Curwen Rolinson

Back in 2012, when the Ministry of Social Development made a whole swathe of highly sensitive information about its clients and operations (including case-notes, personal details of at-risk children, medical records, legal paperwork etc. etc etc.) available to literally anyone who walked off the street into a WINZ office and used a self-service kiosk, I don’t think I recalled Paula Bennett appearing behind the National Leader of the day to demand that the minister in question responsible resign forthwith? 

Everybody knows the old adage that when it comes to lies, there are three kinds: “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Political press releases, particularly from the National Party, often combine at least two out of the three in some sort of high art form. Yet as is a truth known to only fewer, the best and most persuasive lies are those that actually contain at their core or at least in their sheathing … a hard element of fact. 

I’m pretty sure that if *anybody’s* guilty of the whole aiding and abetting “terrorism as a tool of statecraft”, and generally being a “state sponsor of terror”, it’d be the Americans.

Several days ago, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro made headlines for his visit to a Holocaust memorial in Israel. Not so much for the visit itself, of course – it’s the sort of thing that is almost de rigueur for newly minted world leaders heading to that particular country on political pilgrimages. But rather, for his ensuing statement upon exiting the remembrance center, about those archetypal villains of the narrative of the 20th Century, the Nazis. Namely, that they were of the “left”. 

In the past week, comments have surfaced from Francis Fukuyama – aka the man who propheceyed that the perceived ascendency of ‘liberalism’ in the late 80s and early 90s meant history was now ‘over’ – claiming Chinese system is a “real alternative” to ‘Western democracy’  

Yet someone in National was plainly aware that the ‘optics’ of the matter … were not going to look particularly good, in the blood-tinged aftermath of our worst-ever terrorist attack. And so – whether motivated by a sense of compassion (or, as Bridges put it today, the result of being both “emotional” and possibly also “junior”), or simply a desire to limit the potential finger-pointing post-facto from a PR perspective … somebody chose to remove the petition from public view.

According to yesterday’s Herald, Turkish President Erdogan, is using footage of Friday’s atrocity as part of his party’s ads for a currently occurring suite of elections being held in Turkey…

We can but hope that those fundamentally, quintessentially Kiwi characteristics of an inexorable resiliency of spirit and cast-iron commitment to community, mean that at least here – here of all places, in what should otherwise be (but sadly, often isn’t), “the best of all possible worlds” – “the lights” may be dimmed somewhat … but that they do not , *cannot* , go out in perpetuity.