Paul Holmes

Paul Holmes is shit. Shauny and I would tell you that ourselves but we have a policy of never writing anything we can "borrow". With that in mind, we're delighted to have Diane Revoluta on board to put the Jurassic journalist in his place after he wrote this awful piece of nonsense about Waitangi Day. What follows below is taken directly from Di's blog.

My rewrite of Paul Holmes’ article entitled ‘Waitangi Day a complete waste: It’s time to cancel our repugnant national holiday’, featured on the New Zealand Herald website, 11th February 2012.

Waitangi Day produced its usual hatred, rudeness, and violence against a clearly elected Prime Minister from a group of hateful, hate-fuelled weirdos who seem to exist in a perfect world of benefit provision. This enables them to blissfully continue to believe that New Zealand is the centre of the world, no one has to have a job and the Treaty is all that matters.

In one small part of the country, people protested in a largely peaceful manner during a speech from the leader of a party that seeks to progress the economy in the short-term at the expense of our future generations’ interests in our land and assets – a man whose entire public persona is geared towards appeasing the white, middle-class New Zealander; and protested the fact we live in a country where the indigenous group of a nation can be labelled a group of ‘hateful, hate-fuelled weirdos’ in our leading newspaper. Also, I don’t know how to use the thesaurus function in Microsoft Word so I have used both hateful and hate-fuelled in immediate succession. Elsewhere, Waitangi Day produced its usual scattering of picnics, sleep-ins and celebrations of the birth of a nation, 172 years ago.

I’m over Waitangi Day. It is repugnant. It’s a ghastly affair. As I lie in bed on Waitangi morning, I know that later that evening, the news will show us irrational Maori ghastliness with spitting, smugness, self-righteousness and the usual neurotic Maori politics, in which some bizarre new wrong we’ve never thought about will be lying on the table.

I am a washed up, former TV presenter who was fired almost ten years ago but tries to cling to my D-grade celebrity status by writing a column for an even lower-brow news website. I use long strings of adjectives to reach my word count.

This, we will have to address and somehow apply these never-defined principles of the Treaty of Waitangi because it is, apparently, the next big resentment. There’ll be lengthy discussion, we’ll end up paying the usual millions into the hands of the Maori aristocracy and God knows where it’ll go from there. Well, it’s a bullshit day, Waitangi. It’s a day of lies. It is loony Maori fringe self-denial day. It’s a day when everything is addressed, except the real stuff.

As well as writing boring columns that no one would bother to read were it not for the curiosity of seeing just how low I will go in an attempt to make a comeback, I also consider myself quite the legal beagle. I have read the Court of Appeal judgement of New Zealand Māori Council v. Attorney-General but I consider myself to be a greater legal mind than former President of the Court of Appeal, Sir Robin Cooke, and therefore reject his widely-accepted interpretation of the Principles of the Treaty and will continue to refer to them as ‘never-defined’. Also, sometimes I swear in the hope cool kids will like me.

Never mind the child stats, never mind the national truancy stats, never mind the hopeless failure of Maori to educate their children and stop them bashing their babies. No, it’s all the Pakeha’s fault. It’s all about hating whitey. Believe me, that’s what it looked like the other day.

Māori can be blamed for all of society’s problems. Māori parents are especially at fault. They should follow the example of exemplary parents like myself. The children of perfect, white parents like ME never develop $1000-a-day P habits.

John Key speaks bravely about going there again. He should not go there again. It’s over. Forget it. It is too awful and nasty and common. It is no more New Zealand day than Halloween.

I am orgasming over John Key so must write in short sentences.

Our national day is now Anzac Day. Anzac Day is a day of honour, and struggle, bravery and sacrifice. A day on which we celebrate the periods when our country embraced great efforts for international freedom and on which we weep for those who served and for those who died. I wouldn’t take my three great uncles who died at Gallipoli and in France - Reuben, Mathew and Leonard - to Waitangi Day and expect them to believe this was our national day. I wouldn’t take my father, veteran of El Alamein and Cassino, there. Nor would I take my Uncle Ken who died in a Wellington bomber, then try and tell him Waitangi Day was anything but filth.

I am related to white men with noble sounding names. I am will now go about dragging their names through the mud by association to me.

No, if Maori want Waitangi Day for themselves, let them have it. Let them go and raid a bit more kai moana than they need for the big, and feed themselves silly, speak of the injustices heaped upon them by the greedy Pakeha and work out new ways of bamboozling the Pakeha to come up with a few more millions. When you start doing talkback or any kind of opinion broadcasting in New Zealand you learn that certain groups are loony, highly vocal, highly organised and they never rest. The second looniest are the anti-fluoride crowd. But leave them aside for today.

Isn’t it funny how I use te reo Māori here? How ridiculous – an indigenous culture having a unique language. In addition to heaping offensive stereotype upon offensive stereotype about Māori being ‘big’ and only good for gorging themselves like the savages that they are, I will also use words like ‘loony’ because the only thing funnier than racial minorities is people with mental illnesses.

The row actually started with Piri Weepu filming a public health commercial in which he’s seen bottle-feeding his daughter who has an allergy to dairy and the message is that she will grow up in a non-smoking house. That was the message, for God’s sake. And it’s a nice image. Dad, an All Black hero, Maori of the Year, bottle-feeding his little girl.

Please ignore the obvious irony of me holding up Piri Weepu as some great, iconic Kiwi father when I have just spent the past 500ish words either explicitly or implicitly stating that all Māori are – among other things – weirdos, lazy, greedy, hateful, ‘loony’, abusive, ‘silly’, self-righteous and manipulative. It is an irrelevant point.

Many mothers would have appreciated seeing a baby being bottle-fed. Others appreciated that it showed a man involved in an intense part of nurturing baby. One or two mothers came forward this week and spoke about how they’ve been monstered by bullying women in supermarkets who berated them for buying formula.

HE’S FEEDING A BABY. HE’S TAKING AN ACTIVE ROLE IN PARENTING. He’s also part of the group of Māori parents that is wholly responsible for all of the child abuse and educational failures in this country, but ignore that because HE’S A MAN AND HE’S HOLDING THE BABY. Women, bow your heads.

Most mothers want to breast feed, I’m sure. No one disputes this. Some simply can’t. And in the case of Piri’s little girl, she can’t handle dairy. But the hysterics saw a man, a bottle and a baby and were about to erupt. Never mind the positives, the non-smoking household, the All Black tenderly feeding his little girl. There was man and a baby and a bottle and it was the crime of the century.

I have felt the need to refer to Piri’s daughter as his ‘little girl’ three times in this article. This is to emphasise the tenderness of a man feeding his child. Also, please take special note of how progressive and open-minded I am in realising that not all women can breast-feed.

Take it off, screamed La Leche, obviously. And suddenly the segment disappeared. The chief executive of the Health Sponsorship Council, which made the ad, is Iain Potter. Mr Potter says the council received overwhelming opposition to the bottle-feeding clip. I bet it did. And I bet I know who from. Iain Potter should show some common sense, grow some balls, and learn to stand up to a highly organised band of intolerant people.

Obviously, this group were screaming. They’re hysterical women! Poor old Iain Potter was subject to so much screaming from these harping harpies that, being the ball-less, senseless man that it is, he listened to them! Outrageous. Oh, also, me having the audacity to call anyone else on this planet intolerant? Just put that in for some lols.

Overseas, just to change the subject and keep an elegant internationalism in the column, can you believe Russia’s and China’s intransigence at the United Nations Security Council on the matter of Syria?

I am tiring of attacking Māori and hysterical women, let’s move overseas and find new groups of people about which I can make offensive comments!

So now Syria will grind on in broken, abject misery for the rest of the year until they shoot the despot. I can’t figure old rat-face Bashir. He must know that he’s going the way of Gaddafi, with a refuge in a filthy sewer pipe for a while before the bullet in the head, being towed backwards through the streets to public display in a meat locker.

People from countries like Syria and Libya are lower beings than even Māori so I am going to talk about them as less than human and instead make analogies to rodents. I will just sit here waxing lyrically about the situation in a country where hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed and amuse myself by being grotesque. Cool?

He’s married to a very beautiful British woman, Bashir, a real English rose. One report suggested she and her family had tried to leave Syria last week but the convoy had been seen and turned back. She must know what’s coming. Armageddon is what’s coming. One dreads to imagine what they’ll do to her pretty face.

I am going to end this article with a completely irrelevant mention of Bashir’s wife, who – like Piri Weepu’s daughter, but unlike my male ancestors who fought in wars – is not worthy of an actual name. I then will reassert my journalistic prowess by ending this vitriolic rant with the one concern we all have about the unrest in Syria: the fate of the white woman’s pretty face.

Di, we thank you for your insightful translation.