The irony of United States President Barack Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize while sending additional troops into Afghanistan was not lost on many.
He holds that conflict to be a just one to fight.
Afghanistan also highlights the difference between civilisation and anarchy and why respect for due process is vital.
The prospect of increased dairy farming in the Mackenzie Basin has led to a campaign opposing the idea.
The shame is that most people are not giving the Resource Management Act (RMA) a fair chance.
Of the 2247 visits to the respective submission pages on Environment Canterbury's website, fewer than 5%, 103, have bothered to visit the page containing detailed information about the applications.
The Greens have seemingly turned on something designed to give them what they have demanded in terms of strict emissions and effluent management.
But if due process ends in the negative, there will be no development.
In writing this, due process demands people take the time to inform themselves of the facts instead of glibly submitting blind. Submitting blind shows total disregard for due process and is one step down a very slippery slope.
While Federated Farmers wishes to see reform of the RMA, many of its provisions are sound, including the right for legitimate applications to be heard locally by experienced commissioners.
Seemingly, though, much of the concern is not about the concept of "loose housing" but its location.
The basis of the RMA is about managing the effects of activities rather than regulating the activities themselves.
In other words, the RMA guides the location of activities and controls those activities that might result in unacceptable environmental impacts.
RMA applications can be non-notified, whereby the consent application is deemed by a certain set of provisions in a plan to have minor effects, or notified, as the Mackenzie Basin applications have been.
As they were given prominent coverage in the Otago Daily Times, they were no secret either. The RMA and resulting hearings process are also quasi-judicial.
This means the hearings commissioners who assess these applications are performing a statutory function.
That there has been overt negative political comment is worrisome.
The Green Party is erroneously building up these applications with the most emotive of words.
Putting the location aspect aside as something for the hearing commissioners, is "loose housing" a terrible corruption of the New Zealand brand, as Dr Russel Norman, the Green Party co-leader, makes it out to be?
Not according to his colleague Jeanette Fitzsimons.
His former Green Party co-leader was so impressed when she saw a "herd home" in action, that she entered the following words on her website about good farming stories: "I must admit I was prejudiced about herd homes before I saw this one . . .NZ is known for grazing its animals outside all year round . . . surely we don't want to coop them up in barns away from the light and the sun and the fresh grass?
"However, now I'm a complete convert.
"The high roof is translucent and lets in lots of light.
"The overhanging sides are open so there is air movement through but rain and cold winds are kept out.
"The cows are free to move around, and there is fresh hay or silage under the eaves around the outside edges of the barn for them to feed at will.
"If I had any doubts about the animal welfare side of things, it was dispelled when I saw them waiting in the race to get back in again out of the rain."
No doubt we will hear scale thrown back at us, but Ms Fitzsimons seemingly accepts the principle.
So let me be very clear, Federated Farmers will never support factory or battery farming, but the mental picture the Greens conjure has tricked even the SPCA into taking a position at odds with what Ms Fitzsimons has seen with her own eyes.
There are several "loose housing" farms and these are held up by some regional councils as exemplars of best practice in effluent management.
Council policy is actively pointing dairy farmers down this road, so consistent this debate is not.
We will need standards, and where better to start that process than benchmarking against the European Union's organic production-friendly housing standard, and guidance from the United States and Canada?
Setting welfare standards for dairy cattle is why we have the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee.
Yet we are not having an informed debate about what those standards could be.
In fact, we are having the complete opposite, led by those who ought to know better.
So after years of putting acid on farmers to get farm animals off pasture during winter conditions, Ms Fitzsimons may have seen a vision of the future. That makes the Greens' grandstanding perplexing and inconsistent.
Green MP Kevin Hague on the backbenches pointed to a "loose housing" farm as being what the party wanted.
He also conceded the biogas and environmental benefits were real, but it apparently does not apply to these applications! All this from a party that has demanded we get animals off pasture and take urgent action on emissions.
Confused? It's no wonder many genuinely believe there will be 18,000 cows in one gargantuan barn and not 16 separate farms.
That is why I just ask this please give the applicants and the hearings commissioners all a fair go under the RMA.
- Don Nicolson is president of Federated Farmers.
