http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1203/S00264/lyndon-hood-brownlee-fighting-to-the-finnish.htm

Click for big version.

SCOOP: So this Finland thing...

GERRY BROWNLEE: Well it was meant to be humorous.

SCOOP: Humorous?

BROWNLEE: You know, a joke!

SCOOP: About what malnourished woman-hating murderers the Finns are?

BROWNLEE: No no no: based on what malnourished woman-hating murderers the Finns are, but about the Labour Party.

SCOOP: So...

BROWNLEE: Ha, ha, Labour Party. You'd have to be pretty Finnish not to see that it my comments were satirical.

SCOOP: So what do you mean by satirical?

BROWNLEE: Well, like, maybe something that was mean to be funny but it wasn't really. But with a core of truth.

SCOOP: And what core is that?

BROWNLEE: Well, there is a real country, called Finland.

SCOOP: Isn't satire forbidden in Parliament?

BROWNLEE: No, no it forbidden to use footage of Parliament for satire. It's like 'bringing Parliament into disrepute'. It's all right if it's just us doing it.

SCOOP: Okay. So, satire is often associated with the use of irony...

BROWNLEE: Irony. Yes, that's it, sorry. I was being ironic.

SCOOP: So what was the underlying meaning?

BROWNLEE: The who?

SCOOP: What were you actually trying to say, if you were being ironic about abusing Finland.

BROWNLEE: Can I have a clue?

SCOOP: Well was it, for example, an ironic commentary on parliamentarians and the kind of torture they put a factoid through once it enters the legislative chamber?

BROWNLEE: Oh, no. Well, obviously if you want to be all post-structural and examine it purely as a textual artefact without reference to the intentions of the author then it might be an excellent example of, of, what you said. But no, I was thinking of just generally ironic.

SCOOP: Like ten thousand spoons?

BROWNLEE: No thanks, I carry one with me.

SCOOP: By generally ironic you mean...

BROWNLEE: You know, like, 'ooh, look at me saying this'. (Makes finger-quotes:) "Oooh scary Finland."

SCOOP: Sort of postmodern irony.

BROWNLEE: Yes?

SCOOP: So you basically didn't mean it.

BROWNLEE: "Yes."

SCOOP: You have to admit that basically you were – in Parliament, as leader of the House – exaggeratedly abusing the people of another country to score cheap political points.

BROWNLEE: Exactly! Clever, eh? Guess that's why I'm earning the big bucks and you're just writing made up interviews with politicians.

SCOOP: Are you sorry?

BROWNLEE: Well, I'd love to apologise for the Finns but I'm really not responsible for them.

SCOOP: Will you apologise to the Finnish government?

BROWNLEE: Well I'm sorry if they got offended. They don't need that on top of all their other troubles. Like having to live in Finland.

SCOOP: The Prime Minister has expressed his regrets to President of Finland.

BROWNLEE: Well I'm sorry about that too.

SCOOP: So do you think that should settle things?

BROWNLEE: Yes, I consider the matter Finnished. Ha ha. Just kidding. Love you guys.

SCOOP: Mr Brownlee, thank you.

BROWNLEE: Didn't mean to Nok-ya, Finland. Heh.

********

Labels: finland, finlandgate, gerry brownlee, nothing to do with john clarke, nz politics, satire

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1009/S00120/scoop-satire-the-christchurch-dialogues.htm



Gerry Brownlee to be played by first person with immaculate comic timing that comes to hand. Scoop to be played by his straight man.


Scoop: So – this Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act.

Brownlee: Yeah. So with y'know the RMA and so on we were a bit worried we wouldn't be able to get on with the job of rebuilding. I mean, it wasn't designed for this situation, was it? It'd be ages just getting basic consents. So we all got together and decided the best thing, the best thing to do, for the recovery of Canterbury, was to pass a law that let me – well, the Executive Council but, y'know, me – to let me just rewrite any law I wanted to.

Scoop: Isn't it Parliament that makes laws?

Brownlee: Well, it used to. Now it's me.

Scoop: Just laws about Canterbury?

Brownlee: No, everywhere.

Scoop: Any law?

Brownlee: Well not any law obviously. That would be ridiculous. Clearly there have to be limits. Like I'm not allowed to rewrite the Electoral Act or the Constitution Act or the Bill of Rights or… or… there's another one I can't rewrite…

Scoop: I'm guessing not the Resource Management Act?

Brownlee: No, you're right, I can do that one. Specifically mentioned.

Scoop: The Commerce Act?

Brownlee: That too.

Scoop: The Hoildays Act?

Brownlee: That's not it.

Scoop: The Crown Minerals Act?

Brownlee: Ha, no.

Scoop: The Crimes Act?

Brownlee: No.

Scoop: I wouldn't have thought you'd need to rewrite the Crimes Act …

Brownlee: Oh man, tip of my tongue.

Scoop: So if you wanted you could, say, make fraudulently obtaining a passport legal.

Brownlee: Hahaha. Yep.

Scoop: Or raise the drink-driving limit?

Brownlee: Don't be ridiculous.

Scoop: The Decimal Currency Act?

Brownlee: That's not it, I can change that one.

Scoop: But why would you …

Brownlee: Shh, I've almost got it…

[pause]

Scoop: The Abolition of the Death Penalty Act? The Accident Compensation Act? Acts and Regulations Publication Act, Administration Act, Admiralty Act, Admiralty House Act Repeal Act, Adoption Act, Adoption (Intercountry) Act…

Brownlee: Ooh, the Adopti… No, no sorry, can rewrite all of those…

Scoop: The Adult Adoption Information Act, Affiliate Te Arawa Iwi and Hapu Claims Settlement Act, Age of Majority Act, Agricultural and Pastoral Societies Act, Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act, Aid to Water-Power Works Act …

Brownlee: Look, you're just distracting. Oh never mind, I'm sure it it'll come to me. Where were we?

Scoop: Don't you think this is undemocratic?

Brownlee: Well I can't stop the elections.

Scoop: True.

Brownlee: Well, I can, but only local elections.

Scoop: Oh, yes, because you'd already sacked Environment Canterbury.

Brownlee: Actually I meant if I want to I can rewrite the Local Electoral Act, but you've got a point there. Look, just because I've been granted absolute powers over New Zealand's laws, doesn't mean I'll exercise them.

Scoop: So who'll decide if you do?

Brownlee: Me. But I'm sure the opposition is will provide plenty of scrutiny.

Scoop: Scrutiny?

Brownlee: That's right.

Scoop: So if you decide to go about randomly rewriting the laws enacted by New Zealand's Parliament…

Brownlee: … everyone will watch very closely while I do it. Scrutiny, see, very important. And we'll consult too, which as you know means…

Scoop: Before you randomly rewrite the laws you'll tell everyone.

Brownlee: I promise. Can't ask for fairer than that.

Scoop: And this bill that lets you do this passed unanimously?

Brownlee: Yes.

Scoop: What was Parliament thinking?

Brownlee: Anybody that dumb, I couldn't begin to guess what their motives are.

Scoop: Doesn't this all seem a bit authoritarian to you?

Brownlee: 'Authoritarian'. Yes, I think that's exactly the word. Well done.

Scoop: So your Government…

Brownlee: I'll just write that down.

Scoop: Your Government rammed through the Super City and disestablished the Canterbury local government. One of your Ministers released personal information on people who complained about their policies. Is authoritarianism your answer to everything?

Brownlee: I wouldn't say that.

Scoop: I know you wouldn't say it, but is it true?

Brownlee: I don't think it's very fair.

Scoop: Well can you think of any problem you wouldn't solve with authoritarianism?

Brownlee: Well, I, for example if my problem was I wanted a cup of tea, I might boil the jug or I might ask someone to make some for me.

Scoop: And if there wasn't any tea?

Brownlee: Well, if it was like that I suppose I would go for the authoritarianism.

Scoop: Perhaps you'd commandeer some tea?

Brownlee: Obviously I'd have to suspend the Crimes Act first otherwise it would be stealing. But look, that's not reason to go around calling us names. Some might say that's hampering the reconstruction effort.

Scoop: Oh.

Brownlee: There must still be a gallows somewhere in this country.

Scoop: Sorry, Sir.

Brownlee: If you oppose this legislation you're against rebuilding Canterbury! Why do you love earthquakes?

Scoop: But I ... You're loving this aren't you?

Brownlee: Yep.

Scoop: You [expletive deleted]

Brownlee: The Judicature Amendment Act! That's it! I knew I'd get it eventually.

********

Labels: christchurch earthquake, dooooom, gerry brownlee, legislation, nz politics, satire

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1008/S00059/scoop-satire-the-calculator-of-cthulhu.htm
without apologies to H P Lovecraft

Click for big version

1

My doctors have sensed that I am holding something back, that secret is ravaging my mind. Yet I cannot speak of it. If my story became know, it would surely tear apart the gossamer veil that lies between mankind and insanity.

The most recent doctor, a young man, suggested I might write down, secretly, the unspeakable memories I can never share. At first, I could not endure the bare thought of revisiting those horrors, even in private memory. But now, here I sit, beside the kindling fire as night falls, and my shaking pen writes these words.

I still cannot think of the affair of the Prime Minister of New Zealand without a shudder of unmitigated horror.

The days have turned to weeks, since my wild flight from Wellington. Fear, and the immediate preservation of my body, have given way to a fear for my soul. And I brood continually upon the things I have seen, upon certain astronomical events and upon recent discoveries in subatomic physics. The dread I feel – for myself and for all of humanity – has only expanded.

I wish they had never built that monstrous apparatus under the Swiss Alps. Its dangers have so often been guessed at, never for the right reasons.

2

I confess I had never been a friend to John Key, and that I opposed his unusually rapid rise to power. But I never spread any of those peculiar rumours about him, dismissing them as the envious fictions that power inevitably attracts. I do not speak in personal emnity, though recent events have changed my assessment of those rumours.

Now, I remember one that had all the marks of an urban legend – a set of stories with different circumstances, matching only in the most gruesome details. Saying that at various times and places, he was known to have shot off his own mouth, yet appeared entirely unharmed immediately after.

I gave those no more credance than the other stories, such as the one about how he'd killed a guy, just to see if he could get away with it if he smiled and claimed it was part of his economic programme.

3

Nobody saw anything unusual in the Prime Minister's behaviour. He had become, if anything, more relaxed and charming.

Yet recently certain of his personal habits had become more pronounced. He would produce strange items – "statistics", he called them – perhaps regarding Australia, or employment, or Women's pay, the number of children failing at school or the sufficiency of evidence for driver blood/alcohol laws – that did not seem to have come from any recognisable data set of this Earth.

Just then I was, partly due to my own eccentricities, at a loose end or – as I thought – I might not have given the matter any thought. And I also began to wonder why his Ministers were one by one ceasing to appear in public for interviews.

I began a methodical search for a clue as to what mysterious process he had used to manufacture those facts.

Soon I found the deeper tunnels, below the pre-European foundation of the Parliament buildings, and the disturbing markings which my torchlight revealed on those walls.

And I knew that my search had been subconciously driven by some subtle recognition.

As a youth I had chanced on certain arcane volumes, and acquired a secret passion for these bizzare and secret histories – though I was never quite certain if I took it seriously. In truth, my first thought of political life was sparked by a rumour that the Parliament library contained a copy of the fabled Necronomicon (though it proved to be a woefully incomplete Latin version of the mad Arab's writings).

My investigations took to hidden sites all around the world – a passion for travel that bemused my colleagues. I have puzzled over worn inscriptions in half-sunken Venetian crypts and shuddered at distorted friezes uncovered in abandoned Tibetan temples, amidst the shrill, arcane piping of the Himalayan winds.

I see now that every moment was a step on the path that brought me here.

4

As I journeyed ever deeper into those underground passages, the strong the often-remarked scent of despair and madness that clings to Parliament became gradually stronger. I was on the point of turning back, overwhelmed by the stench, when I heard movement in front of me, and saw light.

A kind of cavern opened up at the intersection of several tunnels, filled with a sourceless, pale green light. Strangely-carved arches vanished upwards into dark cyclopean vaults. A robed figure was capering manically in the eldritch glow, consulting the marks that filled the limestone-dripped walls and scribbling notes on scraps of paper that littered the sandy floor.

At first I did not recognize him – how could I have? But it seems he was fully aware of my presence. I drew a shocked breath as the Prime Minister turned and spoke to me.

"See!" he said, "I told you! We are catching up with Australia – if you use percentages!"

And his waving hand forced my attention to the whiteboard my eyes had instinctually tried to avoid.

5

I recoiled in terror as I saw those monstrous calculations, that obscene, non-Euclidean arithmetic – inscriptions that were half numerals, half grotesque symbols representing realities far removed from our own.

I made the mistake of trying to understand it, and was trapped by its mesemerising insanity. Those conclusions that seemed to shift from one moment to the other! The unhallowed divisors he had used to derive such fiendish percentages!

Yet even as my brain swam I knew I had yet to uncover the full extent of this horror. For surely this man who was once human – and was in between times a currency trader – could not have become the creature of illogic I saw before me without the company of another, without the example of some shambling monstrosity of pure madness coaxing from beyond the edges of reason.

And at that moment, I felt the atmosphere change. An increasing wave of stale air flowed from one of the further tunnel mouths. It steamed as it rose, forced from unthinkable, scorching depth by the rapidly rising bulk of some gibbering creature of the black pit.

In a moment that I believe saved my remaining sanity, animal fear overcame my mental paralysis. I turned and ran.

Behind me I heard the Prime Minister, who had turned to welcome the tunneling force of unreason that was surely approaching, call after me in dismay:

"But you can't go – you haven't met the Minister for Economic Development!"

6

My limbs ached and my lungs burned, but knowing what was behind, mere bodily pain could not slow my flight. It was something far more insidious that drove me near to despairing collapse.

As I desperately ran towards the imagined safety of daylight, I sought to measure my pace towards my goal against certain milestones I thought I saw in the far distance. Yet as I sought to check my progress against this arbitrary goal, I found these milestones had vanished, or had never existed at all. Without them, I suddenly feared all my tremendous efforts might be making no progress at all, or even sending me racing in the wrong direction, back into the hole I had come from.

Even space itself: I think I ceased to believe in anything. Shub-Niggurath! The howling Nyarlathotep! Ïa! Ïa! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Yet, partly because I had no other ideas, I kept running. Somehow, I emerged alive.

7

When I tell the doctors I am horrified by the Government, and would do anything to change it, they think I am making small talk.

The truth, and the source of my enduring horror, is that we are governed by creatures capable of such hideous computations, whose relationship to what we call reality is a matter of personal convenience, in whose mad grip established fact crumbles into incoherence.

Somehow they projected into our brains an image or safety, a steady hand on the tiller. Now, like one awakening from a dream, I find that every sphere of Government is being destroyed and rebuilt. Rebuilt in the lunatic image of its incomprehensible builders.

And I ask myself how they can wilfully distort the properties of accepted underlying reality.

But is not 'charm' a property of those quantum particles those scientists and engineers foolishly seek to summon in those cthonic tunnels under Switzerland?

And can it be coincidence that mere days after I saw those half-real calculations distort known reality, a gigantic explosion rippled across the hemisphere of the Sun closest to earth? I am told that the storm of that cataclysm is, even as I write, reaching our atmosphere and causing an eldrich glow in the night sky. I dare not look.

8

No doubt many think me mad. I have done nothing to discourage it, and I certainly had no need to counterfeit the symptoms of nervous collapse. The only one I have heard to doubt it is the one who knows the whole truth.

But I had to take a tangled path to escape that tangled web. If I simply fled without explanation, I could not be sure of my safety. Even here, hundreds of miles distant from that buzzing hive of madness.

I had to leave – as permanently as I could – without suspicion of true cause of my flight. I could not have my colleagues on the scent of the horrible truths that have destroy my happiness. And I had to show the irrational powers which I fled that I could remain silent.

The desperate solution I devised was as follows: I sent an anonymous letter attacking the leader of my own party around the press gallery, leaving clues to be sure that it would be traced back to me within the day.

They insisted I leave, and will do anything they can to stop me going back. They imagine themselves triumphant. If they knew the truth, how they would envy me.

9

As I write, and the Southern sky glows greenly, I have indeed found a certain strange peace. Setting these events on paper has put them in an inexplicable order.

It only remains for me to throw these closely-filled sheets into the fire. I must do it now – to be certain these horrific secrets spread no further.

In a moment.

Someone is knocking at the door.

********

Labels: chris carter, cthulhu, gerry brownlee, h p lovecraft, john key, nz politics, satire

Oh yes...

Werewolf: From The Hood: Striking Comedy Gold

Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee has announced the discovery “significant” quantities of irony underlying the Parliament area of Wellington. He said the Government plans to exploit these to “the maximum possible extent”. More>>

Last Month's Werewolf: From The Hood: The Battle Of No Oil

In twenty ten BP caused a slick
With an oil well they built off the mighty Mississip’.
The platform blew apart at the seams
And sank in a fire you could see from New Orleans.
More>>

I kept delaying blogging about the last one because I wanted to write something medium-length about the hilarious historical revisionism involved in the 'British Version'. Long story short, read the end of that column, the watch this:



... the comments in YouTube can get a bit crabby.

Labels: battle of new orleans, bp, gerry brownlee, johnny horton, mining, nz politics, oil spill, satire

I don't think I've said this here before, so here it is:

ENERGY and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee mortified residents of Thames today as he rampaged naked through the Coromandel Peninsula township, seemingly completely oblivious to the screams of horror emanating from locals as he jogged sweatily up the main street, waving, winking and attempting to shake hands with residents, several of whom were later treated for shock.

That's what we've been missing. Someone really vicious.

RABID FIRE. Does what it says on the packet.

Labels: gerry brownlee, nz politics, rabid fire, rain of burning burn, satire, satirists

I've occasionally made images for Scoop in advance, on the assumption an opportunity could be found or manufactured to use it in the future.

I was so struck by the image Clair Browning launched this Pundit post with I couldn't resist doing my own version. I call it, "Balancing our Environmental Responsibilities with our Economic Opportunities".


Click to enlarge

I'll keep it here for the moment, along with this David Garrett picture, the time of which has, in fact, come, but which remains a bridge too far for the Scoop front page.

Labels: boerwoeo, Clair Browning, environment, gerry brownlee, graphics, mining, national parks, national party, pundit.co.nz