Dialogue: Unite to defy hopping onions and sex-crazed mammoths

By JOE BENNETT

Keep New Zealand GM-free. Crikey dick, I shouldn't have to be telling you all this but it seems that the message just isn't getting through.

Who can trust a scientist? Oh yes, we've all heard them insist that they tread with infinite caution, that they inch towards truth in a collegial manner, testing hypotheses, applying the scientific method, doubting everything. There's nothing to fear, they tell us. Everything that needs to be done will be done to ensure we're all as safe as houses.

Well my house was burgled last week so if it's proof they want, let them put that in their test-tubes and run their little bunsen burners over it.

But will they listen? Not a hope.

Golly gee, you only have to look at them to know that something's gone horribly wrong with them. Unforgivable slip-on shoes, suspiciously stained lab coats masking who knows what deformities - as it happens I do know what deformities, what I don't know is the words to describe them - little pubic beards, bulbous spectacles and eyes like dots.

They're exactly the children you instinctively bullied at school and, as usual, instinct got it right. Keep on bullying them and don't rest until they've seen sense.

Because once the GM cat's out of the bag, well, you can say goodbye to life as we know it.

Three-headed salmon won't be the half of it. We'll have weeds we can't kill and onions that think they're toads and resurrected Siberian mammoths rumbling through Ponsonby en route to Auckland Zoo where they'll be trampling down the gates in an unseemly race to be the first to deflower baby Jumbo, and we'll have to summon Sam Neill from Queenstown to stop them.

But Sam will be shacked up in the States making more of his eerily accurate documentaries about the future. Not that he'll be much better off over there, where they've been quietly engineering the genes for years.

Every American cornflake is now half maize and half wombat, and giant distorted vegetables roam the badlands of the Southwest terrifying the Mexican slave labourers.

Of course the CIA has hushed it all up, but you only have to open your eyes to see the effects of GM on the nation - shopping malls the size of Stewart Island, Vietnam the Sequel and a bozo of a President - but they're all far too busy stuffing their faces with growth-hormone burgers to notice.

Tell all that to the scientists, however, and they'll scoff. I know. I've tried it. And God bless 'em, they're feisty. They have a well-organised line in propaganda and they're only too keen to trot it out. Reams of stuff, suggesting that science is merely another term for knowledge and that it is science that freed mankind from the yoke of subsistence living, and science that has multiplied his life span, and science that has fed him, and science that has kept him safe from predators, and science that has cured him of diseases, and science that has made his beer, and science that has kept it cold.

And they'll smugly add that nothing has ever halted the march of science. Though yesterday's clerics may have roasted old Galileo they couldn't burn his science, and a good thing too, they'll say, because science has done us good.

Well, there's an easy answer to all that tosh. Just look them straight in the eye and say Hiroshimathalidomide in one breath. Then spit. And if that doesn't put a cork in their mouths tell them that all the supermarkets in Britain, that nation of the scientifically informed, are refusing to stock anything tainted with genetic engineering because the people don't want it and the people are always right.

Of course they'll come back with the well-worn idea that people naturally fear what they don't understand, and that only 100 years ago your average man in the hansom cab was terrified of electricity.

And you have to hand it to them: they argue well, but that's only because they've all been trained by the multinational corporations. Best thing to do is just to ignore them and get on with normal life. Make an appointment with your naturopath, munch noisily on bran, sew yourself some linen trousers - anything to block them out.

And when finally the torrent of their lies subsides, as it will, look steadily up at them from your felting work and say, "But anyway, GM's unnatural."

Believe me, they'll be lost for words at that. At last they'll give up and go away and you'll be free to leap into your Volkswagen and head for the bush, there to restore your tissues amid green benevolence, a world of balm and harmony that is our only home, the gentle caring mother we call nature.

But don't forget to tell search and rescue where you're going.