A bloody elephant

I don’t believe I have ever, since arriving at voting age, voted Tory – in NZ that is the National Party.  My father regarded it as axiomatic that one would and should vote National.  He had got it into his head that, by and large, Labour (Socialist) MPs, by definition without private means, needed to be employed by the state and to draw a salary as MPs in order to eat.  National MPs by contrast were generally free of the need for any extra income, and were therefore in politics solely for the nation’s good.  

I knew when I first heard him propound this that it was utter humbug.   My sister votes National because she thinks they are “safe hands” and that is what matters.   I have always voted Labour, mainly because of their impressive history in NZ and because, at their best, they are genuinely principled.  Of course there have always been some ratbags and opportunists.  But now, ere the next general election in late 2014, I will have turned 80.  I find I am very tempted by the Greens. 

One of the many reasons is that they attract such contempt and vitriol from the Tories and others that, as it seems to me, they must be doing something right.  It is almost as though the powerful commercial interests and the diehard conservatives and “Right To Rule” lot, the “Natural Party of Government”, are actually afraid of the Greens.  The Greens, being so often factually and inconveniently correct, telling the truth, actually impede things the powerful want to do.  So you caricature them, ridicule, laugh contemptuously, make jokes about muesli – above all, avoid the issues.

It’s interesting…  As I write, a small flotilla of protest boats has arrived off the North Island’s west coast where the major oil consortium Andarko proposes to drill into the seabed.  Oil prospecting off our coast horrifies me, not only for its clear environmental dangers, but also for the fact that we do need to find alternatives to fossil fuels.  The Greens and others were prepared to confront the oil rig and its ancillary craft – but the rig failed to show up.  Well, well, well…   Maybe it will still come up over the horizon. 

Scoffing at principles and idealists has been a pleasant sport for as long as I can remember.  Cynics and realists are the ones who get rich and wield power.  But now it seems clear enough that all this is destroying the world our grandchildren will inherit. 

Climate change is not my specialty.  But to this layman observer it seems that extreme weather events are more frequent and more severe, with more consequences. It may very soon spiral out of control – well, control is clearly already an illusion.

So...  It is important now to deny political power to the climate change deniers and the remaining scientific mavericks on the bastions – as also to those who don’t care one way or another, so long as they get what they want and hang the consequences.  It is important to remove the pompous, comfortable and powerful from politics, to challenge their rule at every point. 

 I can see very well that the Green Party includes some wackos, vegetarians, millenarians, and women with no bras.  (Yes, OK, I’ll come quietly…)

I also have problems with the sanctity accorded to the Treaty of Waitangi and Te Reo.  Maori plundered the environment in their own ways, long ago, and without hindrance.  Our environment’s collapse will be without regard to ethnic status.

Then there is the latest spectacle of our Prime Minister, John Key, at CHOGM in Sri Lanka.  Yes, he assured us, he was certainly going to get tough about human rights and the hideous abuse thereof over many years in Sri Lanka.  He was going to confront the president about that very thing.  But in the event, smiling plausible John toned it all down in the interests of money, trade and Fonterra – and gratefully received the gift of an elephant for the Auckland Zoo.  Isn’t that wonderful!  Just what we need.  A bloody elephant. 

 

 

 

Re-victimisation

Any mere male who sticks his head above the parapet during the prevailing frenzy about “Roastbusters” risks getting it blown off.  I feel safe enough however, since nobody reads this blog anyway.  The Roastbusters are a few adolescent males who have been bragging on line about their sexual conquests of young and under-age girls.  They first get these girls drunk, then gang-rape them. 

Of course it is without excuse.  Now we are having protest marches in all NZ’s main centres and some towns, we have petitions demanding everything up to actual emasculation, we have howls about alleged police prevarication and incompetence, we have endless moral posturing, we have politicians diving for cover.  Two prominent radio talkback blokes on something called Radio Live have been forced off the air.  They had made specious, ignorant, blokeish remarks on the issue, and were immediately crushed by widespread feminist ferocity.

Something else is going on here, at another level, and I wish I could see more clearly what it is.  Is it an anti-men splurge?  Auckland has just been treated to the spectacle of its mayor, a practicing Roman Catholic, caught in adultery.  We have had inane commentary from his girlfriend and her subsidiary lover called Luigi.  All this is less than edifying, and it has brought out all our hypocrites and assorted moralists.  The secular culture seems to have a permanent underlying level of anger.  There is much talk about the need for “heads to roll”, and people “demanding answers”. 

What we are not allowed to do is “blame the victims”.  This is called revictimisation.  Evidently these young women are blameless, which I find difficult to believe.  It is not compulsory to drink at all or to get drunk.  We are being told that these girls, being young and/or drunk, are not capable of consent.  That’s interesting too.  It seems that the females who have long been demanding equality in everything, want to exempt themselves from responsibility when it comes to consent to sexual activity.  The blokes have responsibility for their decisions but the girls don’t. 

Under-age sex is a crime, consent or not.  And rightly so, it seems to me.  Rape is a crime also.  Otherwise, I am inclined to think, the girls have to accept responsibility for their own choices, and so do the blokes.  Crime, if it has happened, should be reported.  If there are problems with that – the police not taking you seriously, or hassles with court procedure or the rules of evidence – then our Justice and Police Ministers should cease posturing and fluffing around and come up with solutions. 

Documenting one’s alleged sexual exploits on the web is unpleasant, juvenile, a kind of public exhibitionism.  Surely there are ways of simply blocking such nonsense on Facebook or wherever it happens. 

But this is an alcohol-sodden culture.  What else do we expect?  The activities that have whipped up such a storm lately are the direct and predictable outcome of our way of life – hedonism, alcohol and drugs, the macho culture, kids leaving school without having achieved anything worthwhile, the collapse of decent family structure, to say nothing of the much-vaunted marae, mindless and pointless sport-ridden secularism.  What we are seeing flows naturally from what has become of our culture.