To make things fairer, we need to equip ducks with small heat-seeking missiles, triggered by the sound of shotgun fire, and programmed to zero in on the occupants of maimai across the land.  With any luck the project will be underway in time for next year’s ‘Bag a Duckshooter Season’.

Meanwhile here’s a foretaste, drawn to my attention by Q.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R8prS1jsvI

But there was a mystery here. There was seating for 10,000 people at the Simon and Garfunkel concert in the Vector Arena, so how could the seats have sold out so quickly. Eleanor took her story to Fair Go.

Turns out all 10,000 tickets were gone by 9.17. Amazing? Well not when you consider that three quarters of those 10,000 tickets had gone on sale a week earlier. But not to the general public. 7500 tickets had been snapped up by Visa cardholders who had signed up to be part of Visa Entertainment. Only a quarter of the 10,000 tickets were available to the general public.

Eleanor thought this was a bit on the nose and so did Fair go. Shouldn’t the public know how many tickets are available for sale to them and how many have been pre-sold to preferential buyers?

Well no, said the show’s promoters, an Australian outfit called Chugg Entertainment.  And no, said Ticketmaster, the agency selling the tickets. And no, said Visa Entertainment. And they all said that this information was ‘commercially sensitive’, which is total bullshit. And none of them had the grace or the gumption or the guts to turn up on Fair Go.

So all three had their names put up on Fair Go’s ‘Wall of Shame’ which is where they all belong.

An appalling performance and a classic example of how not to deal with a justified complaint, if you want to come out smelling of roses.

A rather better performance was put up by Auckland’s Sky City Casino on the same programme.

The story was about a promotion the Casino had run where you could win $20,000 just by walking in the door. You didn’t even have to place a bet  All you had to do was wear a wristband you were given with a ticket number on it and wait for the winning number to be called. Which is exactly what Fair Go complainant Josie did. And, to her amazement and delight, her number came up. 

But Josie’s delight was short-lived. She’d taken the wristband off and that was against Sky City’s Rules and Conditions for the promotion. Bye, bye 20 grand. Josie, who claimed she had neither seen nor heard anything about Terms and Conditions took her story to Fair Go.

Turned out you could see the Terms and Conditions – all 22 clauses of fine print – by going to the ‘action station’ and asking for them. This, as Fair Go rightly observed, was ridiculous. And, Sky City claimed, announcements were made saying that if you removed the wristband you would void the competition.

To its credit, Sky City sent along one of its executives, Kevin Tracey, to talk to Kevin Milne.

Kevin was pretty good, He accepted that Josie hadn’t heard any announcements about Terms and Conditions, agreed that the Terms and Conditions needed to be more obvious, explained the quite justifiable reasons for the rule about not removing the wristband and, most  important of all, brought alone a truck-sized cheque for $20,000 to give to Josie who was naturally over the moon.

So Kevin ticked all the boxes on how to deal with a potential PR disaster: front up, admit your mistake, offer a remedy.

But if we can nitpick just a little, the best thing to do when you’re interviewed on a programme like Fair Go, is just answer the questions. Don’t use your appearance as a PR opportunity to promote your company or sell your product. It annoys viewers and they see through it.

The first question Kev asked Kevin was: ‘Why does it matter if someone’s wearing a wristband or not?’

To which Kevin non-replied: ‘Kevin, first I should say this has been a fantastic promotion for Sky City. Over the last four months we’ve given away a million dollars to 40 or 50 very happy people. And you know 135 thousand of those wristbands have been given out.’

This is the equivalent of the retailer telling you that they’ve sold 500 thousand of these toasters without a single complaint and yours is the first to explode and burn down the house.

Later, when Kev says to Kevin, ‘You’ve got some good news for us, which is the cue to hand over the cheque, Kevin replies, ‘I should say that for us this is about one of our customers having an experience that we don’t want her to have. We want her to have that winning feeling, but without the deflationary bit. So it’s not about the law.’ [Translation: We did this out of the goodness of our hearts, not because we were obliged to do it.]

Better just to hand over the cheque, which Kevin then does. But he can’t resist one final comment on Josie’s delighted response: ‘This is what the Sky City experience is supposed to be about, Kevin.’

Well, I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but for most people ‘the Sky City experience’ is about doing you dough.

But that’s another story. Congratulations Kevin. Overall a really good effort.

McCarten’s argument is that Labour bosses were so fearful of a return to Parliament by Judith Tizard that they persuaded Twyford to fall on his sword, possibly with the promise of the Auckland Central nomination in 2011. With the departure of Helen Clark, I no longer have the inside gen on the Labour Party, but McCarten’s thesis at least sounds plausible.

Labour’s handling of this issue, more than ably assisted not merely by the right-wing press and bloggers, but by the media at large, has been less than pretty. Tizard must have been reluctant to open a newspaper, listen to the radio or turn on her television set over the past few weeks, so venomous has the comment been about her.

Meanwhile the media, and seemingly the party hierarchy, appear to have anointed UN diplomat David Shearer as Labour’s candidate for the seat. It’s a strategy that may well backfire. Shearer’s abilities are not in question; he might well make a first class MP. But local electorate organisations don’t like being presented with a fait accompli where candidate selection is concerned and may well rebel.  I’ve had some experience of this myself.

Norman Kirk was firmly opposed to my selection as Labour candidate for Miramar in 1972. I had committed the twin sins of being a television personality and an academic. The party hierarchy were well aware of the boss’s views and there was strong resistance from Head Office to my candidacy. The effect was merely to make the local electorate people more determined and I won the nomination.

[As it turned out, Kirk was right.  The '72 election produced a Labour landslide, but the candidate for Miramar failed to win the seat.]

Seven votes will decide who wins the Labour nomination for Mount Albert – four from the electorate and three from Head Office. If I were one of those four, I might well be starting to feel somewhat disgruntled around now. Whether it is reality or not, the perception is that that the old boy network is at play here. A close friend and former advisor to Phil Goff, who has been out of the country for three years and does not in any real sense live in the electorate, has jetted home to be dubbed ‘frontrunner’ in the race before even getting off the plane. There are veiled suggestions of carpetbagging. None of this may actually be the case, but it is certainly how it looks. And in politics how things look is everything.

At another level, what Labour now needs more than anything is rejuvenation. Shearer will be new to Parliament certainly, but his age and close association with the Labour establishment do not really suggest an infusion of fresh ideas. And with the announcement that Russel Norman will stand for the Greens, rejuvenation and new ideas have become an urgent priority.

I should declare that Judy and I have both offered 24-year-old Meg Bates our support in her attempt to win the nomination. Meg has been one of Judy’s tutors in Political Studies at Auckland and we have got to know her very well.  If she doesn’t win the nomination, we’ll be delighted to support whoever does.

But get to know Meg and you realise that you may well be looking at a Helen Clark in the making. If she were to win Mount Albert, the very real possibility would  exist that only four MPs will hold the seat in a hundred years.

Now that would be something!

In my teenage years they left me in bed, my wails and protests not worth the effort, not worth marring a morning that was always special for my father.  I think it was the only day of the year apart from Christmas that he ever took a drink.

Every year the crowds at the cenotaph grew smaller, until the word ‘crowd’ was a misnomer. We were sick of hearing about The War, we were fiercely pacifistic, we were young and we were scornful.  Today’s teenagers flock to dawn parade, make pilgrimages to Gallipoli, respect this day and the sacrifice it memorialises, and understand its meaning for New Zealanders. I like the teenagers of today better.

It’s partly because of them that two of our television channels now celebrate Anzac Day with major coverage.  I cynically believe that TV One joined the party mainly because it could see its audience defecting in droves to Maori Television on 25 April.  But if it took a programming rocket from MTS to wake TVNZ up to the change in New Zealand’s attitude, so what? The programmes are there – though not in prime time.  That’s reserved for a repeat of Dancing with the Stars.

I’ll be tuned to MTS on Anzac Day, because not only do they have great programmes all day long, their heart is in there as well. That’s what we need. This isn’t a day to be cynical or opportunistic.  It’s a national day that pulls us together like no other.  Waitangi Day can be fraught with tension; Labour Day is just a day off. Anzac Day links us with our past, makes us grateful for our present and reminds us to be protective of our future so that we will never be forced to make those sacrifices again.

Watch almost any television news bulletin and you’ll  hear someone praying for something to happen, or not happen. The background to their prayers is normally a real or potential  tragedy of some sort.

Individuals pray for themselves or those close to them to be cured of life-threatening illnesses. The relatives of people who have gone missing pray for them to be found and returned home safely. Families pray that the names of loved ones will not appear on the lists of those killed in plane crashes. Churchgoers pray for the victims of natural disasters.  World leaders pray for peace.

Prayers are often at odds with one another. A nation prays for victory in war. Its enemies do the same. Drought-stricken farmers pray for rain. Holiday makers pray for good weather. Sports fans from opposing teams pray that their team will win.

There is no correlation between prayer and goodness. Saints pray. Suicide bombers pray. Both expect their reward in heaven.

Our parliamentarians pray, beseeching Almighty God ‘to grant that we may conduct the affairs this House and of our country to the glory of Thy holy name, the maintenance of true religion and justice, the honour of the Queen, and the public welfare, peace and tranquility of New Zealand, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

No-one who watches parliament could conclude that this prayer has ever been or is ever likely to be answered.

But then, in Christian theology, prayers can never be answered, since the doctrine of free will means that God cannot interfere in human affairs. That, at least, is the justification given by Christian theologians for God’s failure to prevent human suffering. He cannot interfere. In reality then, Christian prayers are only ever answered in the sense that something wished for actually happens. What really determines whether a prayer is answered is luck, fate, karma, being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time – whatever you want to call it. This is the only way you can explain the randomness of ‘answered’ prayer.

Two hundred more or less equally innocent people are on a plane which disappears off the radar over the Tasman Sea. A search begins. Across New Zealand and Australia, relatives of the passengers pray that their husband, wife, son, daughter, mother, father, sister, brother will be saved. Only ten have their prayer answered. They and the media describe the survival of the ten people as ‘a miracle’ . The word has religious connotations, leading people to say, ‘Thank God!’.

This immediately begs the question as to what the attitude should be of the relatives and friends of the 190 people who perished in the accident. Perhaps they should  curse God? After all, the very concept of answered and unanswered prayer presupposes a selection process, based on some unknown divine criteria. God chose to answer the prayers of the relatives of ten of the passengers and not the prayers of the relatives of the other 190. Why?

Keeping God out of the equation altogether seems to be a more rational approach. The survival of the ten  passengers was a ‘miracle’ only in the sense that it was, like all miracles, an outcome hugely against the odds. Crash investigation and the testimony of the ten survivors is considerably more likely to produce reasons for the crash and its aftermath in terms of human life  than attempting to fathom the mind of some supernatural being.

I’m an atheist myself, but even if I accepted the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent god, I would still be mind-boggled by the concept of Him/Her responding to ten trillion voice-mails a day asking for  ten more years of life or a win on the Lotto. If I were God, I’d probably regret ever having created the sniveling, wheedling, importuning little creatures in the first place.

I’d have a point. It’s hard to decide whether talking to God reflects the most extraordinary hubris or the most abject lack of dignity. As a non-believer I find it a depressing and demeaning picture – centuries of human beings on their knees, genuflecting, abasing themselves, trading worship for favours and forgiveness. And all for nothing.

Of course the trouble with being an atheist is that if you’re wrong you’re going to take a lot of stick in the afterlife, but if you’re right, you won’t know it, let alone be able to crow about it. It’s a risk, but on the whole, I think the argument against there being a god or an afterlife is pretty conclusive. If I’m right, then all that praying and praising has just been white noise, lost in the ether. Return to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such zone.

Sad, eh?

Judy and I were taking our regular constitutional around Herne Bay last Saturday when our ears were assaulted by what had to be a fleet of  SAS attack helicopters landing on the normally tranquil Marine Parade. There could be no other explanation for the impenetrable wall of sound that threatened to  knock us off our feet. 

‘Maybe we should go back,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Judy, ever the brave one, ‘This could be serious. There could be casualties.’

So we turned the corner. And there they were – not SAS attack helicopters but something much, much worse: three Auckland City Council workers brandishing leaf blowers, marshalling the russet autumn leaves fallen from liquid amber and magnolia into monstrous piles to be collected by a brace of electric sweeping carts idling further up the street.

A bullet to the brain is too humane a punishment for the vandal who invented the leaf blower. He deserves to be hung, drawn, quartered, then reassembled so that the whole process can start again.  And again and again and again.  When he finally expires, his head should be impaled atop the Sky Tower, church bells rung joyously across the land and his bloody confession nailed to the door of every Mitre 10, every Placemakers, every Bunnings Warehouse, every garden centre and hardware store in Aotearoa. They have polluted the air with noise. They have disturbed the peace.  They have profited from the sufferings of their fellow man.

‘And woman!’ [Judy]

Now here’s the thing about leaf blowers:

Of all the so-called ‘labour-saving’ devices, other perhaps than the chainsaw, the leaf blower is the loudest, most annoying  and most brain-frazzling.

Of all the labour saving devices, other perhaps than the battery operated revolving ice-cream cone – yes, they do exist –  the leaf blower is the most unnecessary. Autumn leaves not merely make our paths and verges look more beautiful, they are genetically programmed to resist permanent transfer from one place to another. 

Of all the labour saving devices, other perhaps than the high voltage fly zapper, shaped like a tennis racket – yes again – the leaf blower is the least efficient. The humble garden rake does the job better, faster and more cheaply.

Of all the labour saving devices, including the water blaster, the leaf blower has become the must-have, can’t-do-without boys toy cum status symbol cum penis extension of the 21^st century. Every bugger has one.

And that is the nub of the problem. You see, if everyone used their leaf blower – and their weed-eater and their hedge-trimmer and their lawnmower and their chainsaw -   at the same time on the same day each week, say Saturday afternoon between three and five, there might well be a danger of the earth moving a degree or two on its axis, but at least it would be quiet for the rest of the week. And either global warming would be halted or the weather would be nicer.  

When I suggested this at a party recently, a guy told me that one of the Scandinavian countries – Denmark or Finland or some such place – already has a law along these lines.

So why not here? Because every time someone tries to do something beneficial to the environment or likely to improve the quality of our lives, the great unwashed start screaming ‘nanny state’ and demanding their Godzone given right to do whatever the f*** they like,  whenever the f*** they like, wherever the f*** they like.

Most of these cretins are men and most of them are more in love with their noisy power-driven ‘labour saving devices’ than they are with their wives or children. The leaf blower is to the Kiwi bloke the equivalent of the gun to the good ol’ boy in the US of A. Don’t you try an’  take it off me now, you hear!

We’ve got a few in our street. I’m convinced they’ve got a roster to ensure that there’s always one leaf blower in operation during daylight hours and occasionally after dark. And if they can’t be there themselves they’ve got an army of gardeners who wouldn’t recognise a rake if they stood on it and the handle flew up and hit them in the face. (Cherish the thought!)

I’ve got to stop now. A neighbour’s alarm has just gone off, Telecom are using a concrete cutter to dig a post hole across the road, the Green Acres guy has started up his petrol-driven hedge-trimmer next door and Max is yelling because he wants to show me the live rat he just dragged through the cat door.

You know the trouble with the ‘nanny state’? It never went far enough.

This surely breaks every rule of good set design. A background should add to the mood and the look of the programme.  If it’s an interview set it should allow people to wear a variety of clothing and colours without clashing horribly, looking like clowns or disappearing.

What it should never do is compete. This background not only competes – it wins every time.

And then there’s the panel set.  Three people elevated like high court judges, and Paul Holmes peering up at them from below, barely able to get his chin over  the bench.  Paul isn’t the tallest fellow on the planet, but he’s not a midget, for goodness sake, and this set makes him look ridiculously short.

Q + A is a welcome addition to our telly fare.  It’s our only chance to see politicians in extended interviews, to get past the sound-bite culture. The presenters are good – Holmes is in his element on an intelligent programme and Guyon Espiner has calmed down his Jack Russell impersonation enough to let people answer questions.

So let’s get rid of those moving backgrounds and make it a good watching experience as well.

And bring back the whimsically eccentric Jane Clifton.  I miss her.

19/4/09:  I see that they’ve lowered the bench on the panel set.  Now if they’d just deal to the stripes…

Some explanation of the mindset of the more high-profile apologists for a change in the current law is to be found in their connection with, and in some cases membership of the ACT party, the Sensible Sentencing Trust, Family First, the Destiny Church and other conservative political and religious groups. These are people who cannot see beyond punishment as a response to unacceptable behaviour whether in the family or society at large. Their field of vision ranges from hitting naughty children to locking up violent offenders and throwing away the key.  Neither response has ever been effective in improving children’s behaviour or in deterring violent crime. Quite the reverse. 

Equally concerning is the willingness of these groups to dishonestly manipulate public opinion. The 1999 Law and Order Referendum, initiated by the Sensible Sentencing Trust, provided a striking example of the ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ style of survey and was deliberately designed to offer respondents Hobson’s choice. It read:

 Should there be a reform of the justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?

Three questions but only one available answer – either Yes or No. So if you were in favour of ‘greater emphasis on the needs of victims’ and ‘providing restitution and compensation for them’ – as I am – you also had to be in favour of ‘minimum sentences’ and the brutal Victorian concept of ‘hard labour’ for all serious violent offences’.  Which, needless to say,  I am not in favour of.   

Ninety-two percent of respondents apparently were. But most thinking people would have realised that the referendum presented impossibly conflicting options within the one question and would not have responded at all.

In an interview I did with the Sensible Sentencing founder on Radio Live a couple of years ago, Garth McVicar agreed that the Law and Order Referendum question was so flawed as to be meaningless. One might have thought the advocates of smacking - essentially the same people -  would have taken care to ensure that the same mistake would not be repeated.

But the ‘Anti-Smacking Referendum’ has again  been deliberately phrased to bamboozle respondents. It reads:

Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?

This is the equivalent of asking: ‘Should doctors recommend an exclusive diet of McDonalds and KFC as part of a healthy weight loss programme?’  McDonalds and KFC cannot be part of a healthy weight loss programme. And it is open to serious doubt whether smacking can be part of ‘good parental correction’.

If they are to have any validity at all, the language of referenda questions must be neutral. To make the ‘Anti-Smacking Referendum’ neutral, the word ‘good’ has to be deleted from the question. Even its title is misleading since there is no reference at all to ‘smacking’ in the Act. The word simply does not appear.

Bradford’s bill  was designed to prevent abusive parents using Section 59 of the Crimes Act to escape penalty.  Its purpose was clear:

To abolish the use of reasonable force by parents as justification for disciplining children.

The wording of the current Act reflects this:

Nothing in the Act or in any rule of common law justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.

And it includes the following clarification:

To avoid doubt it is affirmed that police have the discretion not to prosecute complaints against a parent of a child, or person in the place of a parent of a child, in relation to an offence involving the use of force against a child where the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in proceeding with a prosecution.

That is precisely what the police have done.

Well, in the end it comes down to whether or not you think it should be legal to hit children. ‘Smack’ is such an innocuous word. But you cannot ‘smack’ a child without ‘hitting’ or ‘striking’ the child. And the word includes a range of possibilities – from the ‘tap on the bum’ which the proponents of the referendum would have us believe a smack means, to the volley of frenzied thumps which most of us have observed from frazzled parents on the street, in supermarkets and on buses.  Indeed, one of the best arguments against smacking is watching a parent smack a child. Generally the child is squirming or struggling to get free. The parent restrains the child by holding onto its arm with one hand, while using the other hand  to paddle its bottom.  Usually the child is crying or screaming. It is not an edifying sight.

But it is instructive. Smacking invariably means that the parent has lost control. Reasoning and constructive communication have been abandoned in favour of physical force.

I suspect most parents feel bad after they have hit their child. And, as a parent of five children and grandfather of ten, I understand very well the stresses that can impel the most loving father or mother to strike out.  We should be careful, as the Act allows,  not to prosecute the parent who on a rare occasion lightly smacks a misbehaving child.

But that is very different from the state legitimising or sanctioning the smacking, hitting, striking, corporal punishment – whatever synonym you prefer -  of children by their parents. That is a very slippery slope. Proponents of a change to the law want a ‘light slap’ to be legal, but the term defies definition and the police and the courts will be faced with the same impossible task they faced in defining ‘reasonable force’.

At present children are protected in law from all corporal punishment in 24 countries. They include Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Israel,  Norway, Finland, Sweden – and New Zealand.

We should be proud to be on that list.

Yes, it’s the annual Good Friday, Easter Sunday shutdown for shopkeepers who don’t want to be turned into criminals for making a living. Under the Shop Trading Act 2008, both days are designated ‘restricted trading days’. Unless a shop is specifically exempted, it’s an offence to open on these days, and law-breakers are liable to a $1,000 fine.

Sounds simple? Well it is, until you start looking at the exemptions. For example,  the owner of a dairy, service station, souvenir shop, duty free store, transport terminal bookstore, chemist shop, takeaway bar, restaurant, cinema, or video-store can stay open on both days.

According to the Labour Department, the rationale for this  is that enterprises dealing in ‘tangible goods’ – things you can buy, take home and keep – can’t stay open, while enterprises not dealing in tangible goods can.

So where does this leave the dairy, service station and transport terminal bookstore? In theory each of these enterprises should not, for example, be able to sell you a newspaper,  magazine or book – a significant disadvantage, one would have thought, for the transport terminal bookstore – since these items can clearly be taken home and kept; but should be able to sell you foodstuffs, which can certainly be taken home, but will not be kept as tangible goods.

But even this is arguable. A tin of Watties baked beans or a Magnum ice cream can be stored in the pantry or freezer for weeks, months and presumably years. Only once they have been eaten can it truly be said that they are no longer ‘tangible’. This is clearly a grey area in the legislation which requires urgent clarification.

You can argue, of course, and the Labour Department does argue,  that any enterprise which can be deemed to provide an ‘essential service’ should be exempt from the legislation. This would allow service stations to sell petrol and oil – people have to get from A to B -  but nothing else, other perhaps than foodstuffs, which we’ve already identified as a grey area.

Here a further complication arises. If the rationale for allowing foodstuffs to be sold is that their sale constitutes an essential service, then only essential foodstuffs should be available for purchase.

The Magnum ice cream, for example, could perhaps only be sold to someone who had just had their tonsils out. A doctor’s certificate would, of course, have to be produced. Even the purchase of staple foods, like bread and rice, would require proof from the prospective buyer, perhaps in the form of an affidavit or  Polaroid photograph, that he or she was completely out of bread or rice, and had no satisfactory substitute in his or her fridge or pantry.

Chemist shops would seem to come under the ‘essential service’ banner, providing they only filled prescriptions for or sold essential medicines. But this is another grey area. While insulin is clearly essential to a type-one diabetic, is Alka Seltzer essential to a person suffering from a self-inflicted hangover. I would have thought not. Here again, the prospective Alka Seltzer buyer should have to produce a doctor’s certificate, affirming that his aching head and upset stomach constituted a medical emergency. Again the legislation clearly requires urgent clarification.

Which brings us to the video-stores, cinemas, restaurants and takeaway bars. None of these enterprises could remotely be considered to constitute an ‘essential service’, though they do appear to be covered by the ‘tangible goods’ provision in the legislation. One does not normally ‘keep’ a rented video, a movie or a meal.

More difficult to understand are the exemptions  for souvenir shops, duty-free stores and transport terminal bookstores. None provide essential services and each could be said not merely to sell, but to specialise in ‘tangible goods’.

This brings us, I believe, to a core principle behind the legislation. The souvenir shop, duty-free store and transport terminal bookstore cater primarily for tourists. And tourists, so far as we Kiwis are concerned, can go to hell in a handcart – though they won’t be able to buy one on Good Friday or Easter Sunday. New Zealand citizens, on the other hand, are constrained to serve God and not Mammon on these days.

So somehow or other we have come to the position that stuffing your face with hamburgers, pizza or KFC, eating and drinking up large in a restaurant,  going to see No Country for Old Men (R16 Graphic Violence) at the flicks, or watching a rented porno, all constitute serving God, while buying plants or tools to tend your garden on Good Friday constitutes serving Mammon.  Though it’s no longer sinful on Easter Sunday.

Well, if I believed in Him at all, I would have thought that, of all of these activities, gardening would be the most pleasing to God.

But it’s all just absolute nonsense, isn’t it?

In the first place, religious belief  has no legitimate role to play in lawmaking. When and whether shops stay open must be solely a matter of industrial law and not of religious observance. Holy days and holidays must not be regarded as synonymous.

But if we are to have undemocratic and retrograde legislation, let it at least be consistent. Let’s not make absolute fools of ourselves by saying that it’s OK to make money renting videos, selling duty free watches and flogging pulp fiction at airports, but not OK to make money by selling someone a lemon tree or a spade to plant it with.

Either ban the lot and make us all wear sackcloth and ashes for two days, or give every trader and every potential customer the right to make up their own mind on what they’ll do at Easter. I’m for the latter. Let’s open the doors. Let’s breathe the fresh air of freedom. Let’s, for heaven’s sake, grow up!

It’s the same for newspaper columnists. People with considered views, who can see both sides of an issue, need not apply. A columnist’s success is judged by the number of irate letters his or her editor receives. Essential characteristics -  one-eyed, dogmatic, over-the-top, contemptuous of other views. Best current New Zealand examples – Michael Laws and Garth George.

A very clear idea of how perfectly Henry fits the loved/loathed paradigm was to be found in the on-line responses of Herald readers to what has been termed ‘moustache-gate’. There were 45 pages of them when I last looked. Almost none came into the ‘considered, see-both-sides’ category.  A majority  thought that hanging, drawing and quartering was too good for him:

Paul is a self-righteous, obnoxious and overbearing twat.

God, I feel like chopping that little toe rag’s head off and watch him run around like a little cockroach.

Paul is a mean, sadistic bully.

One can imagine him at school; organising a willy-stretching competition behind the bike shed without taking part himself.

Paul Henry is an embarrassing fool. When he was a National Party candidate for Parliament he was beaten by a transsexual. Perhaps he has not got over it.

His defenders, on the other hand,  though Paul was God’s gift to television and were equally virulent:

Paul Henry is hilarious and is the reason that Breakfast rates so much higher than the TV3 version. And what is the harm anyway? Its probably a compliment for a greenie chick for someone to notice her moustache. Goes with the hemp singlet and underarm hair.

Paul Henry is a mastermind! Those of you damning him to hell should know you are playing right into his hands. He enjoys the backlash and you are shooting him straight to super-stardom. Paul is a living legend. Recognise!

 I also cried when I heard Paul’s comments about the ‘Mo’. Well, to be more accurate, I had tears rolling down my cheeks from laughing. What woman would go on national TV with that enormous ‘Mo’? It would have been rude not to mention it!

Paul’s keeps it real and makes the breakfast show fun to watch some Nz’ers just need to stop being flipin dry balls and if you dont like it then all good just breathe and change the channel. because we all know you love him too. [Punctuation and spelling not supplied!]

And, finally, there was this  novel theory:

It could just be a result of years of French nuclear testing and nuclear fall-out. It could make women grow moustaches and turn men into rude, politically incorrect brutes.

Who’s right – his critics or his defenders? Both. Henry is an obnoxious prat.  His ego is out of control and, as a broadcaster, so is he. He has done  more than enough to deserve the boot.

BUT he is also one of the most intelligent, most incisive, most accomplished, most polished, and most entertaining broadcasters this country has ever seen.

 Can’t live with him, can’t live without him.

So what should be done with Paul? Well firstly he should be fronting Close Up. Mark Sainsbury may be a nicer person, but he isn’t a patch on Henry as a broadcaster. He stumbles his way through the programme, is often barely articulate and his interviews are a shambles. But he’s responsible and safe and Henry isn’t.  

So here’s my solution.  Mark goes back to his previous job as a political editor. He was extremely good at that. Paul takes over Close Up where he is likely to beat the pants off the much nicer John Campbell.  But there’s a proviso. Henry’s contract includes a ‘penny in the jar’ clause. Every time he breaches the Broadcasting Act’s standards of balance, fairness, decency or good taste, $10,000 is deducted from his salaryand donated to the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards. Should work.

Meanwhile, check out this hilarious Media 7 compilation from Russell Brown and his Paul Henry Dick-o-meter.