Sat here in the Northern Hemisphere, I am ridiculously pleased to see that the New Zealand Herald (my first career choice out of school in 1969!) can still behave like a newspaper. Key and his donkeys are clearly unsafe, but it beats me who you can elect instead. Any country that can consistently elect Winston Peters shouldn't be allowed out at night.

There is a discussion on Linked In in a Kea (“New Zealand’s Global Network”) Group on the subject, in particular that New Zealand could and should do better.
The thrust seems to be that these ex-pats are dismayed that a country that relies on a clean green image can be so disinterested in meeting its obligations. That seems an obvious problem to me but if nobody actually in the country can fire up the issue then people in France and Hong Kong and the UK have no chance. One contributor suggests James Shaw is a “returned” Kiwi who is trying to do something useful. Sadly James ( http://www.jamesshaw.net.nz/ ) is a Green party member.

Some nice vignettes of the era. For someone like me, born in 1951, it was all just a continuation of "idiots versus hooligans" from the '60s. The young copper in 1969 who told me not to call him sir "in New Zealand we call each other mate" was not so civil in the 70s when my hair had 5 years uncut growth.
I do like your "idiots versus hooligans", I'll save it for my book. Ha!

Ye gods, I lit a few fuses. Anyhow, don't see fighting as heroism necessarily. Research suggests a large number of soldiers shoot to miss which kinda spoofs hero angle. In WW2 the buggers got sent, didn't always volunteer, so is it just inertia?
Don't know what a straw man is. I'm in IT and they are everywhere and signify nothing.

My mate got caught in the draw, embraced it with enthusiasm. On leave told us (all looking like poor copies of Zappa) how he and some of his mates were on a railway platform along with a long haired bloke. They harassed and tormented this guy. Heroes all, apparently. Took 12 months for my mate to bleed off the killer instinct. Bought a Morris Minor, took up painting.

No arguments, just mentions. But the word courageous pops up in the post after yours. Don't think I didn't chew over the options when I thought I might find myself in the army, let alone go somewhere and get shot. I just get the feeling the objector subject gets biffed in just in case there is too much of a hint of admiration for ex squaddies.
Dangerous subject, worse than politics.

Not balding but aging. Trying to make the point that it may be aging that makes you not generation, thus maybe my old man's attitudes were more to do with his age than his generation. Then again, could be whistlin'.

Pardon the late butting in, I too was up for that last draw but my birth date didn't come up. I was not so sanguine about the risk of ending up in Vietnam as a conscript as Joe appears to have been. This was shaping up to be the nightmare that my Dad endured and I thought I had escaped. Hadn't allowed for American stupidity and Muldoon insecurity. I was just out of the discipline of school and didn't have any intention of taking on another, I was growing my hair like almost every young bloke, the revolutionary optimism of the 60's was slow to fade and life beckoned. Not death and the art of death.
But I appear to have aged fast. The constant wheeling out of the conscientious objector and the faint hint that this was real heroism begins to grate these days. I could never resolve whether it took more guts to go or not to go but bailing out was not braver. Having seen the occasional UK vet in a chair minus any limbs, I suspect they might swap 5 or 6 years in the can to get those pieces back. Maybe it is just too cosy liberal round here. And as for how long ago this stuff was, a bloke on BBC radio 4 this morning pointed out that the First World War was closer to the sixties than the sixties are to today. And maybe I'm closer to death now than I was ever going to be in 1969.

My old Dad spent his war in North Africa and then Italy. He never said a lot but had a stack of photos, including one taken from under a truck in the middle the desert. In the far distance can be seen a German fighter curving around. My Mum tells me he had shout out loud nightmares for years into the fifties. His health was a mess and he died at 54. Mum's boyfriend later on was a North African veteran as well, and as he got older he talked more and more. One night in my Mum's kitchen with him and my son (who had a brief dalliance with military life but couldn't hack the discipline), he started talking about Cassino, bodies and bits of bodies, and being terrified all the time. Then this big old fella in his eighties began to cry and could talk no more. He'd been carrying this shit around for 50 or 60 years.
I work now with a young woman engaged to a bloke in Afghanistan, beats me how she lives with tension of the constant flow of bodies and maimed back to Britain. Right or wrong, its no way to make a living whether you get sent as a conscript or a regular.

Arthur Allan and police misbehaviour was smack dab in an era when convential (unquestioning) respect for authority was racing down hill and the boys in blue from "Otahu" gave it all an extra shove.. The late 60's and the 70's was when police were carrying out politically inspired raids on bookshops and underground magazines, when they were called pigs with real meaning (an epithet shared by a beloved prime minister), and any sense of good and evil you got as a child got blasted away by stuff like Kent State. The clear attitude of authority to youthful complaints was "yeah, and what are you gonna do about it". I left school in 1969, and come the end of the 70's people like me were liable now to be the lawyers and accountants, the journalists and managers. And we could do something about it. My oldest fella is a policeman now, proud of the lad, and I do not envy the job he does. Time (and age) sure does change things. Pity it hasn't changed Mr Hutton. Sleeping easy is not the same as being in the right. And knowing you are right isn't proof.

Jools Holland, the enemy of great music. Can't stomach the pretentious no necked twat. If he has any musical skills they are submerged in his self important preening. Or am I just too angry?