Oh no more horses horses, We're gonna swim like a fish

From our Court Reporter

Allie Gations (whoever she is) continued to swirl today around the conduct of Supreme Court Justice Wilson. Controversy raged, and a series of short but vehement cliches will bring showers to Westland and parts of Otago. Sorry, that was the Weather Report.

Alert readers will recall that Justice Wilson is currently in the dogbox for deciding, back when he was only on the Court of Appeal, to preside over a case without seeing any relevance in or any reason to disclose his $NZ 250 000¹ business debt to one of the two lawyers involved. Then the worms got out of the can somehow, and the fish² escaped from the kettle³, with Allie Gations and counter-Allie Gations flying hither and yon about the full extent of Wilson's later admissions to his judicial colleagues about his business obligations. Meanwhile the case came back to the Supreme Court for a re-appeal (while Justice Wilson had been appointed to that august body), and then for a recall of the re-appeal.

But reassuringly,

[Attorney-General] Mr Finlayson told The Dominion Post last month that he was a friend of Justice Wilson and the [1/4-million-dollar debt] was "incorrectly" characterised in some media reports as a "conflict" or "raising the possibility of a conflict".

Two questions remain unanswered:

-- Ideally the original case that came to appeal would be that of Justice Cocklecarrot and the 12 Red-Bearded Dwarves. If not, please make it so on the next recension of reality.

-- The business dealings between Wilson and Mr Galbraith QC turn out to involve not narcoterrorism, not people-smuggling of Ukrainian prostitutes, but WTF horse-breeding of all things.

I mean, WHAT IS WRONG with these people? They spend a life-time ascending slowly through the legal fraternity like a floater rising to the top of a septic tank, then they reach the pinnacle of the juristic profession and are welcomed with muffled fanfare into our country's governing elite. The opportunities for hedonism and self-aggrandisement are endless. But such is the narrowness of their vision that they choose to ornament their idle hours by buying and selling and paying other people to train feckin' horses. That is just sad.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would normally be the first person to consider the case but Dame Sian Ellis is unable to assess Wilson's case because she has her own horse-racing business deals with him.

The theme for this year's Riddled Write Like Thorstein Veblen competition is "The Place of Horse Racing as a Vehicle for Ostentatious Display". I would enter it myself, but Another Kiwi is a bad loser at Scrabble, so the words "otiose", "invidious", "nugatory" and "obviate" have mysteriously been expunged from the office dictionary.

My own appreciation of horses is limited to their culinary applications so conceivably I am missing something.

Notice complete absence of horse-meat from NZ market.

¹ Still worth a lot even in real money.
² May or may not be red herrings.
³ May or may not have the same albedo as the pot.