Harden up like a good bloke
In a world of rampant misery – except for the Rugby World Cup – a still small voice of reason is a treasure. Isn’t ACT’s David Seymour a delight? They should harden up, the MP told Victoria University students last week, when they complained about students’ rising stress levels. That’s reasonable, because the strong should win in the great game of life, and the weak should go dig a hole and jump into it. Or maybe they could set up in business as shoeshine people, polishing the leather of the elite to a twinkling gleam, from a kneeling position.
In fairness, Seymour says – as does United Future’s leader Peter Dunne, who was there – that Seymour was reported out of context. In fairness also, law student Olive Wilson stands by her side of the story. And equally in fairness, I say that any politician who chooses to debate in front of a student audience gets what’s coming to them.
Seymour allegedly observed that people who suffer from stress and anxiety ‘‘choose not to be happy,’’ and has since clarified that he believes some people with mental illness don’t need medication, which dovetails nicely with, say, cutting government funding for prescription medicines.
That’s as authoritative a psychiatric opinion as you’ll get from someone with degrees in engineering and philosophy. Hopefully Seymour will expand in future on the subject of surgery among the poor, who don’t think happy enough to be able to pay for it. In the meantime his private member’s bill has enabled rugby clubs and bars to sell liquor at odd hours while the rugby’s on, making him a good bloke.
John Key has also had challenging vocal moments, as he did earlier this week when Morning Report’s Guyon Espiner challenged him with the result of a TV3 poll on the new national flag. It found that 70 per cent of people don’t want the new flag Key is so keen on, but with a few tricky sidesteps the Prime Minister argued that the poll wasn’t worth anything because the outright question asked was not ‘‘sophisticated’’.
Here he coined a new term to describe the statistical complexity he’d prefer, one that would be nuanced with shades of sophisticated meaning to deliver a ‘‘granular’’ outcome. Think gravel. Think sand. Think obfuscation and a word I would use here, ‘‘slippery’’. Really it’s a shame to have to talk to the public at all.
Endangered Sumatran tiger Oz has made the news wordlessly, by behaving as a wild animal will, given the chance, by fatally mauling Hamilton Zoo keeper Samantha Kudeweh. She is the third zoo employee to be killed here in the last six years.
I can’t comment on what exactly happened. Nobody can as yet. But Hamilton City Council chief executive Richard Briggs at first implied that the tiger could be killed as a result of the attack, which would only have added to the tragedy. There are just 500 of these animals left in the wild, and Oz sure didn’t choose to live his life in a cage in a cold country.
Devoted as zoo people are to their animals, those animals really belong in their natural habitats, and I grow increasingly uncomfortable with how we save specimens and keep them in cages while, through human greed and overpopulation, destroying the places they really belong in.
We make soft toys of wild animals and pretend they’re just like domestic pets, but they’re not, and they’re as bored and under-stimulated as any human prisoner serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. At least domestic cats choose to live with us, but if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of their teeth and claws you’ll know they’d wipe us out smartly if our sizes were reversed.
I’m sorry for the needless death of a good woman, but if I’d been a tiger, programmed for a life in the wild, I’d probably have done the same.