Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 30/05/2000
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, KAYA ORAAAA & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Tuesday May 30, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit & excellence against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down]
I was wrong.
Yesterday I stated my belief that Comrade James Neanderton's announcement that he & his Alliance colleagues would oppose the mooted ban on smoking in clubs & bars represented an outbreak of conscience & principle. I really should have known better. Yesterday afternoon I received a much less attractive explanation from a parliamentary insider. When I read it, I had to admit to myself that, alas, it was a far more plausible explanation than mine. Here it is:
Lindsay
While I would love to believe that the Alliance's white-anting of the smoking ban was based on logic, the force of public opinion or a previously hidden desire for freedom, I'm afraid that the real answer seems to be base politics. The Alliance are destroying the pet policy of a Labour Minister in retaliation for the humiliation of Matt Robson over the "sex and kids in jail" debacle last week. Never underestimate the in-fighting capacity of parties of the left. They often seem to save the strongest venom for those closest to themselves.
Even the language used by Anderton is very similar to that of Clark and Goff when they cast Robson adrift last week.
I have attached a press release from Gerry Brownlee which makes that point very clearly:
"King's smoking ban victim of gangland execution.
"Annette King's plan for a smoking ban in pubs has become the latest victim of the gangland-style war which has broken out between the coalition partners, says National MP Gerry Brownlee.
"Last week Helen Clark's mob shot down Alliance minister Matt Robson's plans for hot-and-cold running sex in the nation's prisons, Mr Brownlee says.
"Now, in an obvious act of retribution, Jim Anderton has rubbed out Annette King's plan to ban smoking in bars.
"Mr Anderton effectively admitted revenge was the motive for blocking that idea when he said on Radio Pacific this morning: 'This was an announcement by a minister who said that she favoured doing it this way. Well, the Alliance wasn't consulted on that. It wasn't a government policy.'
"That's an almost word-for-word repeat of the explanation Helen Clark gave last week for killing off Matt Robson's bonking-behind-bars idea, Gerry Brownlee says."
This, I have to concede, in the rotten, stinking world of politics as practised by the Molesworth Mafia, rings much truer than my own interpretation. And here was I taking at face value Neanderton's claim to have been influenced by the voices of protest that have been raised against the ban since it was first proposed. Not only that, but patting this programme on the back for being the main repository of such voices. It is my wont to dub the Alliance "retards," for obvious enough reasons. In this case, it was I who was the retard for entertaining for a second the preposterous notion that the Alliance leader would sincerely take the high ground on a freedom issue & not have a cynical, base, mean, conniving ulterior motive. The one hopeful thing to come out of it is that if Labour & the Alliance are behaving this way toward each other so soon into their rotten, stinking regime, there's no way they'll last together for three years. Not that the return of Gerry Brownlee's lot, along with the Compulsion-Touters, would be any improvement.
For now, in any event, I bestow upon myself the Mad Laughter Award for being such an idiot.
[Mad Laughter Award]
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