Te Radar: Students show why they are welcome to join brain drain

It never ceases to surprise me that those who demand access to ideas are the least likely to want to hear them.

This was nowhere more apparent than on Monday when Victoria University students shouted down university management as the latter attempted to justify increases in the cost of their educational products.

All we can hope is that these unruly students will become a part of the great New Zealand brain drain.

It is this scattered diaspora who are the focus of the Department of Labour, who, like some kind of modern New Zealand Company, are engaging in Wakefieldian-like attempts to woo people back to the fair shores of this distant and under-populated isle.

Included in their campaign arsenal is their newzealandnow.info website (see link below), which spends your tax dollars answering such significant questions as, "Does New Zealand have to wait for international film releases?" Surely this cannot be a motive for our best and brightest staying abroad?

I say that if people want to stay away because our tax rates are too high, let them. If they state, "There just aren't the same opportunities in New Zealand", agree. If they announce, "London is just so much bigger", then simply thank God we got rid of another moron.

Thankfully, the website doesn't list too many examples of the undesirable side of our society, such as the furore generated by New Zealand Cricket after they mooted the idea of corralling families and sober folk away from those who wish to imbibe the sweet nectar of booze while attending their events.

Naturally this has offended some, none more so than lobby group Alac, who instead insisted on drunks being evicted from sports stadiums. In their press release they ask the following question: "What does it say about our society that we need to create a special zone for families and children to feel safe at a public event?"

The answer is self-evident. It says that we as a society are mature enough to realise that part of our culture involves the ritual abuse of alcohol often combined with a sporting fixture and the sun.

It is thus the responsibility of those in power to allow us to express this cultural peccadillo away from the annoying attention of children and wowsers.

What makes Alac's statement worse is that we the drinking public finance them via a levy on our booze, to the tune of $8 million last year alone. Clearly, the only way to thwart them is to drink less. Somehow that doesn't seem like any kind of victory.

Lamentably, newzealandnow.info doesn't mention the joyful celebration of Kiwi derring-do by some residents of our newest correctional facility at Ngawha.

These rapscallions discovered that they could climb out of their cell windows and stroll round the complex at night.

Fortunately, sophisticated security mechanisms detected this activity, when the guards noticed that someone was pilfering their tea and biscuits.

Nothing, it seems, is as effective in securing our prisons as the simple phrase, "Hey, someone took my bikkies".