Who is running the world these days – the pansy bloody diplomats or the blue collar realists? I’d like to think the latter. Fortunately I’ve grown accustomed to disappointment over the years.

For instance, when a foreign woman visits the shores of NZ only to be terrified, embarrassed and made to feel completely out of sorts – this is not a welcome, this is an ultimatum; conform to our primitive, pugilistic ways or be gone with you. Then we, as New Zealand high society, have the gall to be outraged..? Come on..? Somebody needs to pull their bloody head in.

Before you try to tell me this is not the almighty PC juggernaut at work, have a think. New Zealand as a country, who once prided itself on free speech, free expression, free protests and just about every other free action could imagine – including nuclear – in latter years has become so ridiculously precious that all anybody needs to do is utter in public the word, ‘Nigger’, and suddenly all hell breaks loose. It isn’t even that anybody really cares; it’s that we think we should care. Freedom of speech? What a crock. Said it before, I’ll say it again: what ever happened to ‘Sticks and stones…’ For God’s sake, words are nothing. They’re in the air. If we don’t want to believe, interpret or be affected by them, we don’t have to. That is our liberty as rational people. But we’re not rational anymore, are we? We as a nation are so tied up with restricting public speech, that this particular right of passage, has been clean forgotten.

Who gives a damn that a broad from abroad wasn’t into rubbing noses with a group of men she had never met? (Is that not what we endeavour to instil in our children – don’t rub noses with strangers…?) Who cares that she was more than a little unnerved by a tribe of big, black, half naked, tattoo embellished men; jumping, lunging in her direction with upsetting facial expressions, brandishing weapons and in general, trying to intimidate their audience? Although I suppose, that is the point of a war dance.

My advice, New Zealand, get the hell over yourself. You are no better than other places and as much as we might like to think it, our culture is not unique. It is intimidating and often grotesque.