I like my poppies red, but . . .

I have to say, I’m somewhat nonplussed by the opposition to the White Poppies that Wellington “peace” activists plan to sell “just one day before the annual RSA red poppy day street appeal.”

Sure, these are the munters who regularly interrupt ANZAC Day commemorations at Wellington’s Cenotaph with jeering, flag-burning and naked protests—whose pacifist luminaries were somehow found with guns, including a sniper’s rifle, in the ‘Urewera 16’ police raids--but on the issue of the White Poppies I don’t see what the problem is.

I don't agree with them or their argument, and I'm not likely to buy one of their poppies myself, but it seems to me they're perfectly entitled to sell them in whatever market they can.

And I don't buy either the argument that they're competing for the same market. That the white poppies will somehow reduce the sale of red poppies. Why would it?  Last year the Peace Movement poppies earned them just $5000.  That’s hardly competition—even if they were competing for the same market, which they’re not. They’re selling a different-coloured product representing something very different to the red poppy—and no-one who is even moderately awake is likely to mistake the white poppies’ unwashed patchouli-smelling sellers for an old digger selling “the real thing.”

So I’d suggest that those opposed to the sale of the white poppies simply realise that the sale of the white poppies is an example of precisely the sort of freedom the old diggers were fighting for—the freedom to protest—and reflect that the more opposition to them they foment, the more publicity they give them.