The Politically Incorrect Show - 06/12/1999

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Monday December 6, 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!]

By now I'm pretty well inured to the horror stories people send me of the doings of little Hitlers administering District Plans drawn up by local bodies & armies of ratepayer-funded consultants. "Inured," not in the sense of no longer being outraged, but of no longer being astonished. I committed myself to the fight for freedom six years ago. I knew that it was going to be anything but easy, & that the trend was all in the opposite direction. Even so, if you'd told me then that citizens of this nation would end up requiring Resource Consents to mow their lawns (sorry, "modify their vegetation"), that such consent might be withheld because the lawn-mowing might disturb the sex life of the king fern, that people could end up doing six months' Periodic Detention for doing preparatory work for a paua farm or be fined $10,000 for upgrading a bog into a duckpond, or even trimming their trees, I would have been incredulous. Today, such abominations are commonplace, & no longer surprise me. I often joke that soon we'll need resource consents to fart, grimly mindful of the fact that my jokes, like the "lookism" one, have a habit of coming to pass.

One thing continues to bewilder me, though. Since I continue to feel intense outrage over these bureaucratic atrocities, I assume that everyone else will too - that the simple act of drawing people's attention to them will create an avalanche of indignation in which these dreadful District Plans will be irretrievably buried. After all, it happened in the Far North, did it not?

Silly, naïve moi. That notable & noble exception aside, very few seem to care, & many rush to justify these excrescences. Here's an example, a letter to the editor I cut out of last Tuesday's Daily Marxist:

"Resource consent & town planners in Arrowtown & Kerikeri have come down hard on those who paint their house & their letterbox the wrong colour. More's the pity that the town planning division of the Auckland City Council doesn't follow suit. The hocus-pocus retail strip that fronts the waterfront next to the container wharf & Mechanics Bay is an insult to the cityscape of Auckland. The first level was bad enough, the second more of the same, & now there's a third tier that looks little better than a henhouse. The people from town planning who allowed it to happen deserve the same fate as the numerous National MPs who are now looking for a new job."

Well, yes they do, actually, for reasons that Adrian Chisholm's Abolish Bureaucratic Crimes organisation will make abundantly clear in the next few months - but not for letting retailers decorate their properties as they see fit! What has happened to this country that we now accept that being told by bureaucrats what colour we may paint our letterboxes is the norm?

We may all have lost our surprise at these things - I for one will continue to express my outrage, while I still can. Who's with me?

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

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