Irrelevant in the world

Pop over to Sydney today and what would you see? The Harbour Bridge? Yep but from a distance. The Opera House? Yep but again from a distance - Antipodean version of the Berlin Wall has been installed by all accounts. The Manly Ferry? Sure to be around. But for another tourist attraction that will only be on view for a few days you will see a country making a complete dick of itself. Not many people will notice and less will care.

APEC hasn’t really got up to flying speed and New Zealand is already being shown to its seat at the back behind the column just next to the Gents. Our true place in the world order is being rammed down our throat. No one cares what we think. The world is wearing one of those hats with the corks dangling off the brim to keep the NZ flies at bay. In addition to all this irrelevance we are exposing our brand of politics to the ridicule it so richly deserves.

MMP New Zealand style is a mess and the world can see this if they can be bothered to look. We had the spectre of our ‘Foreign Minister’ rebutting questions about a trade deal with China because Goof is the bloke handling that. ‘But you’re the Foreign Minister’ ‘You must ask Phil Goof about foreign trade matters’ What an embarrassing joke.

But it gets worse. The pursuit of a fairyland ideology in the grown ups pragmatic real world is about to be exposed for the disaster that this sort of posturing always is. What two planks of policy does New Zealand hold up as making us iconically Kiwi? I suggest our nuclear free at all costs stance would be one and our clean green image the other.

The former has transformed itself into a religion of the looney left. All nuclear power plants are built with technology that hasn’t changed since the late 1940’s. Chernobyl is the role model for all things that have even a touch of fission in them. Any nuclear power plant is really a clandestine nuclear bomb factory. If you even say uranium you start to glow in the dark and sprout an extra hand out of the middle of your forehead.

The clean green bit has morphed from tourist pictures of Milford Sound into this carbon neutral bollocks that the Headmistress thinks is such a wonderful thing. She even dreams it might get her re-elected. We are going to be world leaders in carbon neutrality because all that comes from the UN (and in particular their IPPC) is regarded in the same regard as utterances from the Oracle of Delphi. The IPPC says carbon neutrality is a good thing. Anything this political trouble maker says is gospel because a) it is from the UN and Helen worships the UN (looking for a job there in the future some would say – they deserve each other) and b) the IPPC is an animal that suits SWMBO’s purpose. The IPPC says global warming is caused by carbon dioxide and so it must be true, There is no evidence for this but why let that get in the way of a good political wheeze.

So far so good but now here comes the tricky bit. You have to put the two together; no nuclear power and carbon neutrality. We are all going to need more energy in the future. I think even the member for Cambodia might grudgingly acknowledge this. The IPPC say that using fossil fuels for this is evil and so we must look at nuclear power. What? Nasty, ‘orrible, dangerous nuclear power? Yep – that. ‘Right you are’ say the pragmatic countries of the world – trifling nations like the USA, China, Russia and yes, even Australia. ‘Sounds good to us – this global warming is all bollocks but if it is an expedient way of flogging nice safe modern nuclear power plants to the great unwashed we’ll be in like robber’s dogs.’

But where do Helen, Goof and Winnie go from here? One of the gods in the temple (the IPPC) says go and buy yourself a nuclear power station and the other god in the temple (we will be nuclear free until hell freezes over) says buy a nuclear power plant and the sky will fall in. What to do?

Winnie’s ploy is easy, go to the pub. The other two are not going to take a blind bit of notice of what he says so he might as well make an early start on the frosty foamers. But what of Her Indoors and Goof? Laud the merits of wind power? Howls of derisive laughter from Beijin. Tidal power is really good? Moscow wets its pants. Geothermal works really well? Rotorua (a suburb of New York) is carried from the room on a stretcher.

I can just imagine Goof walking up to the delegation from China (representing over billion people you will recall) clutching a windmill and asking them if they wouldn’t mind stopping building a coal fired power station every ten days because we (and don’t include me in this we) don’t like it. A polite version of the reply would be ‘Go and indulge in sex and travel’. I suppose he could crawl back under the door and ask if they would like to buy some West Coast coal.

It looks as though the headmistress and Goof will try and get the communiqué on global warming watered down to not mention nuclear power at all or only put it in 6 point type. And the reaction of the rest of the real world to this will be? ‘Go away you silly, irrelevant country‘, ‘It’s way past your bedtime’ or ‘Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries’ would be good guesses. The communiqué will be issued in the form the real countries want and Helen and Goof will be left to try and spin their way out of a diplomatic face full of omelette.

I’m a bit like a cracked record on this I know, but this government’s refusal to recognise that we do not live in an undergraduate political science assignment that has to be marked by Trotsky will be the ruin of us. Wake up you dozy buggers and get rid of this mob. They are incompetent and make us look silly when we go out into the big boy’s world.

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