A good example are the clowns at Rotorua Lakes Council, who thought it was a wonderful idea to spend $90,000 of their ratepayers’ money to import mud from Korea as part of some ridiculous festival they were planning. However, howls of outrage from ratepayers, farmers and others about the waste of money, risk to our biosecurity and access to plenty of local mud in NZ forced the council to change its mind and cancel the Korean mud importation. Fortunately, this pressure from the agriculture sector and others made the council see sense, but it should never have happened in the first place.