Free Doctors' visits? Free Prescriptions? The Alliance leader says these election bribes will cost $850million. Says Libertarianz Tobacco Deregulation Spokesman Joy Faulkner: "This is the exact amount taken off tobacco consumers to pay for the cost of their health!"

Anderton says the money for this bribe will come from what one Alliance pamphlet calls "fat pigs" - those who earn over $60 thousand a year.

"But hang on a minute," says Faulkner, "he would be collecting the whole lot off we smokers, which is ironic considering that he and his ilk - his coalition partners, the creators of the anti-smoking agenda - refuse treatment to the very people he proposes should be paying everyone's health bill."

"This is not my idea of justice," says Faulkner. "When I am already paying for my own medicine and doctor's visits, and are likely to be forced to pay for everyone else's as well then I will, against all my libertarian principles, be cancelling my private health insurance. And so should all other smokers."

ENDS

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>