Kiwiblog

I am getting confused on which Twitter accounts are parodies and which are not. Take two Green MPs.

The Sue Kedgley twitter account is a parody. The comments seem a bit too extreme, even for Sue, such as:

is off to find schools that sell kiddy killing food made by National Party supporting multinational fast food capitalists!

wants to ban anyone selling children unhealthy food. It should be like tobacco and alcohol. Kids don’t know what’s good for them! I do!

shocked that 84% of schools are still selling hot dogs, sausage rolls, hot bites or pies – no wonder kids are become fat, we need action!

is wondering if she could be elected Mayor of a Wellington supercity

Is sad that so many children were abused over Easter by the multinational chocolate capitalists that seduced their parents.

So I am pretty sure this is a parody account. Mind you Sue does go on about easter eggs a lot.

Then I saw Liberty Scott complaining about Catherine Delahunty’s twitterings. And my first reaction was that he has fallen for a very good parody.

But then I went and looked at Catherine’s twitter account, and I am not so sure it is a parody. Examples:

Gorgeous day in Te tairawhiti unless you want to appeal something to enviro court and dont have five hundred bucks just for filing fee

My mate Grant hawke has it right. Maori have been on the advisory commitee since eighteen forty enough already!

Despite the pretty words and new clothes am hoping new puppy at white house will stop killing afghanis and funding Israel wars on Palestine

Awesome Tairawhiti sunshine a good to start our own banks instead of trusting the white boy club

If it wasnt for almonds and dark chocolate I would go crazy here. As for Michael laws gang Bill who needs It?

Those QPEC people defending public and free education are awesome and palmy north was balmy today

I think it might be genuine.

Two fun opportunities for people interested in the Wellington Central race.

First we have the four main candidates on Backbenches tonight. Stephen Franks, Grant Robertson, Sue Kedgley and Heather Roy. They’;; be talking about the economy, tax cuts and why you should vote for them!

I suspect a big audience tonight so pay to be there early. The show screens at 9.10 pm on TVNZ7.

Also iPredict has launched a set of three Wellington Central stocks.

You can invest in a Grant Robertson victory, a Stephen Franks victory or a “Other” victory in Wellington Central. The share will pay $1 if you win and the initial offer price is 55.5c for Grant, 43.5c for Stephen and 1c for Other.

Advanced investors can also buy a bundle of all three shares for exactly $1. If the combined price of all three is over $1, then you can make money buying the bundle and selling the individual stocks (or just the stock you think is over priced).

Lots to cover in brief. First the Australian political party leader who told off his 17 year old daughter on Facebook, exposing her drunken party photos to the world! Also wonderful is the conversation between two of Alexander Downer’s children on Facebook about why he was so pompous in a photo

Bernard Hickey complains (as I often have done) that we are paying $79 million into TVNZ6 and TVNZ7 yet they won’t make them available on Sky TV. He quotes former TVNZ Head of News Paul Norris in support – they have a reponsibility to make them widely available and could extend them with a flick of a switch to 700,000 households overnight.

Andrew Bolt has a fascinating exchange with an academic over the “stolen generation”. While there certainly is much in Australia’s past that was deplorable (as in NZ), it is apparent that certain portions of it such as the “stolen generation” have been over-hyped. He cites the example of one Aboriginal leader who claimed to be part of the “stolen” generation who was “taken from my family” but in fact was put up for adoption by her father who could not cope with five children.

Lindsay Perigo writes a moving account of his last face to face meal with Anna Woolf, who is dying of brain cancer. Even just reading his account makes the eyes water – I can’t imagine how hard it is for those who are close to Anna, let alone Anna herself.

The Telegraph points out that if Michael Phelps was a country, he would be coming 5th on the Olympic medal table – ahead of Italy, Russia, Australian and Great Britain.

Frog Blog joins Nick Smith on wondering why DOC is spending so much money on a new corporate brand, when it has just laid off 60 workers to save money.

Liberty Scott exposes Sue Kedgley’s scaremongering over cellphone towers. Good God, this debate was settled over a decade ago in terms of science. I’d be more inclined to take Sue’s campaign against the towers seriously if she’d give up her cellphone.

Lindsay Mitchell covers the launch of a second Maori based party. The Hapu Party is led by David Rankin, and three policies to date:

1. To have Maori eligible for the pension at age 56, because of the lower life-expectancy of Maori
2. To introduce a flat rate 18% personal tax and GST rate.
3. To immediately allocate all treaty settlement money directly to hapu and marae

They have me with policy No 2. Policy No 3 is between Iwi and Hapu to resolve in my opinion, and Policy No 1 has no chance. Worryingly for the Maori Party, Rankin also talks of financial irregularities with a Maori Party MP and a SFO complaint.

And the third and final part is just as good. Read this third post by Sue Kedgley. I like this part especially:

The President of one of the main Italian NGO’s, for example, Antonio Duovati, from the Committee for Food Sovereignty, explained that New Zealand is seen, thanks to our flag waving for free trade liberalization policies, as ‘an enemy of the third world’ and a slave of America and Europe.

Oh wow we get to be both an enemy of the third world, and a slave of America and Europe. Do you get badges to go with that?

You know what is really funny. All these people decrying the effort to alleviate the food crisis – I bet you very very few are from countries starving. Sue is quoting oh gosh an Italian NGO. I bet you they are starving. Now fo course you don’t have to be starving to have a view on food policies, but I reckon the views of Sue and her Italian mates that NZ is an enemy of the third world, is not shared by those in the actual third world.

Anyway to make up for all the irresistible Greens bashing, I should point out that Frog has done a very good response to my post on trying to get an overhang in Parliament, and is what I call a partial retreat. I still think they are on somewhat dangerous grounds talking about party votes for the Maori Party being wasted, because they are only wasted if there is overhang. One you get past an overhang situation, a party vote for one Party is just as valuable as a party vote for any other party which makes the threshold. But nice to have a thoughtful response.

Oh it gets even better. The first blog post from Sue Kedgley sees her blaming free trade for the third world food crisis (and contradicting herself as she complains about subsidies). Now it gets even worse – Bill Gates and GE rear their head. Read Sue’s second blog post:

It was to be expected, but still a shock, to find Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation at the conference (they weren’t excluded like the NGOs) launching a new bold sounding “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

Good God. They let Bill Gates in. How dare they. I mean his charitable foundation only spends US$800 million a year on global health initiatives – almost more than the UN’s WHO. And with the Rockefeller Foundation have only invested US$150 million to enhance agricultural science and small-farm productivity in Africa.

The cads. We should shoot them at dawn. How dare they be allowed into a conference to discuss helping solve the food crisis.

The Rockefeller foundation are also evil doers. All they have done is develop the vaccine for yellow fever, funded social sciences and funded agricultural development to expand food supplies around the world. The heartless bastards. They have been so sucessful at health and food that the UN WHO was set up on their model, and they are actually credited with funding the Green Revolution in the 1940s to 1960s which increased agricultural production around the planet.

So maybe you know they are not totally bad people to have there.

But what were these bastards doing:

In partnership with various UN agencies, aimed at ‘lifting millions out of poverty and hunger by increasing the  productivity and profitability of small scale farms in Africa.

My goodness, the very thing Sue was complaining about in her previous post – that local farming was unsustainable.

a bold journalist asked directly whether the seeds would be genetically engineered.  They then admitted that some would be, such as a new strain of Nevica rice which ‘takes the flavour of Asia and the robustness of rice in West Africa to produce a high yielding rice.

Oh my God. How sick are those people. They want to produce a high yielding rice which is more robust. We can have no part of that. Far better people starve than we use technology.

I was not allowed to speak at the conference, or attend any bilateral meetings or negotiating sessions

And I never thought I would be saying this, but let us hear three big cheers for Jim Anderton. He may have saved NZ global embarrassment.

I encourage everyone to go read the blog post by Sue Kedgley on the World Food Conference in Rome. It is a stunning example of madness and extremism.

They argued that the main cause of the crisis was that food production in much of the developing world has been decimated by three decades of globalization and free trade liberalization policies. Previously self sufficient countries had been unable to compete with heavily subsidized, cheap European and American food and so small self sufficient agricultural sectors collapsed in country after country, leaving developing countries dependent on imports and food aid.

Now read this carefully. In the first sentence she blames the food crisis on free trade liberalization policies (never mind even the very lefty UN is blaming it on biofuels and saying free trade is the solution), and then in the second sentence she complains about heavily subsidized cheap food undermining local agricultural sectors.

Earth to Sue – come in Sue. That is protectionism – the very thing you are in favour of. People who support free trade like me want subsidies and tariffs to be abolished. That way those countries which can most efficiently produce food, get to do so. I suspect Africa would boom in terms of food production if indeed one can get Europe and the US to remove their subsidies and tariffs.

It is scary that a long serving MP can not know the difference between free trade and protectionism. I think this shows that the anti globalisation fanatics have just started to use it as a slogan. Anything they are against they label as free trade and globalisation.

NZPA through Stuff report that Sue Kedgley will again be the Green Party candidate for Wellington Central.

WC is the highest party vote in NZ for The Greens. I thought they might stand Russel Norman there this time as he is a co-leader, and would attract even more attention.

National makes it selection tonight. I’ll blog it when known. I think it will be very close.