KEY POINTS:
Best billboard mash-up (creatively altering political ads for the purposes of satire) that will probably backfire and pull in votes for Act's Rodney Hide.
* * *
Did self-appointed mayor of Newmarket Cameron Brewer lend National leader John Key his favourite tie to wear while announcing his tax policy? Photographic evidence shows they have the same taste in neck accessories - silky baby blue with white square dots. Bruce Martin, from Mt Eden, remembers that on April 1 Brewer tried to trick the public into believing Newmarket had won a lucrative contract to dress Helen Clark for the election campaign. It turned out to be an unsubtle April Fool's Day joke ... "However perhaps Newmarket is styling John Key?" he wonders.
* * *
Amy responds to Matt Hancock's comments about unnecessarily large Ford Falcons as company cars. "It has been shown time and time again that it's not the power or displacement of a vehicle that makes the economy, but how the driver drives it. Recently on Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson raced a particularly fast BMW, the M3 (4 litres), behind a Toyota Prius (1.5L), for 10 laps around a racetrack. Surprise, surprise, the M3 got 19mpg and the Prius [also] got 19mpg. ... The point here is that, driven at the same speed or in the same style in daily traffic, the more powerful cars are not necessarily guzzly or bad for the environment; quite the opposite, as smaller engines will struggle to operate in 'normal' traffic whereas the big, torquey engines will happily idle along using less fuel. This is also true within my family. ... My 2.0L AWD Subaru gets the same economy as our 1.7L Honda Civic. The Subaru barely needs a nudge to move in traffic where the Civic demands boot to move."
* * *
A Norwegian politician says she will not seek re-election after running up a large phone bill ringing fortune-tellers at taxpayers' expense. Saera Khan, 29, an MP for the ruling Labour Party, admitted calling pay-per-minute fortune-tellers 793 times in one nine-month period, for a total of 133 hours. In one three-month period, she spent 4590 kroner ($1227). Labour's parliamentary leader Hill-Marta Solberg said advice from fortune-tellers had not influenced the party's work in Parliament.
