OPINION
Bob Jones
In an at times ridiculously over the top article by an Annamarie Quill, the Stuff website recently waxed worshipfully about the virtues of the West Coast town of Reefton.
First, it had the cheapest houses in New Zealand. There’s an age-old reason for that being few people want to live there, notwithstanding its vaunted trout-fishing, potential gold mining resources and the discovery of a rare mineral, antimony, yet to be mined but apparently in hot demand.
I loved this line from the puffery, “NIWA recently named Reefton as one of the country’s least windy cities”. City? I bet NIWA did nothing of the sort. It has a population of about 1000, for God’s sake. Even the Vatican City has more inhabitants than that.
But my favourite quote was re an alleged Auckland “rich-lister” “who had shifted there when he could have chosen any of the 243 countries he’d visited”.
He must be an alien and have visited countries in distant galaxies, given there’s only 195 acknowledged states, including self-governing dependencies, on planet earth. But if not, presumably he includes Reefton as a nation, although even the Stuff hyperbolic article stopped short of that assertion.
Perhaps the best line of all was the claim that Resources Minister, Shane Jones, was “jumping up and down with excitement” (about Reefton).
I think most folk would happily bet that Shane, whose figure doesn’t lend itself to such an action, would be incapable of even standing on one leg, let alone jumping up and down.
Still, given the region has been hit by some earthquakes recently, perhaps we’d be wrong. And if so and Shane has taken up jumping up and down, let him be responsible about doing this and confine it to remote villages like Reefton.
Curious about the astonishing incompetence in this article I Googled Annemarie to find she’s based in the Bay of Plenty and once worked for the Herald’s Rotorua newspaper.
As no-one leaves the Herald for Stuff we can draw an obvious conclusion, quicky borne out when I brought up one of her articles, this about John Key, only to read this four word line,
“Like me and John.”
I could read no more, nevertheless, it says everything about Stuff’s lack of editorial staff that such glaring illiteracy is now being published.
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