Something really spooky about this Halloween nonsense

Even worse is Prime Minister John Key’s lackadaisical response to questions about our involvement in this international scandal.

At a press conference on Tuesday he seemed to suggest that there was stuff we were doing as part of Five Eyes that was too secret for even him to know about. In a democracy that seems entirely inappropriate.

Truth is, Left-wing peacenik and author Nicky Hager probably knows more about our involvement in US-led cyberspying than Mr Key, having written a book about it that is held in the European Parliament’s library in Brussels.

Mr Key has probably never read it and it would appear he doesn’t want to, in case he finds out that we can hardly claim to be cleanskins when it comes to cyber snooping and that taxpayer funded spooks are involved in activities which most Kiwis would find morally and legally questionable.

But Five Eyes isn’t the reason I’m feeling a little less than generous to Uncle Sam right now.

My real beefs with the leader of the free world this week are Halloween and Transmission Gully.

When I was a kid Halloween was a weird thing that Americans did and played no part in the annual raft of holidays I and my contemporaries looked forward to. After all we had Guy Fawkes. I’m talking about Guy Fawkes before the Fireworks Lady and the health and safety brigade came along and ruined it. I’m talking about Mighty Cannons and Double Happys and bonfires and burning effigies of people, not council organised displays and insipid Roman Candles and restrictions on the sale of pyrotechnics that have taken all the risk and excitement out of what used to be bloody good fun.

Sometime in the eighties and nineties when the Warehouse and the Two Dollar Shops started to dominate retailing, we were colonised by cheap costumes and fake cobwebs and the Americanised version of Halloween.

Kids stopped blowing their fingers off and putting crackers in letter boxes and started begging for ‘‘candy’’ (that is American for sweets).

Now we treat Halloween like a genuine fixture that has some cultural relevance to Aotearoa when in reality it is a tacky unhealthy commercialised scam.

Still I can’t complain – gale- force winds and driving rain largely kept the brainwashed zombies away from my place on Thursday night and the one brave soul who rang my doorbell insistently was dismissed with a gruff ‘‘We don’t do Halloween here’’.

It was another American import that really got my back up this week in the form of Green Transport spokeswoman Julie Anne Genter, who hails originally from Minnesota.

Having lived in the capital for a grand total of two years Ms Genter chose to rain rather heavily on the progress parade that was the announcement that work on Transmission Gully will start sometime next year.

Now while it is true that if I had a dollar for every time the Transmission Gully road was going to be built I wouldn’t need the income from this column, anyone who has lived in the Wellington region for any length of time knows deep in their bones that we need this road. True, Ms Genter has some qualification in traffic management, but I understand parking is her specialty and I would much rather she applied her skills to that issue than arguing against a road which will improve the safety and efficiency and liveability of this region out of sight.

I can actually live with a bit of cyber spying and the odd kid begging for candy at my door, but an outsider putting the kibosh on Transmission Gully really gets my back up.

Maybe we should have taken Uncle Sam up on his rumoured offer to build Transmission Gully when the Marines were here back in World War II.