KEY POINTS:
Fireworks facing ban as PM talks tough - It was like Afghanistan in my suburb, says Clark - NZ Herald headline, Nov 5
Look, it's time we stopped mucking around and got serious. Really serious. It's time we banned EVERYTHING!!!!!! Not just fireworks. The lot!!!!
Lets not
be gutless here!! Let's not settle for some namby-pamby ban on fireworks. Let's ban every daft, noisy, irrational, unnecessary and troublesome activity known to human kind. Because they all pose problems.
Take whitebaiting for example. It may not be big in tranquil Mt Eden but its clearly very dangerous. Two people have perished this year pursuing the tiny piscines. So whitebaiting's got to go.
And New Year's Eve. And Christmas. For obvious reasons. We may not realise it here because it (usually) doesn't snow in December but Christmas has got a huge carbon footprint!!!!! Certainly not something you'd want to show off to your Kyoto Protocolleagues.
Especially when Environmental Sustainability is part of the new curriculum. So Christmas has got to go.
Heck, with a bit of help from a crusading editor we could probably ban netball as well. And we should. Forget the World Champs, what we need are global clamps on this manifestly dangerous activity.
A dedicated editorial newshound could ensure every Monday throughout the netball season that we are confronted with frightful front page photos of tearful young girls sporting appalling black eyes or disfiguring gaps in their lovely teeth, each the result of an accidental elbow and each accompanied by a suitably disturbing headline. Netball Nightmare perhaps, or I'm A Victim, Says Victim.
Blimey, with a bit of luck, somebody might even have a car accident after the game.
Imagine the story then!!!! Critics Slam Netball Horror Smash - PM Calls For Ban.
Not that she has, you understand. She's presently focusing exclusively on fireworks. And rightly so. It's clear the Prim Minister was not amused to find herself in the middle of a weekend war zone.
"The noise ... was horrific," she told the New Zealand Herald on Monday. "I felt as if I was in downtown Kandahar. And that's not right."
The only New Zealanders who should have the slightest inkling of what it's like to be in downtown Kandahar are members of the SAS - and we're not even supposed to know they've been there!
It stands to reason then, if there had to be a ban on what our soldiers are doing except when one of them gets a VC then there must certainly be a ban on fireworks too.
Naturally, there'll be the odd wimpish wowser who says, "Hang about. If there was an awful lot of noise in Mt Eden it can only be because there were an awful lot of people having an awful lot of fun (99 per cent of it innocent) letting off an awful lot of fireworks and therefore, surely, the awful old democratic principle, Majority Rule, should apply?"
Nonsense!!! The sooner we ban that sort of outmoded thinking, the better we all will be. In your dynamic, modern democracy, the facts are ravishingly simple. In your modern democracy, when the majority are a bunch of uncivilised yobbos and the minority is the PM then the Minority Rules.
And if the Minority Rules we should have a ban, then a ban we shall have. Either that or get old megaphone Len to give any troublesome teens a hefty clip round the lug'ole with his loud hailer and, basically, a ban's safer.
So we should get behind the Prim Minister's call for a fireworks ban. After all, they're guaranteed to feature in the Nasty Awful section of this new Enivronmental Sustainability curriculum.
But back to the ban. And it behoves us, surely, to back the Prim Minister on this.
Admittedly, she may wish to ban some other things first - like the Accident Black Spots on our State Highways. After all, they are government property and they do actually kill a number of real people every year. Or she may prefer to ban dysfunctional DHBs. Or David Cunliffe saying silly things.
Once that's all done, she can turn her attention to the Kandahar carnage that annually ravages suburban Auckland and, as the extinguished poet laureate, Mr Jam Hipkins astutely points out ...
We really need to back her
Now she seeks to ban the cracker
And the fiery things that foul Mt
Eden's air
For the fireworks noise and fumes
Should not taint suburban rooms
It's all so truly beastly and unfair
That sort of racket may well mar
Life in downtown Kandahar
Where real fireworks are what folk must bear
But it's not what we are needin'
In the Garden of Mt Eden
Even once a year is more than we can bear!
Let the Afghans make a big mess
With their pyrotechnic madness
But let them keep their horrid chaos OVER THERE!!!!
Us good burghers want to ban it!
And expunge it from the planet,
Theirs is not a Guy Fawkes fate we wish to share.
