In Ham's Way.

"Oh" you might think "It is that little old New Zild again with the sheeps and cows and mad Sir Mr Peter Jackson of Rivendell, innit"

But no, there is more to this green and peasant land than just nice things. We have a long and proud tradition of being killed or killing in other people's wars. To this end we have armed forces and they are of particular note to this blog when we are trying to flog off old jets to people called  Hoss. Sadly this did not go ahead and we got a "bad seller" rating on e-bay chiz, chiz.
In recent times, NZ has responded personfully to requests from Iraq for jolly good soldiers to go over and teach their jolly bad soldiers how to do the soldiering. This request is an "Operational Matter' of course and so the general public has not seen it and the fact that it came so soon after the Prime Mincer (Hoban 1982) was over in the US hanging around the White House is like, whatevs.
At this stage everyone thought  that there was only a short time to go until the teaching time was up and the summer holidays begin, yeahaar.
Until Mr Spoilsport Prime Minister said "Ah no, youse have to stay there because it is a seething hellhole and indications are that the seethiness is not going to go down anytime soon, so sucks to be you" in typical Key government fashion.
This brings into play one of the great characters of the administration Gerry Brownlee. Yes, Gerry "the Peacemaker" who nearly engineered an incident with Finland and respectful co-worker with the Christchurch mayor in the re-build i.e. "Parker a clown".
So we are dealing with one of nature's gentlemen here. Who is the Minister for Defence, because honestly he can't do too much there, eh?
So what did Gerry have to say about the extended education mission in Iraq? With his intellect turned all the way up to 11 Brownlee opined

“We’re not insulated from the sort of thing that we saw in Orlando.” – Gerry Brownlee, re NZ extension of troop deployment in Iraq

A truly memorable moment in NZ political history. Sadly, one of NZ's better radio journalists got to talk to Gerry and it was a bit of a slam dunk as the kids say:

Gerry Brownlee: "New Zealand is not immune to the sort of lone wolf attacks that you saw in Orlando a couple of weeks ago ... this is as much our war as it is anybody else's."

Susie Ferguson: " ... Are you saying that deploying New Zealand troops to Iraq makes New Zealand safer from homicidal homophobes?"

I imagine Gerry walking the streets of Wellington shouting at beggars for hours after this.