A brief insight on the Queen's Birthday Awards and Gongs! The Knighthoods are usually reserved for rich business people, those that push their own barrows, Judges, doctors, professional sports people or ex-politicians and so on.
Almost without exception these people have earned large sums of money in their various fields and that surely can't be counted as being a public service. For heaven's sake, they are being paid for what they do. Now they are given a licence to perform on the lucrative public speaking circuit if they so wish.
If history is anything to go by, Knighthoods were always a good guide as to who to avoid and nothing much has changed. It's a pity they were ever reinstated, presumably only to give some perceived respectability to recipients when the irrelevant New Zealand honours were sufficiently non-descript enough to meet the need. In other words, they meant very little to the NZ public generally and that's as it should be. The Order of New Zealand (ONZ) is something else again.
I am appalled at the hypocrisy of Mr Cullen in accepting a Knighthood, having due regard to his track record in promoting and supporting the abolition of them, it is the one good thing achieved by Labour in over a decade of power.

E Henry, Tauranga.