The NZ gardening ban

Joshua Drummond at The Spinoff highlights a great thread at Reddit about how personal gardening in NZ is banned. It happened a year ago but came back to life when people attributed the avocado shortage to the ban on gardening.

Some of my favourite extracts:

Actually tariffs to protect farmers are about as logical as banning gardening to protect farmers!

A great film by the way.

Josh also does a short history of gardening on his own site:

after the 1981 Spring Bok Choi riots, about which more hardly needs to be said, Prime Minister David Lange was cautious about allowing further gardening activities. With New Zealand public opinion on the resumption of gardening split, after Muldoon’s hastily-called Snapdragon Election, Lange was invited to debate an earnest American private horticultural advocate, Jerry Falwell, at the Oxford Club. The moot: Personal Gardens are Morally Indefensible. It looked for a time like Lange had met his match as the Falwell led an impassioned defense of the role private gardens played in winning World War Two and in the balance of power in the postwar period.

“I can smell the fertiliser on your breath,” Lange retorted, famously…

Love it.