Competing Voices:
#1 - Journalism bears its middle class, would-be social climber teeth on this baby. P is formerly a working-class, or worse, poor scourge. It's the preserve of ugly, misshapen men with a mess of tattoo on their faces and arms, and for pitiful wenches with a mouthful of rotting teeth. You tut-tut and imagine how bad it is for the children, who you can feel just AWFUL for right now. Methamphetamine is a glorious social tripwire. It's where that oaf who can seemingly afford to live on your street suddenly, whose shirts are more expensive and cars more numerous than yours, made his ill-gotten gains. You just wait for his commupance.

Latterly, P is also the downfall of the spoilt rich. Millie Holmes is fantastic because she's a walking, slurring, hollow-cheeked exemplar of how those with too much wealth can and will fuck up monumentally. Suddenly, middle New Zealand can extend its patronising social sanction below and above itself - both ways lie fundamentally indolent and idle children, parents who care more about their own material wellbeing (be it their dole bludging or their million dollar salaries! Not like my small, humble business) and a superb cautionary tale, the subject of women's suburban running groups and water cooler conversation. P is a social divider, suddenly, that excludes the middle class and implicates those who don't read the paper, and that well-off nouveau aristocracy simultaneously. It's a newspaper staff of comfortable 40 something upper-middle income bracketeers' news story come true.

2. Cynical would be hack: the papers were fucking five years behind on this shit. I could've have written a 3000 word expose on what Millie Holmes was getting up to in 2003 via hearsay and private girls' school acquaintances, and I never met the poor girl. Lift your gossip game.

3. First post lalz.