In 2004/2005, I lived in Whanganui for a year or so and went to the River City for medical treatment. After many years of difficulties from a lifelong medical condition I finally found a specialist who said he was able to assist me with some ‘experimental’ treatment he had developed. Every day for several months I would trot along to his medical clinic, where it quickly became apparent he was really engaging in guess work – and I was essentially a guinea pig – trial and error and all that.
Back in those days Whanganui, like most New Zealand provincial cities, had a slogan: theirs was “Love This Place”. So began a rather happy period in a very pleasant city I have great affection for.
This coincided with the run-up to the 2005 general election and Whanganui was a hotly contested marginal electorate. The Socialist MP was Jill Pettis, who had a surprisingly long political career despite never being promoted from backbench obscurity; the Tory candidate was Chester Borrows, a future MP ‘wet’ of tidal-wave proportions. Both parties were out campaigning more or less full time from around Easter and it was great fun to observe from the sidelines.
One day I staggered back to my flat after enduring the doctor’s painful treatment to find in the letterbox the daily newspaper, which contained a handwringing front-page story about how young people were leaving the city in droves, with both Pettis and Borrows (and Mayor Michael Laws) vowing to do something about it.
The paper, coincidentally, contained a profile of National candidate Chester Borrows. As part of the profile he mentioned how his children lived abroad. Also in the letterbox was a leaflet from MP Jill Pettis that was a mere four pages, but contained (I swear I am not making this up, dear reader) the astonishing total of 22 photographs of herself. You don’t know narcissism until you’ve read a leaflet from a Labour MP, folks! Squashed in amongst the photographs was her mentioning how she was jetsetting off to London to attend her son’s wedding.
This was too good to pass up. I sat down and wrote a letter-to-the-editor pointing out the paradox, between vows and handwringing on the one hand and families living abroad on the other, of our political masters. I finished the letter with the one liner “guess not everybody ‘loves this place’?”. To my surprise and delight, that glib one liner attracted numerous follow-up letters from other readers.
Yesterday Mr David Seymour had a press release published bemoaning the exodus of New Zealanders to Australia for (supposedly) greener pastures. The implication being we should make things better here so people remain living in God’s own. Fair enough. Except there didn’t seem to be a problem circa 2009 with him ‘fleeing’ to Canada for five years, carrying on a longstanding tradition within ACT of residing abroad for long periods.
It’s another example of how rotten the political class is in this country: lots of bored, decadent rich kids head off overseas then return, somehow get elected to parliament, then try to prevent people they consider their social inferiors from doing the same thing. Mr Seymour – and every other MP – doesn’t have a problem with Prudence and Sebastian from Remmers heading to Sydney (be under no illusions about that folks!): no, it’s just impertinent oiks like Rangi and Charlene who shouldn’t.