The Blue Stain

Video by Liz Gunn

You will likely know Liz Gunn as a NZ media personality who now runs the FreeNZ news platform. The content is controversial by mainstream standards and generally politically incorrect by government standards.

Recently as discussed in the post Gunning For Liz is a cancel-culture pile-on from a group of generally mainstream media.

This followed an altercation at Auckland Airport with Airport Police, Gunn and her cameraman.

The video itself traverses significant ground, leaping from subject to subject which is not helpful in terms of being objective about any one particular issue – in that respect it tends to support a rebellion against authority in general rather than any specific corruption.

The allegations leveled at police though should not be glossed over. They represent a snapshot of police brutality that needs to be recognized for what it is rather than dismissed as justified thuggery.

This harks back to the parliamentary protest and the propaganda-reporting that was supposedly justified by, ‘The Emergency’.

I can give an objective opinion, because I was there (apart from the odd foray into the city) the whole time, and one of the few journalists that bothered doing the nightshift.

There are two things that should be mentioned, among the omissions and misinformation of the mainstream.

1. The majority of the protestors were women. Health workers, including doctors, teachers, and regardless of their reasons, unemployed due to mandates. This was a conflict for Ardern in not addressing the, River of Filth, as Michael Wood put it as had Ardern fronted on the steps of Parliament she would have faced the venom of her own gender, many of whom had supported her on that basis but now dispised her politics.
2. In the week leading up to the final confrontation, the Defence and Police mandate verdict dramatically altered the emphasis of the protest. For many that was the moral victory that foreshadowed Ardern’s eventual departure, even if that took almost another year. So, the protest had begun to wind down. Instead of significantly ramping up the following weekend most of Lampton Quay had cleared out. The heavy vehicles, trucks and busses had departed.

When the final assault began on the Wednesday numbers had retreated further. What was left was essentially a village of women who, although despite the mandates now being recognised as illegal still had no job. They did not have their careers restored, nor their loses compensated.

The number of men that participated in the final conflict was insignificant compared to 600 police not to mention the imposters that arrived on the last day simply for the gratuitous violence against police.

If you’ve watched the video, the allegation of inbred hostility is not something that should be dismissed lightly.

For those women that want to claim equality and fight like a man, bear the consequences. Generally women are still the vulnerable gender in society often in situations, that require recognition and protection.

I certainly hope Commissioner Coster takes a good hard look at what is alleged in this video and dwells on what his own legacy might be.

Watch The Mandate Announcement.

https://fb.watch/j5_aksd8hm/

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The Auckland Swamp

Wayne Brown has been elected Mayor of Auckland City and whether he likes it or not he’s being talked up as a head-busting swamp-draining “Warrior Without Woke” limitations.

Wayne Brown

That has had some people resign already and will have others wondering if they will keep their job within the Auckland City Council.

It’s been an issue in the building for a while – an admission made to me that it was an easy place for some people to get a job that they didn’t deserve or wasn’t required.

The upside though, is that there will be many people in Auckland who wanted to know that it was worthwhile having another go.

Those hard call moments in business, if you haven’t been in that position, can be hard to understand. They are tough life decisions in hard times.

Do I keep going? Dare I have a go?

For Auckland, Brown will be a very visual incentive to thousands of people. At times, that’s all it takes – the knowledge that other people are singing to a tune called self-responsibility.

Given that our national politics is at a standstill, stalled by a government defending unwanted policy, and a compromised Opposition, our local body initiatives are paramount to a recovery that starts now, rather than after the 2023 election.

Auckland is one of two places I’ve got my eye on, and rightfully so as journalism can play a important role in assisting any recovery.

Tania Tapsell

Rotorua is the other.

In both cases with right-wing Mayors fresh in the job, woke journalism chasing sob stories rather than success stories will be a hindering, rather than a helpful force.

Auckland is still the centre of secondary GDP, and Rotorua could be the heart of tourism again, but realistically it’s Tapsell that has the tougher job ahead of her.

Queen Elizabeth 11

The Septic Pond

#MallardMustGo was a long and desperate plea to see Trevor Mallard’s tail feathers gracing the horizon.

I’m not sure that it eventually happened but rather that the liability of Speaker Trevor remaining became untenable. What stories he tells in Ireland, when he arrives there as the next Ambassador for New Zealand, will have time to mature over Christmas.

His parliamentary slide, either way you look at that, ended up as scorched earth. Probably just as well with regard to his parliamentary toy; it would have been a lamentable tourist attraction in the grounds of parliament.

New Zealand’s parliamentary spectacle hasn’t been Mallard’s alone – if anyone must bear responsibility for that, it is our second-term prime minister Jacinda Ardern and her willingness to tolerate the lamentable incompetence of her caucus colleagues.

While we are lamenting … the indignity we’ve endured from overseas media stating the obvious about New Zealand’s administration, is the responsibility of our media industry having sold its principles for pretty pictures.

I’m going to gather the best of those reviews here.

[“News From The Pond” was a social media phrase attached to Mallard’s latest exploits. Fair to say that New Zealand is a ‘Septic Pond’ by comparison to the country Labour inherited after “9 long years of National.”]

Sky News 19 August 2022

https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/new-zealand-prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-accused-of-lying-and-overseeing-a-coverup-of-the-partys-bullying-culture/news-story/c9a402d835d129d7c253cc5516ae5ae7

And it was predicted where woke politics would take us a year back from this post:

Supermarket Checkout Conversations – 2017

The power of Facebook to bring back memories, even though it is such a sad occasion as the 2017 election.

I wrote that particular post for two reasons:

Firstly, because on the lack of understanding of MMP by some voters.

Second, as a reflection of Northland politics, Shane Jones and Winston Peters both being in NZ First.

This post, is a reminder that NZ First are hopeful of a return to parliament in 2023.

Liz Truss

Liz Truss

Britain’s new prime minister embraces a narrower than expected win over rival Rishi Sunak. It has been suggested that he might have won but for the fine tuning of his campaign.

Typically, Conservatives turn up to the fiasco to fix the mess. They’re generally regarded as safe hands in a crises, and expected to inspire confidence, and exhibit strong leadership on the way back to normal life.

Those expectations and challenges lie ahead of Truss as the UK continues to recover from the politically generated catastrophy called Covid.

Boris Johnson, has left the stage with the sting of the pandemic in his tail and won’t be remembered for much else apart from his bad hair days.

Did Johnson get the big calls right? That’s typically the mantra and probably not one that will be kind to Johnson. Truss, also doesn’t come with an inspirational history and will need to prove herself from day one.

Truss has her doubters and her first 100 days will be critical to market reaction and public expectations as the UK faces, like most other Western economies, a battle with the cost of living.

I’m not going to waste words on what doesn’t need to be said now. In a situation like we have now, getting there was the easy part.

The world will be watching.

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Immediate support for Truss not so charitable.

One month on.

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/30/opinions/liz-truss-economic-policy-disaster-ghitis/index.html

Subsequent Post

https://bcbnzblogcomponent.wordpress.com/2022/10/15/much-fuss-about-truss/

A Spring Saturday

I was so tired last night, for a moment I even thought I might be dying. I’m old enough to be allowed to think that, though.
After the frenetic weeks we’ve had, I’m sure I’m not the only one who experienced this – if you think we’ve inherited an insane world from this government, you’re not alone.

Call it hit the wall if you like but there are people dying when they shouldn’t be.
That’s a conversation we’re struggling to have, even though it’s a global experience for the Western World.

The European Parliament appears to be the only rational governor with their current investigations, while the UK media do raise the issue in a broader fashion than US sensationalism of it, and as excess mortality scratches at the surface in Australia, it is glibly ignored in New Zealand.

It’s accepted, and these stats aren’t even hidden behind official information. I put that to the test this week and got a reply from Stats NZ the same day. It may be hard to make sense of though when you look at what is presented but after discussing this with qualified people, yes we do have excess mortality – it’s happening but the staggering omission is that we are not rushing to see if, this is adversley impacting Māori and Pacifica.

Meanwhile our fearless government carries on its insane deliberations about masks, mandates, and any other mindless matters, that might distract us from real world problems.

For those adversley affected it’s possibly a situation similar to suicide were families are reluctant to have that discussion in public. I know how hard we fought against the Clark government over the media restrictions 20 years ago. That was something I inadvertently got dragged into, had a wtf moment and joined the battle. The Press Council as it was then were equally the enemy. We obtained the statistics by stealth and published them on a blog in an act of rebellion – it does worry me though that what you’re reading now is the current act of rebellion, if a government were to consider this misinformation.

This week we’ve had a discussion about the most inept government the country has ever had. Possibly because it didn’t fall over like many might have expected. Even though the Duck has gone, the water still runs off. Ardern and her mish-mash executive carry on in their own remote fantasy world removed from our reality.

You might think this is different to the Clark Government but it is not. We had 100s of protestors not 1000s. John Tamihere talked about civil war, while we fought over the foreshore and seabed and the Chinese wanted to take black sand from the beaches rather than trees from the Solomon’s as they are now. Even Brian Tamaki was in that picture too, with a political distraction named, Destiny Party.

It’s a bigger version of what was happening then. We didn’t talk about people being awake, we asked what colour the elephant was today and whether Tarzan would recognise an elephant coming over a hill if it were wearing sunglasses. 

The idea that National and Labour are two wings of the same seagull shitting on us has gained more popularity recently. It’s been that way for the last 60 years, post war, but has never been so obvious nor as disfunctional as we see now. It’s been a gradual process previously described as a slow motion train wreck or the silent war.

Today, I’m left asking myself what do we do now?

Much of my time recently has been invested in defending human rights in Tokelau, they are in more turmoil than us, even if we are talking about only 1500 people. But should that matter?

We have this disastrous situation of idiots wandering about our Parliament making rules or deciding what rules ‘we’ might make today. The issue is the same between those 1500 people in Tokelau and the 5 million people on their mainland even if those comparisons are not obviously discussed.

We’ve lost our functionality and our democratic processes to some fake emergency and have no effective governance.

I have been in the camp of an early election (this year rather than next) as I think many others are and have been working towards.

So, on this Spring Saturday, we’ve arrived at this, pregnant pause, about what to do. I picked that particular term as I was told yesterday that Tokelau has seen a string of medical emergencies with pregnant women. They’re almost 100% jabbed.

Unlike us Tokelau live in a media blackout rather than the media confrontation that we’re fortunate to have here. Our fledgling alternative media may lack professionalism, expertise, experience, standards, but not enthusiasm, determination, and courage and a willingness. If you’ve been watching you’ll see the significant contribution recently that’s brought out government hostility. The reason is quite simple. We’ve been giving their mainstream propaganda a real hiding.

That makes the government look publically stupid and irrelevant to progress. That’s a significant point. The same place the Soviet Union was in, where media had to make a decision.

It was a media decision in a situation like we have now that caused the actual collapse of the USSR.
What happens next realistically sits with a few editors, and if you were wondering why they meet online on a Monday morning, with the PMs propaganda team, that’s probably the best answer you’ll get.

Go with grace.

Our Distuped Days

“Emergency and Media” are capable of causing mass hysteria, which is what we’ve seen during New Zealand’s covid response. Dr Matt Shelton, in a recent video described what he saw as weapons grade psychology in action.

Ardern welcomed, “Our new normal” This ‘disturbed and disrupted’ environment we find ourselves in – our ‘Distupted Days’.
We’re each in our own ‘distupted’ environment trying to make sense of our consequential circumstances.

“Waking people up” is not new, either. This term appears in history as a known response to these reoccurring situations:
And here we are …

I consulted some friends in literature. Charles Dickens replied, “Definitely needs a new word … ‘Distupted’ … Very Dickenson.”

Others were quick to join the conversation.

James Barrie, “If it’s happened before it can happen again.”
Samuel Clemens, “History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Malcolm Gladwell, “Little things can make a big difference.”
Wendell Wilkie, “Education is the mother of leadership.”

Writers have a contemporary responsibility. The greatest exercise of the mind, I like to call it. An examination of the moment has produced many good books, in the past, not the least of which is “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens which was published first, as a series of newspaper editorials.

I’m sure you have your own favorite book, or perhaps now, a favorite YouTube clip, that you find some sense in – the return of the word, if it hasn’t been censored yet.

Perhaps not you? You’re happy with your piece of the world and cannot understand why others are not.

Why a mass of demonstrators would gather at parliament, chanting, “Love and Peace” and “Freedom” and carrying a confusing array of banners.

The resistance didn’t disappear underground as it has in past events – it stood its ground and Resistance Media fired up around the country, the opposite to what has happened in comparable situations in media history.

“Hold the line” was the protest chant when police confronted protestors at the Parliament Protest in February and since, a media possy of failed journalists has produced endless propaganda to finally arrive at its recent pinnacle of “Fire and Fury”. A media product of our Stuffed News.

Certainly not the glory days of journalism.

And the day after this week’s protest at parliament the news was quickly out that new figures just to hand can reveal that our police expended nearly four million dollars at the February Protest.

Not everyone is blind to the consequences of the current administration and their distupted outcomes.

Mallard and Ardern have totally eroded any sense of decorum, decency and democracy in New Zealand Parliament. Holding the Govt to account is core to our democracy.

DemocracyNZ

Our future stability has its obligations, even if it is little things like continuing to point out the obvious.

in other news …

Target Obsession

This is not statire.

There may be an official definition in a psychology journal (But not one I’ve found) otherwise “Target Obsession” may live in the realm of the obsessive compulsive disorder.

Perhaps though, it’s a man-made self-imposed disability. A learned behavior where we busily create our own dumb result.

The phenomenon may turn out to be more widespread than any initial observation, once we’ve put our contemporary behavior through some critical analysis.

First there has to be a problem or a reason to create a purpose. Whether that’s real, imagined or fictitious is irrelevant.

Once we have established that situation and feel we need a resolution we are on a path of, what do we do, and how do we do it.

I tend to think though that if the problem is real the target or result should satisfy the purpose.

If the problem is fictitious, and the purpose and the outcome dubious the purpose becomes keeping control, and meeting the target to justify the behavior.

Sound familiar?

If your thinking doesn’t automatically go to our covid response then I’d really like to know if you have a better example.

Target Obsession

Of course, we went target-mad over the jab.

The doubters will be in at this stage, calling me everything from anti-Ardern hater to whatever but the situation is not new to me.

I’ve seen these target mythologies invading business over many years. Something I had an intense dislike for and studiously avoided. Not that there shouldn’t be reasonable targets but not at the expense of a well researched purpose.

I’m sure I’ve got a few business heads nodding, and reminiscing over how much that one cost and what a waste.

What got me started on this, is more important.

I was listening to an analysis of the Dutch Farmer’s Protest and the policy pathway that led to the current mass disorder in Europe … and there it was.

The further down the policy tract, the more excessive the target became, the more unrealistic the demands were, and the more ridiculous the expectations.

And of course, the inevitable result is a conflict that is close to civil war with police drawing weapons with live rounds against protestors.

So, no I didn’t do a Clint V Smith just to target Labour’s Covid Response, they did it themselves, and yes we should be having a Royal Commission, looking into the our Covid Response and not a rigged commission excusing the stupidity and the costs whether financial or real.

50 Years of the Big D

DISCRIMINATION

When we look at the significant criticism of the US Supreme Court by both the Prime minister, Jacinda Ardern and Foreign Minister, Nanaia Mahuta along with a chorus of support, of course there is more to it.

Politics is very, in our face these days. So much so that we are tied to the moment rather than an awareness of generations of change.

The 50 years referred to in the headline is the period from 1975 – 2025: Are we there yet? Not quite?

The time frame is regarded as the essential liberation of women rather than discrimination against men – The War on Men: the casualties of peace.

I’m curious to see if there will be any backlash, any real acknowledgement, any change … as women’s demands were an essential element in downfall of the City of Rome, and we’re very much in a similar global space now.

Still, this is only a recent snapshot of the centuries of activism that was interrupted by the World Wars then rekindled  alongside the post-war development of the United Nations.

In 1975 following the Vietnam War protests, where women cut their teeth on modern political activism, we had an International Women’s Year and their  Mexico Conference.

That set in motion a variety of treaties, initiatives, organisations, and demands on the attention of democratic governments to create non government organisations to support women.

The initiative of global conferences went on to 1985 (Nairobi) 1995 (Beijing) – With the appearance of, Hillary Clinton.

• There were a myriad of other associated conferences but in 2004 something else happened – The Women’s Conference, renamed in 2004, had started as the California Governor & First Lady’s Conference on Women in 1985.

That was the end of the regular international conferences of a decade and while a variety of other women’s conferences continued, women’s initiatives essentially become synonymous with the United Nations development programme for women.

By this stage we had in New Zealand the rise of Helen Clark as a second term PM, and a not entirely unturbulent relationship between Clark and Clinton who would later famously say of Clark, ” … her opponents have observed that in the event of a nuclear war, the two things that will emerge from the rubble are the cockroaches and Helen Clark.”

That was in 2008 suggesting the animosity and competition was not only alive and well but also around Clark’s potential future appointment to a position in the United Nations.

Putting aside the specific abortion issue you can see there is much more to the global competition of women than first meets the eye and that’s a good starting point when looking at why our political women are so concerned about events in far away places.