THE MAN BEHIND the Iwi-Kiwi billboards that very nearly won the 2005 election for Don Brash and the National Party has confirmed his involvement in businessman John Third’s and former Act MP Owen Jennings’ campaign to drive down the Greens vote in the run-up to 20 September.
In a comment sent to Chris Trotter’s blog, Bowalley Road, Mr Ansell states:
Chris, well spotted.
A big, bold campaign is required and justified to counterbalance the hundreds of thousands of dollars of free advertising being provided by the media to Nicky Hager’s attempt to gull the gullible into believing that the right play dirtier than the left.
As someone who has been involved in three ad campaigns for Labour, one for National and two for ACT, as you know, compared with Labour (they who stole the 2005 election then retrospectively legislated their theft), National are the gentlemen of the political spectrum – they just don’t have a Dotcom hacking their every conversation or a Hager receiving the stolen property and writing shock, horror stories about them.
And no, the Labour means Greens campaign is not being done for National or any other party.
I, for one, am disillusioned by all the right wing offerings at the moment. I left Key’s office when it became obvious to me that his motivation was self and party before country. I left ACT twice because they refused to grasp the nettles necessary for victory. And I don’t like the Conservatives’ intolerance of gays and such (though I do like Craig’s policy of a binding referendum on race-based seats).
So I don’t know who I’m going to vote for. But I shudder at the potential destructiveness of a Cunliffe cabinet that’s 30% Green.
And that’s what Labour means Greens is all about, Chris: to jolt what we call “the tradies and the ladies” awake to the frightening new political reality on the left: that a Cunliffe government is still very possible, and that it would be hugely damaging to the New Zealand way of life through no particular fault of Labour’s.
On current polling, Cunliffe is going to have no choice but to appoint five to seven Green cabinet ministers, some of them to very senior and influential positions.
(And, God help us, possibly even some of the Hone Harawiras, Annette Sykeses, Laila Harres and John Mintos from the even loonier left.)
I think you’ll find the main driver of the campaign, John Third, will be as open and honest about it as I’m being. He doesn’t mind if I talk about it, since we’ve got nothing to hide.
This is just a bunch of concerned Kiwis, none motivated by any party connections as far as I know, wishing to inform our countrymen and women of the true nature (no pun intended) of the not-so-cuddly Greens.
In the contest of ideas, I think you’ll agree, that’s perfectly legitimate.
To expand on those two target markets:
The “tradies” were brought up to believe in the class struggle. But they also believe Labour’s been taken over by what one of them colourfully referred to in my local the other day as “the feminazis and pillow-biters”.
In their socially conservative eyes, by comparison with the latter, a guy like John Key represents the voice of sanity. But their tribalism runs deep and they could vote either way. Especially if, in the Kiwi tradition of fairness, they reckon “it’s time we gave the other lot a go”.
We’re going to ask them not to – by showing them what that would mean for them, their family, and their country.
We’re going to boldly apprise them of the fact that, while they weren’t looking – distracted by the media beat-up over Hager the Horrible’s book – the left just got a whole lot lefter and redder (the Greens being nothing if not deepest red).
These sparkies and plumbers and builders are practical blokes who cut to the chase and come with very large dollops of common sense. They spend their days solving problems calmly and rationally. Then they go hunting and fishing.
And if there’s one group they can’t abide, it’s those knee-jerk enviro-panickers and exaggerators from the Green party who want to ban all forms of fun, for reasons which they haven’t properly thought through.
The “ladies” are the ladies of the Remuera Garden Circle and the like who believe it would be nice to have the planet represented in the corridors of power. They’d rather be out weeding their gardens than inside studying the communist infiltration of Greenpeace, so still believe the Greens are who they say they are.
They’ll be shocked to learn the truth, and we plan to do the shocking: informing them that the Greens’ love for the environment comes a very poor second to their desire to kneecap capitalism and put people last.
So far I’ve done about fifteen billboards which you’ll be seeing over the next three weeks. Any questions, just ask and I’ll do my best to answer in full.
Wow! I read Ansell’s comments and even laughed at loud at some of it… but then I realised this man is serious. He genuinely believes this stuff…. I am speechless.
Well they do say a fool and his money..
…donates to the Green Party, which invests her money in a windpower generation company and loses the lot!
(True story.)
Could you run that gag about the Greens’ threat to Kiwis way of life again? Look the ‘damage to New Zealand’s way of life’ is a horse that has long since left the stable, effected by a right-wing cabal who hijacked the centre-left Labour Party. That this cabal was right wing was eventually confirmed by the roles of the likes of Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble in the Assorted Crooks and Tax-dodgers Party.
And of course, no original thinkers themselves, the National Party continued the evisceration of the New Zealand economy, laying what was left of it open to foreign predators, pissing away vast treasure in the hamfisted privatisation (i.e. looting) of publicly owned assets, allowing wholesale price gouging and profiteering by the privatised monopolies that thus came into being, until we now have a leader who is prepared to sell whatever remains of New Zealand’s sovereignty to United States corporates. I wonder what form The Rt Hon Mr Key’s thirty pieces of silver will take.
And Mr Ansell reckons a left wing party constitutes a threat to New Zealanders’ ‘way of life’? Spare me.
Well said, King Oath
Shows how nutty the right Wing nuts are.
Bloody clueless.
Yes, a nutty right wing conspiracy theorist!
I wish I could agree with all these comments, but I cant. Negative tactics work. So far attacks from the far right have been completely neutered by the scandals arising out of the Dirty Politics book but there is still plenty of time for these posters to work unless there is still more to come from, or about, Slater.
If the National vote really is falling the posters can be negated as being still more dirty tricks from National and will do them more harm than good. If National can steer clear of any more scandals for a week, the mood will change and the posters might be effective.
This is the big danger for the Left: the concentration span of voters is about 20 seconds. They are quite capable of anything over the next 3 weeks.
Even in this sincere letter to Chris, Ansell is in propaganda offence mode. It’s McCarthy and the invasion of the body snatchers talk. He attacks the greens multiple times but never gives any evidence (sound familiar). Someone please follow the this money trail.
John Ansell – better Dirty than Green.
Better Labour red than Green red.
(Only now Labour red means 30% Green red.)
I feel a poem coming on…
Labour are red
National are blue
In this ad I’ve read
Greens are red too!
Of course, the other word for speechless is dumb.
But thank you DAIRYFLAT2. It warms my heart knowing that I’ve brightened a disadvantaged person’s day.
Is this man sane?
Arguably not.
I’d replace arguably with demonstrably.
Are the Greens red?
There it is: the ‘loony left’ and the ‘rorty right’. This kind of person with more money than sense, I’d say, would be a right wing slitherin’ tongued Rorty
I’m not the rorty right, I’m the naughty right.
Not to mention the folically-disadvantaged, well-over-forty right.
Will I be entitled to free Propecia and the Elixir of Youth under a Green government?
Burn them all I say. Let them waste their money.
You just want to recycle my waste.
And I will be attacking those billboards with everything in my arsenal
With all those lights, how about a complaint that they are dangerous to drivers as they will distract them with all that light at night.
Anything to stifle your opponents’ freedom of speech. Typical lefty morality.
Here’s another idea: debate the facts and may the most persuasive argument win.
Too risky?
If you ever find yourself in the emergency ward, just hope for your sake that Dr Ropata isn’t the head surgeon.
Me too. I worked with him once. Turns out he was only an actor.
Dunno. Have you tried it yourself?
For an individual who expresses such vehement bigotry against the Greeens….not once did he quote any particular policy of theirs that was the offending one. Instead , what we got was a tirade of – in a nutshell – ‘We hate the Greens because they are the Greens’.
Consequently he came across as the same old narrow minded, bigoted bore making generalised statements based more on gross generalisations and hysteria than the persona of one who was informed and articulate enough to express just what it is that irked him so much about the Greens.
To be honest , to have representatives of such a predjudiced individual as himself in parliament would be a continuation of the same sort of disaster we have experienced for the last 6 years……in fact the last 30 years…
He likes people who cuts to the chase?….ok…well -Ive spent the biggest part of my working life as a tradie , mate ,- and I can tell you buddy the only agenda youre pushing is the further advancment of youre neo liberal economic ideology .
Plain and simple. So stop trying to use tradies as youre political ammunition- and give up the charade , mate. You dont give a fuck about tradies.
And the real reason youre shitscared of a Cunliffe led Labour /Greens govt this election is that they will bring in a more Keynesian based economic model that is FAR more in line with the egalitarianism that we tradies AND ALL New Zealanders once knew and prospered under.
Stop being a bloody liar and using generalisations about other people to bolster up youre bullshit arguments.
And piss off back to your Ivy League cronies and read some Mont Pelerin society propaganda magazines or something.
Have sweet dreams about 80-90% of the worlds wealth held in the hands of 1% and exploitation of the working poor – if thats what gives you your jollies ya’ prick !!!
Mislead the tradies through FUD to enrich the elite – in the grasp for power integrity is collateral damage.
ED40: defacing billboards is, of course, part of the left’s traditional pre-election vandalism strategy. (As is abusing the messenger, like the first two commenters are doing. Anything to avoid engaging with our demonstrably accurate messages.)
The more you vandalise our legally purchased property, the more our target market will understand perfectly the point we’re making. Deface away!
We now have written permission to deface the billboards of hate. Thanks, moran.
Don’t bother trying to interact with him Ovicula. His sort of money buys a lot of delusion. Plus, he’s an expert manipulator, he’ll just be trying to play you whole time.
He gave one good bit of advice though, defacing the billboard will just play into his hands. I imagine his professional advice in this situation would be to just rough it up a bit so that it looks like an old ad that someone had forgotten to take down. Well OK, his actual advice would be to pay for an even bigger billboard campaign but some of us don’t have the sorry of money he’s used to getting.
This is a lesson in not posting from a smart phone 🙂 “sorry” should be “sort” in the last sentence above.
My advice would be don’t break the law and show my neutral target audience that I’m right about the Greens being red wolves in kakapos’ clothing.
While I can see the advantage to us of Greens defacing billboards which seek to point out the two-faced nature (no pun intended) of the Greens, that is not necessarily my client’s view!
“Thanks, moran” Priceless! Stupidity and irony in a contest of wills. Stupidity won, I think.
Yeah mate- demonstrably accurate messages for your overseas foreign banker overlords.
Piss off mate- you fool no one.
Sorry for the delay in responding – I’ve been on the phone to Zurich.
Who are your financial backers Mr Ansell? The public have a right to know.
And do you also believe that the public have the right to know the identities of those who support left-leaning third party campaigns?
Are you comfortable with the public knowing your income and who you donate money to?
Why do you think others would be any different – especially when they may not be as keen as I am to be exposed to a bunch of slavering wolves like you guys?
Having said that, I’m not in touch with the funders.
For all I know, they may be people who don’t mind being outed. John Third certainly doesn’t, and neither do I.
What matters is the accuracy of the message, which is absolutely correct.
Why should people be able to tell the truth?
Anyone who defaces those billboards is attacking the messages and the messenger who has put them there.
To paraphrase …
The person who has put them there is attacking the Green Party and what they stand for. It is a way of using money to do “Anything to avoid engaging” constructively with the community to debate the views.
The more you vandalise our communities with your trash the more the target market will understand perfectly the point you’re making which is not necessarily the overt one on the boards..
So PETE, you regard a billboard which alerts the public to the 100% true fact that 30% of a Labour cabinet will be Green is a dastardly “attack”.
An unvarnished statement of truth is an attack, I see.
And you obviously think the public being reminded of this truth is a terrible thing – vandalism even.
Why are you so afraid of people knowing this? And what is wrong with us telling them? Surely you don’t believe the Greens should sneak into cabinet by stealth?
John, if I may ask – why the preoccupation with other peoples’ sexuality?! At a time when this country owes nearly $70 billion in debt; has mounting inequality and child poverty; falling home ownership; multiple threats to the planet’s environment (including out own coastal waters) – you, Mr Third, et al, are pre-occupied with gays and lesbians?!
Bizarre, if I may say so.
Well done, Frank. You’ve just given an excellent example of dishonest lefty diversionary tactics.
I make a comment in passing about what a guy said in a pub about feminists and gays to illustrate the worldview of one target audience, and you – shamelessly ignoring my other incidental comment about deploring the Conservatives’ anti-gay policy – say I’m obsessed with sexuality.
You say this despite 99% of my comments on this site and elsewhere being about why a Cunliffe cabinet will be 30% Green, and why that’s a bad thing.
The purpose of my comments is to draw out of you crooks your modus operandi so my neutral target audience can see that what I’m saying about the Green-communist-socialist mindset being corrupt is 100% correct.
So thanks!
C’mon people, he’s just here to play with you, don’t engage in his arguments, just congratulate him on his wit and spend your energy elsewhere.
The worst thing he’s doing is turning the debate into a partisan war with lots of digs at ‘lefties’ which is the last thing this country needs. Just look at the US political system to find out where that approach leads.
Aaron, I’m just encouraging lefties to behave like lefties for the benefit of those neutrals who may not have been aware of their unpleasant, unethical natures.
Please don’t ruin my fun.
Dear Mr Ansell.
I do not like your political view, though I can see some truths in what you say. For what it is worth, as a person, I am happy with my gender and sexuality, but I respect others views, as apparently you do. I can be a bloke, but know that assaulting or sexually abusing a woman (or anyone come to that) is wrong. That is not gender as much as bloody common sense. I would not say I am a ‘feminazi or pillow biter’ (though what the heck is a pillow biter?), but I think it is really important that men shout out loudly that real men – REAL blokes do not assault or abuse women. Just as no-one should abuse anyone else for any reason (except those very few within the law such as self defence or defence of another – maybe).
However – yes – there had to be a but. I believe that your putting signage up like this is probably illegal as you are trying to influence who people vote for, even if it is by trying to influence who people do not vote for. That concerns me, not as a politician, but as someone who cares for democratic process. If a Party loses because they did not have, or did not promote, their policies, that is fine. If the left Parties lose because people do not like a Green-Labour probable coalition, that is also fine. To lose however because the Prime Minister is using SIS to spy on us as opposition politicians, and releasing smear campaigns, especially against hard working civil servants, that is far from fine. Just as it is far from fine to lose because an anonymous person has again launched a smear campaign outside the law (maybe).
I believe the public has a right to know what Nicky Hagar has said. The right wing of NZ politics were not complaining about ‘corngate’, and such issues need to come out into the open. We need to know our politicians are working for the people and not for self interest. His book now is essential, and I do not see him as pro-left, but as a good journalist. In the future, he will no doubt attack a left Government if they screw up, and so he should. I may not like it, but freedom of the press and the fourth estate is essential for democratic process.
And back to democratic process. We have laws about campaigning for good reason. If you do not like the Green Party, then set up a protest Party perhaps. Stand up and seek election based upon neutralising what you see as the evils of the Green Party. (And again – I do NOT agree with that perspective). Speak up against corruption in National, and indecisiveness in Act. However, speak up as part of the system as opposed to hijacking our political process, as mandated by Parliament, to promote your own views and prejudices. (I mean that word not emotively, but meaning personal likes and dislikes).
I am proudly left. I think that a Labour-Green coalition will be a good one. The Green MPs I know are good, solid people, and I consider many of them a sad loss to the Labour Party. However, that is my personal view. Because I believe that, I am standing for Parliament, all be it at a position where I am almost dead cert in not succeeding this election. I stand for what I believe in, under a political Party banner, and I suggest that you do the same so people know what you stand for.
Left, right or centre, we need good people in politics. We need a good Opposition to allow democratic process. If there is no Party or group representing you, John, then start one! If you are so sure of your stance, then stand up and be counted as opposed to hiding behind anonymous billboards.
Finally, the legal blurb. This is my opinion and do not represent the views or opinions of anyone else. I am posting as a private individual who feels passionately that clean campaigning and transparency is paramount in a true democracy. Other Parties may or may not agree with my view, and my view is that if Labour did not exist, I would probably be Green. However, I am giving my view as a private individual, and nothing in this should be taken as policy for any Party, or legal advice.
The innocent must be protected unless… [censored].
Regards
Simon
In other words…..good blokes and blokesses – not scumbags. And Simon seems to fall into the former camp not the latter. At least he doesnt favour or condone skulking , weaseling around back alleys and acting in a clandestine way. Hes upfront.
This little episode with emails and corruption reminds one of the Brash era saga…exclusive brethren ….donations etc….
Strange…..that was the Natz tellin porkies back then as well…..some people never seem to learn…
You seem to have suppressed the little matter of the left stealing that election, then retrospectively legalising the theft.
I knew you’d want me to remind you to avoid accusations of bias.
Simon, that’s a lot of irrelevant waffle, in amongst which you seem to be suggesting that a person should not be allowed to exercise his freedom of speech with his own money.
Instead he must join a political party, which of course may also not allow him to exercise his freedom of speech on an issue where his own views do not coincide with that of the party.
You really don’t like democracy, do you? No wonder you’re in Labour.
I’m delighted for you that you’re happy with your gender and your sexuality, though what that’s got to do with the Labour means Green campaign, God knows.
I’m also happy with my gender and sexuality, though if I was a male Labour candidate I’d be very disturbed by the anti-male selection bias in that party.
I was waiting for someone to try to twist my quoting of a bar patron’s crude comment as though it was my own. I used it to paint a picture of my target market, not to echo my own view about gay people, which you will find as tolerant as yours. (That’s why I don’t like the Conservatives’ Bible-basher-based social policy.)
You seem to be using your comment to make all sorts of comments about yourself which are irrelevant to the subject under discussion.
I find it curious bordering on sickening that you suggest Hager would criticise a Labour government’s corruption, yet he had the perfect opportunity to do just that in 2006 but said nothing, preferring to focus on tittle-tattle about the Nats than the very real electoral corruption of Helen Clark.
In keeping with my views on freedom of speech, I believe Nicky Hager has the perfect right to publish his books, but that he should also be prosecuted for receiving stolen property, and the hacker should obviously be prosecuted for stealing it.
And to suggest that I am somehow keeping my views anonymous when I’m the most open commentator I know, always posting under my own name and always in a very forthright manner that should leave no one in any doubt where I stand – is risible.
These billboards are not mine, except in the sense that I was the designer, but in revealing the whole advertising strategy on the Bowalley Road blog I could hardly be more open about my role, and my client is happy for me to do so.
I repeat, engaging with this guy will lead to all out partisan war – the amount of personal digs in the above comment is clearly an attempt to aggravate people. I’m not sure exactly what benefit he sees in doing this but it’s pretty clear that people could waste a lot of time arguing with him.
Remember he’s a PR/advertising dude, there’s always something else going on beneath the surface.
Well , mate…hang out with thieves…you start to learn their ways….best for you to seek out some decent company i should imagine….
Try the Greens…they seem to have a lot of good people of integrity I hear…
Hi Chris or anyone who knows the answer to this – is this guy subject to electoral laws regarding how much he can spend etc. The climate change campaign and even that music video have been deemed political broadcasts.
I will answer that, as however hard it is for you lefties to believe, we are doing everything entirely legally having checked with a lawyer.
The legal advertising limit for third parties (an appropriate term given the name of our authoriser) is $300,000.
Any more questions?
Plonker!
Go and feed some poor homeless people!
There is one billboard on moorhouse ave in Christchurch and it does not meet political party or electoral specs.
It doesn’t disclose who posted it up.
So I would say its illegal.
If its illegal then by tearing it down you are doing a public service. The Police and Electoral Commission should thank you for doing their work for them for free.
And if it’s not would you still tear it down?
LOL yeah right Kim Dotcom blamed again when the real hacker is known & is a guy who goes by name Rawshark whose only motivation to grab info from Whaleoil aka Cameron Slater is & was that Whaleoil is a bastard & a prick for calling a young deceased guy a feral.
Dear Mr Ansell, you obviously have a very low opinion of a large number of Kiwis, namely those who don’t agree with your political philosophies. If you want to add your pack of lies to National’s then knock yourself out sunshine!
I’m the subject of quite enough threats of violence from you guys, why should I need to attack myself?
Whale oil would’t publish this either ….. left right or where ever you can’t face the truth, and that is why I will be proven right , sleep on that.
I don’t understand why he is so against the greens or any political party for that matter, they are all spouting the same bullshit – growth growth and more fucking growth. Not one of them is telling it the way it is.
Everything is going to hell in a hand cart, from the environment, to energy, to global financial shit. Well within the political lives of most of the politicians ‘winning’ the next election (Judith Collins being maybe the only exception:)?) one if not several massive shitstorms are gong to hit cloud cuckoo land NZ, then watch this bunch of losers running around like a bunch of headless chickens.
We are fast going to find out there is no such thing as 100% employment or zero poverty, we will see a levelling of society though, we are fast going to become one class of citizen the hungry one.
We are 3 – 5 days away from anarchy at any given time, as that is how many days food there is available to the masses.
NON of the above ‘facts’ are discussed, as adults you should all hang your heads in shame ESPICIALY the parents.
Our leaders are driving us at light speed way over the edge of the cliff, while fully focused on the rear-view vision mirror.
Several things this 400 ppm CO2 saturated environment doesn’t need – more humans making and using more stuff (growth), for one thing, it doesn’t need and can’t give affordable warm housing, with flat screen TVs and 2 cars in the garage . Just as the Arabs are finding out after the Arab spring, “that was as good as it gets”, and in a year or 3(?) you will look back at these hedonistic days with fond memories, and that is all we will have to show for it …. But you can always vote the problems away.
Robert you’re the guy that defaces billboards raving about peak oil, as I recall. And yet, typical of all Green doomsday scenarios, the world turned out to be awash with oil.
This is what’s so devious about the Malthusian socialist-pessimist Greens. Their catch-cry should be “2-4-6-8, Panic and Exaggerate!” – hey, that could be a good line for a billboard!
In the late 1700s, Thomas Malthus published his gloomy prediction that at something less that one billion people the world’s population would soon not be able to feed itself.
That was bollocks, of course, and remains so. He did not factor in man’s genius for inventing and adapting. (And of course, the more people, the more geniuses.)
More recently we had the population bomb theory. Also bollocks, since the more market capitalism drags poor people out of poverty, the fewer children they have.
Now places like Japan and Europe are having to worry about how to replace themselves, not rampant overpopulation. It’s now clear that the world’s population is set to peak at about seven billion, then stabilise.
Talking of geniuses before, one Mexican scientist with a new strain of wheat solved the Indian famine problem. This is the sort of thing that’s happening in GrownupWorld all the time, and we should be proud of belonging to such a clever species.
But in GreenWorld, for political reasons, people like you continue to pretend that it’s all gloom and doom, and always was and always will be.
The best way for a neutral to understand the political divide is that socialism is applied pessimism and capitalism is applied optimism.
People like Robert Atack will always rave about the world going to hell in a handcart.
All I say is, “Look around you – not at Robert’s bleak world but at the world as it is. Do you see any evidence that it is about to end? Or do you see evidence of an ingenious species living ever longer, getting ever richer, solving its problems one by one, and moving forwards at an ever more remarkable rate?”
If the former, you’re a gloomy Green faux-environmentalist/communist or socialist pessimist. If the latter, you’re a capitalist-optimist.
The evidence for optimism is thousands of years of human survival against all odds, particularly in the last two hundred years when life expectancy doubled thanks to the Industrial Revolution.
Robert and his Green mates would have marched in the streets against the Industrial Revolution. They would have focused only on the smokestacks and ignored the life-enhancing benefits.
But look at us now. The people in the nation with the shortest average life expectancy today (Afghanistan at 40 years) live longer than the people with the longest life expectancy 200 years ago (Great Britain).
Progress is not a dirty word, Robert. It’s why you’re here.
Erm…..I think you’d best tell that to the many starving people in Africa ….now isn’t that the result of far right capitalism?…y’know…..the one whereby we don’t give a rats shit if the kids die if there’s nothing to invest in?…and if there is…lets manufacture subversion and foment a war to get what they have?…
Hmmmm..perhaps your time would be better spent as an overseas aid /medical worker,…or do you wish to duplicate the same mentality here, bud?
Wild Katipo: You really are poisonous aren’t you? I note you don’t mention anything about corrupt Marxist dictatorships replacing orderly colonial governments.
Do you really think the poor of Zimbabwe prefer life under Mugabe to life under Ian Smith in Rhodesia – the former breadbasket of Africa?
You have no answers to my points about DDT and biofuel. But then there’s not much you can say, is there? Easier to stage a typical lefty diversion and a froth at the mouth about capitalism.
You obviously don’t realise that one of New Zealand’s wealthiest men, Stephen Jennings, formerly of Renaissance Capital in Moscow, is investing heavily in Africa. He will certainly do more for the place than the green movement did.
Or fascist ‘relocation ‘ camps doing more than just relocating , bud.
Stop perverting the truth to suit your own ‘BORN TO RULE ‘ garbage , mate.
We all realize the crap you support is just another form of oppressive passive totalitarianism.
Whether you want to bang on about communism as evidence for your extremism or Franco style right wing fascism – its all the same old crap and we all can see right through it.
I find it quite humourous that a person so ‘successful’ as yourself cant even see the difference between Social Democracy and Communism , – which is what most people want to see RE-INSTITUTED in our country. Such as is now prevalent in the social democratic states of Scandinavia – among the per capita most wealthiest nations on earth currently !!
NOT COMMUNISM !!!!!!!!!! GO HAVE A READ UP ON THE DIFFERENCE , PLEASE!!
Until then , – old son – just get your facts straight before you bother to post PLEASE !
And by the way-as an edit- most KIWI’s want a SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC form of govt- NOT COMMUNISM….
Just to letch’a know that under neo liberalism…and its inherent favoritism towards the rich and super rich… goes against the grain of the time honored egalitarianism that people in this country fought to preserve-
Not have it hi jacked by some crass Laizze Fairre garbage imported from the USA or the 19th century Austrian school of economics.
And which …by the way …caused the Great Depression.
Yep…in regards to your first point , buddy , you play with a poisonous spider…don’t cry when you get bit.
Second thing is , ..Im finding this delightfully humorous taking the piss right out of you .
Why is that you say?..well for starters, ..for every historical point you make (biased of course ..with unsubstantiated pseudo facts)….there is another point that so easily refutes your dubious claims. And that’s all they are….claims. Not facts. Mere opinions.
But the main thing Ive been playing round with is your professional arrogance and that assumed air of humor you mask your anger with.
What do you mean , you might ask?…well…have you not noticed that to date I have not presumed any political allegiance?…and have steadily brought it back to your neo liberal bent?
Of course you say your not a Nat supporter, ..of course you would say that….because simply…you would do deals with the very communists you say you abhor if you could make a profit.
Hells teeth , man!…your the sort of character who would happily trade with Putin this very moment if you could score a buck.
So therein lies your neo liberal love of capitalism for all to see…you don’t even believe in the tripe you post!!!
You are what we would simply term a trader, a mercenary holding no allegiance to any political group. Money is the all pervasive thing to you. And slagging Greens earns you money . And that is all it is about.
And thusly…collapses your diatribe about communism…and thusly also…lies the false premise on which you make about the greens…anyone with a cursory knowledge of them knows they are not communists.(your argument is weakened and shown to be hot air because you consistently seem to display confusion between communism and social democracies…)
Pride cometh before a fall…and you are not exempt.
You have been shown for the political fraud you are…neither holding allegiance to any political bent or policy save that which facilitates your ability to make cash …and hence negating any argument you might ever have had.
In summary…. anything you say is to be regarded now or in the future for the ludicrous , meaningless drivel that it actually is.
You certainly do have a good sense of humour, Wild Katipo. Particularly your little jape about most people wanting the reinstitution of social democracy.
All the polls I’ve been seeing say most people want a return of the National government.
Yes…it might pay for you and your little right wing sycophants to speak to others outside your little group then.
And by the way- the very fact you have to either
A) bring in your little mates to support your idiot arguments on this site ,…
or B) keep ticking the ‘vote for’ box yourself impresses no one here.
All it goes to show buddy is the weakness of your inane thought processes.
Toorah chump.
Actually that period of short life expectancy was an aberration. remember the 3 score years and ten? No hospitals, virtually no medicine…
Too many people, not enough food? Not hard to find places like that.
Many parts of South Auckland would be an easy place to start.
When Kim Dotcom texted Wayne Tempero “I wonder who hacked Slater ;-)” even people who can’t join the dots between feeding corn to cars instead of people and mass African starvation (or between banning mosquito-killing DDT and 50 million dying of mosquito-borne malaria take your pick) should be able to figure it out.
FAMBO: Thanks to Helen Clark stealing the 2005 election by illegally overspending her advertising allowance in the week that mattered most (the second most corrupt action by a PM in NZ history next to her changing the law to make it legal), an independent campaign like ‘Labour means Greens’ is limited to $300,000, ie – before you all start howling about rich pricks – the same amount Owen Glenn donated to the Clarxists a few elections back.
How do we go about putting in a complaint about these billboards being in breach of the electoral law?
That’s mush, NOMUSH. They comply fully with the law – at least according to a top lawyer.
Must everything you oppose be illegal? If they opposed National, you’d be high-fiving, right?
The right keep saying stuff like “Greens would bankrupt the country within 6 months”.
But they never say exactly how.
When I look at Greens monetary and economic policy… I see many good things. More progressive taxation, capital gains tax, establishment of a green investment bank… not hugely radical stuff actually, and most of it, if not all, tried overseas.
The German Bundestagg has just under 10% Greens. The world has not ended in Germany, in fact, they’re doing rather well.
Where the right get their crazy ideas… they’re just not logical!!
Does my head in this does.
You don’t live in Germany, do you Lara?
Ask a German mum about her power bill since the country was conned into green electricity generation ten years ago by those Greens you speak of so lovingly.
We Kiwis may be grumbling about the incremental rise in our power prices: 37% in the last decade. But do you know how much German power prices have soared in the same decade?
100%.
Not only that, but contrary to the Greens’ professed love of the animal kingdom, those forests of propellors that now blight the German countryside are responsible for more birdstrikes than the aviation industry.
But then Green policy and death have always gone hand in hand. Especially in Africa, where hundreds of millions have died as a result of insane, inhumane decisions to ban the DDT that saved millions from mosquito-borne malaria, and the decision to feed American food crops to cars instead of people.
The Greens put people last. That’s not me saying that, that’s what the evidence says. If you’re happy with that, don’t complain when they take their wrecking ball to your economy.
Now I don’t expect Green supporters to believe this, since the Green religion has them well and truly greenwashed. My messages are aimed at those considering joining. I hope you’ll look at the evidence and think about it.
In GrownupWorld, feeling is no substitute for thinking.
This is quite a lesson in political spin we’re getting here. First of all you have to appear calm and in control at all times, a bit of humour helps too.
Use emotive language that resonates with the people you’re trying to reach – presumably the undecided voters in the middle – I don’t think he’s trying to connect on an emotional level but at a much deeper level. I have a vague memory of reading about advertisers deliberately trying to connect with our beliefs at that level but I can’t remember where that was now. Maybe, if we’re lucky John might explain this strategy to us.
Speaking/writing confidently is important too. I think someone debunked that malaria comment somewhere else on the Daily Blog already so I know it’s not true but notice how incredibly believable his comments are. I suspect use of statistics (real or otherwise) may be important here.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere there are the comments that are meant to get through to left wing people and wind them up so everyone can see how nasty they are.
What he’s doing is quite deceitful too but even while I’m aware of the strategy, I still feel like John is someone I’d like because of the jovial way he seems to approach things.
Now I don’t wish to equate John with the Devil ;-)vbut as many Christians will tell you Satan employs deception and confusion to achieve his ends and he would never actually appear amongst us with a pointy tail and pitch fork – it’s much more likely that he would appear to be a superficially attractive person with easy answers.
I mean this in a metaphorical way of course, the lesson is that those who want to cause trouble have to appear to be good people if they want to be really effective at what they are doing. It’s why John Key was supposed to remain totally separate from Cameron Slater.
Well, that Reading the Maps chappie called me a Lizard Man, and now I’m the Devil. I guess that’s progress.
You guys give me too much credit. I just believe sunlight is the best disinfectant and want people to debate the facts.
If you can prove me wrong, prove it. Every time you simply abuse me, I win.
“I just believe sunlight is the best disinfectant and want people to debate the facts.”
Lol! You really do have a sense of humour!
…You were joking, then, weren’t you?
….Weren’t you?
…Gulp…
Oops, my bad.
There is no abuse in pointing out your foolishness , none whatsoever…however it is also plain for all to see, therefore somewhat redundant I suppose..
Ans as stated….your ‘facts’ are mere subjective unsubstantiated opinion , nothing more…
A fool is to be corrected in his folly.
Hahahaaha…purposely leaves out the high living standards and salary / wages of that country that OFFSETS that cost due to NOT having a far right neo liberal govt.
Thats the problem with these Mont Pelerin types…..the allure of wealth at the expense of the bulk of the populace blinds them to concepts of sovereignty , nationhood…
This character is the type who would happily see our wages/living standards drop with the TPPA done and dusted….
So ones got to ask….what do characters like this get out of it?……
“Hahahaaha…purposely leaves out the high living standards and salary / wages of that country ”
…for which you have absoutely zero evidence. NZ doesn’t need a marxist/gaia experminet thanks. We’re doing just fine.
Proof of the suppositions that Ansell brought his little mates to the site. Proof also that here we have a semi co ordinated (if co ordination is possible on the right ) small group of lonely hearts e mailing each other to try and disrupt ‘the other blog ‘
Honestly…quite humorous.
Ansells message is spot on and I thank you for reproducing it in full for me to forward to all my fence sitting friends who naively think that Greens are actually nice people
Too right Andy – I’ve unfortunately met a few of those nasty Greens – seen them kicking aside hungry babies so they can go and tend their beloved mariwackybacky plants. Put them in front of a camera and they’re all smiles and clean water but actually they live vile nasty misanthropic drugged-addled lives.
I mean look at that Kennedy Graham joker nasty wacko law academic – the worst kind (unlike that brilliant incisive philosophy academic who is comfortable with close family relations). Where did he go wrong compared with his immaculate brother Sir Douglas? Too much smokey dopey. At least his nephew Carrick is making a reputable name for himself in PR.
L00L
All I can say about the dirty politics lately is that they make Muldoon a saint. Rob, if you can hear, I’m sorry I wished you ill. This Ansell character by comparison wastes money on racism and polluting the environment. You could do much better Ansell by giving the green stuff to the Salvation Army. That way you might on the way to heaven get up to that dark cloud above the pollution levels and wished you’d voted Greens.
Let us all recall that this is the same ethically stainless, morally principled, political ad necromancer, John Ansell, who once shared a cup of piss and bile with Invercargill-based, self-professed, racist, and misogynist Louis Crimp … for purposes of cooking up a mythical $2 million campaign to further froth racial animosity between Pakeha and Maori. A socially engineering idealist to emulate, I must say.
And what is wrong with advocating for a country where all people have the same rights, live under the same law, vote on the same roll, and when people’s taxes are used to help those in need, it’s because of their need, not because of their race?
In twelve polls conducted so far in various media on various aspects of racial privilege, the percentage who agree with the above proposition is always more or less 80% – including a large percentage of forward-thinking Maori.
To all neutrals who are observing this debate: there’s a world of difference between criticism and racism.
The accusation of racism is just a trick to scare off the meek. Sadly, it works on most of them too.
But without the opportunity for criticism (of all things), there is only mind control.
The parties of the left specialise in trying to make people who don’t agree with redistributing your income to their mates feel guilty. Notice here how they always play the man and not the ball.
That’s because they have no answer to our facts.
Are you happy with being played for a fool?
Ah yes, the neutrals. This exercise in A-grade trolling is for their benefit. There’s two things John is doing here, one is to speak past us with political statements that resonate with undecided voters (his area of expertise of course) and the other is to wind up the regular commenters so that they react from an angry emotional place and rage at him.
By doing it in a humourous way it just serves to increase the perception that he’s a good guy and everyone here is a nasty piece of work. As I’m sure he’d say perception is reality at a time like this.
Actually, I thought the ‘playing the man not the ball’ comment was a bit risky though since it’s pretty clear from the many, many comments he’s written that playing the man is one of his own tactics.
“The accusation of racism is just a trick to scare off the meek. Sadly, it works on most of them too.”
Heh. This sentiment far more accurately describes your bandying of the label “communist” whenever talking about the Green Party.
Ansell’s epithets have integrity and promote the “contest of ideas”: others epithets are cheap name-calling.
@ Ansell
“The parties of the left specialise in trying to make people who don’t agree with redistributing your income to their mates feel guilty.”
Nope, people need to take more responsibility for their responses/internal conflicts than that. Any guilt is far more likely due to an underlying realisation that there is merit in redistribution but that they don’t want to support such things due to private advantage being a greater priority to them.
The left putting forward sound societal principles shouldn’t be blamed for internal personal conflicts of individuals in that society.
I thought you would be into ‘personal responsibility’? The very least an individual can do is take responsibility for their emotional reactions.
@ John Ansell
“And what is wrong with advocating for a country where all people have the same rights, live under the same law, vote on the same roll, and when people’s taxes are used to help those in need, it’s because of their need, not because of their race? –
Because people advocating such things, such as yourself, are ignoring that there is a systemic problem in this country which creates obstacles for some races; obstacles to deriving the benefits that other races enjoy.
This picture says it all:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwGdYVhCAAANK9J.png
Your ‘type’ rely on peoples’ ignorance to get your agenda pushed through. (Like the DDT lies you are spreading) If people were informed, they would all realise how very unhelpful the ideologies you push are and National would never be voted in.
Blue Leopard: If Chinese New Zealanders earn more on average than Pakeha, does that mean my Taiwanese wife has to give me a racial inferiority bonus?
If gay people earn more on average than straight people, does that mean my hairdresser has to give me a heterosexuality discount?
If farmers earn more on average than townies, does that mean my dairy farmer cousin has to give me free butter?
If left-handers are on average better tennis players than right-handers like me, does that mean I should start every game with a 15-0 lead?
If blond young women get more sex than bald middle-aged men, does that mean I… you get the picture.
Why should a person’s race be used to brand him or her as a basket case needing state aid?
Classic!
“If Chinese New Zealanders earn more on average than Pakeha, does that mean my Taiwanese wife has to give me a racial inferiority bonus?
If this is caused by a systemic fault, the fault should be rectified by the government.
“If gay people earn more on average than straight people, does that mean my hairdresser has to give me a heterosexuality discount?”
If this is caused by a systemic fault, the fault should be rectified by the government.
“If farmers earn more on average than townies, does that mean my dairy farmer cousin has to give me free butter?”
If this is caused by a systemic fault, the fault should be rectified by the government.
“If left-handers are on average better tennis players than right-handers like me, does that mean I should start every game with a 15-0 lead?”
If the left-hander in question has the additional talent the stats indicate they would and wants a challenging, interesting game, yes. If the left-hander is simply a bore – they will probably not agree to the handicap and you might stop seeking out their company for tennis games, viewing them as poor sports.
“If blond young women get more sex than bald middle-aged men, does that mean I… you get the picture.”
If a bald middle-aged man has this ‘disadvantage’, and wishes to have a ‘pissing contest’ with a young blond as to who has the most sex, then… it is likely his rigid, dyed in the wool attitudes would be creating a disadvantage. I would suggest he rectify the cause of the problem – his attitudes. I don’t fancy the likelihood of him doing that, do you?
“Why should a person’s race be used to brand him or her as a basket case needing state aid?”
Who said anything about ‘basket case’?
If there is a systemic fault causing problems for a certain race, then the government should rectify the problem, that their policies, after-all, are creating.
And how do you define a person’s race? Especially when they’ve got more than one?
Do you take the one with the most blood? Not here you don’t.
Steve O’Regan (known as Tipene when he’s got his hand out) is 15/16ths Irish, and his daughter Hannah (sorry, Hana) is 30/32nds Irish.
By what systematic dysfunction are they able to claim the distinct advantage of racial inferiority?
(And no, the Irish are not officially regarded as inferior. The opinion of the English doesn’t count any more.)
How would I define a person’s race?
By asking what they identify with. For example, if they have Maori blood and identify with that race, then that is their race.
I’m mostly English and Scottish, but also ever-so-slightly Irish. (Like the O’Regans are ever-so-slightly Maori.)
If someone told me I could get a racial inferiority bonus for declaring myself Irish, I’d be Sean O’Ansell, to be sure, to be sure.
It’s called responding to incentives. Maori do that well, and who can blame them?
Maori respond to incentives well?
Well the incentives mustn’t be working very well, then:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwGdYVhCAAANK9J.png#sthash.rZ8OD1Bh.dpuf
You really must vote The Civilian Party, your logic sounds strikingly similar:
“Under a Civilian Government, the current tax structure, which charges the highest income earners 33c on the dollar, will be inverted, so that it asks the country’s lowest income earners to contribute 33%, while asking the higher earners to contribute at the lowest rate, 10.5%.
This will help to discourage poverty by making it a less financially appealing option, and encourage success by making class mobility not simply a matter of prestige, but in some cases, a matter of life and death.”
So this guy is a shill for corporate polluters and is being paid by a Coal company. He’s an embarrassing weirdo who worked for Act twice. He’s some crazy Christian too, right? As if this election couldn’t get any weirder we’ve got the looney John Ansell and his buddy John Lawrence Third looking to put up inane word-play. Idiots!
I’m happy if you want to pretend I’m a weirdo or a redneck or a corporate shill – but please don’t call me Christian.
I detest all forms of mind control, including the Green religion that’s controlling you guys.
I forget to factor in that some of you missed out on the humour gene.
To elucidate: when I said on Morning Report that NZ’s rockstar economic growth was caused by God (who must be a Nat) flattening the People’s Republic of Christchurch, that should not be construed to mean I am religious. Anything but.
“I detest all forms of mind control”
says the ad man who has segmented the population to find the susceptible “tradies & ladies” who will uncritically fall prey to his masterful use of “flatten and sharpen”. The humour gene no doubt.
Snap! 🙂
Everyone with customers tries to figure out who his best customers are and cater to them. What’s wrong with that?
Just today I heard from a Green friend (on whose Facebook page I’m having a civilised debate – what other kind is there?) that he’s been canvassing Karori and encountering a number of women who, as predicted, are tossing up between National and the Greens.
We will both try to win them over.
“Everyone with customers tries to figure out who his best customers are and cater to them. What’s wrong with that?”
Nothing wrong with that. Who said there was?
“I detest all forms of mind control”
Says the marketing/advertising professional.
😐
Persuasion is not control. People are free to disagree with no consequences.
Try disagreeing with a global warm-monger.
Manipulation is control
Hehehehe……..Sept 15th is gonna be a party on down , people 🙂
This chap reminds me of a failed rearguard action before the hills taken…
With all the lies, the rorts , the deceit that’s going on around National at the moment…there’s bound to be the old ideological die hards who just cant surrender.
Its called saving face. Ansell……its over. Get with the program.
And you’re cherished neo liberal ideologies will be looked back upon in history as one of the darkest , most vicious , most deceitful periods of New Zealands economic history that was ever foisted on the population of this country.
I take it you read the newspapers..watch the news (such as it is) ….do you honestly support whats going on in the highest offices in out land?
I should hope not.
No I don’t. Nor do I support the media’s amateurish focus on the sleaze rather than the substance of the differences between the parties.
The National sleaze reported in Hager’s book is certainly not worse than what was going on in Labour in the Clark era. Politics is not a pillow fight, it’s a battle, and battles are brutal.
I used to think Judith Collins was a potential successor to Key, but went off her very fast after her disgraceful dismissal of Justice Binnie’s report on the Bain case, which I read from start to finish, but I doubt whether Judith had time to read before dismissing the Canadian judge’s findings anyway.
(His impeccable reasoning changed my mind from believing Bain guilty to innocent.)
Cameron Slater once gave me a forum to debate Willie Jackson for four weeks in Truth, and I had some email and phone dealings with him in 2008 over a campaign to highlight Clark’s electoral corruption.
But the book makes it clear that he is happy to lie, and I detest that.
But having said that, I don’t see anything in the book that’s anywhere near as illegal as stealing an election.
The difference between National and Labour is that the Nats don’t have a supportive hacker or email thief (thinking of The Hollow Men) and an author prepared to receive the stolen property and publish its contents for his own enrichment.
If they did, you’d have the same kind of book as Dirty Politics or The Hollow Men, only with probably more skullduggery.
(You only have to see the eagerness with which a random bunch of lefty blog commenters are drooling on this thread about defacing a perfectly factual billboard to see how that side operates.)
You would be far more convincing if you simply owned up to who you are.
A neo liberal mercenary minded capitalist that would be quite happy extolling the Green party if they were to give you financial reward that was ongoing.
So …..as I said earlier …any opinions you forward are to be viewed for the deceit they really are. And taken about as seriously.
Admit it- you hold no allegiance except that which derives you financial benefit. Mercenaries do the same.
I wouldn’t advertise the Green Party if you gave me a million bucks. (Or the National Party at the moment, for that matter.) Anyone who knows me knows that.
As for owning up to who I am, my name is at the top of every comment I’ve ever made on every blog.
What’s yours again?
This is the same John Ansell who sounded quite nutty on Morning Report saying that god must be a member of the National party because he munted Christchurch. Surely no one takes him seriously.
By the way, Mr Ansell – some free advice. I was speaking with an apolitical person regarding your billboard on the southbound lane of the Wellington motorway, prior to the Murphy Street turn-off. When I showed her the pics of the billboard, and asked for her impressions, she said it was a Labour billboard promoting their Green coalition partner.
It’ll be interesting how many others view it in the same light. But if it’s in the same vein, well, ’nuff said.
And if not, Frank?
Then they will view it as the work of some out- of – touch right wing wierdos…and wont vote for the rabid rIgHt.
Rabid things are right poisonous – right Katipo?
Ansell is a prime example of the special sleazy breed who seem to dominate in the advertising world.
Manipulation dishonesty and selling bullshit define people like Ansell.
He’s a real idiot for giving permission to alter his bill boards though.
That’s his narcissistic mouth running away before he’d turned on his glib superficial brain.
I hope people take up his offer and change the bill boards in an amusing and artistic manner .
REASON: See my other comment about people lacking the humour gene.
You think its humorous to see 250,000 children in poverty?….
Most normal people don’t.
You think its humorous to see our national debt at around 70 billion because of Nats borrowing…and enabling tax cuts for the super rich then blaming the poor which they created in the first place?
Most normal people don’t.
The list goes on and on and on regards the failure of neo liberal monetarist advocates…but anyways…its over. Pretty much a discredited lame duck…..
And Im sure a lot of victims of it will find that quite humorous 🙂
Do you think it’s humorous seeing millions of Africans dying of malaria because the Green movement got mosquito-killing DDT banned, and turned food crops into petrol?
I think you’ll find an agonising death in a hovel in deepest reddest, Marxist Africa trumps living in faux-poverty in the most generous welfare state in the world.
I’m one of those tradies, a sparkie and like to think I’m a practical bloke. My biggest concern is the TPPA because using my common sense it looks to me like such a crap deal for the country, what we’ve been able to see of it so far that is.
I was, like my kids, brought up hunting fishing surfing tramping skiing diving kayaking (and free thinking) and I know it’s not much fun wading in shit let alone swimming in it.
Could have jumped the ditch and made more money but no fracking way, i like it here.
Cheers
Ps I hope you don’t meet my missus, an avid gardener, she’d rip your nuts off.
More violence from the left. I’m very happy that you’re making it so easy for my audience to observe the Greens’ true colours.
Like I keep saying, he’s here to cause merry hell for his own benefit – he’s even kind enough to explain to us what he’s doing.
He’s winding you up while making statements about political issues in a way that makes perfect sense to right wing voters. Anyone who argues with him is guaranteed to look like an idiot to those people.
The result is a further entrenchment of partisan warfare between the left and right, which is never good for us. A better thing for us to do is to be connecting with the genuinely conservative people on the right who are only now starting to see what a bunch of radicals the Key government actually is. My grandfather was a staunch National supporter but he would be spinning in his grave at what these guys have done to the country and there would be plenty of others today who would feel the same way if they could only see past all the PR and spin that’s out there.
When you support an economic ideology such as far right neo liberalism …by its very nature it has to be done by stealth…which is of course, was how it was introduced.
What we are witnessing in parliament at the moment is precisely the fruits of that stealth being uncovered and exposed.
To advocate and maintain a system that gratifys the super rich at the expense of the rest…secrecy , and doublespeak is expedient …
And like all corruption….once exposed , …the main players start to turn on each other in an effort for self preservation.
This is precisely what we are seeing now .
Ansell….its over….and no amount of ‘ humor ‘ , self aggrandizement of how clever you think you are will ever change the fact that there is now irreparable damage been done to your cherished beliefs.
It has all unravelled by the very people who instigated these things. And the public are appalled at it.
That is the problem for these types…always it appears good at first…but sooner or later it becomes unsustainable…just look through history.
Corruption is but for a season.
But the penalty ,once exposed , – destroys the political careers of those who indulged in it.
Hey Johnny boy that was an idiom commonly used by tradies and you want to go and cry to your mummy. Maybe you don’t know tradies as well as you think or pretend.
I didn’t say I was offended, Tom. On the contrary, your comment assisted my cause. I may even use in my campaign – along with all the promises of vandalism.
What a thicksh*#. All from a guy that lacks the intelligence to tie his own shoes. Its no wonder only the likes of the KKK and the National “party” Front think Ansell has any clues.
Yes NED KELLY, but thankfully I don’t need to wrestle with shoelaces because one of my ingenious fellow species-members invented slip-ons.
That’s progress, you see. One day they’ll come up with a pill for your dishonesty.
Ned Kelley, you just had your buttons pushed by a guy who’s a master manipulator – and fair’s fair, he’s made you look a bit silly because he got you so hot under the collar.
Is Aaron the only sane one here? (Oops, I mean apart from me.)
See Comrade Lenin’s views on useful idiots.
Ansell, you an your mates at the local, nice an cosy self centred bigots, you like John Key are always in the past when in debate, always referring to what Helen Clark did, JK has been in 6 years an it’s a mess for all middle to lower income tax payers, the biggest thing National has done is exposing Political Corruption, THEIRS !! Like you Ansell I have voted Nation, (Muldoon x 2) and ACT x2, but both these parties are now so focused on now policies an ugly capitalism, greed that they have no vision of our future in fifty years. As a so called tradie, who climbed the corporate ladder I certainly do not wish my children’s children’s children’s live to be controlled by the nasty , vile corrupt practices of Coporates. Throughout my life I have seen businesses come an go, raping an pillaging on their way.
Some businessmen are crooks, John, absolutely, no question.
But it’s childish to assume that business in general is bad – real GreenWorld thinking, if I may be so rude.
In GrownupWorld, business is how we make a living by supplying a product or service that helps someone else in some way.
Could even a practical man like you make something as basic as a humble pencil?
No – it takes millions of industrious people to mine the graphite for the ‘lead’, to mine the copper and bronze for the brass endy bit, rubber trees have to be tapped, timber must be grown and felled and milled. Paint – where does paint come from – not sure. And lacquer.
And you hate corporations? How would you make a pencil?
While we have free speech, crooked businesses get exposed and die, while the vast majority continue to give us what we want and we all get richer and live longer as a result.
What about giving business overall some credit instead of all this perpetual moaning?
We’re a great species and, by any measure, and despite ever-present problems which we’re very successful at fixing, we’re doing fantastically well.
Oh this just gets better and better – what are you saying? That we must be supportive of monopolistic corporations otherwise we wouldn’t have pencils?
Like you put forward, people are very resourceful. I agree, and consequently am sure that people could find ways to make pencils without the need for being underpaid, having their jobs casualized and their democratic system undermined involved in the equation.
Whilst I disagree thoroughly with your ideology, I appreciate your taking the time to converse with people here.
My pleasure, Blue Leopard. It’s a contest of ideas, and I don’t claim a monopoly on the good ones, but I try to understand the latest thinking on both sides.
I’m surprised to hear a socialist arguing against monopolies, and in that I agree with you.
I’d rather have as much competition as possible and am sorry New Zealand is too small to have more in certain crucial markets where the prices remain too high for lack of players.
Yes, I am saying that the capitalist system is the best way to produce a pencil. What system would you use?
You need to give each producer – be it miner, rubber-tapper, timberjack or painter – enough incentive to play his part, which he does not for the common good, but for his own good and to feed his family.
As a by-product of going to the mine or the forest or the pencil factory to feed himself and his family, he finds that he has contributed to making something useful to a child in some faraway school.
By that division of labour, stoked by incentives to work to a high standard, we clever humans get our stuff.
People have an incentive to work harder when they themselves benefit than when the state benefits – agreed?
Capitalism is the worst system – except for all the others.
@ J Ansell
I prefer a Social Democratic approach rather than the more ultraistic forms of Capitalism.
Monopolies are proliferating due to our having followed unfettered varieties of Capitalism (Neo-Liberalism or Laissez Faire). These versions inevitably lead to concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. A wide variety of monopolistic behaviours are quick to follow. Basically this ends up destroying the very system that allowed it to flourish. This is the weakness of Capitalism, of which unfettered forms exaggerate.
We are seeing these effects currently in New Zealand – loud and clear.
Social Democracy/the Mixed Market Model has worked better than these unfettered varieties. It has done so, because it counteracts this frailty of capitalism.
I, therefore, in the name of accuracy, correct your final statement to:
Social Democracy is the worst system, apart from all the others.
I personally believe the proliferation of monopolistic effects is the most serious issue we face because I view all other major contemporary issues are arising from this one underlying issue.
This is the reason why I support the left wing parties in this country because they more sincerely and accurately align their policies with Social Democratic principles. It is also why I am averse to the right-wing because while they market one thing, they provide something else. What they are really offering are attitudes and failed political approaches that are creating instability and the breakdown of our society.
I expect ansell to scream, cry and bite his pillow when national get routed at this election 😉
Creepy old rich white guys like him have had their day.
He can go back to pushing the drug booze with some wonderful alcohol adds.
Go be a drug pusher again Ansell …………. its about all your good for.
There’s a Bit of money in it eh ?
As anyone who knows me knows, I’m not a fan of National under Key, who will be remembered as having achieved a great deal for himself and his party but – like Holyoake and Muldoon before him – pretty much nothing for his country.
So just as I asked you not to call me Christian, please don’t call me a Nat.
Having said that, I’d still much rather they won than a Labour party with seven Green ministers, a possible Green finance minister and Red Russ and Mad Meti as joint deputy prime ministers.
Hmm, Is it just me or is attacking Russel and Metiria (who many of us know to be decent people) the best attempt yet at winding up green voters? I’m interested to hear what others thought because the was the one that produced the biggest emotional reaction in me.
Agreed, Aaron.
When an attack is made on something one believes in but knows little about, I believe one is more likely to feel threatened for one’s belief. The more one comes to know (in this case about what Russel and Metiria are ‘really like’), the more such attack becomes merely annoying rather than threatening.
Mr Ansell, clearly very good at his job, is armed with a range of ways to wind people up, coupled with his persistent use of good grammar and avoidance of slang. In this way he is able to provoke without committing himself to a stance or making it easy for him to be caricatured in a soundbite.
Were it not that I disagree so strongly with Mr Ansell’s side of this debate,I might admire the excellent job he is doing of constructing such a strong (as measured by the response it is getting) argument out of so little substance. Smoke and mirrors indeed, in the hands of a master charlatan.
So….youd rather say that with a Keynesian based economy back in the 1960’s and 1970’s with virtually full employment and no serious widespread poverty in New Zealand that….
The last 30 years of neo liberal monetarist policies that have created over 250,000 children in poverty , sold off our assets, (including land…1 million hectares ) conditions whereby first home buyers are excluded from the market , and put us 70 billion in debt is ‘doing ‘ something for our country.
Your a joke. Truly .
I rest my case.
May it rest in peace.
Tena tatou katoa huihui nei i tenei muka korerorero.
Greetings, Martyn. I attended the GCSB meeting in Christchurch recently and am grateful for what your blogsite is doing for our democracy. And Chris, thanks for spotting this. Greetings also to the concerned lefties that inhabit this site, invariably including citations where possible to back up their views and confirm their facts, and even to our resident trolls for reminding us all what we risk becoming if we allow our standards to fall too far.
Not that I agree with most of them, I’m also grateful to Mr Ansell for making his true motivations so clear. I’ve never tried to pick up a snake with a highly poisonous bite, but were I ever to do so I could imagine the same trepidation that goes with making the following statement.
Mr Ansell may officially be acting for his client, but the tenor of his statements makes it abundantly clear that he is also expressing (his?) personal views. He may, as he states, be drawing out our responses to inform his client, but our collective responses seem to be just as effective at drawing out his.
However, as for informing undecided voters that voting Green is a bad idea (will he consider this response as addressing his argument?) because he is concerned for them and cares for our democracy, no he isn’t and, I believe, no he doesn’t. I will now try to refute his assertions with logic.
Of all parties reckoned to have a significant chance of getting MPs into parliament this time, three including the Greens have not yet been in cabinet ( though the Greens have been in confidence and supply). Throughout FPP and continuing with MMP parties have taken turns to get into and be voted out of government – all well and democratic.
So why is it So Crucial that the Greens never ever get even one chance at sharing government?
Not because they couldn’t be voted out if people changed their minds after three years – evidence to date is that if any party is likely to try to subvert or suspend democracy so drastically it would be the one currently governing us.
Democracy’s interests are served when voters choose according to the best information available. However, Mr Ansell’s billboards are clearly designed to encourage people to vote according to fear of what they don’t understand. Not to get better informed by looking at Green policies, but to ‘trust me when I tell you that their positive-seeming policies are all lies, not worth even a look’.
Why attack the Greens in this way, and why now?
Well, they have been growing rather steadily, and could even have up to seven cabinet ministers. This however isn’t a real threat, as they could always be voted out next time, unless…
…unless enough voters liked their policies so much that they decided not to vote them out. (Ever again.)
Democracy is about learning which has to include making mistakes and learning from them. If there is no question that the Green masterplan is to impose martial law under urgency in the first 100 days, voters should be free to take them at their word and see if they keep it.
Why do Mr Ansell’s clients so not want this to happen? This is the bit about which I think they don’t want to be upfront.
Now I look forward (a bit apprehensively it’s true!) to a personal attack from Mr Ansell which I will take as providing evidence in support of my argument.
Well, this is going well. All swinging voters who are thinking of voting Green or Labour should now be able to observe these people’s true colours.
Wild Katipo is right: I haven’t put up much in the way of evidence. I thought I had, but that was on another blog. I will do so now.
Where to start. What about with Greenpeace? Its founder, Patrick Moore, abandoned ship when it was taken over by communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Russel Norman was a member of the Australian Communist Party.
(Metiria Turei, by contrast, formerly a member of the Random Trollops performing troupe, began in politics as a candidate for the McGilluddy Serious Party in 1993, before contesting the 1996 election on behalf of the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 1996 and finally, in 2002, the Greens. She is likely to be ‘Joint’ Deputy PM with Red Russ in a Cunliffe cabinet.)
The Greens are not who they say they are. But even if they were intent on saving the planet rather than destroying capitalism (let’s face it in 1800 they would have been marching in the streets against the Industrial Revolution), their environmental policies have probably killed more people than Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot put together.
As a result of the hysterical book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in the early 60s, the environmentalists got DDT banned. DDT was produced to save allied troops from dying of malaria in the mosquito-infested Pontine Marshes in Italy. These marshes had been uninhabitable for millennia, but were drained by Mussolini, then reflooded by the departing Nazis in order to cause maximum deaths to the Allies advancing on Rome.
DDT not only saved the soldiers by killing the mosquitos, but saved millions of potential malaria victims all round the world. Malaria death rates in countries like Ceylon and even the US dropped from hundreds of thousands to single figures.
Totally predictably, when it was banned – for reasons which scientists later proved totally unfounded – 50 million people died of malaria, mainly in Africa.
More recently, the Green movement hit on the brilliant idea of feeding American corn to cars instead of people. Result: food prices skyrocketed, making food unaffordable to poor Africans, leading to mass-starvation.
The Greens seem to hate Africans, for some reasons, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual.
That’ll do for now. My evil corporate backers and I have a conference call with our Swiss bankers.
Join the dots… or join the Greens. Gaia be praised!
That’s really not as good as the rest of the posts John did. I think referring to all those statements as ‘evidence’ was possibly a step too far.
It also looks like he has become emotionally invested in this whole thing since he’s starting to boast about what he’s doing – or maybe telling swinging voters that his purpose here was to show people’s ‘true colours’ can’t undo the emotional jolt of seeing all that purple prose – I have to agree that it’s somewhat alarming how easy it was for him to wind people up – but then this is a comments section on the internet so it’s not like it’s unheard of.
But did you see the comment about “Joint” deputy prime ministers? Boy, that was a goodie!
You know damn well I was right,mate. And I will reiterate my point : You don’t give a fuck about tradies.
To your ilk…they are handy usable stereotypical non existent individuals portrayed as bumbling , simplistic , non thinking plebs for you and yours to feel you can portray as some sort of blue collar , beer swilling morons who always vote right.
Have I got news for you , son. This aint no TV advert for some new type of hand lotion – this is a Nationwide election !!!
This isnt some rich boys club that thinks it can fuck around with our futures …as you will see in a very , very short space of time.
And I can tell you right now , mate…there’s a lot of people who are now sick of all the lala land spin doctors and advertising mercenaries like you.
And that’s why soon you will find…’your services will no longer be required’.
People want reality- not some dreamland bullshit make believe crap dredged out of an old outdated Mont Pelerin society magazine at the bottom of the comic pile in a doctors waiting room.
Well I was right about their language.
Have a look at what I actually said, not what you imagined I said:
“These sparkies and plumbers and builders are practical blokes who cut to the chase and come with very large dollops of common sense. They spend their days solving problems calmly and rationally.”
How is that an insult?
Hey Johnny boy. Recommended viewing from this sparkie.
TED talk Aug 14 “Beware fellow plutocrats the pitch forks are coming”
Also’ haven’t met a plumber yet who hasn’t dreamed of ways to stop mixing water with shit.
Hmm no reply,this tradie must be getting close.
Hunting and fishing tradies ? the wrong target group for you mate.
Recommended reading
“fish and game magazine” (read by 300,000 enthusiasts) issue 38 march 2014 pages 6&7 Chief executives comment
also worth a look
http://www.fishandgame.org.nz/rma-reforms
Yes folks the commie smoke screen is all about shit in water.
Cheers
PS beware the gardening ladies.
Hahaha…so now were objecting to the use of the vernacular , are we, old son?
Wasn’t it you who said you liked people who could cut to the chase?
Or is the REAL TRUTH you’ve never spent a day in your mercenary , money grubbing neo liberal life on a REAL construction site?
And again as Ive stated before…you are not to be taken seriously….but only those in whose devious agendas you are on the payroll for.
Ill say it again – you dont give a fuck about tradies.
You’re not doing very well in the thumbs up/down department, are you, Spider? Must be some sensible people here, after all.
Your argument is just about on its seventh and eighth legs.
That story regarding deaths from malaria due to an agricultural ban on DDT use is a totally mendacious fantasy.
Grow up Mr Ansell.
Another insult without evidence.
Just read this thread, there is more evidence here of your intellectual age than for your claims regarding DDT, for which you have produced no evidence whatsoever.
Here’s my evidence: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-truth-about-ddt-and-silent-spring
Where’s yours?
The commies!!! Watch out for the commies!!!!!! The COMMIES ARE COMING!!!!!
You’re in the wrong decade mate. McCarthy is dead and buried.
Well-shrieked.
Let me spell it out for you:
YOU’re in the wrong decade mate.
Shrill cries of “watch out for the commies” belong to a bygone age. You appear to be showing yours.
L00L
Putin a bit more analysis, Anon 🙂 (Sorry.)
Communism, socialism, social democracy – whatever words you use to disguise it, you believe the state knows best.
The Greens would have an army of bureaucrats telling farmers how many staples to use on their fence posts.
No thinking person surrenders their free will to a state.
No thinking person would remain stuck in the concerns of the 1950’s and ’60’s.
They would update their thoughts in response to current conditions and would realise that a certain level of state power is required to counteract corporate/big business power.
They would realise that having had state power systematically undermined and weakened over the last thirty to fifty years, has allowed unelected people, who are unaccountable toward public interests and regardless of wider concerns – reckless toward them in fact – to capture power and drive the country in problematic directions that are harmful to many.
They would not surrender their will to such a trend.
http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=9
A capitalist system, like a rugby match, needs sensible rules and good refereeing. No argument there.
A capitalist market is like an Arabian bazaar – traders hawking their wares in all directions, but despite the confusion of choices, you tend to get what you want at a reasonable price.
A communist market is a nice orderly bread queue, and when you finally get to the end there’s no bread.
The leaky homes crisis was an example of weak rules and weak refereeing to protect New Zealanders against insane Green thinking.
Succumbing to the idiotic belief that untreated timber would not rot has so far cost us $14 billion.
So yes, a certain level of commonsense regulation is essential. Unfortunately sense is rather uncommon.
Glad we have found some point of agreement.
Given the view you express here though, am puzzled as to why you would endorse the right-wing, whose popular sentiments of ‘removing bureaucracy/red tape’ is all about removing the type of protections that you appear to believe is commonsense.
I am also puzzled by how you can conclude that ‘weak rules and weak refereeing’ protects anyone from anything.
I agree sense does appear to be uncommon. Why else would Key be so popular?
😉 😉 😉
You jest right? The leaky homes debacle was a failure of laissez faire capitalism brought about by a deliberate and wilful lack of government regulation as wanted by said capitalists, not due to any green commie conspiracy.
After all, social democracy with a green party in government doesn’t seem to be working too badly for Germany, does it?
But then anyone who intimates they think Putin is a communist is looking for monsters in the closet. I mean what’s next? The re-emergence of the bogey man?
We need an evolutionary jump away from this old fashioned stupidity, we won’t have a so called “life style” what so ever in thirty years if we don’t think green and progressive NOW! We won’t have a habitable planet! But all the old cronies will be dead by then leaving a stuffed, polluted, revolting legacy of total exploitation for $. We maybe even lucky not to go extinct as a species, we are already in the sixth massive extinction on this planet of biodiversity. You lot will be remembered for your cynicism and total disregard of life on earth nothing else. Take your greedy piles of ill gotten gains and try to enjoy what you will be taking away from future generations.
Another Malthusian socialist-pessimist. I was talking to a 27 year old the other day and he was saying he’s already lived through three ends-of-the-world. God knows what my total is.
Maybe one day you’ll get your wish and be able to say “I told you s-!”
But as the ghost of Malthus should realise by now, it’s not likely.
Your just cherry picking your arguments that you think actually back you up. The truth is we have major over population which is going unchecked globally this is killing the thin biosphere and all like support systems we rely on on the planet. N.Z is trying to cash in on this. Fresh water is becoming corporatised and controlled already around the world, and guess what N.Z is doing? Using 80 litres of fresh water to make 1 litre of milk and 79 litres of piss and shit back into the fresh water rivers to carry on polluting the harbours and lakes. This also destroys other food sources.
Fear not….he got to travel by using his mercenary advertising skills and getting paid by the highest bidder.
This man would say anything if it gained him financial advantage.
Therefore…not to be taken seriously.
The ones to be taken seriously are the devious motives and agendas of the ones paying him.
Ansells advertising standards are showing through…..
Bending the truth and presenting propaganda as an argument …..
How much money did you make pushing the drug alcohol Ansell ?
Do you think the drug alcohol should be pushed by advertising Ansell?
Because to me your just a greedy old dishonest drug pusher Ansell.
And I hope your own effort towards dirty politics is as successful as the exclusive brethrens was ……………. 🙂 .
Anyway I’m thinking of painting the blue national party logo on the signs…… keep it honest and all that.
More vandalism.
So you ask me how much I made pushing alcohol, then before I have time to answer “not very much at all, though I did do a campaign calling for the banning of tobacco advertising”, you pronounce me guilty as charged.
Yep, a lefty.
And again , sadly….we have to point out this mans mercenary bent . This chap would be just as happy getting financial reward campaigning for tobacco or alcohol as he would against it. The deciding factor for him is ‘ which will make me the most moolah?’
Thusly , as stated before…he is not interested in any party policy , but only that which he can procure by soliciting his advertising wares.
Not one to be taken seriously. Easily discredited , shown for the mercenary cynic he is , and dangerous to any democratic election.
What a wild web of deceit you weave, Katipo. Of all the fantasy allegations, rarely has anyone been quite so wrong about me.
Oh yes …Im sorry I forgot….your a neo liberal..globalist …mercenary…you like lottsa bucks…yes…how silly to forget that…national soveriegnty is a pain for you , isnt it John boy?
You like the BIG deregulated thing…y’know – where you can get us tradies and workers workin for a bowl of rice…now then…what was that you were sayin about how you dont like communism again?
So some-one who’s involved in their own vanity dirty politics project and spends $300,000 doing it claims he was paid ” not very much at all” for pushing the drug piss with his adds.
Were you paid more than $300,000 for pushing that drug Ansell?.
Is $300,000 “not very much” ? .
I also note tobacco users do not usually crash their cars into other people, commit sexual assaults or suffer a form of violent psychosis as some of those who have over indulged in the drug that you’ve helped push do Ansell.
To me your a roastbuster enabler …… along with the national party of course.
And what is the matter with you advertising types ?.
To much time at the pub perhaps?.
You’re called REASON, yet you can’t read a simple blog comment correctly. Try again.
John Ansell says nothing of substance about why he is concerned about the Greens.
Endless ad hominem and character assassination and slander.
No evidence to support defacement of billboards is being perpetrated by Green Party supporters.
No actual comments of substance about why the Greens are “dangerous” or whatever.
John Ansell: Usurping and undermining democracy since ages ago.
Advertising is always about money and it is often good at creating imaginary fears.
Whether pushing alcohol to make you more popular or promoting feminine products to make woman feel less ‘icky’ they often play on unfounded fears.
So Its best to look at what John Ansell is trying to sell us with his dirty politics attack adds ………..
He’s selling a corrupt Wall Street type prime minister along with his former booze executive chief of staff wayne eagleson, who together have given us the most sleazy corrupt and dishonest government we have ever had.
And creepy old Ansell is trying to attack people like Metiria who can look straight into the camera and give a straight forward honest answer to questions without the fear of being caught out for telling lies and refusing to answer like john key is doing at present .
Ansell is selling us a bent dirty and corrupt product that can not give an honest answer.
Ansell ……….. the lubricant for buggering New Zealand politics 🙂
Ah, very droll REASON. And don’t forget a John is a prostitute’s client and a toilet – you should be able to get one or both in somewhere.
Unfortunately I’ve debated Metiria on Maori TV and she looked straight into the camera and was caught out repeatedly – not lying, just not knowing what she was talking about.
Hopefully she knows more about matters Green than matters Treaty.
Until she has ministerial responsibility, we shouldn’t assume she will be any better at fronting the media about affairs of state than anyone else.
I’m trying to spare her any possible embarrassment.
‘ One NZ ‘ …are we boyo?…y’know …the wee white fairies from Scotland were here originally…if so…it aint so now.
Sure sounds like the bullseye was hit dontcha reckon , laddie?
Gotcha .
Boyos are Welsh.
Whose colours are red and Green.
Now we’re back on-topic.
More ad hominem.
Ad hominem is no substitute for discussion about real issues, JOHN ANSELL.
My goal is to discuss real issues. If you look back at the comments you find distasteful, you will see that they are all in response to ad hominem attacks on me.
I would be delighted if someone wants to debate the facts. I’d given up hope that anyone here wanted to do that.
Mr Ansell has done his clients proud and made several more contributions to this thread than anyone else. As it has been for his clients I like to assume this is part of Mr Ansell’s paid work and that therefore he is possibly better placed than the rest of us to outdebate opposition simply by keeping it up longer.
While I don’t feel able to take issue with all Mr Ansell’s comments, perhaps I can address one or two.
When I first posted I admitted to anticipating a personal attack by Mr Ansell, and I appreciate that he has so far refrained from doing so.I continue to hope that the debate can be about facts and ideas rather than personal matters.
Mr Ansell notes that in his Maori TV debate with Metiria Turei she was caught out, not lying but due to ignorance. A pity maybe, but no real harm done, no behaviour to unlearn as would be the case if she had been lying, and a situation I would expect her to have done much to improve since that debate.
I liked Mr Ansell’s saying “until she has ministerial responsibility…” as if she should indeed be given a chance to show how well she would handle it. I’m pleased to agree with Mr Ansell on this.
Regarding what ‘a lefty’ would say and what the Greens’ ‘true colours’ are, I think Mr Ansell is really referring to what you can get people to say if you provoke them enough. If Mr Ansell wishes to claim that what people can be goaded into saying shows what they are really like, I would say he must also accept that how he would like to be seen is also a cover for what he is really like.
I would welcome Mr Ansell’s comment on this point.
George, you have posed a reasonable question and I’m happy to respond in like fashion.
I’m not expecting to be loved by readers of this blog. As far as sensitivities go, I think I’m a normal person if not an oversensitive creative one, and don’t much enjoy being loathed by anyone, let alone a largish subsection of my community.
But if I want to use whatever abilities I have to alert people to things which I believe aren’t right, I have to push through that. In my campaign against the Treaty grievance industry, I’ve got used to all the tricks and I now view abuse as a sign of success.
Now to my motivation…
I’ve observed that often things in life are the opposite of the way they seem. People too. (Me, even.)
If you’re a parent and your children besiege you for endless sweets or fizz, and you say no because they’ll rot their teeth and make them hyper, people call you a good parent.
If you go to church (which I don’t) and subscribe to the view that if you give a man a fish you’ll feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you’ll feed him for a lifetime, people call you a good Christian.
But if you take the same road less travelled in politics, people (like those here) call you a draconian right wing bastard.
What seems compassionate often turns out to be cruel. It’s often the strong parent we thank in the end.
In the case of the Greens, their expertly-cultivated cuddly image has been found all round the world to mask a more sinister agenda, and their pure-sounding policies often have catastrophic unintended consequences.
Even more than Labour, Greens are hard-core socialists who either have no idea of how to afford their utopian policies, or are deliberately trying to undermine the capitalist system they so despise.
I think that’s worth pointing out, don’t you?
Like you, I want a better society and a clean environment. Unlike many of you, I believe we belong to an amazingly resourceful species with an excellent track record of continuous advancement (at least since the Industrial Revolution).
I see no reason to panic and punish ourselves because of threats which are far from proven.
If you’re wondering why the climate scientists have been a bit quiet recently, it’s because they’re finding real cause to question the feedback assumptions which are at the heart of global warming theory.
If the feedbacks turn out to be not real and the models on which the whole climate religion is based are even more wrong than they have been so far, how will the socialist-environmentalists explain their way out of it so they can continue their redistribution agenda of fleecing the rich capitalist democracies and propping up the poor Marxist dictatorships?
Stay tuned.
I hope this answers your question.
Greetings John. And thanks for your considered response to my comments.
In light of our country’s current parapolitical situation I’m keen to see more and better communication among people and hope that blogging, considerately used,will be able to deliver this. Its format has what I consider the huge advantage that a contributor cannot be cut in on or interrupted in saying what they wish to. Perhaps some way down the track more comments will become more thorough, however I have observed so far that the ‘leftwing’ blogsites I go to do have the advantage of being more likely than the ‘rightwing’ ones to include reference citations, which I usually follow up.
On that topic I wish to thank you for your DDT-related source citation, as a result of reading which I realise I have to rethink my position on pesticides.However this will take a good deal of independent research, and time of course.
Rather than address all the points you raise, which doing properly would take more time than I have for this, I would prefer to focus on one about which I have some experience, namely Treaty of Waitangi related matters.
It seems little known that the crown-iwi treaty settlements of recent years have mostly been between 1 and 2 percent, and never more than 3%, of the actual value expropriated from Maori as accepted under crown law in each case. This endemic and legally agreed injustice and impoverishment of Maori explains much of today’s situation, including in my view why the argument for ‘one law for all’ is as invalid as assuming that hospital treatment should be the same for all regardless of their illness or injury.
The attempt to rectify an injustice that has been running for so long has not been easily made, involving sums of money accrued over well over a century that might well tempt those present at the settlement not to apply it as their ancestors would have preferred.
Understandably something of what looks like ‘a treaty grievance industry’ has arisen, rather like what I would call a side-effect of major surgery, unfortunate but in no way sufficient as an excuse for not undertaking the surgery.
Perhaps I could close by saying that i think we all need to go on learning more, that there are many mistakes yet to be made and that I hope we can make them more cooperatively.
George, I have an entire blog devoted to the Treaty issue which I invite you to peruse: http://www.treatygate.org.nz.
I set it up, not because I enjoy the inevitable knee-jerk accusations of racism any more than I enjoy being abused here, but because I have dug deep and found that much of our ‘accepted’ history is at the very least contestable, but that no one in the government has the guts to contest it.
As with my Green concerns, I find that things are the opposite of the way they seem, and so are many of the people.
For example, if you buy the idea that tribes who breached the Treaty and took up arms against the Queen deserve compensation (which Sir Apirana Ngata, for one, did not), I’m not surprised you find it unjust that iwi are only receiving a tiny percentage of the value of the land that was ‘taken’.
(In fact, most of that land was sold on a willing seller/willing buyer basis, and much of the land that was confiscated was returned shortly afterwards.)
And yet the value being quoted is not the 1860s value plus inflation, but the modern-day improved value.
Improved by guess who?
Willie Jackson keeps a straight face in saying Ngai Tahu really should have got $30 billion, being the (almost entirely Pakeha)-improved value of the South Island today.
He does not mention that all of that island (bar the small coastal pockets they were living on), plus a healthy portion of the North Island, was sold before 1840.
Why? Because the chiefs had no use for trees or rocks – since they had no farming or forestry or mining – but plenty of use for money which could buy guns and blankets and the white man’s steel tools.
The land in Auckland was worth very little to Maori, who had largely abandoned it because of the threat of invasion from the north. It was only when the settlers worked hard to improve it and build a capital there that its value escalated.
Their attachment to land in those days has been massively overstated, as has the reverence for all things natural, wheeled out to emotionally blackmail fools like Chris Finlayson.
The facts show that of the 40 species to go extinct in New Zealand, 34 of them died out when only Maori were here, thanks in large part to the burning of huge tracts of forest.
(Yes, the white settlers also burned forests – to create an industry which helped them become the wealthiest society in the world.)
And yet whenever we want to build so much as a jetty we must ask permission of tribes (tribes which lived in a state of constant warfare, not to mention cannibalism, in the decades before 1840) because they are “the guardians of the environment”.
And of course we don’t just have to ask permission, we have to bribe the tribe.
The whole Treaty grievance industry is about money, not mana. It’s all about keeping a straight face in the face of white-faced fools, and Maori have a wonderful sense of humour.
(Consider how easily a taniwha can be mollified with the right amount of koha.)
I don’t expect you to like my site first off, but I hope you will persevere with it and understand that I am presenting jolting information for a reason I believe is valid.
I do appreciate you engaging with me in a reasonable fashion.
On visiting your site, John, I went down the page for about an hour and presently recognised having visited it once before. (I think it was when the Allan Titford affair was at the top, but not sure.)
The links between yourself, Paul Moon and Martin Doutre in particular are fascinating, and apart from the real suffering that has obviously gone on would make an absolute ripper of a play – Shakespeare himself (always provided we believe he did actually write all those plays) could hardly have come up with a better plot.
However, by about now, while I would be keen to continue this discussion and I appreciate the site moderator’s forbearance so far, to comment further I believe would entail wandering too far off topic.
Please expect a further visit to your site looking for contact details.
Well, Mr Ansell, at least you are consistent – consistently negative. If you are so supportive of National why is it that you actually have virtually nothing positive to say about them. Your entire outlook is negative. Have you not listened to your own messiah? – he told us last night in Christchurch that we are on the cusp of something special! To listen to you anyone would think the end of the world is nigh.
What makes you think I’m supportive of National. I simply think they’re the best of two pretty poor options for leading our country: bad v worse.
(A lot of choices in life are between bad and worse. Bad is oil drilling that could cause an oil slick. Worse is banning oil drilling and losing jobs, export income and a golden opportunity to be energy-independent.)
Apparently John Key was on radio this morning saying I’m not likely to help him because I hate him.
I don’t hate him. As a person, I like him. As a politician, I think he may be unrivalled in the world for keeping his poll ratings up.
But as a leader who’ll go down in history for taking the hard decisions and making the kind of step-changes that will take our country forward, there I think he’s rather average.
(His timidity exemplified by his refusal to nudge the superannuation age up to 67, which even Labour say they’ll do.)
On the appeasement of Maori radicals, I’m totally opposed to Key. I protested against him at Waitangi. But on preventing a deepest red-Green Labour government, I’m in total agreement with him.
The Nats resent me for speaking out on Treaty matters, so wouldn’t hire me if their lives depended on it. This campaign is not aligned with, funded by, or getting any assistance from any political party, though obviously if successful would benefit the parties of the right.
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