Rosemary McLeod attacks me in today's DomPost

Rosemary McLeod — a lovely women, and probably the world’s worst copywriter when she dabbled briefly in advertising in the early 90s — gets stuck into me in today’s DomPost.

I’ve asked the editor for the right of reply. (I’m not holding my breath, given the Dom’s craven cowardice in banning ACT’s totally factual ad – while insisting that the party pay for the space in full.)

Assuming that the Dom will be consistent in their cowardice, I’d better reply to Rosemary’s points here:

There’s no need for satire in a country that does it naturally. We have the ACT party, and need little more. Let me explain.

In fits of gentility my mother used to make fancy desserts in tall parfait glasses, layers of custard, fruit and whipped cream, say, with a cherry on top.

OK, so we now know that gentility isn’t genetic — but so what? Come on, Rosemary, get to the point.

To eat these you needed special long-handled parfait spoons – a dainty crocheted place mat wouldn’t have gone amiss – and this reminds me of both a proverb and ACT’s leader.

Oh for God’s sake.

“He who sups with the devil will need a long spoon” – like my mother’s long-handled ones – when dealing with irrepressible types like John Ansell, author of a self-published book of verse – and CD – entitled I Think The Clouds are Cotton Wool.

And a very good book it is too. But what does my poetry have to do with the price of fish?

On the day his latest advertising campaign was launched, Ansell, ACT’s marketing director, who has effervesced recently on both Maori and women, was absent from the party conference.

That’s because I’d asked to be released from my contract three days earlier, Rosemary. And I was the creative director, not marketing director. Get your facts straight. 

He later resigned from the party.

Earlier, Rosemary. I resigned earlier, and confirmed it later.

ACT’s leader, Don Brash, could not be seen to publicly condone Ansell’s comments, let alone his verse, yet such topics draw together the most delightful of pink-skinned blokes, the thinkers.

Let alone his verse? Huh?

And would you have talked about skin colour if the thinkers were brown-skinned, or is that just OK cos we’re ‘pink’?

Embodiments of all that is racially and culturally superior, they know they are endowed – probably by God – with special insights of a purely logical kind, as well as superior mating tackle, which helps with logic and stuff like that.

You’re dead right about God, Rosemary. There’s no doubt He was a Muslim-strength misogynist, considering the excruciating nature of childbirth, periods, women’s magazines, and your columns.

Women have been dealt with – logically – twice in the past couple of weeks by these better-endowed sorts, first by sacked Employers and Manufacturers’ Federation boss Alasdair Thompson, who pointed out that we menstruate, and therefore can’t be the equals of men in the workplace, and now by Ansell.

Yes, and it’s amazing how many honest, rational women have responded agreeing with both of us. (See the post below from Vivienne.)

Oh and — hate to interrupt your illogical rant with a fact, Rosemary – I don’t believe Alasdair ever said that because they menstruate, women ‘can’t be the equals of men in the workplace.’

I think you made that up.

I can’t speak for Alasdair. But I agree with my wife that women may well compensate for their comparative lack of attendance (again, a fact — which Alasdair was absolutely entitled to state) with superior performance when they do deign to turn up.

Women are famous for multi-tasking. They’re certainly more conscientious than men, and infinitely more obedient.

And as long as the work doesn’t involve building or fixing anything, in my experience they make first-rate employees. (And, indeed, employers.) 

He explained that ACT’s advertising concepts – which he’d apparently been in eager charge of – should focus on men because women don’t want to “talk bluntly” and are “ruled by their emotions”.

Men ultimately defer to the brain for hard decisions, he added, while women look to their, you know, weepy bits.

Rosemary, are you seriously suggesting I was not telling a blindingly obvious truth?

Was that truth not made all the more obvious by women’s repeated re-election of  Helen Clark?

If it was down to men, Rosemary, Clarxism would have been flushed away in 2005 and Brash would now be in his sixth year as PM.

Does anyone seriously doubt that New Zealand would today be a more prosperous nation under Brash than it was under Clark – or than it’s ever going to be under the decidedly more feminine Key? 

Men, being on the whole more logical and economically literate, are more likely to opt for long-term economic gain at the price of a bit of short-term pain.

Women, being more concerned about preserving their day-to-day popularity, will plump for short-term gain, and guarantee long-term misery.

The only exception to that rule was in the Britain of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher is one of the greatest conviction politicians of all time, and fully deserves to be elevated to the status of honorary man.

(Ayn Rand and Ruth Richardson are two other thoroughly logical women. Jenny Shipley was strong. And I have high hopes that Crusher Collins will soon become that rarest of birds: a National Prime Minister who is not a complete waste of space.)

British women ‘got’ Maggie because she related her economic management to their household budgeting.

And he was happy to be leaving ACT, he said, because they were collectively “white cowards” who were not standing up to the “Maorification” of the country.

An annoying, but typical, journalistic misquote.

I was referring to New Zealanders more broadly, not just ACT. ACT is by far the least cowardly party — but far too cowardly all the same.

The world hasn’t heard such rhetoric since Enoch Powell, and as luck would have it, he and Ansell appear to have knowledge of the classics in common.

The ancients believed women’s wombs and uteri could travel around their bodies causing all manner of hysterical carry-on – hence the very word hysteria, which proves once and for all that we’re loony-tunes.

 If you say so, Rosemary. But I most certainly did not say so.

As regards Enoch Powell, his warnings about ‘rivers of blood’ if Britain threw open her doors to ill-fitting immigrants have been proven spectacularly correct with the infestation of moronic, home-grown, murderous, misogynistic Muslims now being incited to jihad by medieval mullahs in the mosques of Londonistan.

I thought an old feminist like you would support Powell’s position, Rosemary. He certainly supported yours.

Ansell did not spare Maori, who he said had “gone from the Stone Age to the space age in 150 years, and haven’t said thanks”.

Well, they have. And they haven’t.

Has one Maori leader ever expressed gratitude for all the wonderful life-enhancing technological marvels that Western civilisation has bestowed upon his people?

(Marvels like the wheel. And writing. And shoes. Not to mention the computers on which so many of them have penned abusive, text-gangstarese threats to me in recent days.)

All we hear is a relentless wailing and moaning about how the rest of us are not giving them enough.

He is evidently a believer despite all the evidence – unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction, high rates of imprisonment, poor health, shorter life expectancy – that Maori are somehow ripping us all off.

Yes I am.

The choices made by too many Maori to wag school, not study, bludge benefits, invade homes, do drugs, eat junk, smash heads and kill their kids, are just that.

Choices, Rosemary, choices.

For too long, cunning Irish Steves pretending to be Maori Tipenes have been donning their whalebone carvings and pulling the wool over the eyes of weak whiteys.

For too long, these Steves and their lawyers (especially one called Chris) have tried to make it the fault of other New Zealanders that Maori are ‘disadvantaged’.

That the education system has ‘failed Maori’.

That the health system has ‘failed Maori’.

(Yet strangely not the welfare system.)

In fact, as any honest examiner of the facts can see, Maori have failed the education system. It is Maori who have chosen not to avail themselves of Western medicine, not the other way round.

That’s their free choice. They should not blame others if they’ve wasted these golden opportunities for advancement. 

If you think I’m being harsh, Rosemary, look at what the Chinese — the “Yellow Peril” of this time last century – look at how they forgave, if not forgot, their racist oppressors.

Look at how they just got on and beat the whites at their own game.

That, I think, is the difference between Buddhism and Confucianism and socialism and tribalism. It’s the difference between looking forward with hope, resolve and optimism, and looking backwards with bitterness and one’s hand out.

Of course, we can’t blame these cunning iwi aristocrats for waging their long-running campaign of emotional blackmail. After all, Treaty grief has worked a treat so far.

Given half a chance to extort billions of dollars from a government weak enough to fall for their tricks, you and I might well do the same.

But the game’s up.

The Maoristocracy should not expect the rest of us to renegotiate Treaty settlements that they were happy to accept as fully and finally settled in the 1940s. (I’ll be blogging the evidence for that soon.)

I rather think Ansell has himself demonstrated how it’s possible to leap from the space age to the Stone Age in a single bound, back to when involuntary grunts passed for dialectic.

I’d rather make involuntary grunts than involuntary grants.

Those were the days, when Maori would have been taught to be thankful for chicken pox, measles, influenza,and the host of other diseases from the northern hemisphere that nearly wiped them out, and grateful that they lost their ancestral lands thanks to the workings of a legal system they had no part in creating, and whose machinations were foreign to them.

That’s nonsense, Rosemary. Precisely the kind of absurd emotional female non-logic that I was talking about.

Here’s the boring old fact: What nearly wiped Maori out was each other. Heard of the Musket Wars?

Bloodthirsty, armed Nga Puhi warriors rampaged through the land slaughtering half of their fellow (unarmed) countrymen.

This was in the 1820s and 30s, before your disease-infested Brits even got going.

If the Brits had waited another ten years, they would have walked into a land where all that was left of the natives were bullet-shattered bones. 

(Trouble is, it would also have been full of insufferable Frenchmen, hence why they couldn’t wait.)

There is a Disney version of the settlement of this country by Europeans which all of us learned from the back of cereal packets.

Yes, but even that Disney version is not as fantastic as the make-believe Maori-Marxist version that today’s kids get brownwashed with, year after year after mind-numbing year, in social studies.

(Which should really be called socialist studies. For about eight years straight, whenever I asked my kids what they were studying in social studies, the only answer I ever got in that whole time was “The Treaty”.)

In the make-believe Maori-Marxist version, there is, I am confident, no mention of how the Maori wiped out vastly more of their own people deliberately with muskets than the British did accidentally with diseases.

Nor of how an activist judge called Robin Cooke dreamed up the first of two Landmark Lies: that the Treaty was a partnership between a bunch of stone age tribesmen and the greatest civilisation on earth.

(As opposed to an agreement to run the country and protect Nga Puhi from southern tribesmen hell-bent on revenge for Nga Puhi’s ethnic cleansing of their relatives — and from the fearful French and a gathering swarm of escaped Australian convicts.)

In the Maori-Marxist version, there is, I’m supremely confident, no mention of how Geoffrey Palmer, that legal genius who gave us the Red Tape Multiplication Act — I mean Resource Management Act – conjured up out of thin air the second of the Landmark Lies: that the Treaty contained a set of Principles.

(Presumably written in invisible ink.) 

Nor of how the government has been covering up the true English version of the Treaty, the Littlewood Treaty, ever since it was discovered in the late 1980s.

Nor of how the same government slapped a 75 year suppression order on the carbon dating results of hundreds of Celtic stone dwellings in the Waipoua Forest that are likely to prove that Maori, as well as being not indigenous (they invaded by sea only a few hundred years before Tasman, after all), were also far from the first people to settle these islands.

But there is another reality in the consequences for Maori, just as there has been for native people wherever Europeans have moved in and taken over.

And that is that their life expectancy and living standards improve out of sight from what they were under their own management.

ACT’s latest advertising slogan, “Fed Up With Pandering to Maori Radicals?” panders to people who insist that the shared history and common plight of Maori, native Australians, and native Americans is their own fault.

Such a belief, whatever Ansell says, is infinitely less about logic than emotion.

Rosemary: in the old Maori world, the rule of conquest was, ”We won, you lost, eat you.”

When a Maori tribe defeated another tribe in battle, the losers were slaughtered or enslaved.

The victorious chief then celebrated by ingesting a delicacy that may have been the original inspiration for the Hokitika Wild Food Festival – the enemy chief’s eyes.

(Te Rauparaha, Te Kooti, Hone Heke, etc. had cause to be grateful that the British Army commanders preferred meat and two veg.)

In America and Australia, the white colonisers were similarly ruthless. The Spanish in Latin America were even worse. 

But the British in New Zealand were astonishingly civilised by the standards of the day.

Thus there are hundreds of thousands of Maori alive today who would not be, had the usual 1840 Maori and Pakeha rules of engagement applied.

I’m not saying, Rosemary, that that excuses legitimate breaches of the Treaty. It doesn’t. There should be redress for those breaches which can be proven.

But it does put in perspective how lucky the descendants of those Maori people are to have a Treaty to wail and moan about, and a tribe with which to share the spoils.

The same cannot be said for the tribes that their tribes massacred, like those in Taranaki, who were massacred by the Waikato, and the Chatham Islands Moriori and Wellington Maori, who were massacred by the remnants of the Taranaki.

The guilt trip isn’t all one-way, Rosemary.

It’s time for the Treaty gravy train to chug back to the station, and for you to stop letting its passengers do your thinking for you.

Here endeth the logic.

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