Crafar farms, note-taker funding, and then there was Mallard.
The summer continues in its refusal to be one with drizzle becoming a constant of the late afternoons. This is a summer that feels like late autumn, though you get the odd bit of respite.
Not that I've felt too much respite this week. But if you dish it out, I've always said, then you've got to be able to take it. But, my gosh. How dare I suggest there is anything negative about the way we commemorate Waitangi Day or suggest that the annual agitation there is putting many people off caring two hoots about it. From the reaction of some you'd think I'd called for the annihilation of a people.
But let me tell you this. While the objections to what I said have been strident, so has the support for what I wrote been immense. I've never had such reaction to a column nor had so much unsought support or affirmation. And I would suggest that what I wrote is what most people think but don't dare say.
I ran into an American who's lived here most of this decade. In fact he's become a citizen. He said to me, out of the blue, "New Zealand tends to get in its own way, doesn't it?" And I understood him and I agree with him. We all do it, I think, Maori included. I just think that instead of shouting and ranting with bitterness and resentment, which is what Waitangi seems to so many of us to be at the moment, we should work together to get jobs and a better attitude to schooling and to diet. These things are hard to make progress on, of course, but we've got to work together because we're in this together. We've got to look after each other. Heaven knows we have on millions of occasions so far and there's nowhere else for many of us to call home.
