And so we agree wholeheartedly with Coddington when she writes this bit:
Why are they this country's tall poppies? Just because they drive flash cars, have made a pile of money, and have glamorous women on their arms?
They certainly prove that money, no matter how much of it they take - and Hotchin along with his mate Eric Watson took $91 million in dividends - can't buy class.
Tall poppies are those into whose head the phrase wouldn't even enter.
People such as Justice Lowell Goddard who, as chair of the Independent Police Conduct Authority, has changed what was perceived as police doing a whitewash of complaints against themselves, into a speedy, constructive watchdog.
The latest report outlining improvements needed in child abuse investigations is a good example of what Goddard has done to this once fusty institution.
There are hundreds of other examples, but the rich-listers who have benefited from investors' lost savings are not tall poppies.
They're just casts from worms which might one day grow tall poppies, and they well deserve to be hounded for not paying their bills.
If these people died tomorrow, would they leave New Zealand a better place? I think not.
They are, as George Orwell wrote in his 1940 essay The Lion and the Unicorn, "an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the idle rich, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to.
The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog."
It's hard to disagree with anything that Coddington has written there. If flashy displays of wealth are what creates tall poppies, the garden needs to be rotary-hoed, in our humble opinion.
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