The previous week wasn't much happier.
We had a poor tourist girl sexually assaulted in a caravan in Turangi.
Horror hit our roads in Welcome Bay as two girls, not wearing safety belts, died in a preventable car crash.
On the issue of the caravan attack, I renew my call for authorities to get really tough on people who harm tourists. By robbing, raping, killing or ripping them off, the perpetrators are harming one of the key legs upon which our economy, and jobs, stands.
There should be mandatory sentences for anyone hurting a tourist. Let's start with two years in the slammer for breaking into their vehicles and stealing their belongings.
Five years for assault.
Ten years for rape.
Fifteen years for causing death.
These are minimum jail terms, not ones that can be bartered away.
Hit the crims extremely hard to send a message to them and to reassure potential tourists they will be safe here. We also need to get hard about how to deal with the lunacy on New Zealand roads.
At least 15 people died this holiday period. That's appalling but, when you see how people drive, it is no surprise.
The reason there are so many fatal head-on crashes is simple. Some idiot has gone on to the wrong side of the road.
Usually it is being impatient and overtaking in ridiculous places. I like the comments the other day from the Welcome Bay survivor who said he heard the driver of the accident-causing car saying "it wasn't his fault".
The survivor said his wheel brace was outside the ute and he really wanted to use it on the bloke. In similar circumstances, the same thoughts would go through my mind and someone very big would have to hold me back.
Please, will someone really educate drivers before they give them licences and will someone kindly instil a bit of personal responsibility back into this nation. Because from where I stand, in 2012 the less responsibility taken by people means a far less safe society on so many levels.
THEY say you should forgive and forget but, sometimes, people shouldn't be forgiven or their deeds waved away.
In my book infidelity is one of the unforgivables and yet there are some spouses who take back straying partners.
Not so one champion of a man from Italy.
Antonio C, a 99-year-old, discovered his wife had been cheating on him and he wasn't best pleased. He had been tidying up old papers when he discovered letters to his wife, now 96, from a lover 60 years earlier.
Antonio confronted the floozie and, once her dentures were back in, she confessed she'd had a lover in the 1940s.
Despite her pleas, Antonio stormed out of the house, as quickly as a near-centenarian can, and left his 77-year-old marriage stone cold dead.
Well done, Antonio!
IF YOU think your grandkids are little horrors, check out this Austrian ratbag.
While her Poppa and Nana were away on holiday, she burgled them, not once but twice.
Oh what's a bit of food or a few coins among relatives, you may reckon. Well, not in this case.
The gal ripped them off for almost $40,000 in total, including $20,000 cash and the rest in the shape of jewellery and a gold bar.
One suspects she's off the old couple's Christmas pressie list.
Forever.
SO, THE mouth from the south, Michael Laws, has got himself a gun.
The man who wanted to take journalists out and shoot them because he didn't like questions on John Key and John Banks' tea-time conversation, says he has a shotgun.
How he got hold of a weapon after the comments he made is anyone's guess, but I would put it down to bureaucratic stupidity. Or else no one was actually listening to him at the time he made the threats.
Guns are dangerous things, Michael, be sure you don't get the noisy end around the wrong way.
richard@richardmoore.com
