 RCR with Paul Brennan. Reality Check Radio. It's Friday once again, boy. This one came around quick and on Friday mornings here at Reality Check Radio, we have our political panel. Are you ready? Here we go. I'm gonna introduce our panelists again. Cam Slater. Hey Cam, good to see you again. Good to see you again. Good morning. Olivia Pearson with your Don't Swear note right in front of the monitor. Just just in case. Good to see you again. Good to see you too. I'm Marty Gibson. Sitting amongst, well, it looks like, well, this is, can't see, but wood paneling and some sort of fluffy thing next to you and a bottle right in front, it's going on there. Oh, just relaxed. Getting into Friday. Yeah, fair enough. All right, yeah, I like the paneling. It's like the paneling of the panel. It'll come back at some point. It'll come back in the fashion at some point. It looks like bleach paneling. Oh. There's a business in that. That's another story. It's just a pod building that doesn't have kids running through it. Right. Is it a place of work, Marty? Yeah, yeah, I'm borrowing it off my wife. Okay. All right, boy, y'all, what a week in politics. Where do we start? It's gotta be the River of Filth guy. Yeah, I reckon we could start with Michael Wood. Oh, wait, can we award the gaslighter of the week right now? Who to? Him. Yes, well, he has been gaslighting us, saying, you know, I just sort of kind of forgot about the shares that were there. You know, he sounded a lot like Father Ted when he was caught with the fundraising money for Lords in his bank account, you know, and then the Simpleton father sits there and says, well, the bad that money from Lords, Father Ted, he says, oh, yes, yes, it was just resting in my account. Yes, Father, it was resting there for a good long time. So what we've got is Michael Wood as a minister, owning shares, a poultry amount of shares. He sold them yesterday for $16,000. We're not talking a huge amount, but it's not a good look. And initially when this story broke, I came out and said, well, you know, he's been a bit silly, but it's not really a saccable offense. But then we've subsequently found out that we were first told that, I hit Chris Hiptons, that he was told six times he had to divest himself with those shares. And then the following day, it was discovered in parliament under questioning that it was actually 12 times. And then in the meantime, he's also made a decision on a regional airport that would compete with Auckland International Airport, which is a direct conflict of interest. And he still hasn't sold the shares, which is a relatively simple thing to do at this point. And yesterday, we found out that he had been told by Jacinda Ardern's office three times that he had sold them when he hadn't. And now there's an inquiry by the Pecuniary Interest Registrar. And then to top it all off, back in 2020 and 2021, he misled a newsroom journalist and they've plastered the emails all over their website showing that he said none when he had, you know, they asked me, is there any other interests out there? And he says none. So what we've got here is the minister described the freedom lovers as a river of filth is actually the filth. And he's been obfuscating, gaslighting, misleading over all of this. And we actually can't believe the word he has to say anymore. And surely he should be sacked for this. I thought socialists weren't allowed to own shares. Well, maybe that's why he kept hiding his dirty little secret, his little, you know, he bought shares when he was 18 and working at Hugh Wright's. And, you know, I sort of quipped about that. He'd got a hot tip from a share boker while Michael Wood was measuring his inside scene for a set of trousers. Or walk shorts. Probably for matching socks. I think he was, I think he, when was this 19, 1988 or something like that? He had to be in that era, yeah. Probably passed the walk shorts era. Oh, maybe. Hugh Wright's pants came with special panels for pocket billions. Stubbies. That's a sole work experience is working at Hugh Wright's measuring men's inside scenes. That's like how you've been served. The senior negotiator for the Financial Sector Union, which is unionist is, I think, the second most numerous occupation in the beehive after former teacher. So if you ever wondered what a country run by teachers and unionists looks like, here we are. Behold. Yeah, so I look, it's pretty shabby. The fact that it's gone on for four days now, there's an old saying in politics, if something's still going after three days, you've got a real problem. And the only way you can cauterize that bleeding stump of a career of Michael Wood is actually to sack him. And even then, the inquiry's still going to carry on. So they've got a bit more time and some more pain on this. And I wouldn't mind betting some other stuff comes out. So he's under the bus? Well, he should be. Will he be there? Well, Chris Hipkins is running a huge risk now. He's looking like he's defending a rather murky looking and rather slippery and oily looking. And the way he does is here and all that. I know we shouldn't really criticise people for doing that, but he just looks like an oily little oik, little union bovaboy. You don't see the oily hair look around much these days. Let's be honest. My dad used to have hair like that. Yeah, there was a mafia look, wasn't it? You with your guinea charm and your silk suits and your oily hair. Yeah, yeah, get the cream out. But, you know, this is a guy who spent a lifetime as the understudy of Phil Goff. And he's ruined his career in in about three seconds flat by. Doggedly holding on to Auckland Airport. She is for whatever reason, you know, asked 12 times. You can't say forgot about it. You just can't. So it's it's shabby and it's a it's a bad look for hipkins. And if you know, there's a rule in politics, if you make the Prime Minister looks look bad, then you're finished. And that's what it's looking like for Michael Wood. But I guess we'll they want a bit more pain. So we'll just lurch on. Any more comments to make about Michael Wood? No, but well, yes, I would only say that we are living in a time where politics is so corrupt and so run by liars and it's lying as a way of life. As I've said before, that the anomaly now is to actually be surprised by somebody who's decent, honest and on the level because that's as rare as a unicorn. So we now expect people to lie and to have corrupt dealings. And that's very sad. New Zealanders, other people, Plato was talking about when he said, one of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. Right, the truth. Yeah, it's a bit of have you read Plato's Republic? I've got it. I've flicked through it. I haven't read it. They take your children off you at seven. The boys could be a bit of karma working. Not a great model could be a bit of karma. All right, so what's next? Well, we've got W. H. O. Yeah, Sean Plunkett seven months ago. Hang up on a caller who had called into the platform, you know, the promoted as a free speech alternative radio station. And Sean Plunkett said about demonising people and carrying on and towing the statist. The resistance. Yeah, the pit, yeah, called the resistance. But but in reality, he's controlled opposition and he, you know, anybody brought up anything about vaccines or about the about the who or any sort of, you know, this is what he called conspiracies. He just hung up on them and then, you know, abused them. Well, seven months ago, he hung up on a caller who was concerned that the who had plans for digital vaccine passports. And what do we find out this week? The who in the EU have announced a partnership creating global a global system of digital vaccine passports. Yeah. And that's been in play for quite a while, as I understand, because it was about a year ago that the World Health Organization had contracted German based Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T systems to develop a global vaccine passport system with plans to link every person on the planet to a QR code and digital ID. There is nothing conspiracy theory about it. It's all there, isn't it? And, you know, I think Sean Plunkett is often inspired by that joke that you don't have to run faster than the bear, just your friend. I think that's his relationship with mainstream media. Yeah, so just a couple of steps ahead of them. Well, not even a couple of steps. You know, it'd be a few steps with heavy panting. And that was an appalling call. I mean, that I did listen to it. And Sean, he does this, but this is his style. And this is what makes him insufferable and unlistenable, is he's so rude. He sounds like an old bitch, Nana on the regs. And, you know, he screeches and he sound he's got no control. It's nasty, but it's in a way that he thinks is somehow cool. And domineering, but it's so rude. And the amount of good information that callers have had to him that he just overrides with that terrible act is it's I don't know how anybody could listen to the platform. Well, it's better. There's nothing worse than a pseudo intellectual proving his complete ignorance about a topic and cutting off callers so abruptly and deriding their actual facts that they've got as some sort of a conspiracy theory. And then, you know, this is the thing we keep joking about this, you know, the difference in time between a conspiracy theory and a fact. And it's a matter of weeks these days. In this case, it's seven months. But this information is all out there for, you know, people who should be well informed, who should be able to discover this information for themselves. We've all discovered it for ourselves. Nobody pushed it our way. You know, we discovered very quickly, you know, the benefits of things like Ivermectin and the the the abject failure of the vaccines. And we're only just discovering that now, but it's all too late for a whole lot of people, especially the dead ones. It's very late for them. Yeah, it's not coming back. You know, and I always said to people, that's fine. You can choose to have a vaccine, but if it goes wrong and we've had incidences of of medicines going wrong, Thalidomide, the most, I guess, catastrophic and large scale one. It's too late once you've got it in your arm. You can't unvaccinate yourself. Have you seen that poster of Thalidomide with it's it's strapline safe and effective? I haven't. Well, funny you say that, Marty. I was watching a video that was someone gave me a link to and it was shot in 2005, I think, and it was a case regarding a vaccine injury from another vaccine. Now, I can't remember the full details, but they had the same line, safe and effective. The guy who was giving evidence for the for using the vaccine. Safe and effective. Safe. That this line for years. Well, tobacco use is safe and effective, too. Remember, they used to describe tobacco use for asthmatics. The menthols are really really helpful for that. Yeah. Do you should we play? Should we play a bit of that of what you're talking about? That absolutely. OK, let's have a listen now. Now, people say that this is going away, not going away, but the vaccine path has just lived with covid and forget about it. Well, it's not really going away, because at the moment in Bali, the World Health Organization. Oh, for God's sake, Paul, what's this got to do with Bali? The World Health Organization are meeting in Bali, so effing what? And how do you know that, Paul, because you read it on the Internet because someone in your stupid, moronic, bloody echo chamber sent it to you. So the World Health Organization is meeting in Bali, so what? You tell me. So let me tell you, they want to reintroduce the digital vaccine passport for you and I to travel around the world. So let's have a digital health certificate acknowledged by WHO. If you have been vaccinated or tested properly, then you can move around by incorporating other use such as a digitized international certificate of vaccination, routine immunization cards and international patient summaries. They want to reintroduce the digital vaccine passport. International certificate of vaccination for you and I to travel around the world. How do you know that? I saw the meeting. I saw it on the Internet. Paul, goodbye. You've just heard it, folks. Any comments to make after playing that panel? Well, just Sean Punkett showing his absolute ignorance about a topic and ignoring the advice and warnings of a far more and well-informed listener. And, you know, if you deride people like that, then you're just going to quickly lose listenership. You're going to lose audience and when did that style of interviewing and rudeness and meanness? And just pigheaded stupidity become something. It's shock, jock, talk back is what it is. Yeah, yeah. But but that era has kind of gone and there are, you know, there are times and places for kind of being that way. But I mean, he must want people to call in and offer their opinion. But why is anybody going to call in and be treated like that? You'd beaten up. Yeah, I guess we'll find out, right? Maybe I'll make it put on a voice and make it make a call. See what happens. Hold your hold your nose and make a call and have a mouth full of plums or something. OK, I'll think about that one. All right, moving on. More babies. Now, we had a guy who'd made a documentary on why the global birth rate is crashing and it is crashing. And it's actually very serious. It is. It results in a whole lot of problems. A universe of problems, especially for the younger people have to support it all through their taxes and there's less and less of them. So Luxon's on to something here. Yeah, great point. And, you know, as usually, he's fallen into a bucket of tits and come up, sucking his thumb. He I think Cam made the comment, you know, should have passed that one on to Nicola Willis and he absolutely should because, oh, man, let's take a wager on how long it's going to take to get another handmaid's handmaiden's tail comment from. You know, some childless woman, I guess. There's just some things that bloke shouldn't talk about. They should just never get into it. And he's just going to walk straight into a eugenics argument or, you know, there's a Christian fundamentalist wanting women to stay in the kitchen and produce babies. But I mean, I guess, no, now he can add another slogan instead of big, better. Now we've got have have more kids have more babies. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. And I'm going to say he is absolutely correct. It shocks me now. And it's very sad. It saddens me how women don't want babies anymore. And part of that is the price of everything. Babies are expensive, but it's got more to do with feminism and the unhealthy narrative that feminism has had for what, 50 years that somehow it's a lesser role being a woman at home. But you can talk about it if you've got a different personality than Christopher Luxon, who I've said before is quite spineless. But Victor Orban in Hungary has been so aware of this problem that several years ago he is he gives tax breaks. Basically, if you're a Hungarian woman who wants to stay home and raise three to four children and consider that your life role, which is a great role for women being a full time mother, you are exempt from tax for life in Hungary. That's how serious he is about bringing more children into the. Well, that's what that's what Israel does with their ultra orthodox, completely state subsidised. And all they do is produce, you know, 12, 13, 14 children. It's all state subsidised. And so well, good for them. Good for them, I say, and the more babies, the better. I wish I had more children. I agree with you, Olivia. I agree. But as one of the ways for another one, Israel, those got a problem. They're one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world with the Pfizer vaccine. And those birth rates are going to drop considerably. Well, that's the other elephant in the room when it comes to I mean, there are the reasons why the birth rate is falling before this. But now add that layer on top. Well, and that's what Victor Orban did not do in Hungary was mandatory backs either. So. Is it easy to move there? Yeah. And they've got Eastern Orthodox Eastern Orthodox church beauty all around you. I mean, really, what's not to like? But they also they also don't have an immigration problem because he just said, right, you come across that border and you're not supposed to be here. We're just sick to dogs on you. Yeah, he's staunch on that. So yeah, I mean, that that that's leadership that actually does protect a country. You can't do that in the liberal West because, you know, you just get hounded for being an authoritarian. But there is there is it's not really authoritarian. It's deeply protective over your. Well, it's patriotism. Isn't it? It's looking after your citizens. Citizens have to mean something. Yeah, I got I got really interested in this because as I was doing reading the papers for media matters, I noticed incidentally, a lot of women talking about the troubles that had conceiving. And so I did some research to see if I could find a single instance of Ashley Bloomfield giving a crap about it. And no, not one. Didn't wasn't worried about and New Zealand's birth rates dropped from 2.1 in 2010. I think in just 10 years, it dropped to 1.6. That's off a cliff. And and I couldn't find very much about it. But I did find this comment by an obstetrician gynecologist who presumably helps women who are having fertility issues. And she's a professor at University of Auckland, Dr. Michelle Wise, and this is from a couple of years ago. But her quote was in response to asking being asked about, you know, why New Zealand was having this problem. She replied, there's a lot of population experts in environment and climate change experts who might suggest we have a population overgrowth problem and having fewer children might not be a bad thing. Looking at a finite amount of resources. Yeah. How would you like to go to her with a fertility problem than expected to fix it? She'd probably give you the deep of error. Well, I think I read in the US, there's actually a movement trying to cast any extra humans as unethical because of the. Did you hear that Tucker Carlson interview with Elon Musk, where he was saying he was talking to the CEO of Google and he said, look, this is this. A lot of the stuff you're saying, CEO of Google is terrible for people. And the guy called him specious. Well, like, like he was called. Oh, gosh. So I remember Jordan Peterson did some podcast with a guy that can he lives in South Africa. He's a professor of university in university there. And he calls himself an anti-natalist. Did you ever hear that? Wow. Their idea was that his idea was that man had gone in his evolution beyond anything that was useful and had over evolved. And therefore it was our moral duty to make sure that children were not born because because of the fact we die and that death is so painful for us, it would be better if we weren't born. It was shocking. What planet? And I remember Jordan Peterson was trying to entertain the philosophical ideas for as long as he could. But eventually Peterson got a bit worked up and said, where's your courage, man? Where's your courage to live? Sure, we die, but, you know, there's this thing that happens in between called living. And that's what we focus on. What a life that must be. I've spoken. And also the moral imperative would be that if you really believe that, as this man did, if you really believe that, well, why don't you top yourself? Well, that's what I think about some of the greens, not that I want that to happen. But if you're worried about overpopulation and resources and everything, you're expecting someone else to do it. How about volunteering yourself? It's pretty of income. Give somebody money away. It's like public transport. Everyone thinks it's a great idea for other people to use. And all these greens and they talk about carbon, the carbon they want to control and remove from our lives is us. Yeah, there's a self-loathing going on there. Is that what it is? Very much, very much so. Well, I don't know if it's... I just wonder whether people have had... I don't know, they navel gazed too much to the point where their fear of death is so strong that they can't live life. And I mean, we all die. We've just got to accept it and get on with it. Well, that's part of living, is to understand that and cope with it. Did you read about the mouse experiment? Have you ever heard of that? Where this guy made a mouse heaven for mice and they basically bred and they had unlimited food. And eventually what happened was the female mice stopped having sex, started eating or harming their babies. A group broke off called the Beautiful Ones who became homosexual. And after a certain point, the last mouse was born. And he replicated that experiment tens of times and got the same result. And it's like I keep saying about unwinds thing with civilizational collapse happening, like clockwork, three generations after you take the stigma off premarital sex. You get that harem's form and you know. So we're seeing that kind of experiment result playing out in front of us. Is that what you're saying right now with us? I think it's foolish not to look at what's happened before to try and explain what's happening now. I saw Paul Spoonley said it's pretty obvious why it happens. Women are having children later, they've got careers. And it's just, well, that's crap. As usual, there's no references or figures. Well, according to the guy we had on Namascapes and he'd made three parts of this documentary. He was a real serious player in understanding this. It's because one of the significant reasons is because relationships don't last long enough. It's as simple as that. But you look and then with the delay that you have, the relationships don't last. Suddenly the woman is in a position where there are no options for a long-term relationship and the age thing has conspired against you and it's kind of checkmate. But do you have these societal constructs like marriage, for example, where you've got people who are living longer. My grandfather died at 70, my grandmother died at 80 and that was considered really old. Well, my father's 80 now and he's pretty sprightly. So we're living longer. And you've got people, when they say dying until death there was part in the marriage vows. It was about 60, 65 is what they meant. You know, you died because you wanted to, right? But now if you're gonna live to 80 or 90 and it's to death there was part, you're going, oh, please let me go. You've got another 40 years of this. Imagine living with someone and they're retired longer than that you were living with them while they worked. You know, at least when they worked, they went out away from the home and you got some peace and quiet during the day. But now they're retired and they're there for 40 more years. You certainly have to have a system for dealing with that. Well, that's right. Here's a question. Everyone wants long life, longevity. You wouldn't want to live too long, would you? Even if you're in health, it all would become the same. Having steered death in the face. Same. Right? I have a different perspective. I was sitting there in the hospital in the emergency room thinking, wow, that was a pretty close run thing there. I came pretty close to croaking and so I changed everything about my life and some people would say I've become more selfish but I've actually started enjoying life a whole lot more and putting more balance into my life because it was nearly all taken away and I didn't want to die or go out pegging out slowly thinking, gosh, I wish I'd done that. Yeah. And so only people who have experienced that near-death experience, and I'm not talking about the type where you saw the light coming but when you're sitting there in the hospital, close shave and you're thinking, gosh, things have to change and you can go completely bonkers on that. But you wouldn't want to live to 150 or 200. But if you're fit and strong and you've got your health, why not? I mean, long life is a blessing if you're healthy and you have good family and close relationships around you, then it's beautiful. And even if you take on a more fragile, well, of course you're going to become more fragile, it's still worth living. But at the moment, life itself is not valued. Well, I believe it's because we're under a depopulation agenda and they're doing everything they possibly can to, as the guy from the World Economic Forum, what's his name, Yule Harari, that guy? No, that guy. The guy that wrote Savians. He also is of the view that humans have almost over-evolved and that our best moral and happiness guide is to be before farming and agrarian. But there was a miserable life. But there was a miserable life where people like me got on all right because we had the means and the wherewithal to go and hunt and kill. Well, that's what he's saying, is that the hunter-gatherer life was sort of like the apex of proper civilization. It's so dark. It's incredibly dark. It's because you're teaching kids that. You know, that's what really annoys me is the kids who think they're going to be burning up in five years through climate change. Yeah. And the effect of that. Terrible, terrible. And we got to this from Christopher Lux and say, more babies, girls. Well, he's right. We should have more babies. I agree with him. But everyone of the women should say it. But they're not going to because they're feminists and they're climate alarmists. So they want to say it. Or a man who makes women feel like having babies, maybe. Oh, dear. Have a comment just for that. Come on, we could just change the topic. All right, Taka, Taka, Taka. And your time is ticking away. Taka, Taka, he's done his first Twitter show, right? Olivia, this is your wheelhouse. Oh, my little wheelhouse. Well, I mean, honestly, he's phenomenal and he's straight back on the most important things. And this is why Taka can get 70 million views in 24 hours is because he talks about the big things such as who sabotaged the Dnyapa River, Kavanaugh, Khaddam, probably the Ukrainian terrorists. Although it's trying to be pinned on Russia just like they did with the Nord Stream pipeline. He also talked about the lack of media curiosity in JFK's assassination, uncomfortable 9-11 truths, Jeffrey Epstein and how he got so rich and how he really died. Black Lives Matter riots. Black Lives Matter riots. And the big one, David Grosh, who's the veteran of the National Geospatial, is a veteran of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, a whistleblower who has information about deeply COVID programs that have been hidden and that are about retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin. So that's aliens. Grosh's claims have come out just days after a Pentagon chief admitted that unidentified metallic orbs have been found all over the world. That's Sean Kirkpatrick, director of a new unidentified aerial phenomena analysis office, said these objects are making very interesting apparent maneuvers as we've already seen when Tucker was on air with the tic-tacs that were being seen by the fighters... Of San Diego, yeah. Pilots. Well, yeah, so I mean, because Tucker is prepared to talk about these glaring big sacred cows, it's because of that that he can pull 70 million viewers and there's nothing small on his talking points agenda ever. So go Tucker. That would be bigger than all of the cable news audiences put together probably in a week, wouldn't it? Well, this has put it into perspective, right? When he was at Fox, he was the biggest show, not just at Fox, but on all cable networks. And he had five million views each night he was on. Yeah. So he's gone to Twitter and produced a short video. It's only about 20 minutes. And he's got over 70 million views in 24 hours. And the significance of this is not that Tucker Carlson... That's huge, man. I'm just think I'm just processing that. No, it is. But the significance here is that Elon Musk is destroying traditional media right in front of their faces. Absolutely. And this will only get bigger and bigger and bigger for Twitter and Elon Musk. And you're going to start having people consume more and more and more information via Twitter. And you're going to get millions and millions of views. And he's woken up to a model that is going to blitz all of the billions of dollars' worth of investment in CNN and all of these structural organizations that are located physically in the United States and now having a worldview happening via the Twitter platform. And then if he then adds a payments platform into that and payments processing, now you've got a whole ecosystem that will blitz Facebook, will blitz Google, will blitz all of these organizations, including the mainstream media. He'll cannibalize all the advertising revenues that are will drop out of their markets and organizations like NZME and stuff will just disappear. And it's the democratizing of news as it was always envisaged to be until it was corporatized and then amalgamated into these big corporate behemoths that have basically abrogated their responsibility as the fourth estate. And what Elon Musk is doing is bringing the true fourth estate back where we've got the new version of the pamphleteers rising now. When it comes to Tucker, though, I'm interested in his style too, because we kind of operate in that space. He actually doesn't do anything that's too out of the usual. It's just really normal stuff. I don't know, Paul. I mean, it's not normal. Well, it's how I talk about JFK. Well, OK, the subjects. But just the way he does it, there's personality. Well, the thing with the people are missing, too, is that Tucker Carlson was deeply embedded within the traditional news media. Yeah, I think his father was in the media back in the old day. So and what he's doing now is he's saying, they're lying to you and I'm not. They are telling you stories and conjuring up events over there to distract you from what's happening over there. And I'm not going to be silent anymore. And that's the message that he's he's giving out by taking his show to Twitter. I'm Fox saying, though, he's broken his contract. Did I see that? Yeah, yeah, they are. So that was always going to happen. I think he knew that was going to happen. But there I bet he's got an undertaking from Elon Musk for him to fund the legal fight against them. Well, that's just more grist to the mill anyway, isn't it? More publicity, more views, all about eyeballs, locking them into the Twitter platform. Elon has a hell of a lot of power, though, with this channel. Exactly. Well, that's a lot of power in one place. It's a lot of power in one place. And and I know that people are like, oh, Elon's great, our hero standing for free speech and all the rest of it. Sure, at this point he is. But this is a guy that has a company that wants to chip your brain. So as the Zen master said, I'm sitting back going, we'll see, we'll see. Yeah, I'm always, I'm always we'll see. It's like David Seymour and his claim to be the liberty, loving freedoms, you know, of speech type person, which he shuts everybody down all around them. We all saw, I saw Alex Jones the other day say, is Elon Musk the Antichrist? No, dear. OK. Yeah, I did see that, too. I think that's that discussion. All right, well, we do have to move on. All right, Mike Pence cleared of his. He had documents at home, too, right? And he has been cleared of that and and that's all been done. Now he's running for president as a candidate. He can he's so Mr. plain vanilla, isn't he? Oh, look, apart from his rather unlikeable, dumpy and woefully weird wife, he was a whip dog on January the 6th when he certified the disgustingly fraudulent election. If he had had the courage not to certify those swing states with very dodgy outcomes, he would have proven himself to be worthy of being hardcore presidential material. But he did the very opposite. And in a swamp. Dweller. Yeah. And in a public speech recently in D.C., he whined. President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable. That's what he said. To me, he's the Liz Shaney of male Republicans. Actually, no, that's probably Mitt Romney, but Pence is a close second to that ignoble comparison. Trump will wipe him out. And actually, the VP has one job. It really only has one job. And that's to certify or to refuse to certify an election, the presidential election, if it's fraudulent. He failed. He failed to do that one job. And now he's whining and delusional. He's he's just part of the system. And he's he's part of the problem. There exists not only in US politics, but in politics in general around around the world. He's just, you know, been around there for so long, doing almost nothing. And he's he's just the establishment candidate. But why does he think he's got a hope in hell? Or do they know they don't? But there's something else in it for them? Well, I don't know. It's like, you know, well, same goes for Chris Christie. I mean, you know, this was a Trump apology. He's back at it again, too. And, you know, he's never he's never dodged a donor in his entire life. You know, he probably knows where all the pies are. And we're all the pies are hidden in his tailor. Must be loving this, thinking good, good grief. I'm going to I'm just going to make an absolute fortune on the tailoring for the immense jackets and pants that he's going to have to wear out on a day to day basis. Chris Christie is just not credible as a as a politician. I don't know where these people get these ideas from. I don't know where they get them from either, Cam. It's like, unless they're a stalking horse for someone, you know, but I still don't see that working, you know, no, because you wouldn't choose him. And did you see his announcement when he did his announcement speech for his presidential run? Trump pointed this out that he kept using the word small. And Trump went, Trump put out a truth tweet, a truth doubt, as they say. How many times have Chris Christie used the word small? Does he have a psychological problem with size? Actually, his speech was small and not very good. It rambled all over the place and nobody had a clue what he was talking about. Hard to watch, boring. And that's what you get from a failed governor who left office with a seven percent approval rate and then got run out of New Hampshire. This time it won't be any different. But the the other thing Chris Christie is seems to have forgotten his corruption scandal that he had with regarding the bridges and the tolls. You know, it's just not credible. These people are clowns, but that's why I keep wondering why they do this. They must get some sort of payout because Chris Christie or Mike Pence cannot possibly believe they're going to be the president. No way. They've got no hope. But I mean, wait till the Democrats start lining up and we get to laugh at them. Well, Cornel West, I see, is a Democrat candidate, and he's quite a crazy professor type. So is he running? Yeah, I think he's announced he's running for Democratic nomination. He he he answers everything with now that is a powerful question. And then he never answers the question and sister and brother all the time. He's like that character out of billions, isn't he? You know, the the the district attorney in in billions that's chasing after the main character, Bobby Axelrod. And he's got here like that. And you know, just I do know the one you mean. Yes, they do. He's a facsimile of them, really. Let's so that's pants. Yeah, maybe it's just all just a fragment up the coverage. So, you know, it's all these sort of like misdirections going on. All right, we're going to have to spoil through the last few very quickly. Ports of Auckland. Yes, well, Nati Fartour have have come up with a cunning plan to help Wayne Brown in his budget. And they said, instead of selling the airport, why doesn't Wayne Brown sell the ports of Auckland to them? And that will help address the theft of their land without remembering that the ports of Auckland is sitting entirely on reclaimed land. But there's nothing like a bunch of grasping people who think there's an opportunity there for them to grab hold of something. And I imagine there would be some sort of sweetheart deal that this government would be pouring money into so that they can buy the ports of Auckland. But of course, Wayne Brown won't entertain that because he wants to move the ports of Auckland from where it is. So let's reclaim the land. Well, that well, that's maybe we should put it back the way it was. Yeah. All right. Well, just before we move on from it, how come Māori are so loyal to labour when there's that huge difference in treaty claims between what national settle and what labour does? Is it that your average Māori in the street, you know, doesn't see that see any of it? Because I mean, well, I asked this question of Karina Jones. She tweets is Auntie Hey Hey. And she she rung me up for some advice and we had a good old chat. And I said, well, how have you voted in all your years before? She says, oh, labour. I said, oh, well, why was that? She said, well, because mum and dad did and their mum and dad did. And their mum and dad did. And so what you've got is you know, inertia, really, among among Māori. There's a small percentage that vote for other parties, but by and large, they vote for the labour. And there's a certain amount of inertia there. But I also, you know, like to liken it to Pavlov's dogs. So, you know, the famous experiment where Pavlov was, you know, keeping dogs chained to a table and then when they were eventually freed from from their chains, they wouldn't get off the table because they'd so so become so accustomed to being on the table that they didn't know anything else. So they stayed on the table even though they were free to jump off and run around. And that's what I think a lot of Māori are trapped into a cycle of a inertia and be a conditioned response to vote labour because that's what you do. Yeah, it's like one point five nine billion versus two hundred and seventy seven million, you know, Helen Clark. Settled 15, National Settled 59. It's and I guess it's because partly Iwi trickle down makes neoliberal trickle down. Look like her force hooker falls, right? There's not a lot going to to give the Cuzzies new tinies or anything like that. No, there's that's the problem you see. And that's what I said to Karina Jones. Well, why are you thinking you're changing now? And she said, well, because we're treated like we're expected to vote for them and they just treat us like scum. And I mean, I've said this for years and years and years. I just can't understand it. And not for the life of me. I cannot work out why National even bothers to stand candidates in Māori seats. And, you know, they've done that under Luxon with his woke project. They've got candidates in Māori seats. I'll tell you what, there'll be less than 10,000 votes for National in those Māori seats across all of them combined. And it's just a complete waste of time. And, you know, this is why I still can't understand why Luxon contains all of this rubbish, because she just can't come out and say, well, the statistics in the votes show that Māori don't vote for us. So we're clearly not the party that they want to vote for. So we're not going to even contain anything for them. You get a lot more support if you did that. But he won't because he's so woke. Well, he disconnected from the Māori party, didn't he, said? Well, they are vastly different. They're vastly different. Yeah, but they actually declared it publicly. Yeah, of Tarri Anaturri and Peter Sharples, who actually acted with integrity and the clowns that are in there now just actually unmitigated racists. All right, let's wind things up with us now. Jan Tinnetti, before Privileges Committee. I've been following that. I watched it yesterday and, you know, talk about pathetic coming up with these excuses as to why, you know, oh, no, it was just a coincidence. So, oh, no, I'm deeply sorry for misleading on that and just cringing for over an hour before finally the chairman of the Privileges Committee wound it up. You know, it was David Parker and he shut down the National Party questioners. I think it's a foregone conclusion. She may get a cent, you know, she may get, you know, some sort of slap on the wrist with the wet bus ticket. If only we had wet bus tickets these days, they're all sort of hop cards and things like that. It's all digital. It's going digital. Can't even give her a paper cut with it. And, you know, it's it's it just shows, though, the dishonesty and the disingenuous nature of these labor ministers where they want to hide, obfuscate outright lie in some instances in order to prevent the reality of the appalling policies coming to the floor through things like the Official Information Act and other means. And it just shows again, the inherent dishonesty of the labor government. All right. Anyone else got anything to say about that? Because I do want to mention this because I think it's something that we should know. Fiji has almost the same number of soldiers as we do. And there are holes in the holes of our frigates. They've just come back from Canada being refitted. We paid huge money for that. And they've got holes. What's going on there? Who found that out? And I've got a few sources around the place and got contacted last week about the frigates in the situation with the frigates to Kaha is essentially non-operational, despite a refit of the engines. And they've got, you know, arm sized holes in the hull. They're busily trying to keep it quiet. Also, on the way back from Canada, they had what's called in the Navy a rub against a Chinese warship. They've kept that very quiet. But, you know, on Wednesday, Chris Hipkins announced that they're signing a defense pact of some sort with Fiji. And I just laughed and laughed and laughed because I was leaked some documents that shows that the New Zealand Army is hemorrhaging staff so fast, you know, in the order of hundreds and hundreds of soldiers a year, hemorrhaging out the back of the Army. They're demoralized. And I guess this is what happens when you hire the Army to be your little henchman. But the one of the leaked slides that I had from the Ministry of Defense shows that the attrition over the years and the investment and experience that's lost, for example, in 2019, there was 501 soldiers that left. The experience lost was measured in as 2,879 years for a total investment of two hundred and sixty nine point nine million dollars. And if you look at two twenty twenty two just last year, seven hundred and ninety three soldiers left experience of last years of five thousand two hundred and fifty and a staggering half a billion dollars of investment in the training of those soldiers. Well, gone up in smoke, you know, we're not even it's considered normal to spend two percent of your GDP on on defense. We're not even anywhere near that. We're a tenth of that. We might as well pack it up. And so have we done that game over the years? Because we're because we're bludgers. Yeah, well, and all battles, well, bludging off whom, though? United States, Australia, anybody who's got more than us. Well, we also had a prime minister in Goff, who's spat at Vietnam vets. So, you know, you can't expect him to. Yeah. But it's like this cozy relationship with China. China, that, you know, his trump would say China, China. But the only time I've ever seen Jacindra doing run was when someone asked her a question about Hong Kong and squinted away from the lectern. It was almost as if they've sold out our military already. And our military is dysfunctional, right? If you look on paper, we're supposed to have several battalions of soldiers, right? And we've signed this defense agreement with Fiji. Well, here's some facts. The Fiji military has 4040 active personnel. Right, for a population of just under a million. And the New Zealand Army has a regular force size of 4,519. So we've got a population of over five million. So does that mean Fiji could invade us and take us over? Yeah, I mean, you know, famously David Long, he called in the Defense Force when the coup happened in 1987 and said, right, I want to plan to invade Fiji and to stop the take out of the coup and people destroy their army and put in place an interim government in the New Zealand Defense Force back then, which was a lot larger in 1987. The guy laughed at Longi and he said, we wouldn't even get off the beach. Yeah, right. We don't have the ability to transport. And so, you know, Longi said, well, why don't we just fly up some some soldiers in our in our Hercules and land them in Suvar and then take over that wall like in the movies? Yeah, except a fully kitted out set of infantry on a on a Hercules. You can carry about 60 soldiers and we've got three Hercules. And so we'd have a total of 180 soldiers landing at the place where Fiji has the most of their military, right, with the Victoria Barracks. And we'd have 180 soldiers that would then be left there with only the supplies that came in on those planes for a minimum of eight hours before the next lot could come in. Right. And they're all done. But by the time you get the next lot, and they've got all those have been gone, right? So we don't have the ability to project power. We don't have the ability to we don't have the ability to take soldiers anywhere and get them off a ship. Onto the beach. And so we actually when I say we're bludgers, we are bludgers, defense bludgers. We're expecting the United States, Great Britain, Canada and Australia to fill the void that we don't. And, you know, they point to things like, you know, five eyes. Well, we're a flea compared to the investment of all of those other countries. You know, I was doing some work in Southeast Asia for for a government organization. And I was told if all things go to hell and and you need to get some consular support or anything, don't go to the New Zealand Embassy, go to the Canadians, right? The British won't want to know you. The Americans will ignore you. The Australians don't care. But the but the Canadians are part of the Commonwealth and they'll look after you. That was an advice from somebody in the government at the time. But soon or later, New Zealand is going to have to make up its mind whether to ally properly with the UK, the US and Australia or just drift into some kind of an alliance with China. It's very hard to separate our trade from our military alliances when trades run so deep. We can't even protect our economic zone. We've got two frigates when we should have four. We can't even crew two frigates. We don't have enough crews from my this is what my Navy sources are telling me. We don't have enough crews to have two frigates operational at any one time. It is a joke. We got those new patrol planes. We sold some of them with the P8 Poseidons. They're pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, you do a lot. But why did we buy those? Why did we buy those? Is that like a drop torpedoes? Well, so do a whole lot of other things. I mean, this whole thing, where we just we just end up as being this lovely jewel that's just a sitting duck in the South Pacific without a military alliance. I mean, interesting that you use the word bludgeon can that, you know, in order for any protection, military around us, we would have to bludge off other countries. We would. We would. I can I can see that. But this is what you get when you go into alliances that are deep in trade, which are so meaningful to us and so unmeaningful to China as an oblip on their radar. And you couple up with brutal communists. And now, I mean, Australia is on high alert with absolutely China and their aggression. And we would have to choose. We would have to choose sooner or later. Well, we wouldn't choose, but we would just surrender. The quickest way to end a war is to lose it. As George Orwell said, I often use that philosophy in my parenting and apparently the New Zealand military is quite fond of it as well. Well, there's that old old movie in 1959, the Mouse That Roared famous movie where the small little country declares war on the United States and then surrenders, hoping that they'd take it over and, and, you know, save the whole country. And of course, it turned into a great satire. The movie that was The Mouse That Roared. And that's literally what New Zealand is. We're The Mouse That Roared. Didn't the Wagner group guy forget his name? Pregosin or something? Didn't they have a map? There was a video of him last week with a map of the world behind his desk. He was talking and there were red pins in the Chattam Islands. Well, he's probably got more ability to get a whole bunch of Wagner mercenaries to the Chattam Islands before the New Zealand defense horse could get an inflatable boat off a ship. All right. Well, another political panel there. We'll do it again next Friday. It's a very sad state of affairs, isn't it? And it's good to know that we're defenseless as we go get into bed tonight and no one can come and save us. Well, we could have dad's army. Well, we've got no guns either. So we could borrow cams. You know, where the workshop could work on some, you know, good looking fakes. My mates at the antique arms in Auckland have probably got more guns than New Zealand Army. All right. Well, thanks, folks. Cam Slater, Olivia Pearson and Marty Gibson for another one. We'll do it again next Friday. Have a great week, guys. Have a great weekend and a great week. Thanks for this, Paul. Thank you.