ALL NAIL MIKE KING
Woketearoa tries to annihilate a thoroughly decent man
Radio New Zealand (RNZ) has orchestrated a concerted mainstream media attempt to character assassinate, impoverish and otherwise ruin admirable New Zealand mental health campaigner Mike King.
The nastiness being blasted at King is downstream of the following few words he spoke to Heather du Plessis-Allan on radio station Newstalk ZB on Wednesday, 30 November.
“Alcohol is not a problem for people with mental health issues.
It’s actually the solution to our problem and until you come with a better solution…
It stops those thoughts.
I would suggest to you that alcohol has prevented more young people from taking their own lives than it actually makes them take their own lives.
I mean, I’m a drug addict, an alcoholic; my whole life, I’ve used drugs and alcohol to stop that little voice inside my head that told me that I wasn’t good enough, that I was useless.
It’s a release, it’s like a video game.
It’s like methadone, it keeps us going until some help comes along. It’s our life jacket.”
RNZ, the State funded public broadcaster that refuses to call New Zealand “New Zealand”, has led the hypercritical cacophony, with its “reporting” including the following:
‘Drug Foundation executive director Sarah Helm said King's comments were "really unhelpful"’.
‘Labour's mental health spokesperson [and gang lover] Ingrid Leary said that [Government funding of King’s I Am Hope Foundation] should be reviewed.’
‘Mental health charity - Hauora Aotearoa's Founder Jase Te Patu is questioning if it is appropriate to have Mike King as the face and the person behind the government's mental health response. "I really question if it's kaupapa driven. It should be about the kaupapa [whatever that means].’
RNZ’s credulous reporting of what Jase Te Patu said about King is especially lame given Hauora Aotearoa was only registered as a charity in June 2023 and young Jase is obviously just envious of the funding King received.
RNZ gleefully reported that ‘Mike King's mental health charity I Am Hope is being accused of greenwashing after handing out a pamphlet to children presenting a trucking company and a coal-burning electricity company as climate heroes’ and that ‘Climate advocate Tim Adriaansen complained to the charity after seeing the booklet… Adriaansen said sponsorship by some of the country's biggest emitters looked like "greenwashing" ‘.
Clearly, neither RNZ nor Tim know what “greenwashing” - a marketing tactic to lure environmentally gullible customers by falsely claiming that products are environmentally beneficial - really is. (Featuring trucks and coal burning electricity companies in promotional material is the opposite of greenwashing.)
Minor King Funding
A bit more background…the current Government has committed to funding King’s charitable work providing young New Zealanders with free mental health counselling. The funding is NZD6m per year for 4 years, which relatively speaking is peanuts. By contrast, the departed Labour Government spent NZD2 BILLION between 2019 and 2023, purportedly on mental health, to little avail. (Andrew Little, former Minister of Health, glibly dismissed resounding criticism of the parlous wastage with “The wellbeing approach underpins everything the government did.”)
It's not about the merits
This Substack is not focused on the defensibility of what Mike King said about booze and mental health; but just a couple of quotations…
Alcohol makes other people less tedious…Don’t drink if you have the blues: it’s a junk cure Christopher Hitchens
Humankind cannot bear very much reality T.S. Eliot
What this Substack is about is the callous eagerness of the Woke Ideologues of Aotearoa to treat human beings as expendable pawns in crusading their side of New Zealand’s Culture War (this war is real; only Wokeologues claim it isn’t).
RNZ’s attacks on Mike King were not of course remotely motivated by any genuine concern that his utterances on booze would cause any harm, and RNZ and its ilk are not interested in any nuanced debate.
Rather, RNZ and its mainstream media chums were thrilled to brandish King’s words as a weapon to try and attack the current coalition Government over a minor amount of mental health funding, to be expended in fulfilment of an express commitment in the National-New Zealand First coalition agreement to ‘fund Gumboot Friday / I Am Hope Charity to $6 million per annum’. RNZ’s Faux Kind Nasties relish leading a concerted attack on a sensitive and caring man who continually battles his own mental demons and who has done, and will continue to do, a wonderful amount of selfless societal good.
Another pawn in Woketearoa’s horrid game
The abuse of King as a means to an ideological end is reminiscent of another abuse of a human being as a pawn in Loony Left Aotearoa’s vindictive crusades.
In 2018, Oranga Tamariki-Ministry for Children (OT) removed “Moana” (not her real name) from her biological mother at age three. The little girl had been appallingly neglected. Her teeth were rotten.
OT gave custody to a couple (the “Smiths”- also not their real name). And that was the last good thing OT did in this sad story. Because four years later, OT tried to remove Moana from the Smiths, even though they had lovingly nurtured Moana. OT did so simply because neither Smith happened to have a Māori ancestor and OT was adamant that only people with Māori ancestry could possibly raise Moana.
When the Smiths refused to give Moana up, OT took them to the Family Court to try and snatch Moana back to Māoridom.
The express purposes of OT’s legislation include “to promote the well-being of children by…establishing, promoting, or coordinating services that…are designed to affirm mana tamaiti (tamariki)” – defined in OT’s legislation to mean “the intrinsic value and inherent dignity derived from a child’s or young person’s whakapapa (genealogy) and their belonging to a whānau, hapū, iwi, or family group, in accordance with tikanga Māori”.
OT relied on mana tamaiti (tamariki) in its attempt to re-Māorify Moana. But Family Court Judge Callinicos decided Moana’s welfare would be best serviced by her staying with the Smiths. In coming to his decision, Callinicos bravely resisted disgracefully inappropriate attempts to interfere in the case by Chief District Court Judge Heemi Taumaunu and Principal Family Court Judge Jacquelyn Moran, as well as then acting OT CEO Sir Wira Gardiner.
OT appealed Callinicos’ decision to the High Court, where Justice Helen Cull dismissed OT’s appeal on all grounds, despite Moana’s lawyer Janet Mason arguing that Callinicos’ decision had somehow breached the Treaty of Waitangi.
OT’s further efforts to appeal Callinicos’ decision failed but OT was not over abusing Moana. OT made it practically impossible for the Smiths to raise Moana, and in March 2023 the exhausted and demoralized Smiths reluctantly gave up and handed Moana back to OT, with Moana’s lawyer stating “They (The New Zealand State] are now focused on picking up the pieces of this colonial experiment and ensuring Moana is safe and cared for”. OT’s ideological barbequing of Pawn Moana was complete.
What should it take to be a Counsellor?
King’s I Am Hope charity offers free counselling.
New Zealand’s largest counselling association is the New Zealand Association of Counsellors (NZAC). The questions an applicant for full membership of NZAC must answer vary depending on whether or not the applicant has Māori ancestry. The compulsory “reflections” a Māori applicant must record include:
What is the impact of colonization on you and your whanau?
What actions do you or might you take to counter systemic racism in Aotearoa?
Create a goal for future actions you might take to counter systemic racism in Aotearoa?
The compulsory “reflections” a non- Māori (“Tau Iwi”) applicant must record include:
What is the impact of colonization on tangata whenua?
What is your understanding of white privilege within the context of Aotearoa?
Create a goal for future actions you might take to counter systemic racism in Aotearoa?
Just how heartily sick is New Zealand’s general public of this Critical Race Theory garbage? The citizens of the United States of America, of all shades of garbage, have clearly had a gutful and voted accordingly.