The Gentleman's Gambit
When National and ACT use civility as both defence from scrutiny and an attack on victims.
For paid subscribers
Williams Corporations’s Horncastle Endorses Chris Penk
Horncastle’s views include:
The extremist is the person that believe the government should steal half your life in the form of taxes. What is taken from you is not appropriate.
And
People only pay taxes because the government has a legal monopoly on violence. Voting for the government to seize another person’s wealth under the threat of force and give it to you is the lowest form of human behaviour. It is just legalised theft.
And
The political left would be massively weakened if we sold all state owned media and removed all media subsidies. This needs to happen immediately.
The Gentleman’s Gambit
The other day, I read a post by Southland National MP Joseph Mooney, who last year called for a distinguished NZ Professor to be deported for warning about the risks of white supremacy.
Yes, that’s right, Mooney wanted a respectable NZ citizen deported for merely speaking up about the risks of right wing extremism ala United States.
In the post this week, Mooney takes a snippet of an Otago Daily Times (ODT) headline, where Santana Minerals Chairman Peter Cook is labelled a “cooker” and criticises Green MP Scott Willis for not being respectful enough.
"Green MP Scott Willis puts himself on the barbie by calling a member of the public a “cooker”, any claims the Greens make that others should “turn down the heat” and have “more respectful debates” or to have “less division in politics” is shown up as the overcooked and underdone rhetoric that they don’t believe in or practice themselves.
But the context of the full ODT article, which Joseph Mooney completely hides from view, reveals Cook claimed that climate change is “unproven” while claiming human induced climate change doesn’t have any evidence behind it.
Never mind, NZ has lost almost 1/3 of its glaciers in the last 25 years - glaciers like Fox Glacier that have been existent for millions of years before that. And that sea temperatures continue to rise, exactly as scientists had predicted, while we see more frequent and extreme weather events.
Santana’s Cook, who is currently seeking fast-track approval of a controversial gold mine in Central Otago, goes on to decry climate change conversations as “moral panic” exacerbated by “social warriors and ‘Tik Tok’ actors”.
That’s ‘cooker territory,’ but Green MP Willis is actually more circumspect in his comments - expressing astonishment that a business leader would express the views Cook does.
Willis:
‘If any company wants to be taken seriously, they’ve got to get rid of .. the people who are unable to talk sensibly and respectfully with the community.
‘‘If they employ people like this, they show that they have no care and no respect for the community.’’.
‘‘If he thinks that climate change is a conspiracy or a manifestation of the social media landscape, what does he say to those families who have lost family members from extreme weather events that have been made more extreme by the climate impacts?”
