Mike Butler: Holmes column firestorm burns

I have visited Waitangi Day on several occasions – never a Waitangi Day. I visited the treaty house since it is public property but not the marae since it is private. The people on the marae surely can carry on any way they please, since it is private property. If they wish to argue politics and abuse government policy, they are not alone. The problem occurs when vehement racial abuse is recorded by television news and beamed into households throughout New Zealand. Viewers can either agree with what they see, ignore it as having nothing to do with them, or get angry.

It seems that after years of ignoring it, Paul Holmes got angry and exercised his constitutional right of freedom of speech and poured his heart out in the NZ Herald on Saturday, February 11. This is what he wrote:

Waitangi Day produced its usual hatred, rudeness, and violence against a clearly elected Prime Minister from a group of hateful, hate-fuelled weirdos who seem to exist in a perfect world of benefit provision. This enables them to blissfully continue to believe that New Zealand is the centre of the world, no one has to have a job and the Treaty is all that matters.