Similarly the anti-anti-smacking marches were good parents doing a great job and anti-EFA marches were ordinary New Zealanders who were fed up with the nanny state.

L

L

plus I’d like ask lprent whether numbering the comments mightn’t be a useful addition.. certainly for the longer threads.. comments, not replies..

I can’t think of any others though.

It’s like suicides, Marty. A lot goes unreported because it’s felt that publicising it would encourage more of them to give it a try.

I was but a humble candidate in 1993 when I was in the shower and heard shouting and banging in my kitchen. I ran out to find two men grappling with my elderly father while my mother, then-partner and very young children huddled in the corner.

There followed a scene of a portly naked man wrestling which pre-dated “Borat” by at least a decade

These two had insisted on volunteering for my campaign but had been sacked after they had:
- scaled the outside of the Radio Pacific building in Auckland when Winston and I were on air and tried to get in through an open window.
- been visiting homes in the electorate in the middle of the night asking terrified voters if they’d vote for me, with an unsaid by heavily implied “…or else” left hanging.
- attacked a Waikato Times ad salesperson in the mistaken belief she was a reporter.
- decided to make a “real success” of a catered dinner for local business people by photocopying the invitations and bicycling through Hamilton handing them out to all and sundry, resulting in my having to turn away several hundred people who thought they were invited to a dinner for about 20.

A soon as they were sacked they reacted as I’d feared (which is why I’d been trying to keep them onside) and decided that Winston and I were in fact deep cover agents for some sort of Masonic New World Order.

And that’s just one campaign…

Then there’s the stuff that used to come into Winston’s office (I got to open the suspect packages, as it was deemed I had the strongest stomach, though the DPS always weeded out the really offensive and the dangerous).

One that sticks in my mind simply because of the weirdness quotient were the messages, always in orange crayon and always written on “Footrot Flats” cartoon books, which came at least every week. I’m sure most of Murray Ball’s royalty cheques were thanks to our anonymous correspondent.

(Since I’m reminiscing anyway, and no one’s probably reading by now…) I worked in Trades Hall at the same time as Ernie Abbot, employed by a Maori social services organisation that had offices there. I’d often say hello to him as I came and went, but never really knew him well.

I was out at the time the bomb went off and still remember feeling absolute disbelief, coming back to find it cordoned off, that some nutjob had felt strongly enough about what went on in Trades Hall in Wellington to bring to NZ the kind of random violence that, till then, we’d all naively associated with more passionate peoples in the northern hemisphere.

Later I realised that the mindset that stuffs a suitcase with explosives and calmly walks away, leaving it to kill random innocents (and perhaps not even your intended targets, as in that case) is very different to the hot-blooded rage that drives one to become a special constable (or to wrestle me naked). Not the least because it’s usually undetected before – and often forever after – it’s done what it set out to do.

There’s an inglorious record of supression of the Left with violence.

Just to insert a bit of political partisanry (I think?) into this rather unpleasant issue, should the workers’ hostage-taking of their bosses in France a while back get an honourable mention in this post?