SOLO-NZ Press Release: TVNZ Pot Calls Nanny State Kettle Black

May 15, 2008

That wasn't a Chinese-level earthquake rocking New Zealand just after seven on Thursday evening - it was the nation's television viewers convulsed in collective laughter at the spectacle of TVNZ's Close-Up programme belatedly waking up to the Nanny Statism of which it is a part, says SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo.

"There was Mark Sainsbury suddenly fretting about the number of taxpayer-funded ads telling the taxpayer what and what not to eat, drink, think, smoke, wear ... and how to raise his/her kids.

"Taxpayers in the real world outside TVNZ's statist cocoon have been painfully aware of Nanny's finger-waving and nagging for years.

"If Sainsbury has any genuine concern about this neo-Puritan, totalitarian wowserism, he should raise it with his bosses. TVNZ makes a bomb from playing lickspittle to the government and running these insufferable, intrusive and relentless ads. If some involuntary subsidiser of these endless exhortations to Helen Clark-style priggery were, in justified exasperation, to flood TVNZ with wine and thereby drown all the government stooges therein, it would be perfect justice.

"Unfortunately TV3 provides no respite from this nauseating sanctimony. John Campbell pushes a diet of organic grass every second night, and his network plays the same Hitleresque ads with equal relish and short-sighted greed. Yes, Hitleresque. As in ... Adolf Hitler, the anti-smoking, vegetarian teetotaller who tried to impose his joyless ways on all his citizens. Back then it wasn't Quitline and the like, it was Strength Through Joy(!).

"Enough is enough. The government and its goons will inevitably get their comeuppance. Retribution for our stripe-suited self-appointed saviours-from-ourselves might be slightly less severe if they stop their ad-pollution in the interim," Perigo concludes.

ENDS

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