The Politically Incorrect Show

Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 17/09/1999

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Friday September 17, proudly sponsored by Tuariki Tobacco Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
Music up, music down!
Just up the road from Radio Pacific is a bakery. It is bread-Heaven. Fresh, flavoursome loaves of every description which they slice on the spot (sandwich or toast thickness) - ordinary white, high fibre-white, cheese & garlic, cheese & bacon (my favourite), cheese & herbs, wholemeal loaves, fruit loaves (another favourite), lemon scrolls, apple scrolls with cinnamon, custard scrolls, pizza slices with various toppings. I reckon just about everything you could do with flour & yeast is done there, & it's all delectable. Equally delightful are the cheerful young ladies who serve behind the counter - always offering an extra carry-bag even when you obviously don't need one, always offering a "have a good afternoon" as you leave the premises eager to devour the purchases. One day recently the girls were all off work for some reason and the back room BOYS were out front doing the serving. This didn't occasion ME any particular distress, but some of the other male regulars in the shop at the same time were quite vocal in their protests!
A little further up the road is a greengrocer. Yesterday I went in to get some tamarillos, which I like to stew in brown sugar & honey. Yum! They were bagged up in lots of ten to a dozen. Some bags seemed to be full of under-ripened tamarillos, others full of over-ripened ones. I selected a bag of the latter. The greengrocer urged me to take a bag of the former instead, fearing that some in the bag I had chosen might actually be off. "No, no," I said, "these are fine, honestly. I had a good look at them." "Well, just in case," said the greengrocer, "I'll give you a another bag of the ripe ones for nothing." Which he did.
I stepped out onto the pavement thinking of the occasional Christian & socialist (usually both) callers to the programme who tell me that human beings, businesspeople in particular, are irredeemably rotten, malevolent creatures, just itching to rip each other off. This, they say, is the reason we must have a lot of government ownership & control (omitting to explain why people who opt to be in government are any less rotten than everybody else and why we should entrust such authority to them). This little stretch of Ponsonby Road would surely confound the Christian socialists, comprising as it does a second bakery, several lunch bars & cafes, a jeans shop, several banks, a bottle store, a hairdresser, etc., in all of which the product & service are as excellent as the baker's & the greengrocer's. The only thing that remotely smacks of government is the Post Office, and even that sports a sign telling you of all the wondrous new services they're offering now that private enterprise is allowed to compete with them. Why, they even open on Saturdays!
I suppose the Christian socialists will never tumble to the import of all this. Somehow that didn't bother me yesterday as I tucked into my fresh white loaf of bread and savoured the delicious caramel-like aroma of those ripe tamarillos stewing in their own juice, a little bit of water - and lashings of brown sugar. Yum!
Politically Incorrect Show where Yum's the word. 309 3099.