Broadcaster and columnist Mike Hosking slammed Auckland’s Council for allowing the farcical situation of traffic cones everywhere. He should get around more. The bloody things are clogging even the quietest streets everywhere in New Zealand.
I do get around, all over the world in fact, and can tell you that nowhere to my knowledge is there such a comparable cone blitz situation. And for that matter, never in the past 75 years in New Zealand did we endure this.
As the ratings show, Hosking is measurably a highly successful broadcaster and columnist. I don’t listen to the radio but certainly read his columns and whether I agree or not with his advocacies, I greatly admire his economy and word-smithing.
In his complaint he stated he was thinking of shifting to Queenstown, Los Angeles or Sydney. Opt for Queenstown and he could carry on with both his radio and columns but not so from LA or Sydney.
All of this induced a predictable outpouring of venom. I haven’t the slightest doubt the sole motivation lies with his success, this always a cause for hatred and spite with the loser element in this often petty-minded country. After all, if they don’t like his broadcasts or columns, no-one forces them to listen to or read him, but plainly they must do to be able to react as they do. That said, I gather his radio work is early morning. That’s arduous, having day after day to rise at a ridiculously early hour.
He should certainly think about tossing that in and sticking to the pleasures of writing. If so, all power to his arm and may he continue to upset the failure class, who in time-honoured fashion will begin their resentful letters to the editor with a lie, namely, “I normally never read Mike Hosking but…”.
There’s always been an Under Milk Wood cowardly element peeping from the curtains element in our national life, of envy-motivated bitterness towards achievers from the anonymity of keyboard bravado, and before the advent of the Internet, the anonymous letters. I copped my share of those including occasional death threats which upset my eldest daughter, who ignoring my advice to disregard them, pressured the Police to investigate. Lo and behold, little clues enabling tracing some of them, invariably to life-long failures seeing out their non-event miserable lives in provincial boarding houses.
Mike Hosking was right to condemn the cone absurdity. It’s out of hand in this country. He doesn’t pull his punches in his invariably well-reasoned critiques and we should be grateful to him, as indeed the non-failure classes mostly are, reflected by his polling successes.