Politics in New Zealand

BY and large politics in NZ is dictated by the media.

the government sets the agenda and the commentariat pronounces.

That is okay as far as it goes but with only a unicameral parliament there is considerable leeway for a fair amount of nonsense and blather to enter the national discourse.

The commentariat is mainly made up of Journo's who are all graduates of the J-schools distributed around the country and their instincts are that of the voyeur looking for the big story. They have no pretensions to scholarship or deeper understanding of anything (big claim but true). Their only desire is to suck up to the whatever party fits their personal disposition and wait it out for a bigtime PR job.

so we are at the mercy of what are basically anally driven pinheads with average iq's, big egos and not much else.

Any puerility can get traction if some noo noo head thinks its good copy. bring on the five headed monsters.

If they hang around long enough and grow a beard then they can aspire to senior status due only to longevity.

One egregious example is the fairfax pacific correspondent michael field who woke up one morning and it dawned on him that Margaret Mead was wrong.

Here we have basically a bourgeois wonk presuming to falsify one of America's most noted scholars because her work did not fit the norms that he wanted to believe in.

Ditto for Anthony Hubbard in the SST this morning pronouncing on the fate of the Labour Party as if it was dependent on another PR campaign dreamed up in suckky and suckky land.

there is more to politics than this and his rationale is positively juvenile and worthy of the best efforts of radio squawkback at their its virulent.

The main mistakes of the last Labour government were to let the P-epidemic and the boy racer criminals get out of hand without taking the big stick to either of them when it could have.

Their social programme was okay and New Zealanders know that National is basically a party of wannabees who think they know everything and that they can therapize every slow witted teenager into becoming a rocket scientist.

Using your position on a Sunday weekly to deliver self fulfilling prophecies is not journalism mate but arse licking of the highest water and counterproductive in the long run.