fireworks

A Nelson man who was targeted with fireworks by a group of youths has had to agree he went too far by hitting them.  He’s been ordered to pay $100 per offence.

The group had been moved on by an elderly resident and then started setting off fireworks up Te Wehi’s driveway.

Te Wehi grabbed a bit of flaxbush and confronted the group, hitting a female on the wrist with the piece of flaxbush and a male in the forehead.

Lawyer Mark Dollimore said the group of 20 or so youths had been letting fireworks off for about an hour in the street.

Te Wehi had held himself together until they started firing fireworks at his roof – waking up his son – and up his driveway.

He initially went out to the group to get them to move on and accepted he had gone too far and should have called police.

Te Wehi had been under pressure due to domestic issues, and when the group started firing fireworks at his house that “lit his fuse”. One of the youths had been filming the incident.

Judge Richard Russell said he understood that Te Wehi was provoked by having the fireworks aimed at his roof and down his driveway, but he could not take the law into his own hands.

No need to imagine what message this sends to the 20 or so crims in the making.

I blogged earlier about this….this was the front page from the NT News:

The Chinese do love their fireworks:

At the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar this week, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang put on his largest “explosion event” of the last three years, utilizing microchip-controlled explosives to form incredible designs and patterns.

Each set of explosions was calculated to paint a different picture. One series of explosions created black smoke clouds that looked like “drops of ink splattered across the sky.”

In another, 8,300 shells embedded with computer microchips exploded in a pyramid shape over the desert.

Last month I announced that as part of our charter commitment to Fair and Balanced reportage I would be running a regular, apolitical series looking at what fuckwits the Labour party harbours. Here’s the August edition.

Labour have had a great deal of trouble finding candidates to put up in electorates around the country.

It’s not a great time to have your name associated with the Labour party, and this was particularly true in the East Coast Bays electorate – no one has ever been particularly willing to go up against the hardworking and conscientious, popular and competent incumbent Murray McCully. And rightly so.

This time round, the ECB LEC really scraped the bottom of barrel and found some loser dumb enough to stand.

They found a frumpy housewife/primary school teacher known to her few remaining friends as Viv Goldsmith. She has a morbidly obese, drain on the health system and whingeing pom for a husband who follows her about on the campaign trail.

So what makes her dumb? In the press release announcing her candidacy, the bint chipped in this throwaway line:

“She pledges to be a representative who will have a presence and an availability not seen currently in the East Coast Bays electorate.”

Let’s unpack that a little. Firstly, she pledges to be available and visible locally if elected. Then she implies that the incumbent is something other than the hard-working and popular local his constituents know him to be.

The second claim is an outrageous slur that can be disproved in a cinch.  The first is more contentious.

On her website, Goldsmith admits she lives well beyond the borders of McCully Country in the North Shore electorate. Not exactly a new standard of local advocacy is it?

To be fair, a lot of candidates and some MPs don’t live in the electorates they are standing in. But at least they go to some length to get involved in the local community. Not Goldsmith.

Such is her disdain for the people of East Coast Bays, she refuses to even host her fundraisers locally. In fact, she is hosting what she describes as her one “BIG fund raiser!” in another city about eight hours walk from East Coast Bays. Is that really a new standard of representation? Or is it simply the case that Goldsmith has such disdain for people in East Coast Bays she’s hosting a fundraiser many local people would find it difficult to get to. 

Living outside the electorate you want to represent and hosting your “BIG fund raiser[s]!” in Avondalé – a suburb in another city – isn’t a new standard of representation. It’s what I call Dumb Labour.