Bring on the chainsaws

I have several hundred trees on my property. They are mine. I own them. I have paid for them. I owe nothing to anyone for them, not to a bank and especially not to a council or the government.

I own a chainsaw. It is also mine. It is also paid for.

If I wish to introduce the latter to the former it is my decision and no one else's. That apparently is not now the case. I say apparently as it has not altered my behaviour around chainsaws or trees one iota. If I want to cut a tree down on my property I will do so and anyone who thinks differently can obtain some sexual gratification as they leave the building.

It was, therefore, with some delight that I read yesterday that one of the Government's sorely needed amendment to the RMA is to de-deify the common or garden tree. The blanket protection that every weed tree now enjoys is to be removed. And not before bloody time either. Any person who has pohutakawa roots uprooting the floor of his house (as is happening to my ex next door neightbour) will now be able to reach for the Husqvarna and sort the problem out in a sea of noise and 2 stroke. He will no longer have to get the 'permission' of some plonker down at council - which will probably be declined if their track record on these matters is anything to go by. He will no longer have to 'consult' an arborist - paid for by me.

Commonsense has prevailed. But how is this being welcomed by the weird beards whose days of ruling the country are now mercifully at an end? They are of course mortified. The end of the world is nigh (next Thursday looking favorite) Armageddon is just around the corner. We are bring warned that Titirangi and Langholm (nests of stupid plonkers if ever there was) will be turned into lunar landscapes by the end of the month. Developers are this very moment shipping in plane loads of Agent Orange. Napalm is suddenly very popular at Fletcher Construction. Every schoolchild is to be issued with a chainsaw.

Idiots. The proposed entirely sensible placing of trees into their proper station in life does not mean you have to waste every tree you come across. It just means that the current totally stupid blanket rules on every damned tree in the land which places it above your first born child in terms of importance are deservedly consigned to the rubbish bin of history.

I am a great believer that nothing is wholly right or wholly wrong. The last Government did not do everything wrong - very nearly but not quite. The current mob are not going to do everything right but they haven't stuffed up too much yet.

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The RMA is stuffed

If you needed further evidence, and surely you don't, that the RMA is totally stuffed and ripe for the overhaul it is about to get then that evidence came to light yesterday.

Meridien Energy, which is owned by you and me, is paying $170,00 to DoC, which is owned by you and me, to shut up over a proposed wind farm in Central Otago. I stand up and say I am going to do something. I object to it. I transfer some money from my left hand trouser pocket to my right. I then stop objecting and go and do what I was going to do in the first place.

This country is nuts. We belly ache like mad (entirely reasonably) when the power goes off and then get all touchy feely and belly ache like mad when anything is put forward to rectify the situation. This is entirely unreasonable. Cake and eat it stuff. The instrument that has given mileage to this form of objection is the bloody Resource Management Act.

We can't dam any more rivers and we will use the RMA to to stop you doing it. Some damned endangered axolotl that no one outside of a research lab has ever seen might disappear (how can you disappear if you have never appeared in the first place). We can't have any more fossil fuel powered power stations because we can turn the RMA into a Moebius strip and use it to tell you the planet will fry in hell. Nuclear? We don't even need the RMA for that as it is in our DNA that nuclear will wreck our DNA and we'll all end up with six fingers covered in cancerous warts if we survive the inevitable holocaust when the plant blows up because we had it designed by vodka swilling nuclear scientists from 1970's Soviet Russia.

How about a nice cuddly wind farm? The RMA has a provision for visual pollution apparently and that is one of the bases for objection that is currently being used. DoC has presumably found some invertebrate that is unique to Central Otago that must be saved and Meridien is locked into appearing in Court until the end of time.

What are we left with to power our ever increasing population that does not live in caves and hunt bison with sharpened sticks? All I can think of is a perpetual motion machine as sold by that nice man who will turn all your lead into gold for you. And he'll probably run foul of the RMA as well. There is bound to be a clause in there specifically banning the Philosopher's Stone as it upsets the natural balance of the elements.

There is a way around all this and Meridien has found it. Dosh. You go round with a bag of gold (or lead) and dish it out in great (or in this case little - $170,00 hardly rates as beer money for the power generator) lumps to get people just to go away and not object to things. Hardly a novel concept the old bribe is it? The PM wants assurances that this largesse is not hush money. I wouldn't be holding your breath, John, because it is.

This, paradoxically, only reinforces the RMA. DoC, if they have half a brain (fat chance), will realise that have stumbled on a new revenue stream. Object to everything you can lay your eyes on and someone will pay you to go away.

In fact I can see this as a nice little earner for myself. Buy a bicycle, some socks to go with my sandals, some coke bottle bottom glasses and grow an inferior beard. I'm then ready to repair to the Public Library to find things to object to. The DB9 is getting ever closer.

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Try as I may......

........I really am finding it very difficult to find anything to stir the mind into action. The centre of my life at the moment is the cardboard box and it is going to remain that way for a few weeks yet. I am sure I am not the first person to marvel at the amount of junk one accumulates over the years. Living in the same house for twelve years is not something I have done since schooldays (and that doesn't really count for the purposes of this) and I am astonished that I kept three metres of garden irrigation hose, umpteen pots of touch up paint for cars I no longer own, back copies of magazines I will never read, half a dozen doorstops, spare sprigs for golf shoes that hit the bin in 2001 and so on.

Back in the real world there is an utterly nauseous piece penned by History Boy in the paper this morning. He is his usual arrogant self whilst telling the proles (or the ones that his party's so called education system can get 'upskilled' enough to read, that is) that New Zealand is in such great shape economically that we will be immune from the financial woes of the rest of the world. Jumped up little git. I was just in the act of giving up on this party political broadcast by the Labour Party when Dear Leader's dulcet tones assaulted the airwaves. I of course turned to genuflect towards Mount Albert as is right and proper for a loyal cadre - yeah right. She was talking about Lady Hillary going to Windsor for the Queen's Memorial service for Sir Ed. The Tax payer is going to pic up the tab for the travel arrangements for the Hillary family. I've no problem with that. But the way she announced this was truly revealing. It was not, Cabinet has decided, or the Government has decided it was I have decided. Poisonous harridan.

There was a very readable article in the Herald yesterday, or maybe the day before, by the Japanese representative on the International Whaling Commission. I think in fact it was heavily sub edited as it read like no other piece of prose penned by a native Japanese speaker I have ever read, but no matter. He, quite rightly in my opinion, accused 'the west' of gross hypocrisy and cultural arrogance over their stance on Japanese whaling. This topic, like many emotive arguments, tends to be discussed without a recourse to examination of the facts (anthropogenic global warming, anyone?). I have never understood the anti whaling lobby. What is wrong with killing whales? If you are OK with killing cows, sheep, orange roughy or cockroaches then what is wrong with wasting a sperm whale. If you cannot for religious or spiritual reasons see it in you to buy a can of Raid then maybe I can see your point. But if you are happy to walk into The Mad Butcher for a kilo of world famous BarBQ sausages then what is your problem with a whale?

Why do people have this thing about wasting a whale or two? Is it because they are 'cuddly'? Eh? I don't fancy cuddling up to 90ft of blue whale - he rolls over in bed and you're toast. Cuddling up to an Orca - have you seen the teeth on one of those? Is it because they are 'intelligent'? They squeak. This makes them equipped to do long division does it? If you had a child whose only sign of being Bertrand Russell's natural successor was that he squeaked you would ask for your money back. Is it because they appear to live in families? This is of course a myth as the family was banned in New Zealand years ago. I assume all whales that come to our coast have to hide daddy whale when he comes back from a hard day's toil at the insurance brokers and get the lesbian basket weaving whaless from Kaikoura to fill in duties looking after all the little whalelets.

If I were a whale I would accept that any ship coming near me called Something Maru was bad news and piss of and hide hide behind a tree sharpish. That is just part of life as a whale. The world's oceans are a bloody big place and the odds are heavily stacked in the marine mammal's favour when it comes to not being found. They are intelligent, remember, so they can lay trails of breadcrumbs that lead to nasty jagged reefs for the horrid Japaneses ships to follow. Also If I were a whale I would tell all the Sea Shepherd type weird beards to get out of my ocean and stay on the land where they belong. I mean just think how much they are contributing to global warming by hooning around the Southern Ocean in their RIBs.

I've come over all esurient - a dolphin burger might hit the spot.

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Mangroves

I have nothing against mangroves at all. Nor do I have anything against pohutokawas. But they are trees for God's sake and bloody common ones at that. A few acres of mangroves here and there serve a good function - protect against erosion, provide habitats for all sorts of things (most of which, again, are incredibly common) etc. But if they start growing out of control you deal to them and don't start worshipping them. Same with pohutakawas - there's billions of the b*st*rds - all very pretty around Xmas (not so endearing a couple of weeks later, but never mind) and an asset to the place. But if one or two are in the way of something sensible that you want to do - nuke them. I-t-'-s a t-r-e-e.

The trouble with people who lay down in front of bulldozers that are advancing on a stand of mangroves is they have lost all sense of balance. On or off, black or white and nothing in between. I think they have an intense dislike of people - especially mainstream normal people. If you are from an ethnic minority with questionable sexual orientation and a disability of some sort you might pass muster. But, if you really want to get in their good books, you're much better off being a damned tree or an aquatic mammal. They are nuts. They pick the eyes out of the bits of modern life that suit them (the Greens prided themselves on running a Hi-tech election campaign in 2005 with their manifesto on a CD ROM) and treat all the rest that doesn't suit their warped view of the world with the same affection they reserve for weapons grade plutonium.

The thing that really gets up my nose, though, is that these loonies are not harmless buffoons just to be laughed at - if that were the case they would add value to life - on a par with Fawlty Towers and Blackadder. These cretins have the ear of government (NZ has signed the Kyoto protocol remember) and are actually part of government. MMP politics allows for this sort of nonsense and has a lot to answer for

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Rebuilding volcanoes?

Why does a so called advanced society waste food on someone like Rudman? I am astonished that eighteen months or so ago I actually used to read him. I gave the Herald just the cursory glance it merits on a Monday and my eye was drawn to his column courtesy of a 1870's lithograph or drawing or something. It was used to illustrate Rudman's current waffle and showed the Three Kings (not the gamefishing ones) as they were. The picture is a straightforward explanation as to why that area of Auckland is thus called - three volcanic cones in close proximity.

There is now only one left as man over the last one hundred and fifty years or so has quarried away two of them. He did this to advance his lot; construct buildings, use as infill prior to building roads - that sort of thing. The kind of stuff that people do as they become civilised and no longer live under fallen logs and live by eating wetas and earthworms. Looney boy Rudman is now all for rebuilding them. Got that? He wants to rebuild not one volcano but two. Have you ever seen any thing so daft in all your life? I think it might have been done in Las Vegas to turn a profit but to have someone actually suggest that it might be a good idea for 'heritage' reasons is barking even for this asylum.

The scary thing is that there are other people apart from Rudman who might think this is a good idea. Winstone Aggregates apparently are looking at something similar. Now presumably they haven't moved on from one bloke with a shovel and a wheelbarrow to nice big yellow earthmovers by playing the goat in a business sense and I can only assume some of Rudman's mates have got in their ears and shamed them into such weird thinking. Or they can see that by appearing 'environmentally sound and heritage responsible' they can increase their profits.

Can this country please be crop-dusted with a large dose of pragmatism. Where does all this stupid looking back wistfully over the mists of time come from? People wishing they were still hoisting flags on Tiri to tell Auckland what sort of ship was imminently arriving in the port - from under which stone did they crawl?. You can't turn the clocks back. Kings number two and three are now part of the pavement somewhere and that's just the way it is. Move on.

But this lust for the good old days is always selective and it never ceases to amaze me. These clowns never say 'I wish I was living in the 1870s' they just want the warm fuzzy bits. In general the past wasn't as rosy as the Rudman's view of the world would have you believe. It was a lot simpler, sure, but who would willingly go back the life expectancy that was prevelant when there were still Three Kings? Who would give up his V8 for a horse or his iPod for a pianola? Which of them would welcome endemic rheumatic fever with open arms, wax his moustaches every morning, wear spats or bathe in a tin bath in front of the fire?

Rebuild a volcanic cone, give me a break. Besides all of the above, a real builder of volcanic cones showed us how it was done and how futile our farting around with it would be last Tuesday night.

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Whaling is good for you

Just returned from a week's hols. Only one day fishing for no return but it was with a good mate from University days so that was all good. No paper for a week and that was even better.

Dipped the toe tentatively into the newsprint this morning and nothing changes does it. There is another piece of Herald pseudoscience on the front page about DVTs. I think it was something similar that started this thread months ago. Sitting at a desk is more dangerous than taking a long haul flight. There is a picture (mercifully not of an adherent clot in the short saphenous vein) to ram home this horrible truth. It is bollocks of the firt magnitude which makes it prime fodder for the front page I suppose. The quality of the science is just apalling but I guess evidence based medicine doesn't sell newspapers.

We wander aimlessly past Rudman (best thing to do with him) and there is nothing until we come to a rather strange piece about whaling on the comments page. Strange but containig some excellent points just the same. It is written by an Australian of Japanese extraction and talks about the United States empire at one point. Once I'd stopped vomiting I soldiered on and digested his entirely reasonable point as to why the Japanese populace is immune to 'international pressure' to stop whaling. Japan is a very insular country and everything there is Japanese including the language. I lived there for three months about twenty years ago and it was six weeks before I saw anything that was not Japanese (apart from a Ferrari) and that was a Bic ballpoint pen - quite taken aback I was. The vast majority of the population (north of 120 million don't forget) speak no English at all and, here is the rub, don't need to. They are a developed country and don't need ideas from the mainly English speaking West to progress let alone survive. They even surf the web in Japanese. Let us leave aside the supreme intellectual arrogance of the rest of the world telling them how they should behave over a practice that has a cultural significance to them. They cannot accede to our wishes as they have no means of discerning what those wishes may be. We really don't understand. The likes of Comrade Carter trying to foist western ideas in the English language on the Japanese public is like that tribe who stretch their women's necks with neck rings trying to persuade the rest of the world that it is a really good idea - and doing it in their tribal language.

Speaking of Carter, the passing of John Inman last week (Mr Humphries in 'Are you being served?') bought to mind a ironic situation. The chances of 'Are you being served' being screened, let alone made, in this PC society we have forced upon us today are approaching zero. At the same time Government ministers are lauded for their new ageness and progressive outlook on the world by attending one of their colleagues same sex civil union. Hypocritcal ratbags.

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New Zealand's obsession with trees

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.

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