The Politically Incorrect Show - 17/07/2000

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, KAYA ORAAAA & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Monday July 17, 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]

You know things must be getting dire when the people directly or indirectly responsible start sounding the alarm bells about how dire things are getting! Inveterate illiberal-leftie Gordon McLauchlan, doyen of Aotearoa's arty-farties, couldn't conceal his delight when his ideological confreres, the Labour & Alliance parties, were elected to office. He had spent years railing against what little economic reform there had been under Roger Douglas & Ruth Richardson, even while accepting a lucrative contract to front an advertising campaign for the restructured Telecom, & made no secret of his wish for the reinstatement of the previous brand of socialist Big Brotherism. He got his wish - & lo, he doesn't like what he sees. Things, he thinks, are getting dire. In his weekly Herald column on Saturday, Mr McLaughlan referred to our Great Leader as "the national Cub mistress" & decried her bossyboots behaviour.

"I hear the echoes of Calvinism," he wrote, "in these little throwaway sermons from atop the mountain of superior morality. The brisk & frank leadership in the administration of Government during the early weeks of this year was welcome after years of muddled mediocrity & abdication of social responsibility. But is high-handed maternalism, national nannyism, our only other choice?"

It seems to have escaped Mr McLaughlan's attention that high-handed maternalism & national nannyism were already rampant before the Cub mistress came to power, much of it perpetrated in the name of "social responsibility," but no matter - at least he has become alert to the ominous control-freakery of his erstwhile heroines. Of this regime's fanatical anti-smoking crusade, he observes:

"This Government's reinvigorated campaign has the strut of authoritarianism about it, the taint of policy formulated by people who know better than we do what's good for us. If New Zealanders don't understand by now how dangerous smoking is they must be mentally retarded; & if the decision to smoke or not is to be taken entirely out of the hands of the people themselves, will alcohol be banned next; & then fatty foods; & then refined sugar; & after that, perhaps, low-cut dresses & impure thoughts?"

Has Mr McLauchlan been listening to this programme, or is this wake-up call entirely his own work? Either way, I commend him for Saturday's column, even though it doesn't go quite far enough. "The time has come," he concludes, after reminding us that the Nazis drove the world's first major, systematic anti-smoking crusade, "for the Government to reflect on where the line runs between public & private moral responsibility."

For Mr McLauchlan's information, that time came ages ago, literally. And it's not "reflection" that is required, but retreat - a brisk & frank butting out by the control freaks in Helengrad of affairs which are none of their goddamned business.

Politically Incorrect Show ... beating the bastards back. 309 3099.

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