What is it with New Zealand and trees? Why have these risen to deity status in this gwate country? There is a pecking order in the regard which trees are held much like there is in the the army - officers and other ranks, or more aptly, the All Blacks - All Blacks and Great All blacks. There are exotics, and they are OK, and then there are natives. These demigods of the aborial world require you to genuflect before tham and only mention their names in a suitably deferential hushed voice. Rimu, totara, Buck Shelford and ......cabbage tree (which is not a tree at all but a lily). What a truly spectacularly unpleasant and messy object is the cabbage tree. Give me an elder or a silver birch any time. But you have to think the sun shines out of the cabbage tree's phloem because it is a bloody 'native'. If you are a tree, preferably a native, (or Colin Meads) in New Zealand you can do little wrong. If you and seventy of your mates live in Queen Street and Big Ears decides to cut you down you earn yourselves acres of newspaper space for days and even merit an Editorial today. This Editorial is a waste of trees. It harps on for a full three quarter column as to how the trees must be saved because even if they are to be replaced with 95 others we will have to be the victims of a treeless street for ten years. Good grief a whole ten years, how can we possibly survive. I'll tell you how, exceedingly easily because most of us couldn't give a stuff. How long ago did the country come to the brink of Armgeddon when they, like thieves in the night, transformed One Tree Hill into None Tree Hill? We've been through several All Black selection committees since then and they have yet to name the Pinetree's successor. The 'process' is obviously a lot more complex than finding a worthy wearer of the 13 jersey. Let's get over damned trees and concentrate on things that really matter. Waste a tree and another grows back. To be fair some take a longer time to grow than others, but them's the breaks.
Garth George is into trees and other things creationist this morning. He scribes a very pleasnat, non threatening pastoral piece about spring. All very saccharine laden and designed to put you in a good mood for the day.Very nice. But in there is bloody Nanny State again. Garth has just been fitted with hearing aids. Where is this going you may ask? He tells us that these marvels of modern technology and miniaturisation cost the GDP of a small country but then drops the bombshell. It doesn't matter because ACC paid for them. Eh? He, being awash in old fashioned values, never thought of applying for the cost but was encouraged so to do by his audiologist. How so? 'You, being a journalist must have worked surrounded by noisy printing presses in the pre desktop publishing era?' 'Well, yes' 'Please go to window five and collect your ACC cheque for a squillion dollars for the hearing aids necessitated by the auditory trauma thus suffered'. Just like that. Nuts.
Below this there is a truly nauseating piece about that stupid woman in South Auckland who paid $35,000 for a Rav4 worth about $9,000. There is a bleeding heart barrister opining that the government should protect 'victims' like this from loan sharks. How are the poor oppressed masses going to afford cars to take their offspring to the doctors etc. etc. Who in their right mind believes half of this bollocks? Hands up all those who last bought a vehicular conveyance because they wanted to take their kid to the doctor? You buy a car, let me see, to go to work, to look cool, to do donuts, to have something to wash on a Sunday morning. But to take your kid to the doctor? - give me a break. This woman is stupid for a) buying a naff car and b) signing a loan agreement that was ripping her off. If she didn't understand what she was sigining then don't sign it. The only protection required around this case is us being protected from her by stopping her procreating.
No comments:
Post a Comment