Bob Jones: "proof, if any were needed, that God doesn’t make the same mistake twice."

"I detested Bob Jones for many years. My loathing had its genesis in the run-up to the 1975 election when Bob was the brains and financial brawn behind billboards mushrooming across the capital depicting Labour leader, the able, affable and unfailingly courteous Bill Rowling as a timid mouse. It was a malicious propaganda campaign that contributed hugely to the landslide victory of National’s coarse, unfailingly belligerent Rob Muldoon. ...

"[W]hen our paths finally crossed [in 1979] at a cartoon exhibition ... I sported a flaming-red lumberjack beard and had a ginger Jimi Hendrix Afro to disguise my receding hair that wasn’t fooling anyone – least of all Bob. He said, “You’re losing your hair, old man, and you’re fat!” I told Bob that next time I drew him I would make him look even more like PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who he uncannily resembled. ...

"Early on I had no reason to report on Bob in my Listener columns, but in 1983, disgusted with the National government’s wage and price freeze and authoritarian ways, he formed the New Zealand Party with the express intention of removing his old chum Rob Muldoon from office. This left me no option but to cover him. He was great copy, amusing and disarmingly candid to the point where the news media often had to protect him from himself.

"Bob invented Fake News long before it became a thing. After Muldoon called the snap election in 1984, [his] New Zealand Party swung into action and selected an impressive raft of candidates. Bob allowed television news crews a quick peek from the door into their campaign headquarters in downtown Wellington – it resembled the Houston space flight control centre on steroids. Gorgeous women sat at clacking keyboards and flickering screens while fax machines and printers buzzed and hummed. Bob told me later that computer companies renting office space from him were induced to provide the electronics and he provided the women. It was an elaborate ruse designed to demoralise National and it worked. Their normally well-oiled machine corked and hamstrung morale, and discipline crumbled. ...

"I attended a rowdy lunchtime speech Bob gave standing on a trestle table in the smoko room of the local freezing works. Taking questions from the floor Bob was asked by a burly slaughterman if New Zealand’s problems stemmed from our short, three-year parliamentary term, meaning economic policy changed all the time, and as a result 'interest rates went up and down like a whore’s drawers.' 'Can I just correct you there,' grinned Bob, 'trust me on this, whores don’t wear drawers!' Deafening applause, the stamping of boots on concrete and hearty laughter rolled on for ages. ...

"Despite running the best campaign, saturation advertising and Bob’s noisy, colourful presence ... David Lange’s Fourth Labour Government romped into office. Despite getting 12 percent of the vote and contributing to National’s crushing loss, the NZ Party failed to win a seat. [But it was their manifesto that Lange's Government implemented - Ed.] ...

"Bob’s death, while a shock, was not entirely unexpected – for most of his life he burnt millions of candles at both ends. There was no one else like him and there will never be anyone like him again, proof, if any were needed, that God doesn’t make the same mistake twice."

~ Tom Scott from his obituary ahead of today's memorial service for Bob Jones: 'Tom Scott farewells Bob Jones'. Read on there for Steve Braunias's postscript on the very best of Jones's twenty-four books ...

Abundance

 

Many years ago when Bob Jones's semi-libertarian New Zealand Party stood for election — the first party I deemed worthy of having my vote — he ran on the slogan "Freedom and Prosperity."

He later quipped, "It was easy getting folk excited about prosperity. But bloody difficult getting anyone interested in freedom."

Little has changed. 

So it was with that in mind I read Mike Grimshaw's call for An Abundance Agenda manifesto for Aotearoa. Nothing about freedom. Or liberty. Just about "abundance." As if you can have one without the other.

The U.S. manifesto on which bases his own piece says: 

The abundance agenda aims for growth, not because growth is an end but because it is the best means to achieve the ends that we care about: more comfortable lives, with more power to do what we want, with more time devoted to what we love.

Who could disagree, however misguided the notion one could find a common political cause for such an agenda with activists mired more in identity politics, enthno-nationalism and anti-colonialism than any devotion to genuine human progress, or any clue how it might be progressed.

Nonetheless, among the grab bag of bromides and buzzwords Mr Grimshaw brings to his manifesto are these few morsels of mixed but genuine hope:

An abundance agenda: understands that pessimism is the enemy of abundance.

An abundance agenda: argues that pessimism is not so much due to scarcity but rather due to policy choices made by local and central government; but also due to pessimistic decisions made business, by institutions and by citizens. ... 

An abundance agenda: argues for innovation and a rekindling of imagination

An abundance agenda: is based in intellectual curiosity, business dynamism, societal and economic growth – and the end of status quo thinking and action...

An abundance agenda: seeks to grow and expand the resource of capable, innovative minds present in Aotearoa. ...

An abundance agenda: recognises that social and economic wealth does not arise from resources, but from what is done to and with them, and this is due to human ingenuity.

An abundance agenda: seeks to make our cities and regions centres for human, social, cultural, economic, intellectual and technological ingenuity for Aotearoa. It recognises that brains are the ultimate resource and that the ultimate source of wealth is the mind.

An abundance agenda: puts access to quality state education front and centre and asks challenging questions and offers options where this is not delivered. It does this because abundance is based in the flourishing of human capital and potential. ...

An abundance agenda: recognises the fundamental importance of access to reliable and affordable energy, asking what steps can local government and businesses take to ensure energy abundance and the productive use of energy. ...

An abundance agenda: seeks local housing affordability that facilitates daily lives of balance and flexibility. ...

An abundance agenda: integrates and facilitates social and economic entrepreneurship in an environment of enabling dynamic possibilities. 

Despite the mixed premises and many platitudes therein, there are many worse things to promote than abundance.

John Key: "...he served himself and not the nation."

Cartoon by Richard McGrail from The Free Radical

"Something which has puzzled me in recent years is the ... dismissive attitude to the John Key government as wasted years. ... The light dawned when 'The Herald' published an astonishingly ignorant but revealing article by Key on why, if an American he’d vote for Trump. ... In a nutshell Key said ... Trump’s promised tax cuts would suffice to determine his vote.
    "The extraordinary thing about Key’s article was its astonishing shallowness. ... 
    "It was only after reading Key’s article that I finally comprehended [the] steadfast derision for the Key years, specifically the wasted opportunity to make meaningful and desired changes ...
    "His likeable affability aided by a wallowing Labour Party saw him able to coast along, enjoying being Prime Minister but blowing the opportunity to make meaningful change. In that sense he served himself and not the nation and ... condemnation has been 100% correct.
    "It’s now evident Key saw being Prime Minister solely in the context of a personal career highlight experience rather than any wider desire to build a better nation."

~ Bob Jones from his post. [Link added]

"Cleaning up the mess of excessive Council activities ... should be a central government priority."

    "Cleaning up the mess of excessive Council activities, which they’re ill-equipped to tackle, should be a central government priority. Obviously that’s beyond the comprehension of the don’t-rock-the-boat National dullards but very much in the realm of the reformist ACT Party. So much of New Zealand future prospects depend on ACT being a major influential player in the next government, failing which the exodus out of New Zealand by our best and brightest will become massive."

~ Bob Jones from his post 'Stuff + Nonsense'

"...the perfect alibi..."

"Trump, a disgrace to not just America but to the human race, is staring down the barrel at lengthy prison sentences.
    "But, he has the perfect alibi, namely to plead insanity. The supporting evidence is indisputable."

~ Bob Jones, from his post 'The Abomination's Perfect Alibi''

"Book reading is highly addictive and it saddens me that so many young folk these days have never experienced it."

"Older academic friends recount their dismay at the general ignorance of incoming new university students. A major culprit is the cell-phone but in my eyes an even bigger one is the decline in book-reading.
    "Currently, throughout the western world 75% of fiction is read by women. It baffles me.
    "I rate fiction, and especially comedic writing as one of the greatest joys in my life. High on the list of pleasures is the creation of my libraries in four countries....
    "Book reading is highly addictive and it saddens me that so many young folk these days have never experienced it."

~ Bob Jones, from his post 'The Good Old Days'

"Language abuse"

 

Cartoon by Nick Kim

"Ever since socialist ideology was buried in the 1980s by the near universal adoption of market economies, culminating at the decade’s end in the Soviet Union’s collapse, embittered left ideologues have resorted to language reinvention to mask their personal inadequacies as ongoing collective aspirations....
    "Thereafter, [the word] 'socialist' was replaced by the vacuous term 'social democrat.' Jacinda used it frequently. But what does it mean? No user of it has ever been able to explain.
    "The most amusing language abuse by these lefty types is 'activist,' usually applied to protesters lying about in groups, holding signs complaining about this or that. Their major characteristic is inactivity.
    "The current fashionable ludicrously dishonest term these losers use to smother their now unfashionable 'socialism” is 'progressive.' Nothing could be more inaccurate. Collectivists are literally the very opposite of progressive; rather they’re ultra regressive, seeking to resurrect tried and failed big government statist policies of yesteryear."

~ Bob Jones, from his post 'Language Abuse'

 

"Finally, Jacinda herself said the abuse and threats had no effect on her retirement decision, and I believe her."

"Finally, Jacinda herself said the abuse and threats had no effect on her retirement decision, and I believe her. I do so as I’d picked her retirement on the date she announced it, on this site, back in 2021. Her behaviour last year bore that prediction out with seemingly non-stop indulgent last hurrah joy-riding international travelling with teams of colleagues at our expense.
    "Jacinda had been an MP for eleven years without making a mark then a series of improbable events flushed her from obscurity into the PM’s office and subsequently the international lime-light, all beginning with Winston’s shock enthroning her, motivated by revenge against the Nats.
    "Jacinda is a level-headed individual. She knew the adulation was ridiculous and said so to the 'Guardian' two years back, saying she lay awake at night suffering from imposter syndrome, once the absurd Joan of Arc Jacindamania rubbish began."

~ Bob Jones, from his post 'Anonymous Threats'

Watch out for his woggle

"Chris Hipkins is copping the standard new PM honeymoon treatment from the media, albeit somewhat muted. It won’t last and [his] government will be thrashed in October. The only thing which can save it is World War 3 breaking out. Chris massively fails an all-important test I originated in the highly politicised mid 1970s, this after Bill Rowling inherited the office following Kirk’s death, namely no-one could ever be elected as PM if one could imagine him in a scout master’s uniform."

~ Bob Jones, from his post 'Political Imagery'

'The buying of the media is nothing less than political corruption of a scale hitherto unknown in New Zealand'

 

"This [Garrick Tremain cartoon] aptly sums up the disgraceful sell-out by our print [and electronic] media to toe the government line.... willingly prostitut[ing themselves] to the government bribe in return for the taxpayer’s unwitting subsidy...
    "The buying of the ... media, so cleverly summed up by Garrick’s cartoon, was nothing less than political corruption of a scale hitherto unknown in New Zealand."

~ Bob Jones, from his post 'Political Corruption'

Political principles

"Parties of the right once they stray from their principles find themselves out of office.
    "Parties of the left once they stick to them they’re out of office."
          ~ Bob Jones, speaking in the 1984 election [hat tip Cactus Kate]

"The excellent thing about this anti-vaccine protest is it identifies no-hopers..."

"I’ve written before about the wry amusement Wellingtonians derive from the almost weekly protests at Parliament over this and that. No-one takes the slightest notice, specially the MPs....
    "The latest such protest has seen several thousand from across the land led by truck drivers, block the city streets bitching about vaccine mandates.... The excellent thing about this anti-vaccine protest is it identifies no-hopers, many of whom in the next few months will become infected and some will die.
    "In numerous ways halfwits are a huge cost on society thus any action which reduces their numbers is a huge win for the rest of us. They should be actively encouraged to stage more mass protests everywhere for the greater good of society.
    "I’m happy to do my bit and chip in $10,000 for them to stage kissing contests with one another to hurry things along. That would constitute doing God’s work and a more effective albeit different elimination strategy than the nonsensical one claimed by the government two years back."
          ~ Bob Jones from his post 'Doing God's Work'

"That sounds reasonable." #LizGunn

"Former TV One Newsreader Liz Gunn has informed the nation that the recent earthquake centred on Taumarunui was nature’s reaction to the 'tyrannical Prime Minister’s vaccine policy,' which Liz equated with rape.
    "That sounds reasonable."

          ~ Bob Jones, on 'Refreshing Visionary Thinking'

"Trusting and unworldly kids attending university today are victims of a gigantic fraud..."

"There are intangible reasons to justify say a year or two at university as a bridging experience between childhood and adult status. But otherwise, unless studying for a traditional career such as medicine or law, to a very large degree trusting and unworldly kids attending university today are victims of a gigantic fraud.... luring the simple-minded seeking letters after their names....
    "The modern university is today largely a scam, exploiting the vulnerable with its ever expanding range of non-intellectual bullshit degrees.... academic nonsense, in which the participants waste their lives at public expense, pointlessly pursuing esoteric imaginary elements of their utterly bogus purported field of study.... [while universities are] transforming themselves into competitive commercial enterprises while maintaining a veneer, largely imagined, of being intellectual institutions."
          ~ Bob Jones, from his post 'The Contemporary World's Biggest Fraud'