Why race relations are so good in Hawkes Bay

Newspaper Hawkes Bay Todayhas discovered a nifty way of Maori bashing - deputy editor Paul Taggart attacked state spending, except almost all its examples are spending on Maori.

Sunday Star Times has a piece today on the paper's political bias. APN merged the Hastings and Napier papers to create Hawkes Bay Today, which just goes to show the dangers of the one-newspaper town.

Highlights: Editor Louis Pierard publishing an unsigned editorial on the eve of the election (rather than a week or so out, which would allow some debate) on "Why this government should go" alleging: "It plays God, meddling uninvited in cherished institutions... Its arrogance... Its hypocrisy... The soft bigotry of low expectations... Rules enforcing the acceptability of breastfeeding in public... It parades its vanity... It disarms us, insulting our friends and leaving us a South Pacific parasite... We say we've had enough of the smug, mother-knows-best conviction that a government can dictate the way we must live and the way we must think."

The Monday after the election associate editor Paul Taggart vented over the fact the MMP system meant ousted Labour MPs Russell Fairbrother and Rick Barker would stay in Parliament on the list. "They will be free to care even less about their home cities than before... What a joke. Under the former system, Fairbrother would have been defending criminals in Napier court, and Barker would have returned to calling strikes as a union official."