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John Key’s “pinch of salt” style of telling the truth
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Continued from: When spin doctors go bad
The truth? You can’t handle the truth!
When Jack Nicholson bellowed that famous line in the 1992 movie, “A Few Good Men“, few would have thought that it would apply twenty years later; down under here in Godzone; but that this time the tables would be turned against an apologist for the Establishment.
Mark Unsworth – a right-wing lobbyist for a professional “government relations consultancy” company, Saunders Unsworth, seems to find difficulty “handling the truth”. Especially when that truth comes from respected and reknowned environmental scientist, Dr Mike Joy…
On 16 November, the New York Times carried a story on the upcoming release of “The Hobbit“. The article made reference to Tourism New Zealand’s publicity campaign centering around a supposedly “100% pureNew Zealand” theme.
As we should all know by now, New Zealand is not “100% pure”. In fact we probably haven’t been “100% pure” for several decades now.
Dr Joy stated as much and was duly quoted by New York Times,
“There are almost two worlds in New Zealand. There is the picture-postcard world, and then there is the reality.”
Green MP, Eugenie Sage, backed up Dr Joy’s brutal truth, and was quoted in the same article (from a statement she made in Parliament last month),
“We promote our country as 100 percent pure and 100 percent Middle Earth. But to swim in our rivers, which is the birthright of Kiwi kids — you cannot do it in the majority of the rivers that the Ministry for the Environment monitored.”
See: New Zealand’s Green Tourism Push Clashes With Realities
And you know what? They are telling the truth. The clear, unvarnished, simple truth.
Dear Leader John Key and Trade/Climate Change Minister Tim Groser Minister, have now waded into the ‘mix’.
Yesterday (26 Nov), Groser rebuked Environment scientist, Dr Mike Joy, by saying,
“It’s been used as a stick to beat New Zealand by environmental activists.”
See: Minister lashes out at environmentalists over 100% Pure
Today, Dear Leader added, just to make sure we understood what our politicians were “hinting” at,
“It’s like saying ‘McDonald’s, I’m loving it’ – I’m not sure every moment that someone’s eating McDonald’s they’re loving it . . . it’s the same thing with 100% Pure. It’s got to be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt.”
Dr Joy replied,
“I’m not going to lie about this stuff.”
He’s right. Why should he lie?
Politicians know that the “100% Pure” is a marketing scam to bring tourists (and more importantly their cash) to New Zealand and can only succeed if the true nature of our degraded environment is kept secret.
After all, successful politicians like Dear Leader John Key are so used to manipulating facts and employing half-truths to serve their political purposes (usually getting elected), that they forget that the rest of the population are not politicians.
So, having created their own “dynamic” standard of ethics, Key, Groser, and minions like Unsworth, are taken aback when the general populace raise an eyebrow in disbelief when we are expected to take part in conning overseas tourists? Our response is, “They want us to what-?”
How many times has Key been caught out telling half-truths, or not being upfront with the public?How many election promises has he broken; side-stepped; back-tracked; or watered-down until his pledges were useless?
The trouble now seems to be that Key and Groser are now expecting the public to buy in to their truth-bending ways.
Not just “buy in” – but to be tacitly complicit with the scam.
John Key wants 4.4 million people to be like him.
A nation of ‘politicians’.
Surprisingly most of the the general populace won’t have a bar of it.
Key says that no one expects New Zealand to be “100% Pure”.
I wonder what he expects when he buys a bottle of “pure water” to drink?
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Sources
‘100% Pure’ is like McDonald’s ad, says Key
Minister lashes out at environmentalists over 100% Pure
Other blogs
The New Zealand story: 100% pooer!
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