Here’s the tape that’s caused all the fuss. Fairfax has confirmed that it’s the real thing.

After listening to it, you might well decide that it is truly a storm in a teacup. But – it got Winston Peters and his motley crew into Parliament, so the PM may now be wishing he’d released it on the spot!

It’s difficult to decipher, but here’s a link to a transcript on The Jackal’s blog.

Time for a little light relief. Brilliant mock-advertisement by Jesse Rosten.

Photo: Dorothea Lange

Today  the Herald published a story lamenting the extra cost of local, free-range and organic foods, the very foods we’re being encouraged to buy and eat.  They estimate that the clean, green Kiwi options cost us on average 25% more. For people on a limited budget, that isn’t an option at all.

The Taranaki Daily News got closer to the heart of the problem with a story headlined ‘Free food draws poor kids to class’.  It quotes principals from Taranaki schools who say that some of their students rely on their school to provide breakfast and even lunch, just to survive.

Poverty in New Zealand is a problem we often conveniently ignore, preferring to see our country as a land of milk and honey.  Unfortunately, milk and honey are off the menu for hundreds of thousands of Kiwis. More than 200,000 of our kids are living below the poverty line; over 48,000 of them go to school without breakfast.  

This is a disgrace. No child in this country should go hungry. No New Zealand child should be cold or ill-clothed or living in an unhealthy or overcrowded house.  No child should be denied an education just because learning is too hard when you arrive at school cold, wet and hungry – if you get there at all.

The government has prioritised a number of policies to stimulate the economy in an effort to get us out of the current recession. None of these policies, to my mind, tackles head-on the most urgent task of all – eliminating ‘child poverty’.

This should be the number one priority. Nothing is more important. Nothing is going to stimulate the economy better in the long run than having our kids grow up healthy and well educated.  It’s a damn sight more important than ultra-fast broadband and super-highways.

‘Child poverty’  is a misleading term. It implies that the only people affected are the children.  But every child living in poverty is part of a household that is also living in poverty.  Whether that’s the result of generations of welfare dependency or a lack of jobs is not the issue.  The issue is how to break the cycle and get these kids into a situation where we can be confident they have a better future – by giving them a better present.

Brian and I used to support hungry kids in Africa; today our donations go to Kids Can to support hungry kids in New Zealand. If you’d suggested a few years ago that people might need to do this, we’d have scoffed.

But this isn’t a problem that can be solved by donations and charities and volunteers. This needs a full-frontal government assault; it needs policies and budgets and resources; it needs cross-party co-operation.  Above all, it needs the courage to accept the reality of the problem, and the will to make this shameful situation one of the past.

While this website is generally a sports-free-zone, I can’t resist sharing this – possibly the greatest fluke in soccer!

TV3 has a line-up of excellent regular newsreaders, both male and female. They present the news clearly and cleanly, and manage to avoid the contrived and cringe-making wordplay that litters TVOne’s bulletins.

However, the final bulletin for the year had the female newsreader labelling Diane Foreman an ‘entreprenyure’ – rhymes with ‘manure’ – and her male counterpart telling us about ‘nucyular’ capacity and Russell Brand’s ‘sex addition’. Tonight’s presenters are both familiar faces, but the channel didn’t give us their names. Wisely, perhaps.

Accurate pronunciation should be a prerequisite for  those who make their living presenting television and radio bulletins, as should the ability to read short pieces aloud without making a complete twit of oneself, and just because we’re in the silly season doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect English-as-a-first-language from the network’s stand-in presenters.

Take two aspirin and wait for Caroline, Hillary, Mike and Simon to return…

With our myriad children and grandchildren scattered to the winds we tend to hold our ‘traditional’ Christmas (presents and excessive over-eating and drinking) on Boxing Day, when we’ve a better chance of collecting some of them from the airport.

The main event of our Christmas Day is usually elevenses with Mimosas and muffins for all and sundry (followed by a nice lie down for much of the afternoon).  Many of our friends find a couple of glasses of bubbles help to soothe the way through nerve-wracking family events, and stagger off to greet Auntie Sue with less stomach-churning dread than sobriety could offer. Others just like the idea of being mildly pissed before lunchtime. It’s noisy and fun and we never know  if we’ll be catering for a dozen or fifty.

This year we volunteered to be Santa’s Helpers at the City Mission Christmas Dinner.

New Zealand’s Biggest Family Christmas Dinner has now grown to proportions that are either a) heartwarming or b) an indictment on our society. Being Christmas Day I’m not going to go into full flight about NZ’s poverty problem. I’ll save that for New Year – be warned!

This is Christmas lunch done in style. There are well-known and talented entertainers who give up their time to sing and dance throughout; there are enough treats on the tables to give every kid in Auckland a sugar fix; there’s a slap-up meal followed by pudding and Christmas cake; there is an age and gender-appropriate  present for every single person.

The Mission organises it, the armed services do the catering and around 450 volunteers direct, greet, serve, select and hand out presents and then clean up  – and a ton of other jobs associated with a flash mob lunch. It’s a full military operation and it runs like one. It’s also cheerful and exhausting chaos for much of the time as anything and everything can happen, usually does and is dealt to without fuss.

The Mission was expecting around 1800 people for lunch at the giant new Events Centre this year. 1800! We ended up with trestles and tables being hastily laid in every spare space and then over-flowing onto the pavement to accommodate the queues of people who started arriving before 11 o’clock and snaked for what looked like miles, patiently waiting to get in. I don’t know how many people were fed, but it has to be well over 2000.

Apart from a very few, they arrived hopeful and went away happy. They laughed and joked and thanked us with courtesy and sincerity. They were a delight.

I wanted a photo to show the scale of this fantastic Christmas Day enterprise. I can’t find one on the net yet, so meantime you’ll have to settle for one of the Christmas elves, whom I managed to snap with my phone. (Photo now added below)

Santa’s Little Helpers now have sore feet and a glass of wine in hand, and huge admiration for the City Mission and all the people who make this happen, so that no-one in Auckland has to spend Christmas alone or unfed.

Hope your Christmas Day has been a happy one. Ours has.

A very happy and peaceful Christmas season to you all.

This year’s billboard from St Matthew-in-the-City. Ya gotta love them!

One of the hundreds of flametrees in bloom in Rarotonga.

Rational thought and argument currently suspended in favour of slothfulness and self-indulgence.