Media in a muddle about medals and the reason why Willie Apiata won’t front up for NZ Post

Being posted is one thing...

The media have got it wrong again.

They are banging on today about a new stamp issue honouring New Zealand’s 22 Victoria Cross holders.

And yes, the stamps are to be issued – by all accounts – without the country’s best-known living war hero.

Accoding to the Herald –

NZ Post will launch the Victoria Cross – the New Zealand Story, a series of 22, 60c stamps, on April 14.

Every VC winner from Captain Charles Heaphy, who fought in the New Zealand Wars, to Sergeant James Allen Ward, who fought in World War II, will be pictured.

But Corporal Willie Apiata will be represented on his stamp by his medal.

How come?

Panicky posties and charges of forgery bring Super City election into disrepute

It’s a funny old election they are running in the Super City.

No matter who wins, Alf will be suspicious about the result and the going-on that will have tainted it.

Some voters seem to have been disenfranchised by the non-delivery of their voting papers.

Others seem to have been fiddling the system by casting votes with forged papers.

Outrage: if the spoils of victory are going to our opponents, we might as well make Goff our leader

Alf has been hugely comforted by the certainty that a cosy job would be found for him, should he quit parliamentary politics. His ministerial mates would stick him on the board of an SOE, a quango or one of umpteen other types of publicly funded organisation.

Their structures provide for oodles of political appointments, and they enable our ministers to dispense favours and patronage.

Alf is comforted no longer. We are giving these plums – the spoils of victory – to our bloody opponents.

The idea used to be that the jobs were dished out to long-serving, and maybe not-so-long-serving, members of the party in Government.

That was the point of winning an election. You got to run the bloody country – dig up the conservation estate, run down the public service, turn Auckland into a Super City then govern it from Wellington, think about taking travel privileges off the oldies but back off when they squawk loudly, and so on.