) is to clean up the damage we have done to our environment. They also know that high personal taxes (no matter what your financial status) make people less interested in working and that “affordable housing” is just code for more social welfare (or rental property, which Greens oppose if a private landlord is involved).

Reasonable people reject the idea of a capital gains tax as a means of dissuading people from buying investment housing, because in New Zealand there is simply nothing else you can trust to put your money into, and there is no evidence that CGT does anything useful. As for the bureaucracy that a CGT would create, well, that’s just another little artificial commune so beloved of Green thinkers – but this time and once again, the rest of us will pay for its failure.

Cambodia: And what can happen when you hand over your life to numbskulls who promise to re-invent the world. Picture from Dreamstime.com

The Greens are anti-capitalist not because they have anything better to offer, but because capitalism is a natural system based on human instinct that creates wealth along with inequality; and in their Utopian world, everyone must have the same no-blame opportunity to fail. The Greens oppose globalisation, although their Utopia seems to be predicated upon some system of world government, and their position on global warming features an unusually intolerant rejection of opposing opinion that verges on dictatorship. Greens tend to live in urban areas; they harbour a deep suspicion of farmers, who are rich, own land and exploit innocent animals. When the more courageous venture into rural areas, they tend to occupy unproductive land, and then simply die of exposure to the weather or market forces.

The Greens are against nuclear power, although it is our only known form of energy generation that produces no polluting products apart from radioactive waste (which a world dictatorship run by Greens could easily control). The Greens hate roads, but they love hybrid cars with two engines instead of one, because they haven’t the wits to invent anything better – and in their heart of hearts, they prefer cart-horses and bicycles. The latest edict from the Greenhouse Gas merchants who like to throw stones states that the whole developed world must cease growing, entirely and indefinitely, to meet their demands for a halt in global warming. More unsustainable hot air…

When you boil down everything the Greens tend to support, oppose or suggest, you end up with something that looks scarily reminiscent of Marx, Mao, Lenin and Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and their equally grotesque and failed denials of human nature and in-your-face reality.

During his more insane years, Mao Tse-tung dictated that all Chinese traffic lights should show Red for Go. He made a crazy point. If you believe what the potty “Alternatives” say, we should change all the traffic lights to show Green for Stop.

What the fox going on? Reynard is surprised by a cold snap in Britain

Over a pint, Rudolph complained: “Just how short can a human bean’s memory span be?” This mortal frailty has allowed all sorts of self-appointed experts to regularly recycle scares ranging from imminent ice ages or guaranteed incineration to warnings that cover virtually every aspect of nutrition, medicine, frocks and footwear. One minute, we’ll all fry, or we’ll die from eating too much salt; the next, we are advised to wrap up warm (avoid hypothermia) and drink lots of red wine (avoid a heart attack). The next, researchers say that red wine is lethal for your liver and we’re not eating enough iodised salt, and others say that global warming is on hold until 2015.

The Scare Industry has similarities to the fashion business, in that its mission is to keep a gullible populace in thrall to false prophets.

Wouldn’t it be good, Rudolph suggested, if someone could keep a database of all the things that politicians and “experts” say, so that we could have an instant reference point from which to spot all the back-tracking and U-turns they subsequently perform? A brilliant idea indeed, for which neither of us seemed eager to volunteer.

That’s because nobody would pay the slightest attention or money, and we would probably forget to keep the futile project up-to-date.

However, we do have some information with which to work on the idea that memories are short. Survivors of mad cow disease and swine flu scares, who also ignored warnings that eggs and unpasteurised cheese and meat containing fat shorten a happy life, are celebrating their heartbeat in 2010. They cast an increasingly jaundiced eye towards those who warn that getting out of bed might not be a good idea.

Polar bears are increasing in numbers, as are bipolar climate experts

There were international gasps when people saw satellite images of Great Britain, white from top to toe and gridlocked by ice and snow. This was the coldest snap since Eighteen Hundred and Frozen to Death, weathermen said. Well, actually, it was the worst since 1963, when the snow stayed until April but the Poor Man of Europe somehow plodded on. Today, Britain is so cash-strapped that it cannot afford the salt to keep its own roads clear (salt is expensive, as well as being a major health and rust hazard). The UK is a colder place these days, but this has little to do with the weather. The only other discernible difference between now and then is that, in 1963, there were no satellite cameras.

It cannot be long before some melanomaniac says that all the cloud and rain in New Zealand this “summer” has been good for the skin cancer death-count.

How we so easily forget that famines, hurricanes, quakes, pestilence and other natural perils have been around since we crawled on eight legs from the depths. It only takes a couple of months for total amnesia to set in. Back in November, New Zealand’s National Institute for Waffle and Astrology advised that the coming three months’ weather would be average.

http://www.gog.org.nz/2009/11/03/whither-the-weather-well-it’s-sort-of-averagely-in-between-windbags-say/

NIWA's holiday forecast, issued in November. Gypsy fortune tellers are cheaper and more reliable

What happened? The summer weather has been abominable, nothing has been average and hardly anyone remembers November – including NIWA, which has issued a feeble explanation for the actuality (while doubtless hoping that we will have forgotten the pathetic forecast).

These people belong to the group of fantasists who – because they have a weather satellite and apparently live on it – firmly believe that they can limit the increase in global temperatures to 2 deg Celsius. Gloria In Ex-Celsius Deo, they chant.

Somewhere on our planet, there is a gigantic clock depicting the countdown to Armageddon. It has no mechanism and is controlled by experts who have just moved the minute hand back from five to midnight to six minutes to oblivion, simply because they have received “encouraging news” from world leaders.

Tell that to the starving millions, who can’t afford a decent meal or an alarm clock.

The world is afflicted by an epidemic of academics. When it comes to forecasting the weather, you might as well rely on Bob Dylan.

Back in about 1963, he predicted: A hard rain’s a gonna fall.

Outside my window, it’s still hosing down.