Monday, October 08, 2007

And the turtle saga goes on and on

from Fiji TV tonight:
So it's wasn't an environmental group that ordered those dratted T-shirts! It was a bunch of tourists who thought the slogan funny. Yep. I think the NGO's would have been a little more cautious! And Mr Coddy tells it like it is now. Is that Mr Murray Coddy?
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9 Oct 2007 01:43:25
The Apparel company which printed t-shirts with the slogan, Save a Turtle, Eat a Methodist, says the orders were not made by any environmental advocacy group, as claimed by the Ministry of Environment. The Ministry of Environment in a memo to the Home Affairs Ministry has requested that the advocacy group responsible for the t-shirts, be given 24 hours to leave the country.

It has now been confirmed that the T-shirt orders were placed by tourists from the nearby resorts outraged by the mass slaughter of turtles during the recent Methodist Church conference in Macuata.

Windward Apparel of Savusavu took orders for t-shirts with the slogan, Save a Turtle, Eat a Methodist... These have already been delivered. Its the t-shirts that has infuriated the Environment Ministry, which is requesting Home Affairs to kick those responsible out of the country in 24 hours. Its also caused the Environment Ministry to request Home Affairs to assess and undertake background checks on all foreign funded environment groups in the country.

Windward Apparel says, the Environment Ministry has been misinformed. Coddy says, the intelligence arm of the Police Force has also come around calling.
Coddy says people making a fuss about the t-shirts seem to have forgotten the bigger issue at hand. In the business of putting what clients want on their t-shirts, Coddy says this is all part of freedom of speech. He says, calls by the Environment Ministry to kick those responsible out of the country are just going overboard.
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Pic of the Murray Cod in an Australian town used in a movie.

3 comments:

Julie Oakley said...

What a sense of humour failure!

Julie Oakley said...

And it won't help the tourist industry one iota *sigh*

Peceli and Wendy's Blog said...

I thought the slogan was very funny and certainly not to be taken seriously. And then to come out with a government minister reacting and threatening to send packing some NGO hard-working eco warriors! And now it was the tourists who did it!
People in Fiji seem to get in such a muddle - wanting goodwill, wanting tourists, then they just create havoc so readily!
w.