Published today in New Zealand matters:
As ye sow, so shall ye reap
Our dear leader, Czarina Helen, adopted an aristocratic disdain for anyone who didn’t toe her line even more quickly than that other political bully Rob Muldoon. For 8 years, through fearsome competence and an enormous capacity for doing everybody else’s job, she’s got away with sneering at you and me via the media when tough questions were posed.
This time she seems to have underestimated the resentment her high handed tactics have fuelled. Displaying hubris worthy of Ozymandias she and her yes-men have bulldozed ahead with draconian legislation which has got people’s backs up.
Despite the National opposition having been hiding their guttering lamp under a bushel for months, the polls have given them a dose of rocket fuel and dealt Labour a sucker punch. The usually canny Greens after playing “Me too” have also felt the backlash and rightly so.
It’s early days yet, but riding roughshod over freedom of speech is a good way of provoking a massive defection of swinging voters – those are the ones who actually think things out rather than doing what their father did.
To add insult to injury she preceded this outrageous attack on democracy with the cynical de facto promotion of Trevor Mallard as punishment for his unacceptable Mohammed Ali impersonation in the lobby of the House.
The Exclusive Brethren made me do it
Yeah, right.
Although the Brethren are well endowed with hubris themselves – not to mention breathtaking hypocrisy – their ill-judged campaign against Labour in 2005 was never going to have much influence. Kiwis, even politicians and sect leaders, are mostly quite astute when it comes to plying their vote.
This legislation won’t change anything except maybe the advertising income of the big daily newspapers. Ways will be found to ignore or circumvent the law. The legal profession will make a bundle.
When the Law Society, the Human Rights Commission and the Electoral Commission all cry foul, it pays to listen.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away
Thanks Percy.
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