Charles III: the numbers don’t add up for NZ

1683 — Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek becomes the first to report the existence of bacteria.

1787 — The United States constitution is signed by delegates at the Philadelphia Convention.

1796 — President George Washington delivers his farewell address to the American people. He had been president since 1789.

1853 — The first Scottish settlers bound for Waipu in Northland arrive in Auckland.

1862 — The Battle of Antietam (Battle of Sharpsburg), the bloodiest day in the American Civil War, leaves 22,000 dead, wounded or missing in what is the first battle in Union territory.

1872 — Phillip W. Pratt patents his sprinkler system for extinguishing fires.

1916 — The Red Baron (Manfred von Richthofen), the World War 1 flying ace of the German Luftstreitkrafte, wins his first aerial combat near Cambrai, France.

1939 — Taisto Maki becomes the first man to run the 10,000 metres in under 30 minutes, in a time of 29:52.6.

1940 — Adolf Hitler postpones Operation Sealion, the planned German invasion of Great Britain.

1941— New Zealand abolishes the death penalty for murder. It is replaced by life imprisonment with hard labour. Sentences of flogging and whipping are also discontinued.

1952 — New Zealand’s population passes two million. The populations of the four main centres at the time were: Auckland 337,100, Wellington 135,300, Christchurch 178,500 and Dunedin 96,500.

1956 — Criticised by the mayor of Auckland, John Luxford, as a ‘‘nauseating sight’’, an exhibition of drawings and sculptures by Henry Moore attracts record attendances.

1974 — Ian Brackenbury Channell climbs his small ladder and begins an address in Cathedral Square, Christchurch. Despite dodging about 20 eggs thrown at him and being arrested by police, Channell begins life as the Wizard and becomes a city icon.

2000 — Motorists run in fear for their lives when thousands of tonnes of rock crash over SH6, beneath Nevis Bluff at the western end of the Kawarau Gorge, near Queenstown. The slip, estimated at 30m across and 15m deep, closed the road for almost a week.

2018 — Finishing second in the IndyCar season finale, the Grand Prix of Sonoma, was enough to hand New Zealander Scott Dixon his fifth IndyCar Series Championship in a career spanning 18 years. The 38yearold Dixon is now second on the alltime championship winners list behind legend of the sport and seventime champion A.J. Foyt.

THE QUEEN

The anxiously conservative right: Thank you, Ma’am, for everything. For your long service. For your calm and benevolent reign over the Commonwealth. For the special place you so obviously held in your heart for New Zealand — right till the end.

We are a nation united in grief. We bend the knee. The flags are at halfmast and so are our spirits. We bend the knee. God save the King. We bend the knee, and we’re in no hurry to ever actually get up off it.

The morally superior left: King Charles III built his own empire long before he inherited his mother’s. As prince, he used tax breaks, offshore accounts and canny real estate investments to turn a sleepy estate into a billiondollar business. Wealth must never be tolerated.

As for the Queen, she worked hard to maintain an institution built on the invasions and plunderings of colonialism. She ought to have acknowledged the wrongs committed in her name, and allowed herself to be pelted with rotten fruit on a walk of shame every day of her life, including public holidays.

And now the British public are going to foot the bill on a funeral and coronation when people are literally eating each other to stay alive.

Plus we don’t like corgis. Or jewellery. Or princesses. Or princes. Or wealth. Or anything, really, apart from bicycles, John Campbell and masks.

MASK MANDATES

The righteously concerned left: Is the Government trying to kill us? Why don’t they just herd all of us into a killing field, and get out the electronic prods? Because it’s no exaggeration to say this is what’s happening here.

But we can take matters into our own hands. We can continue to go about our business fully masked. On the bus. In supermarkets. And, definitely, on flights — and if cabin crew insist on trying to feed us with complimentary snacks, water, and hot drinks, we should throw it back in their faces and demand they land the plane, immediately. Because we must respond to the crisis reasonably.

The smugly complacent right:

The Government has finally come to its senses, and sent a positive message to the public as New Zealand strive to restore the most important thing in any functioning society — business confidence.

It signals the end of the restrictions and the restraints we’ve been living under in these past few years of the Government’s reign of

TE WIKI O TE REO MAORI The unhappy left: Here we go again with the unsightly spectacle of narrowminded, ignorant racists reacting to Maori Language Week by expressing their hate speech on social media — the pathetic home of all keyboard warriors.

They tear their hair out when Radio New Zealand announcers use te reo. They have heart attacks when television presenters wear moko kauae. They speak of the Queen’s English but all they’re saying is ‘‘Shut up.’’

The unhappy right: Here we go again with the unsightly spectacle of virtue signalling, wet woke libs celebrating Maori Language Week by scorning its critics on social media — the pathetic home of all keyboard warriors.

They think we tear out hair out when Radio New Zealand announcers use te reo. They think we have heart attacks when television presenters wear moko kauae. So what! They should all just shut up.

BLEDISLOE CUP

All Blacks! All Blacks! All Blacks!

All Blacks!

All Blacks! All Blacks!

LAST time Civis was stirring the porridge.

It was early morning on February 6, 1952, and porridge for the family breakfast was cooking on the cokefired stove (which also heated the hotwater cylinder) beside the gasfired oven and hob.

The radio on the mantelpiece was droning quietly, though Civis, aged 7, wasn’t listening.

But Dad, shaving in the bathroom next door, with the door open, heard the news.

The King had unexpectedly died, aged 56, from a heart attack (probably secondary to his smokingrelated health problems, which included lung cancer).

Just after 5.30am on Friday, September 9, 2022, Civis was sitting at the computer, with the background radio tuned to RNZ National, when the announcer, having described the Queen’s family heading for Balmoral, and the implications of that news, was suddenly cut off in midspeech.

When transmission resumed it was with news of the Queen’s death.

So we have, again (for now, at least), a king.

The last king didn’t have an easy time. Born on the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s late husband, he was named for him and known as Bertie.

He was the shy second son of the future King George V, not destined for the throne, but succeeded unexpectedly following the abdication of his lightweight and far from conscientious brother.

He was the last British monarch to have fought in battle (as a midshipman he served in the Royal Navy, the one service in which participants from high commanders to lowest ranks are subject to the same risks, at the Battle of Jutland).

The support of his wife and a speech therapist helped him cope with a bad stammer, and he provided a model of steady service, in wartime and after, that his brother was unlikely to have been able to match even if he’d moved on from his admiration of Hitler.

That dutiful life must have been an inspiration for his daughter’s long and dedicated service as Queen.

King Charles is likely to be similarly hardworking.

But some Commonwealth countries which, like New Zealand, had Elizabeth as Queen, are likely to reconsider their constitutional position now that she’s dead.

That should be done calmly, and not right now (the Prime Minister has noted that such a discussion shouldn’t be undertaken in a hurry), and such moves will be no surprise to Charles.

But meantime Civis, who has at times been described as a pedant, has a pedantic question to ask.

The new king has been proclaimed, both in the UK and in New Zealand, as King Charles III. For Britain, given the King’s decision to use Charles as his regnal name, that is correct, as all the nations making up the United Kingdom have experienced two previous kings so named: Charles I (160049, the farfrom‘‘blessed’’ selfstyled ‘‘martyr’’, executed by Parliament), and

Charles II (King of Scotland 164951, and of England, Scotland, and Ireland 166085 following the restoration of the monarchy).

But should that ‘‘III’’ apply to the nation of New Zealand, of which Charles is now, independently, king?

The last constitutional links between New Zealand and the

United Kingdom (the ability of the British Parliament to legislate regarding the New Zealand constitution) were not extinguished until January 1, 1987, when New Zealand’s Constitution Act 1986 came into effect.

So Queen Elizabeth, acceding to the throne in 1952, could perhaps reasonably be regarded as Queen Elizabeth II of New Zealand.

But there’s been no King Charles of the United Kingdom and its colonies since Te Tiriti o Waitangi, in 1840, formally transferred kawanatanga to the British crown.

This King of independent New Zealand is its first named Charles. And there’s precedent (James VI of Scotland and I of England and Ireland) for using two regnal numbers simultaneously.

The Queen is dead.

Long live King Charles the First of New Zealand, and Third of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland!