A View On Finland

John -

New Zealand Listener - April 6, 2012


New Zealand MP identifies Finland as a military threat


By Toby Manhire


Richard Prosser, a recent graduate from the Gerry Brownlee college of comedy, has been doing a new routine to a captive audience of tens in the nation’s highest democratic assembly.

Military Manoeuvres Act Repeal Bill - Third Reading - Part 6 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlBgUy08ZYU

I post the clip above with some trepidation, and a steely straight face – which actually isn’t terribly difficult – given the requirement that “coverage of proceedings must not be used in any medium for … satire, ridicule or denigration”.

Questions were raised about the best use of parliament’s time today as MPs debated whether to repeal a WWI law that has not been used in 30 years.

The Military Manoeuvres Act was enacted in 1915 to deal with mobilisation for World War I, and enabled the Governor-General to declare any land available for a period specified for military manoeuvres.

National MP Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi launched a member’s bill in 2010 to get rid of the outdated law, and tonight the Military Manoeuvres Act Repeal Bill passed its final reading, 111 votes to eight …

New Zealand First MP Richard Prosser used the opportunity to make fun of comments previously made about Finland by Cabinet Minister Gerry Brownlee, informing the House that his party was unable to support the bill due to the impending military threat posed by Finland.

“Thanks – or perhaps it should be no thanks – to recent comments made by the Leader of the House, it is possible that Finland may now harbour hostile intentions towards this country,” Mr Prosser said.


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Bill Ralston: Why apologise to Finland?


By Bill Ralston


Poor Gerry Brownlee. In Parliament recently he cracked what he seemed to think was a joke and suddenly he’s under torrid attacks from not only his political opponents but the entire Finnish nation. Besides proving he is not a humorist or satirist, Brownlee also managed to discover there is another country on Earth whose inhabitants have thinner skins than we do.

Whenever someone on the planet utters a derogatory remark in the media about our country, we go into contortions of outrage. An obscure DJ in Britain makes a wisecrack, a British rugby writer curls an upper lip, an Aussie reaches for a sheep joke and we enter a state of national hysterics. TV1’s Mark Sainsbury interviews the offenders by satellite, TV3’s John Campbell holds a sausage sizzle, newspaper columnists froth at the mouth. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. Thank God the Finns seem to be even touchier than us.

I blame Labour’s David Shearer. Why not? His honeymoon with the public is going on far too long – let’s blame him for something. It’s Shearer’s fault for prattling on about how we need to follow in the snowshoes of Finland with its kind of progressive politics. That inspired Brownlee to make the witty riposte that Finland was a nation of uneducated, unemployed murderers who don’t respect women. Admittedly, only Brownlee thought that was witty.

The Finnish media certainly didn’t see the humour in it. In an act of comedic Mutually Assured Destruction, a Finnish satirist wittily responded by calling Brownlee fat, and indulging in a little cultural theft from Australia, he cracked a sheep joke about New Zealand.

This is how wars start. Still, if we’re going to make enemies, Finland would be a good one. First, it doesn’t seem to possess nuclear weapons. Second, it has a population of only 5.4 million – just a few more than us – so we are reasonably easily matched weight for weight. True, it has 34,700 military in uniform and seems to possess a few things we don’t, such as an air force strike wing, tanks, and some lethal-looking warships, but the good news is they would have to sail or fly many thousands of kilometres to get here. Better still, they are part of the EU and use the euro, which is now so devalued they couldn’t afford the gas to come all the way around the world to fight us.

I was a bit disappointed in John Key’s rushing off and apologising about it all to Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö when they were both in Seoul. He should have taken a lesson from his Korean hosts; North and South never apologised to each other and they’re still theoretically at war nearly 50 years after most of the shooting stopped.

There is an economic theory that a war can be quite good for a country’s economy; you end up mobilising your entire nation’s industry to make munitions and the cash begins to flow. For example, Sanitarium could give up trying to make Marmite and start producing anti-tank weapons – you get more for a bazooka than you do for a 400g jar of yeast extract.

The only downside of war is that bit about destruction and death, but we’ve solved that issue by being far enough away from each other that we can’t actually fight. We would simply impotently stand shouting insults at each other and building up some really cool arsenals. We’d have a couple of squadrons of F-16s, some real tanks rather than those incontinent LAVs and a fleet of kick-ass warships in no time at all.

Then Brownlee hopped on Key’s shirt tails and made his own apology, saying, “If I’ve offended people, I’m sorry about all that.” For heaven’s sake! They call themselves politicians? Do neither of them realise that a good war usually unites the country behind the political party in power? Every US president in the past half century or more has realised that fact. Maggie Thatcher knew that; it’s why she went to war with Argentina over the Falklands. What were the Argentines going to do? Bomb London with export beef carcasses? She won the next election.

A fine phoney war would galvanise the nation behind the National Government. There would be flags flying, the national anthem being sung and we’d all get nice new uniforms to wear. If I were John Key, watching my party’s public support dribble away poll by poll, I’d seriously consider the idea of re-insulting the Finns. A Mexican stand-off with Helsinki could be just what he needs. Go on. Finland has a murder rate twice our own, its health system sucks and it has many more unemployed. Give it a go. And make Gerry Brownlee Minister of War. He loves a good scrap.



- More laughs provided by the Kiwi House of Comedians..!


John -