WHAT were they on?!
I’m still spewing after reading the 2010 Quality of Living rankings from the New York-based Mercer firm. 
For businesses (and governments) it’s always a big call as to how much to pay your employees when you send them to work and live in different places round the planet.
For example, most people would chop off their right arm to be posted to Paris, but might need a bit of a pay top-up before they felt enthusiastic about shifting the family to downtown Baghdad. 
Anyway, to give the corporate world an easy-reference checklist of global locations, human resources experts Mercer have run their resourceful tape measure over 221 of the leading cities and ranked them according to how “liveable” they are. 
I think that’s a brilliant idea.  However, gentle reader, their final rankings are, quite frankly, scary.
I don’t know where to begin, so why not start with the most obscene of all:  despite having no known connection with human culture or rational standards of civilised behaviour, Auckland (generally called Orc-land by people who have been there) was ranked the fourth most “liveable” city in the world (I’m serious).
Not only did it beat splendid paragons of human life like Rome (with the Colosseum, fantastic pizzas, and current holders of the football world cup) and Tokyo (13 million gee-whizz sushi-connoisseurs, everything works and no crime), but our beautiful, seductive, absolutely wonderful Wellington is ranked Number 12 i.e. eight places behind Orc-land. 
Forgive me while I collapse on the floor catatonic.  This is not good.  And it’s not right.  It’s very not right.  Did no one at Mercer bother going to Auckland?  Have they not seen the place?  Have they spoken with the average duh-Aucklander and tried to get any sense out of them? 
Surely they could have consulted the World Health Organization, or Interpol, to get a heads-up on that wasteland of prisons and nouveau riche up past Pokeno.  Dear me, what were they thinking...
When I think of Auckland, I see the Bassett Road machine-gun murders, the degrading marketing of sexual gratification on just about every corner in the inner city, children left in cars while their parents gamble away their limited cash at Sky Tower casino, pigs being slaughtered on the back lawns of suburban houses, media wives being brutalised, nightmarish road systems that are either choked to gridlock or caught in the crossfire between police and escaped criminals, young women on motorbikes parading their sagging breasts before salivating lowlifes in Queen Street, plus ethnic gangs, drugs galore, killer dogs and college brawls; and, yuk, the North Shore mayor urinating on city streets while besmirching Rodney Hide. 
And don’t get me started on economics.  (The Super City agency asked for a start-up budget of $34 million. In only a few months, that’s ballooned out to $112 million. And yes, you pay.) 
“Liveable”? The lunatics have taken over the asylum.  And they’re laughing all the way to the bank.