A while before Anzac Day in Feilding in 1977 (yes, I’ve told this one before but all of a sudden it seems freshly relevant) they asked me if I’d like to give a speech on behalf of the school.
Excellent, I thought, what a great platform to tell everyone what a mistake they all made voting for Muldoon. I welcomed any opportunity to show the narrow-minded conservative people of the town the faults in their thinking. I wrote a diatribe that drew an exceptionally, some might say objectionably, long bow between the tyranny our brave soldiers had fought and what we were letting back into our lives now.
I handed it over, imagining they would happily watch me wade into the fray, this being a school that very much prided itself on everything to do with public speaking and student self-government and free speech and whatnot.
