Ideology booby trap sank Party pledged to reality and Ordinary People scribe tells influencers

Winston Peters and his NZ First Party evaporated in the general election simply because he departed from the teachings of his guiding light, the late National Party prime minister Sir Rob Muldoon.

It was Muldoon who inculcated Peters with the principle of avoiding entanglement with any exotic ideology or doctrine and to always put the practical needs of New Zealand first, National Press Club president Peter Isaac told the Wanganui Club.

In the event Mr Peters and his party had become inexorably enmeshed in climate doctrine and this perceived entanglement only intensified as Mr Peters had sought to minimise the association by taking a bet each way, Isaac in the immediate aftermath of the general election told Wanganui Club members.

NZ First’s compromising with the all-embracing climate ideology of the other two coalition partners now became progressively more visible.

It took the form of triangulation, hedging, and meant that NZ First became reluctantly yet utterly and unwittingly mired in the ideology, notably as champion of the “billion trees” planting campaign.

The tree planting scheme was designed to appease NZ First’s Green and Labour coalition partners and at the same time demonstrate to the productive sector that NZ First was still behind them.

In the event the productive sector saw it as NZ First acquiescing in a Green ploy to gobble up grazing land in order to eliminate cattle and sheep.

Warnings later on from Mr Peters’ right hand man and now ex Northland MP Shane Jones that resurgent Greens meant a “tsunami from hell” for farmers only accentuated the question about what Mr Peters and his party were doing in harness with the Greens in the first place.

Coalition sponsored globalist-inspired showboating such as territorial local governments proclaiming “Climate Emergencies” further dismayed NZ First’s base as being an exhibition of voguish, frivolous irresponsibility.

A few months after this public posturing the true “extinction” threat the Covid -19 virus swept in from China.

It was unforeseen “and nobody wants to talk about this” by the very global agencies before which the coalition government demonstrably prostrated itself.

In addition to this obeisance the coalition disbursed immense levies in order to receive real, actual emergency alerts instead of fanciful self-serving ideological ones.

Mr Peters at the start had believed that he could weave his way around the booby trap presented by the climatic ideology without actually becoming identified, smeared with it.

He misunderstood the way in which climate was viewed by the Labour Party as a unifying doctrine, and one to be given the maximum emphasis at every opportunity, notably by the coalition’s deputy prime minister – Mr Peters himself.

This was especially so in Mr Peter’s additional portfolio of foreign minister in which he found himself obliged to emphasise and even give priority to the climate ideology in all his dealings with foreign governments about anything at all.

Rob Muldoon had warned the young Mr Peters at his political career outset to avoid abstract foreign doctrines and to concentrate only on what was good for New Zealanders, hence NZ “First.”

Mr Peters’ role as the hero of the nation’s wealth earning sector and thus the older sector of the population that created and sustained it was damaged from the inception of the Labour-led coalition by the abrupt ideological ban on oil and gas exploration.

Isaac went on to describe Rob Muldoon as a green-compatible politician and one dedicated in policy terms to bio diversity.

His negotiation of the Clyde dam had made New Zealand 80 percent power renewable. Muldoon’s support of the wine industry had put it on the global map. He was responsible for the Kiwifruit Licensing Authority and consistently shoved horticulture to the forefront. He was a fellow of the Royal Institute of Horticulture.

Isaac said that the departure of NZ First from Parliament with its vote ranking with that of start-up parties marked the extinction of Rob’s Mob as the Muldoon faithful were known.

He sheeted home the collapse of the NZ First vote to the attempt to blend reality with ideology and the mixed messages that this formula generated, especially the one to the effect that the party of everyday people had abandoned them in favour of the cultural elites.

“While you might not have agreed with what Rob was saying, you were in no doubt what he was saying,” concluded Isaac.

See also:- https://www.nationalpressclub.org.nz

Overseas Investment Commission Loophole allows acquisitions by climate credit speculators

United Nations success in inducing a lacerating self-guilt among New Zealand activists has relegated the nation’s total dependence on agriculture to a mere side-issue in the pending general election.

Farming for United Nations- sponsored financial credit instruments means that immense swathes of productive farm land are under replacement by forestry for the purpose of global emission offset gains.

The United Nations sponsorship means that foreign owners under this scheme can acquire land without encountering New Zealand’s once powerful Overseas Investment Commission.

In fact, only half of one percent of New Zealand is built up. Grass like trees absorbs carbon dioxide in order to grow.

So New Zealand, heavily forested anyway, can process all its own carbon dioxide in what used to be known as the carbon cycle, before orchestrated hysteria overtook the nation’s agri science.

Those using the UN-induced climate fervour to acquire New Zealand farms are doing so in order to use the farms as a countervailing sink to the pollution they are generating in other countries.

Neither is there any guarantee that these forests will ever be harvested.

This is at a time when United Nations is forgiven, and even exalted, for the way in which it has wrought such havoc on New Zealand, a country in which the only economic advantage is that grass grows all the year around.

Last year United Nations encouraged city councils and local government authorities across the nation to declare States of Emergency in support of the UN climate scare

When the real emergency which turned out to be a viral one actually swept the world United Nations whose job it is to warn of such pandemics merely responded to it instead of predicting it. Neither did United Nations have in place any plan of action to deal with a SARS type plague even after at least two recent near-pandemics.

A feature of cults is that the followers consistently forgive their cults for unrealised prophesies. Neither United Nations nor the silly New Zealand municipal councils that last year proclaimed the UN State of Emergency have apologised. Not to anyone.

Meanwhile as foreign buyers acquire once closely-guarded farms the UN-guided activists take every advantage of New Zealand’s drift away from STEM education in emitting clouds of confusing percentages and decimal fractions to back up their fervour.

The Opposition National Party and the once-powerful agri lobby Federated Farmers can only dance around the United Nations fearmongering.

New Zealand agri scientists find their input blocked under a regime which cuts off state institutional funding should these bodies challenge the UN doctrine.

Retired scientists, even New Zealand’s world authorities, find their voice subsumed under, for example, that of various the saints in this UN-inspired cult.

One is Britain’s David Attenborough former presenter of a television programme called Zoo Quest about trapping wildlife for zoos, and who later became a broadcasting administrator.

The UN’s hypnotic grip on the politico-media sector has meant that throughout the Covid crisis, a real one this time, this influence sector has given priority to wrestling back onto the agenda what it sees as its central doctrine, the climate one.

Readers of chain newspapers for example interested in lengthy features on the imperative to find a vaccine found the vaccine in question intended not for humans but for ruminants as an antidote to climate-altering flatulence.

Since United Nations began its focus on nurturing activist causes it has found some little-talked about cravings of the New Zealand psyche to be easy prey for its urban-centred propaganda.

Foremost among these is the New Zealand desire to be viewed as the international leader in any moral cause at all, and to be seen, and admired, ascending to this moral high ground. The words “to be seen” in this moral ascension are critical.

United Nations has pretty much taken over the role in New Zealand once held by established religion, and even the nation’s political – public sector – industrialist Establishment itself.

United Nations bungling most recently in the matter of identifying the wrong crisis and then having no contingency in place for the real disaster, Covid -19, has been deliberately overlooked in the single-minded determination of many politicians to garner its approval, regardless.

Another worrying by-product of this obsessive quest for the UN’s approval is the existence of an only partially disguised official belief that slips out from time to time to the effect that farming which provides 80 percent of the nation’s wealth is a sunset industry, a relic of the industrial era.

This belief is encoded in the uttering. An example is New Zealand government coalition components regularly proclaiming what they describe as the nation’s “bio-diversity crisis.” Translated, this means in fact eliminating cattle and sheep farming.

This is the very industry that has insulated New Zealand from the worst economic effects of the Covid “crisis” the one that United Nations failed to foresee or know how to handle when it erupted.

State television in New Zealand routinely entertains its audience in showing religious zealots in other nations bloodily flagellating themselves in pursuit of a self-cleansing nirvana.

Yet as the nation prostrates its economy in order to meet a New York centred purity cult, the UN one, nobody dare point out the similarity.

Western Intelligence believed that mystery mandarin Nation Builder was actually demolition agent.

When Keith Ovenden married Helen Sutch only daughter of Bill and Shirley he can be forgiven if he believed that in this alliance he had also become heir to a cultural hegemony.

There were though early indications that Keith’s induction chez Sutch would be anything but smooth.

Indeed Keith Ovenden newly arrived in New Zealand and supping with his new in-laws found the experience difficult to the point of indigestion.

This froideur could not be alleviated by the ingestion of a chardonnay or pinot, local of course. A moral absolutist, Bill Sutch was an aggressive teetotaller.

On one of his rigorous hikes in the Makara region of the Wellington coast one of the Sutch companions in the freezing weather pulled out a hip flask of whisky, took a swig, and received a dour dressing down from Sutch on the evils of liquor.

A well set up cove, urbane, the young Ovenden wondered about the cause of this dinner dyspepsia, unrelieved as it must have been by the emollient of any booze.

The reason for the tension as anyone who knew the Sutch menage at this time understood was that Keith was too urbane, too smooth.

Wanted on this familial doctrinal voyage was a firebrand son-in-law. Someone with an audacious disregard for the niceties….A preacher who could pack the Sutch intellectual church.

By the time Keith had digested this there came an event that defined the family forever.

At 2040 hours on September 26 1974 on a bleak Wellington evening and outside a brick public convenience elements of the Security Intelligence Service apprehended William Ball Sutch whose mystical writ across economics, the arts, and geopolitics until this very moment was unquestioned

Bill Sutch must have known that CAZAB as Five Eyes was then known was in the language of those days still “tearing the house down” to expose the high placed New Zealand public servants deemed to be assisting the USSR since the 1930s. Yet he all but offered himself up in the Soviet hand-over bust that night in Wellington.

What was he passing over? Probably the New Zealand meat schedule which gave the Soviets a position on their pricing for their own global meat procurement. The Soviet food shortage had in turn been created by Moscow’s doctrinal meddling in agriculture.

Sutch as the long term and defining supremo of trade during his tour as head of the department of industries and commerce might reasonably have retained access to this extremely useful early-warning data. After all, Bill’s reputation as an economist was founded on centralised pricing.

The subsequent trial in which Bill Sutch was acquitted made him the Dreyfus of the South Seas. Arguments see-saw back and forth and time has not diminished the debate.

Dr Sutch, as he liked to be known, was a mystery within a mystery, a one-man Russian doll, a series of contradictions and irreconciliable differences.

Why do some people flourish in large-scale institutional life while others seemingly equally gifted wither on the vine?

Bill personifies the answer to this riddle. He was all things to all men. You wanted the running on globalism? You went to Bill. Nationalism? Bill was your man. The books were there to prove it, the ones with ringing titles such as Quest for Security, Responsible Society, Takeover New Zealand.

A characteristic of any examination at all of the duo is that the author/commentators seek to focus on Shirley.

Shirley, a human rights lawyer, is a recognisable figure in the causes of the last century. It is in Bill that we find the contradictory persona that will ensure that the Sutch syndrome will continue to be mined for years to come.

For example it was Shirley who looked as if she was from an everyday provenance and Bill with his David Niven-meets Claude Rains aspect who looked posh. In fact Shirley was the daughter of a judge. Bill was the son of a carpenter and a seamstress.

Bill thought of himself as an architect, hence his vaunted role as a nation builder. He saw how real-life architects needed to get alongside the cultural elites, the people who ran the show, and thus he immersed himself in the arts. Nobody likes a dull boy, however adept at administration. He was chairman of the Arts Council at the time of his arrest.

When a year later, at a mere 68, Bill Sutch died the ensuing festschrift, collection of tributes, testified to Bill’s quasi-mystical intellectual status with the most boffo of all the titles in the Sutch constellation – Spirit of the Age, a tag which has about it still now an eerie accuracy.

There are two recent books on the Sutch syndrome. First off the rank was Sarah Gaitanos with Shirley Smith: An Examined Life (Victoria University Press.) Now we have Keith Ovenden with Bill & Shirley: A Memoir (Massey University Press.)

The portrait of a marriage could have been entitled The Long Shadow because this is where Keith has dwelled. He has become frozen in time as the eternal son in law. One recalls his crisp worldly contributions to Column Comment, the local tv version of What The Papers Say. He co-founded The Week a disappointingly short-lived ideas and opinion newspaper. Academia has beckoned over the ensuing years. He was made ONZM.

Oxford, the university, looms over the Sutch saga. Shirley went there. So did daughter Helen and of course Keith was there also. One recalls the words at the end of his long Oxford career of the late Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett.

“We sought truth, perhaps sometimes finding it…..

“But was there any fun?”

Soldier of Fortune & Scholar was present at the creation of global co-operation shift

A soldier of fortune turned humanitarian and increasingly recognised pivotal figure in the last Balkan wars is now thought to have had New Zealand origins.

Major Bill Foxton (pictured) who served with the European Commission Monitoring Mission was present at the hinge of history when it became obvious that United Nations by its structure was unable to deal with conflicts such as those in the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The fall of Srebrenica and other towns that the Security Council had identified as safe areas, but then refused to authorize enough troops to defend can be viewed now as the decisive moment for the UN.

United Nations now switched its emphasis away from policing and instead turned to non-partisan idealistic causes that transcended ethno-politics and belief systems and above all sidestepped dangerous interventions in nationalism.

Its fixation on Climate now evolved as its standard-bearing campaign

It was this Balkan vacuum, the one left by United Nations, into which now plunged Major Bill Foxton.

One of the hottest spots in Bosnia was the Bihac Pocket and it was there that Bill Foxton immersed himself for two years of fratricidal in-fighting. “Bosnia’s Forgotten Battlefield-Bihaj” by Brendan O’Shea is dedicated to Major Foxton

After this Major Foxton moved to Sarajevo as the European Commission Monitoring Mission’s training officer.

After Bosnia, Bill Foxton became in May 1998, an unarmed observer for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe in northern Albania, gaining the trust of the local leaders and of the refugees from Kosovo who were pouring into his area.

“Major Foxton ensured that the OSCE headquarters received a steady stream of accurate information and intelligent analysis from throughout the Kosovo crisis in early 1999,” recalls a general officer in the Balkan theatre

“Bill could not abide unfairness and injustice. As such he was a natural peacekeeper, a peerless unarmed monitor and a perfect candidate for humanitarian work. What made him so effective was his determination to act, in addition to his ability to spot and report accurately on injustice and humanitarian need,” noted the same general officer.

Major Bill Foxton in his career served in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe itself ever since in fact he joined the Foreign Legion as a 17 year old.

As a soldier of fortune he can be seen now as a transitional figure in the profession of arms, a practitioner whose sword became forged into a ploughshare.

With his red hair, barrel chest, and waxed moustache Bill Foxton started his career with the Legion in the last of the colonial wars in Algeria and continued all the way to Afghanistan and in doing so traversing in a personal way modern history.

Along the way he had become one of the English-speaking military sphere’s foremost linguists conversant with the variegated Balkan languages among many others. He is the compiler of the standard Baluchi-English dictionary.

In June 1999, he was made an OBE for rescuing a child from a minefield in Bosnia.

He had earlier lost his left arm while trying to de-fuse an unexploded shell while serving in Oman, a British protectorate. His forearm now became replaced with a prosthetic with a hook on the end of it.

No stranger to military symbolism Major Foxton was to use this hook which had several Swiss Army knife-style attachments as his own trademark.

After continuing to serve in the Balkans for several years after hostilities ended, Major Foxton took one last assignment, this time in Afghanistan reprising his humanitarian assignments.

He was eventually persuaded to leave this war zone only after intelligence reports signalled that he had become a marked man, and was therefore a magnet to attacks which would inevitably involve his civilian charges.

A former intelligence officer with the British army in Ireland during the Troubles he knew exactly what this meant and after an active military career approaching half a century he reluctantly and finally hit civvy street.

His extraordinary life in three armies would beyond the military sphere have gone unnoticed had not Major Foxton become irrevocably bound up with the Madoff scandal in which he lost his life savings and which caused him in consequence to take his own life and which conferred on him a kind of posthumous celebrity.

He had crawled through minefields, disarmed unexploded ordnance, yet ultimately he was done in by the people he trusted, his investment advisers – civilians.

Now there are indications that this soldier of fortune, humanitarian and scholar sprang from New Zealand origins.

It is thought that his father was a New Zealand serviceman who had married in Britain during the war - and stayed there . Major Foxton, the son, was born in 1943.

Meanwhile Major Bill Foxton’s humanitarian operations during the last Balkan wars are considered to have been extensive.

This was particularly so in his ability to deploy regional languages as NATO rapidly took over operations from United Nations.

Asked on one occasion how he was able to assimilate so many diverse languages he said simply that it was a matter of listening to them.

Meanwhile, there is a strong indication that as the Balkans once again became the tinderbox of history there was at this pivot a character who could have walked out of any adventure book and who had a New Zealand connection to boot.

Jason Connery 2009 film proves that Life does follow Art

Graham McTavish might not be everyone’s idea of a travelling companion. A grotesque dwarf in Sir Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, the grizzled fiery lead in Preacher, the only actor to play opposite to Sly Stallone in both Rambo and Rocky…..

Sidekick Sam Heughan presents a milder aspect as the two Outlander stalwarts hit the glens in their Clanlands travel book aided by a strong tailwind in the form of a forward by Outlander creator the American author Diana Gabaldon.

All a bit other worldly you might think as the footloose buddies emerge from behind the footlights to hit the traffic lights in road book on the Highlands.

If Outlander takes viewers through ethereal epochs of time travel, its two real life stars take readers on a feet-on-the-ground terra firma traverse of the highland highways and byways interspersed with the unreconstructed characters who populate them.

Graham McTavish in fact divides his time between Scotland and New Zealand traversing time zones instead of epochs.

He had a big role in a 2009 film called Pandemic in which he played Captain Riley whose mission was to “save the world.”

The film was directed by Jason Connery.

Just this year Britain’s Radio Times readers voted for Sam Heughan to take over the James Bond role from Daniel Craig.

Jason’s dad, Sean, was of course the first James Bond and who is generally considered the first celebrity superpatriot to take up the cause of Scots independence.

This leaves us with Graham McTavish who as he travels between Scotland and his New Zealand-based family and as he cools his heels in managed isolation in the process must be wishing that his film Pandemic had been taken rather more seriously.

Rotten Tomatoes did. It’s verdict on the 2009 film Pandemic was:-

“Moving this exciting thriller along at just the right pace, director Jason Connery builds considerable suspense concerning how it will end…..”

So in relishing their rollicking trail through the Highlands we can discern in the travelogue duologue a foggy whisp of ghostly and indeed deadly Outlander-grade supernatural forces.

Encouragingly for these rowdy latter day Monarchs of the Glen and their publishers, Hodder, is the fact that New Zealand boasts the largest consumption of printed books per head of population and is only rivalled by Norway.

The itinerant actors find themselves pathfinding a print/cinematographic blend in the form of Clanlands being a prequel to Men in Kilts which his described as a docuseries.

Meanwhile, in Scotland’s Highlands the past is the present and so the travellers’ japes and capers are interspersed with historical context.

The authors note that the lockdowns attendant on the current pandemic, the real one, had the effect of putting a sock into their reminiscing and forcing them into the serious business of actually getting their book written.

Time travel is one thing and nowadays true travel is something else involving as it does necessary quarantine hibernation, an interruption absent in the science fiction version.

Not too outlandish then to suggest that Graham McTavish for one will have the time on his hands to start work on Clandlands volume 2?

New Zealand is often described as the Scotland of the South Seas and it is a country that Graham McTavish has visited for the past 30 years.

Since in fact Alice Fraser, granddaughter of the nation’s defining prime minister Peter Fraser, arranged for him to stage his touring Van Gogh show there.

Another coincidence.

Liberal Leader Malcolm Turnbull’s true belief in Opposition policies haunts Australian politics

The Turnbull Test is designed to show the degree to which a political party leader has their heart in their own party. Or in the other side’s. It is named after Australian Liberal Party leader and federal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

He consistently demonstrated that far from being a conservative his leanings were anything but conservative and that in fact that his heart was very much with the Opposition in the form of the Australian Labour Party and the Green Party.

Mr Turnbull’s inability to disguise his preference for leftist causes notably republicanism and climatism continues to haunt the Liberals.

National Press Club NZ president Peter Isaac now analyses the New Zealand party leaders against the Turnbull Test and does so as the New Zealanders tool up for their imminent general election. Do they really believe in their own party? Really?

Let’s look at them:-

- Jacinda Ardern Labour Leader and Prime Minister. Turnbull Test score: 100 percent. Her obvious delight in identitarian politics and the whole United Nations line singles her out as a true socialist looking for underdogs with which to empathise. Her motto is “Be Kind,” and she means it.

Judith Collins Leader of the Opposition and the National Party: 100 percent. She is the governess of Parliament, impatient with mawkish sentimentality, and demonstrably stern with those she views as indulging in it.

- Winston Peters Leader of the New Zealand First Party and deputy Prime Minister: 60 percent. Once a stalwart of the National party he broke away to form his own party. He is at heart what is known in the United States as a Prairie Populist. He is non doctrinal and will dip into other party’s policies as he did with his off-peak travel and discount Gold Card scheme for pensioners.

- James Shaw co- Leader of the Green Party: 65 percent. His buttoned down look continues to betray the corporate financial figure he once was. This in a coalition party whose members often give the aspect of having strolled out of a rock concert. The Green Party heavying of the rest of the Labour-led coalition cabinet in diverting money to a no-no private school, even a Green one, indicates a doctrinal fissure.

- David Seymour Leader of the ACT Party: 110 percent. The leader of this one-seat Parliamentary Party is in a de-facto voting arrangement with National. Mr Seymour has come into prominence through his right-to-die legislation which is subject to an integrated referendum at the general election. Mr Seymour’s upper lip curls in contempt at the mere contemplation of the United Nations omnibus agenda which plays such a large part in the ruling Labour-led coalition doxology.

The Turnbull Test reveals that for the most part the New Zealand political leaders sidestep the perils of the syndrome in which leaders find their sympathies lying in fact with their opponents instead of with their own parties.

Even so, and with the New Zealand leadership emerging convincingly from the Turnbull Test, we find a selection of intriguing ironies and contradictions, some of them centred on the Labour Party’s imperative to inhabit the moral high ground.

Bizarrely New Zealand’s heart-string pulling Labour Party must suppress the ardours of its most activist devotees who are prone in their zeal to tossing their second vote, the party one, to the Greens.

Neither does Labour want to have to forge together another coalition with the Greens, dedicated as the Greens are to the aspirations of an elite constituency that is light years removed politically from Labour’s own face-value worker base.

Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party must somehow deter the Labour Party’s ultra activist devotees from tossing this second vote, their ideological vote, once described as the conscience vote, to the Green Party.

This second vote is a huge bloc and includes for example those involved in education at any level and a large slice of professionals including quasi professions such as the media.

This elites vote as it is often described is earmarked for the Greens in the justified belief that the Greens will enforce a hard left agenda while Labour of necessity must implement bread and butter policies if only to keep the economy going in order to keep Labour in power.

Skilfully, the Greens use their influence with the mainstream media to take both sides of their load-bearing climate policy plank. Thus, if there are floods it is due to “carbon” as they describe carbon dioxide. If there is a drought, then it too is due to “carbon.”

The New Zealand proportional representation system is based on the German one. There are two votes. One for a candidate. One for a Party.

Our test indicates the absence in New Zealand party politics of a Malcolm Turnbull whose stewardship of the Australian Liberal i.e. conservative party was conducted while in his breast beat the progressivist heart of a university social sciences undergraduate.

NZ Herald takes up eccentric infectious diseases scientist’s trolling retribution

Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles publicly advocated the required national response to Covid-19 and at the same time estimated the effect of this response.

Having nudged the nation toward sidestepping the worst of the virus the clinician has taken on the power of making uncomfortable the very people who should be grateful to her.

Phillida Perry’s documentary Siouxsie and the Virus www.loadingdocs.net/Siouxsie intriguingly taken up by the New Zealand Herald has taken the scab off this undercurrent and will ensure that the bizarre outcome will remain a suitable case for study.

In the event Dr Wiles entered the Covid-19 debate when casualties were being forecast in tens of thousands.

Her widely publicised forecasts turned out to be correct and having successfully in advance calibrated the deadliness of the virus and how the nation could sidestep all but its fringe effects Siouxsie (say it “Suzy”) Wiles could have expected to have been elevated into the pantheon of respect and admiration reserved for New Zealand’s over achievers in a few other fields of endeavour…..sport and the accumulation of wealth, for example.

Instead she has become the epicentre of another type of viral attack, the electronic variety, in which she is pilloried for having spoken out in the first place.

Had she been a political scientist then few doubt that Miss Wiles would now be accorded adulation of the type accorded to women who stick their necks out and that she would be receiving much institutional covering fire and protection.

How different attitudes might be had Miss Wiles’ science doctorate from Oxford had been let us conjecture a sociology doctorate from Waikato?

Miss Wiles who is married with children has trade mark flowing pink hair of the variety often associated with fair grounds.

The infectious diseases transmission specialist is of a fuller figure with a round youthful cherubic countenance and dismisses her own startling appearance seized upon so avidly by her trollers as evidence of sorcery and witch craft and self-deprecatingly says she is merely “fat and middle-aged.”

There the matter might have rested had not the New Zealand Herald taken up the documentary which illuminates the darker underside of human nature and the smouldering envy and corresponding resentment detonated in so many breasts by the achievements of someone such as Miss Wiles with her dumpy figure and candy-floss hair-do.

A salient point is that Dr Wiles cannot dispense with social media and thus the trollers just because her brief is in communicating public health imperatives in the causes and the effects of an insurgency such as the Covid plague.

This expertise was why she was recruited in the first place via Edinburgh and Oxford Universities and Imperial College.

The trolling connected with Miss Wiles has about it characteristics often associated with quite a different moral stereotype to the ever-present generalised social injustice one.

This is not the routine drumbeat of the social justice signallers with their ready access to mainstream mass communication.

This is a new claque that has found a common voice and a common target. It is composed of those who find it hard to reconcile the purple-haired clinician’s eminence in relation to her otherwise ordinariness.

Their message to the clinician? If you are so smart, why don’t you go home?

She has shifted and diversified the paradigm of the outrage industry by showing how quickly it can reframe itself from signalling generalised injustice to a contemporary fixation on someone who rises above the noise level and also what is seen as their station.

The lesson of the niche Siouxsie as Sorceress unease boils down to the perils of being different.

In this new and still less obvious sullen electronic chorus there lies a much deeper and more personal signalling bubbling up of resentment and envy.

This devolves onto the “issues” many have here with internationally qualified scientists who break their stereotype by becoming public figures.

As an expert in transmission Dr Wiles must be contemplating her own transit from that of laboratory scientist to high profile public cultural touchstone, icon for some, witch for others.

Political Class Activism Eclipsed Quarantine priorities

Identity politics submerged climate change as the overriding moral issue in New Zealand, often considered a global weather vane of moral causes.

Mass marches switched from the extinction-rebellion climatic catastrophe ones to those vilifying the colonial era and those seen as benefiting from it, then and now.

The political-class rendition of this mild-mannered, fair-minded, and considerate nation as being in fact the repository of a bigoted, tyrannical majority, the kindest categorisation being racist, often delivered in the local dialect as “rashe-ist,” writes National Press Club president Peter Isaac.

This followed on the heels of the extinction-rebellion marches which saw city councils actively encouraging demonstrations seeking to portray a nation dedicated to hygiene, method and order as one of feckless polluting and contaminating.

This U-turn in causes was theatrically-defined by the mea culpa proclamation of the governing coalition’s cabinet who, in one instance, saw one of its members in front of an audience flagellating himself for having enjoyed what he saw as the advantages of being from a white middle class and thus pitifully unfair background.

This hair shirt exhibition was only one of many bizarre such displays as the political establishment turned itself inside out to signal its support of the freshly supercharged identity campaign in which for example senior police representatives were encouraged to attend in mufti solemn ceremonies of atonement.

Greens, by now suffering from acute publicity deprivation, seek to wrestle climate back on the agenda: notably by encouraging the mainstream media to make connections between Covid-19 and man made climate change.

Identity politics in washing man-made climate change out of the popular forum has given agribusiness an opportunity to regain a front foot at a time when its productivity is crucial.

Identity’s subsuming of the political class’s backbone cause of causes, the climate one, in another opposing interpretation has left this particular wing of the media political class, the climate one, pretty much free to implement its agenda, and do so unseen.

The centrepiece of this agenda is to hobble with international-grade show boating political correctness the nation’s underpinning primary and extractive industries.

In the shorter term, few doubt that the media and political class take-up of identity causes and the vitriolic righteousness inherent in this accelerated mass guilt transfer diverted official attention from the myriad details involved in the administration of the nation’s Covid 19 quarantine management.

The viciousness with which this same class, sensing blood, now turned upon elements of public health administration and on the prime minister Jacinda Ardern was itself a lesson on how virtue in its eyes becomes transformed overnight into villainy.

The prime minister and her officials who had successfully implemented a campaign that thrust the nation into the top rank of the Covid-free must have felt a bit like the primary producers who delivering year after year a successful economy, find themselves denounced as threats to human survival.

To what extent did the United Nations’ preoccupation with the Greta Thunberg campaign divert it and, so fatally, its agency WHO from the true threat: the looming one in the form of Coronavirus?

To what extent did the aftermath of this United Nations-sponsored extinction campaign, the one which so hypnotised this same media political class, devalue the meaning of “emergency?”

There followed the regional climatic emergencies, the ones which otherwise responsible local governments, egged on by the equally gulled mainstream media, fell over themselves to endorse and support.

This particular round of institutional mass hysteria has been eclipsed by the real thing, a true emergency in the form of the pandemic.

Moral movements exert a strange force, one of extreme excitability, on otherwise sober sectors of New Zealand society.

Authority figures such as politicians once sought public gatherings to promote themselves. Now, however, in these new-era collective guilt gatherings, these same politicians still do this, but do so in reverse.

They heap guilt upon themselves, about their skin colour, the advantages bestowed upon them by the accident of birth….the word “privilege” recurs…..

They pepper this with selective statistics designed to underline this undeserved head start.

The personal outpouring is a litany starting at the apology which is for being a thoughtless contributor to the destruction of civilisation (climate). It is for being a man (feminism). It is for being white (identitarian). It is for being middle class (poverty).

It is subtle self-praise of the type in which this class excels.

The impression is conveyed that the apologists in their penitence are, or have been, in a position to influence all these. That they have striven to alter the drift of mankind but, having been caught in the tide and that they have been unable to turn it back. That their lives certainly mattered, still matter. Will matter even more.

More such movements will wash up on these shores to be swiftly taken up by the political class whose representatives will turn themselves inside out in self-abasement with finely turned apologia which as we have seen is simply a reverse form of big noting.

Mass guilt transfer movements with their nurtured hysteria will continue to be imported here, and they will continue to arrive at times when nerves are under strain as they are now, by a pandemic and the economic consequences of it.

United States remains first and only nation founded to do good in the world

President Trump’s brandishing of a King James Bible in front of a church was a unifying signal which the mainstream media perversely chose to interpret as a divisive gesture, a stab at the soul of the union, even idolatry.

In fact the King James Bible ranks with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as an underpinning United States document.

It was carried by the original Mayflower pilgrims and became the founding moral handbook of the United States, writes National Press Club president and sometime White House visitor Peter Isaac.

The mainstream is determined to portray President Trump’s symbolic and silent display of the bible as representing the heart of darkness, as being un-American.

In the event and with the King James Version as its centrepiece the United States was the first and still the only nation to be founded in the belief that it was created to do good in the world and enlighten it

President Trump’s waving of the bible was an only lightly encoded message reaffirming this moral authority of the United States and its founding purpose of doing good.

Inflamed itself by its own contemporary interpretations of righteousness the media now sought to engineer the backfiring of the Trump gesture.

This is in spite of the mainstream being overwhelmingly controlled by those who claim adherence to two of the Abrahamist religions – Christianity and Judaism. These are also known as “the book” religions. (The third Abrahamist/book religion curiously enough is Islam.)

The bible incident served to underline how in the popular culture elite urban context contemporary techniques of seeking to be seen to display righteousness have modified and usually replaced those based on the bible.

Trump understood this and the way in which this stylised personal street level moral concoction borrowing only from orthodoxy in terms of fire and brimstone is seen by his own base as posing a long and short term threat to their own security, and to that of the nation as a whole.

This replacement new and ersatz street belief draws its power from a welter of modern and technology fuelled bespoke and free style cravings in the field of segmented virtue display imperatives.

The double symbolism of the Trump gesture was similarly missed. This was that for his bible-waving he had strolled across the lawn to St John’s church, demonstrably scorched by roving rioters.

Trump is no stranger to the religious backbone of the United States, an immersion emphasised by the teachings of his Gaelic-speaking mother Mary Macleod raised in Scotland’s Western Isles and which the mainstream throughout the English speaking sphere cannot bring itself to acknowledge.

While the fashionable urban politico-media class exults in the formula of targeted mass hysteria wallowing in its reflected virtue, president Trump knows that in the productive United States hinterland there remains a sense of revulsion centred on the short and long term effects of the orchestrated over-excitement, and the applied havoc in its wake.

Trump stepped into this beliefs vacuum with his bible moment.

This is the vacuum amplified as it is by the established church through its conviction that it must accommodate and ultimately absorb competing doctrines, ones with a persuasive following. It is the reason for example that it allowed things like the days and months of the year to be classified with the heathen names we all use today.

It is the reason now why the established church backs down from acknowledging the gratuitous mayhem detonated by these single-point ignition to multipoint and now globally viral civic violence eruptions.

It is a mayhem actually visited on working and god-fearing people, such as the proprietors of small businesses and those who cannot afford to move to the suburbs along with those others who are singularly unblessed by being poor.

The established church anxious to appease the well-placed agitators sidesteps the whole problem with incantations centred on mantras of revolving words such as peace, equality, justice, divisiveness…

It is the reason why petrified pastors fearful of losing the support of such influencers simply identified the bible incident as being “blasphemous.”

Meanwhile the arrival of the consignment of King James Bibles on the original Mayflower is one of history’s great coincidences.

The accelerating application of moveable type meant that the King James Version now quite suddenly became available and a consignment was rushed to the Mayflower only hours before it sailed from Plymouth.

The mainstream media in its quest for hip modernity has long dispensed with its once standard god-spot broadcasting segments and published homilies from clerics.

In the looking glass world of the media the bible has gone the way of the Whole Earth Catalogue.

And yet…and yet presidents are still sworn in on them.

President Trump was sworn in with two King James Versions

His own and President Lincoln’s.

President Trump knew as he sauntered to the by now boarded up St John’s church that in today’s era of orchestrated opinion journalism that his bible semaphoring would be reduced to showboating.

Or at best statements posing as questions such as, Was he holding it upside down, and whose bible was it anyway?

His signal though was tuned to a longer distance destination the one beyond the confected rage of the self-regarding mood makers of the coastal enclaves and beamed at the heartlands where once a week Americans still clutch the King James Version.

This hinterland tends also to be comprised of people who do not applaud, condone, concur and generally excuse the setting alight of parish churches such as St John’s.

Family Cluster Lockdowns were Bleaker and Longer

In 1956 schoolboy Brian Bourke found himself in an Ashburton hospital ward, a victim of New Zealand’s annual and brutal polio wave.

He was one of 897 victims in New Zealand that year of the polio virus.

It cost him his left leg, writes National Press Club president Peter Isaac.

Nationwide that same year 50 other victims were not so lucky. They lost their lives.

Mr Bourke a chartered accountant recalls now that his nurses were completely shrouded in sterile material and he was not to identify any one of his carers until many years later when one of them Monica McCormack recognised him at a church service and introduced herself.

When after 192 days in hospital he eventually returned to school Mr Bourke recalls that fellow pupils were wary of him, fearful that they might catch the polio virus from him.

In the event Mr Bourke (pictured) went on to establish himself in New Zealand’s North Island with an accountancy practice and a number of directorships.

Challenging the disadvantages presented by his withered leg he embarked upon distance swimming and represented New Zealand at a Masters’ tournament in Brazil.

More than 800 New Zealanders died from polio also known as infantile paralysis between 1916 and 1961 when the annual epidemic waves finally succumbed to the vaccine developed by Dr Jonas Salk.

The most deaths in one year in New Zealand was in 1925, when 173 people died.

The virus was associated with respiratory ailments and those most severely afflicted often required artificial breathing support.

Conversely and curiously in the light of the current Covid-19 plague taking its biggest toll on the unfit and the elderly the polio virus in contrast attacked the young and the vigorous such as Mr Bourke.

Equally conversely, the polio virus thrived in summer rather than in winter said to be the favoured transmission season for Covid 19.

The introduction of the Salk vaccine intercepted the polo virus prior to the era of mass travel which has proved such a contagion thoroughfare for Covid 19.

Pivoting agilely on the stick which compensates for his prosthetic left leg Mr Bourke who is now 78 knows that he is among the last who can testify through experience to the annual summer polio waves which left in their wake the paralysis of which he is a living victim.

The annual summer intervention of the polio virus which put him in the isolation ward of Ashburton hospital is fading over the institutional memory horizon he notes. Social distancing in the polio era for example centred on shuttering schools, swimming pools, theatres and amusement arcades.

Mr Bourke with his wife Margaret went on to have seven children and he remains a signal figure in community activity.

A lean, tallish fellow with the engaging smile of those sensing their own gift of life redeemed, Mr Bourke a carpentry buff by day and who at night dabbles in poetry believes that the fear and trembling evoked by Covid-19 should be put into human perspective………

“In 1956 we all feared polio because it had a preference for children. There is nothing like it around now. The symptoms were like a very bad dose of the flu with a severe fever. The effects were very different. The paralyses were swift. We were utterly defenceless against it. Doctors had no answer. ….

“When I arrived at hospital they were not sure if I had polio and they put me in a small room with green walls and no window to the outside. They gave me a lumber puncture in the late afternoon and then left me alone. That’s when the paralyses started. I could feel it coming on. I had a strange feeling in my left arm and my left leg. The nurses did not come to check on me. I got out of bed and walked up and down that small room until I could not walk anymore and I collapsed on the floor…

“The others in my family were not allowed to go to work or attend school. Nobody came to visit them and they only went out to buy food. They sat around in the dreary nor-west heat of early 1956 and wondered if they could drink from the same cup or if they should wash all the dishes again……”

In the meantime and declining to succumb to the ravages of age any more than he did to those of polio Mr Bourke nowadays in a self-imposed act of defiance hosts an annual swimming gala in which he personally swims an extra pool length for each additional passing year of his life.