Simon Cunliffe

Paula Rebstock is a well-educated person with an impressive CV. She has worked in Treasury, for the Labour Department, in the Office of the Prime Minister, and headed the Commerce Commission. I wonder if she's ever spent time in a soup kitchen.

Smoking is bad for our health.

Apologies for returning to an old hobbyhorse, but now the Government and TVNZ have conspired definitively to put TVNZ 7 out to grass, and with it the last vestiges of public service television in this country.

There is the letter of the law, there is the spirit of the law and there is intent. Like the Prime Minister, I'm no lawyer but it seems to me most ordinary people do not have a high opinion those who behave with questionable intent to flout the spirit of the law, yet whose actions might not contravene the actual letter of it.

My friend's father had been a prisoner of war. That much I knew and not much else; and I knew it because he had named his only son after the man who, he said, had saved his life, by sharing his meagre rations of soup - little more than a watery gruel in which potato peelings had been stewed - during those unbearably harsh years of captivity.

I recall some time ago having an animated debate with an acquaintance over a policy of the newspaper for which I then worked. It concerned the letters to the editor column, and the rule that anonymous letters would not be published.

Roll up, roll up! Anybody out there, corporations or multinationals want a piece of the action in this country, just sing out. Make yourselves known.

What has the Accident Compensation Corporation got to do with JRR Tolkien?

Death may not be a particularly cheery subject to reflect on, but on occasion it pulls us up short and requires us to examine ourselves, our societies, and asks us to learn.

It does make you feel old - and a little out of the loop. Having trouble recalling when you were last invited to a foam party?