Eric Roy

Bad Day. That bloody Australian Norman was having a go at me about that forest I didn’t read about.

He reminds me so much of Ronald McDonald. Clown. It is so hard to deal with those hippies, they are not at all like the street cleaners I met out on my before dawn run.

Good, rustic folk who know the value of a fair days pay for a fair days work, even if they smell a bit.   Read more »

John Key has announced some small changes to his ministry for election year.

Prime Minister John Key today announced changes to the National-led Government’s Ministerial line-up, to take effect from Tuesday, 28 January.

Internal Affairs and Local Government Minister Chris Tremain, who has announced his intention to retire from Parliament at the upcoming general election, will be resigning from the Ministry.

Peter Dunne will be appointed Minister of Internal Affairs, Associate Minister of Health and Associate Minister of Conservation. Mr Dunne will be a Minister outside Cabinet as he was prior to his resignation in June last year.

Michael Woodhouse will be promoted to the vacancy in Cabinet, and will retain all of his current responsibilities.

Paula Bennett picks up the role of Minister of Local Government, in addition to her current portfolio responsibilities.

The new Minister outside Cabinet will be Peseta Sam Lotu-liga, who will be appointed Minister of Pacific Island Affairs and Associate Minister of Local Government. Mr Lotu-liga is the MP for Maungakiekie and was first elected to Parliament 2008.  Read more »

Eric Roy has announced his retirement and parliament loses a proper hunting and fishing red blooded bloke.

I remember Eric Roy telling an audience how he’d been cured of his cancer by Helen Clark. He’d seen her at the airport and she came up and gave him a hug and a peck on the cheek. At his next oncologist appointment the cancer had gone. He credit Helen Clark for sucking the cancer out of him…by her mere touch.

Two decades after he was first elected to parliament, MP Eric Roy has announced he will not stand for re-election at the end of this year.

First elected in 1993, Roy said he had been humbled and privileged to serve Southland.

He served as an elected member for one term in 1993, before the seat of Awarua was dissolved leading into the 1996 election.

He remained a listed member for National party, where he said he spent two terms serving many electorates in the lower South Island.    Read more »

Christchurch couple Nichola and Hans Kriek are vegans who won’t root non-vegans

As a fan of the outdoors and hunting, one group of people polar opposite to me are loopy Vegans. At the extreme edge are even loopier vegansexuals.

Hans Kriek porned himself in-front of the Primary Production Select Committee last week, deeply concerned over the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill.

You may know Hans Kriek from the nutter animal welfare activist group SAFE. He now wants the Government to start a Commissioner for Animals.

To cut a long story short, Kriek essentially wants equal rights for all animals. Perhaps he wants to give them all a name as well, particularly those sows and chickens popping out eggs all day.

Good ole Eric Roy asked Kriek about wild pigs and how they could be hunted without dogs – a near on impossible task in my view. Kriek fell into that one, calling for an expert committee to be set up to find ways to hunt control wild pigs because he thought hunting pigs with dogs was cruel. Eric Roy told them to HTFU, telling them that was a principle without substance.    Read more »

Readers should remember this blog does not take sides in selections and always encourages people willing to run to have a crack. The only time it will take sides is to highlight unethical or immoral campaigns by dodgy candidates who think they can rig a selection.

Waikato: –  Lindsay Tisch has stared down the party so far and will run another term. He was told he should spend more time with his family but his family are better at kicking doors down and shaking the shit out of people so when they told him to run again he thought he had better listen to his family.

Napier: – Some poor sap is going to get badly beaten by Labour’s Stu Nash. Nash has the earliest campaign hoardings in living memory.

Read more »

Yesterday’s foray into parliament didn’t go so well for the opposition.

Labour were cock-a-hoop, emboldened by the living embodiment of the new Christ figure who leads them. They were helped by an inept performance by Eric Roy.

However their much vaunted insurance policy got panned and then destroyed.

Audrey Young at the NZ Herald reports:

David Cunliffe called John Key’s question stupid, Bill English called David Cunliffe’s new state insurance company idea dumb, and Winston Peters called himself brilliant.

They couldn’t all be right.

With the Speaker away running the New York marathon, Cunliffe still fizzing from his strident speech at the annual conference, and National anxious to puncture Labour’s mood, there had to be a stoush in Parliament’s Question Time yesterday.

Cunliffe started off well but came away with a bloody nose – the answer he gave to what he called Key’s “stupid question” turned out to be wrong itself.

They were arguing about Labour’s new policy to set up a state-owned insurance company, KiwiAssure, as a sister operation to Kiwibank within NZ Post.

Labour says it will reduce the dominance of overseas-owned insurers, keep profits in New Zealand, and bring competition, flexibility and choice to New Zealanders.

Cunliffe implied that National’s opposition to the policy is because it received big donations from the insurance industry in 2005 and attempted to table the Hollow Men documentary on the Nicky Hager book.   Read more »

This weekend’s National party Mainland conference in Hamner Springs will probably skirt around the most important issue…where is the new blood coming through to replace the inevitable retirements?

• Colin King will be on the pension before the next election
• Nick Smith is rumoured to have a major international appointment lined up
• Chris Auchinvole has health issues and will retire
• Kate Wilkinson got the arse from cabinet and will get beaten in Waimak if she runs again
• Gerry Brownlee will either burst or retire   Read more »

What the f***?

An eagle eyed long-time reader spotted the horribly sanctimonious Holly Walker yesterday making a mockery of Parliament’s dress code in an attempt to be taken less seriously than Kermit the Frog as she sits with the adults.

I look forward to Eric Roy, Tau Henare, Chris Tremain and Todd McClay wearing gumboots in Parliament and seeing how that goes down with the Speaker if they do a bit of duck shooting from their mai-mai.

Walker’s female co-Leader has purple hair. Are the Greens in a competition to make the Maori Party seem dignified and well attired? The rest of Walker’s outfit is bad enough. A man cannot get away with looking as disheveled.

If Clare Curran was booted out for the Highlanders jersey, how the hell does Holly Walker get away with gumboots? She’s an MP and an alleged Rhodes Scholar. Although you would not know it after her recent failure in the “Lobbying” Bill and a pelting from Labour’s Senior MP’s.

Women must wear “normal business attire”. A female farmer would not wear gumboots in the city if they had to walk on carpet. Walker’s are probably cheap and from The Warehouse so she cannot claim them to even be a Jimmy Choo/Hunter fashion item. They also break the “no dickheads” rule. Only rural New Zealanders and blue collar workers should ever wear gumboots. Anyone wearing them from a city looks like a dickhead.

Does Winston Peters describe Walker as dressing like “Brown’s cows”?

But Winston Peters, noted for his sartorial credentials, said he didn’t think that leather jackets and cardigans were what New Zealanders expected to see when they came to Parliament.

He had observed relaxed dress standards among men in the Danish Parliament. “They looked like Brown’s cows.”

There was an insignificantly ranked MP from the Cook Islands government seated in Parliament yesterday. Dressed in her form of business attire she must have been sniggering wondering why she bothered. She will return to the Cook Islands and laugh with tales to the jandal wearers at Trader Jacks that New Zealand is so backward she saw an MP in their Parliament wearing gumboots.

UPDATE: Some self important spokesperson from the Greens has rung me to clarify that they were not gumboots…they were in fact Green leather boots…I remarked they still look like gumboots.

One thing that does come to mind though…Is Holly Walker a vegetarian/vegan?

There are three outsiders being talked of regularly. Eric Roy, Lindsay Tisch and Hekia Parata. I think that the fight between Tau and the top brass means that there wont be much space for any of these.

Eric Roy

A man with a presence who would intimidate with his bearing from the speakers position. Known to be handy in an all in brawl and not afraid to kick an enemy when he is down just to make sure he stays down. The best of the outsiders, and with a beautiful .338 Lapua as well.

Lindsay Tisch

Too short, too out of favour and too past it.

Hekia Parata

Would be a good speaker as she is a brilliant speaker herself, and unafraid of ratbags like Winston and Trevor. Her imperious manner may not work well in a referees position. Moving Hekia to Speaker would allow Nick Smith to come straight back into cabinet and take over the environment portfolio, and would remove the conflict of interest issues around Wira being party president.

My sources are telling me that the only one of the three with any shot at being Speaker is Hekia because it is convenient, and she hasn’t covered herself in glory as minister.

The tipline has been running hotter than ever on the battle for the Speaker. In a series of posts I will outline the information I have and the implications of each of these moves.

There are three main contenders. The top brass choice David Carter. The man best suited to the role, Maurice Williamson, and the man with the most mongrel who wants it the most, Tau Henare.

Outside of the three main contenders there are several outsiders, with Eric Roy, Hekia Parata and Lindsay Tisch being touted.

The broarder implications of Tau declaring is that National now have the first signs of unruliness inside caucus. The Prime Minister will not anoint the Speaker, as he has done with every other position so far. There will be old fashioned backroom politics that the PM and his key henchman Steven Joyce have limited experience at.

It is also a sign of the times, there is a strong undercurrent of discontent within caucus, who consider Cabinet aloof, out of touch and of limited ability. If Tau is not bought off he could cause havoc, and could also make others in caucus think that they should have a go too, as they have nothing to lose.

The really difficult thing for John Key is his key offsiders, Steven Joyce and Peter Goodfellow, have no rapport with the back bench. There is no good will towards Peter because he is a Muppet, and even less towards Steven because he is bloody difficult for anyone to like. He is near impossible to get into your electorate if you are a backbencher, and he has a staff who are holier than thou and bloody rude to backbenchers.

As I said I’m going to buy a truck load of popcorn because this is setting itself up for a whole heap of fun, all we need now is corporate whore Matthew Hooton to start running stocks on Parliaments next Speaker.

At this rate London might be a pipe dream for Lockwood.