According to the group who are upset about the monopoly-duopoly that's happening in our grocery sector, you could save, at most per person, about $74 per year. That's if they were to have perfect competition in the sector, which obviously would be very hard to achieve.

Do you know what else costs you $80 a year?

A friend and I were chatting at the gym the other day and he showed me his rates bill, which he had kindly brought to the gym to encourage him to run faster.

There's an $80 targeted rate for the food compost bin. He said, what's that for? And I was like, it's the green bin that's on the street that no one uses. Then he was running faster than I've ever seen him run on the treadmill.

So apparently 60 to 65% of us don't use them. I know they have them in other parts of the country, in Auckland we've only got them just recently, so we're all getting a bit used to them. But $80 a year is what you have to pay.

And I got quite angry because if you're on a fixed income, $80 a year is a lot of money. If you're a pensioner and you cannot opt out of this service.

Who else can charge you for a service that you don't want or need?

What about a pensioner who does their own composting in the backyard? They can't opt out of it. They have to have this bin, and they have to pay $80 per year for the privilege.

It's like a barber giving a lady a beard trimmer and saying here, I'm going to charge you for that. I don't need it. Oh, well, you have to have it. Why? Just cause.

And you know what? They're all made of plastic, these bins, so how's that for the environment?

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I've got an amazing wonder drug to tell you about New Zealand, and it saved me in the last couple of weeks.

People are talking about it from top of the country to the bottom and it's not Ozempic.

No, I'm not taking Ozempic, though, I wouldn't mind trying it. I think a lot of people are curious.

David Seymour made this drug a priority. Yes, I'm talking about pseudoephedrine.

I felt sick, I took it, the symptoms disappeared.

I had a wedding recently and people said they wouldn't have come without it.

What must it be doing for our productivity as well? Fewer sick days.

I spoke to a friend of mine who's a mum, she's got young kids, and you send your kid to daycare, they get all the bugs under the sun, they bring the germs home. The kids are gross and they pass it on to mum and dad.

Mum and dad go down like flies, they take time off work, et cetera, et cetera. And then bam, pop the miracle drug. Pseudo mums and pseudo dads.

So they are absolutely over the moon about this. It's the drug we forgot we needed, isn't it?

I said to my friend, what about the meth addicts? Because that's the argument, you know, the meth addicts will get it and then they'll cook it up and it could be stolen.

It's the precursor to p and she said, I don't care, they'll find it anyway. And I just need to get through my work week and get the kids to school.

So thank you David Seymour for Pseudoephedrine. And thank you to Big Pharma. It's really underrated Big Pharma, a lot of people give it a hard time.

It's like big oil, you know, just sometimes they do good things.

So cheers to whoever it is that makes it.

This opinion piece was originally published August 30, 2024.

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Guilty verdicts have been reached in France's mass rape trial.

Dominique Pelicot's been jailed for 20 years after drugging and raping his wife Gisele and inviting dozens of strangers to do the same for over nearly a decade.

He was also found guilty of taking indecent images of his daughter and his two daughters-in-law.

Of the other 50 men on trial, 46 were found guilty of rape, two of attempted rape, and two of sexual assault.

Europe Correspondent Vincent McAviney told Andrew Dickens that there’s been some disappointment around the sentences for the other men, as they received sentences of between 5 and 8 years.

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