OPINION
Harry Palmer
I received the above update in a Consumer email. It is also on their website. This was my response to them:
Though I’ve been a member of Consumer for many years and will always remain grateful for the help the organisation has given me in several matters, I’m afraid that I consider the above to be of so little interest or worth – in fact quite the reverse, pretty damaging – to the public of New Zealand, as to make you appear as government lickspittles. Did you by any chance enjoy an award of part of the $55 million dollars the recent Labour coalition also bribed the MSM with? In that case you don’t deserve any further financial assistance from your more gullible members.
Your actions smack of the same kind of attempted censorship that government-funded outfits like NewsGuard – which is currently being sued by Elon Musk – were formed for: to dissuade media outlets from publishing ‘disinformation’ and ‘conspiracy theories’ which would counter government ‘spin’. If their dissuasion – their overt threats – don’t work, NewsGuard’s next resort is to approach the publisher’s advertisers and get them frightened enough to starve the publisher of its revenue stream. Funnily enough, your approach seems to be against a company that I strongly suspect offends the government rather more than the public of this country.
I was the production engineer for a well-known gas production company for many years and one of whose products was carbon dioxide. My experience in that area and as a practical engineer gives me certainty in my belief that ‘global warming’ is a hoax being perpetrated on the public and […] you are proclaiming Consumer to be party to […] this. Instead of your ‘Z Team’ or whatever it’s called pursuing the above matter, I would suggest that these ignorant, presumed millennials would feel better marching the streets and screaming anti-semitic abuse in favour of the Palestinians.
Feel free to cancel my membership, which I intend doing myself if you respond with some authoritarian BS lecture about how we all must do our best to ‘save the planet’.
Consumer’s tame reply was to give me a link to use if I want to cancel my membership…