The PR Blog

It was 1971 and a cold winter's day in New Zealand's central volcanic plateau. An area with abundant lakes and it was a yachtie's paradise. My parents owned a house on Lake Tarawera - a most forbidding yet beautiful lake. But was renowned for treacherously mischievous winds that could change direction, change speed and taunt even the most seasoned of sailors. 

My brother and I were keen yachties and, even at 15 years of age, I fancied myself as a bit of a seasoned veteran. ( As you do when you are young and impervious to fear.) My older brother, then about 19 years old, had joined me for a quick afternoon sail before heading home to a warm fire and the comfort of our parent's lakeside home. 

When Benjamin Disraeli said “I must follow the people. Am I not their leader? “ he was on the money.  Leaders do not seek to create a new world of their vision, but to preserve or improve the vision that the people already have and hold dear. Or they may seek to create the vision that the people have.

Either way, it is not THEIR vision; it is the vision of the People.

Trump got this. He understood that his role was not to ask his People to follow him but rather to allow the American People to get on with their lives, make money, make babies and make memories of which they could be proud.

His role? To Follow His People.

On Earth Day, a 50-year-old environmentalist and photographer from Colorado named Wynn Alan Bruce lit himself on fire outside the US Supreme Court.

Friends of Bruce, who subsequently died, said he was worried about climate change.

In his classic dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell famously wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” This striking image served as a potent symbol for totalitarianism in the 20th Century. But as Caylan Ford recently observed, with the advent of digital health passports in the emerging biomedical security state, the new symbol of totalitarian repression is “not a boot, but an algorithm in the cloud: emotionless, impervious to appeal, silently shaping the biomass.” The new forms of repression will be no less real for being virtual rather than physical.

" When we have people who applaud this, what hope do we have? This video is not pleasant, but it must be seen. Thousands of innocent unborn children are torn to pieces every day in the U.S. because most people simply don't know what abortion actually does. With the exception of the final scene (a second-trimester fetus), all of the video you will see depicts children who were killed during first-trimester abortions. Please do not watch this if you are easily upset. I watched it and I am weeping. "

Australian politicians have drifted a long way to the left since the days of Robert Menzies and Arthur Fadden. Starting with Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Don Chipp and Bob Brown, there has developed a monotonous uniformity in main-stream Australian politics.

Over the years, a green slime has infected all major parties - they now differ in details but not in principle. This greening of politics has reached the stage when a politician like Malcolm Turnbull has trouble deciding whether to join the Greens, the ALP or the Leafy-green Liberals.