I enjoyed your summary of Waitangi Day:
‘a fine expression of our nation’s character and values. New Zealand is a country founded by dodgy property speculators from some of England’s second-rate public schools on land seized from Maori by Celtic and Yorkshire soldier-settlers who were pushed out of their own whenua by enclosures and poverty, and who soon found themselves in hock to the same landlords and bankers that had bothered them back home. Maori have tended to have a rather half-hearted attitude toward the nation founded on their dispossession, and so have many of their dispossessors, who have often identified more with their class, religion, or region than with their nation.’

Yoza: surely the phoenicians of the south pacific have been here 40,000 years (or so their tame academics claim) not a mere 1000?

Thanks BB, you are very kind….the publishers are not exactly lining up…

Self publish as an ebook on Amazon.

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin

Off you go then Peter, find another day.
When you find it, you’all come back now you ‘ear

In the spring. Positive. Renewal. Forward looking. Celebration of life.

Not an endless re-run of festering violence from the brainless thugs stuck fast in 1850. Turn the cameras off. Leave them to it.

One imagines the insurance bills factor large David. Which is not how it should be. Just how it is.

But there’s a huge latent market for a well thought out thesis on reducing crime.

I know you have said you were not there long enough but I urge you to write a tell all book about life in the house. The bastards shat on you and you are never going to get one of the jobs reserved for those who play the game so why not get your revenge on the pricks.

But on the wider subject….most people seem to have forgotten that Norm Kirk changed Waitangi Day to New Zealand Day 35 years ago….Someone may be able to enlighten us who changed it back and when….

I agree with others – its a bad joke, and Hone and his clowns should be left to “enjoy” it by themselves….provided nothing is burned down, I am a great believer in preserving historic places.

Nothing to celebrate. Let’s find another day.

Will you make it tonight?

It’s my altruistic side Johnboy. Saving others from terminal stupidity is what I do. It’s a shame they’re so stupid prison is the only answer in this case but there we are, it would seem.

Most of you seem to be semi intelligent. I would have thought TV1 and TV3 would be beneath your dignity.

Specially you reid!

Nowt as strange as folk!

I know that later that evening, the news will show us irrational Maori ghastliness with spitting, smugness, self-righteousness and the usual neurotic Maori politics, in which some bizarre new wrong we’ve never thought about will be lying on the table.

If the news had some intelligence behind it instead of what they do, all the time, they would put forth this angle but they’re so infected with lightweight commercially focused entertainment pap with a strong lefty editorial bent thrown in with all the distortion that brings, they would think this angle is incorrect and simply wrong and furthermore a bit nasty.

That’s how bad this is.

It’s be really good if one could plan some sort of operation to turn this around permanently but unfortunately I’m not clever enough to.

Even if you sell it you just get another TV3 and what’s the point of that.

I think what I would do is imprison every single journalist in the entire country at 4:00 AM one morning and sort through their work one at a time, releasing only those whose work I approved and letting them take over the companies and positions of the one’s I’m keeping locked away.

That’s the only thing I can think of. Holmes wouldn’t be one of the released BTW, he’d just rot inside. I quite like this piece today but he’s got too much bad water under my bridge to make up, I’m afraid.