The highs and lows of modern life

The all-male cabal that runs NZ Incorporated, Key, English and Joyce assure us that the rock star economy is still rocking despite declining dairy prices and a falling dollar. It’s a line they must take to keep our spirits up whether it represents the real position or not.

This is not how governments normally operate. Famed cultural critic and satirist H. L. Mencken reckoned the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Meanwhile serial protestor Claire Bleakley, who cut her teeth on expostulate action earlier this century opposing the use of 1080 and is president of GE Free NZ, recently led her fellow dissidents around the metropolitan streets of Featherston protesting against the elusive Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement. Mr Groser, who sounds and looks like someone right out of the kids card game Happy Families, assures us he won’t sign the dreaded document until he’s convinced it’s in New Zealand’s best interests.

The populace has often been unnecessarily alarmed. In 1970 Hal Lindsay wrote the best seller The Late Great Planet Earth warning us that we would never get to see the dawn of the new millennium. Not long after that international think tank The Club of Rome said we were about to run out of oil and the end result would be catastrophic for the world.

We now know the world is awash with oil and at a new low of $40 a barrel American petroleum barons are laying off staff and plugging their wells until the price gets back up to a level where they consider it is worth extracting.

Last week The Wall Street Journal warned of another recession looming as the Dow Jones plunged and said the US, with a balance of payment deficit in the trillions, has no money left to stop the outcome really biting hard this time around.

I’m starting to sound like The Club of Rome myself and H. L. Mencken will have thought that I should have gone into politics, but I suspect the real threat for the world today is the propensity for some very clever people to hack into significant computers. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, now both living in forced exile, have done so to devastating effect, but the real risk lies with ISIS types breaching the world’s banking system.

And already would-be adulterers are running scared because the Ashley Madison website has been skilfully sabotaged.

Twenty-two thousand New Zealanders are said to be implicated, many of them Aucklander’s who are probably wanting to emulate the antics of their meandering mayor.

Apparently 85 per cent of adultery aspirants are men, but only 15 per cent are of the fairer sex. Just how Ashley Madison was going to achieve partnership pairing is a mystery, unless the ladies were going to be asked to do multiple shifts.

American comedian Dave Barry once asked his audience: “Do infants have as much fun in infancy as adults have in adultery?” It was a rhetorical question, but if asked, I would have said, “No, they probably don’t.”

“No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” -Edmund Burke

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Anatomy of a murder

A quaint expression once used when a young lady weds a man considered not to be her equal was that ‘she’d married below her station.’ In today’s egalitarian society the saying has all but disappeared from the vernacular, but I’m going to reinstate it by suggesting that Millie Elder-Holmes married below her station.

Except of course she didn’t marry Connor Morris; she was merely his partner.

Back in the good old days when the ‘below her station’ was in common usage “partners” were usually people you went into business with.

Videos at the housewarming party Ms Elder-Homes and Mr Morris were attending, taken just prior to the altercation that eventuated in his demise, show Morris verbally abusing his attractive partner and gesturing towards her in a frightening manner.

It’s hard to understand how some women find this sort of behaviour appealing.

The late Mr Morris had taken on celebrity status simply by his association with Ms Elder-Homes and as a result the trial of the man accused and eventually convicted of murdering him dominated our TV newscasts nightly over recent weeks.

The accused, Michael Murray, who had used a sickle on a pole to strike his victim, was seen each day sitting in the dock looking for all the world like a possum caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

I couldn’t blame him. Connor Morris was a prominent member of Auckland’s feared Head-Hunter’s gang. There are apparently over a hundred Head-Hunter gang members languishing in our ghastly jails.

The trial was something of an insight into modern Auckland society. Michael Murray had spent the day of the murder at theme park Rainbows End with two of his children aged 10 and 12 from a previous “relationship”. He took them back to a sleepout he often used at his sister’s home at 401 Don Buck Road where they had takeaways for tea, then played Guitar Hero on PlayStation. Murray’s present partner lives at another address, not disclosed for fear of reprisals, with their three-month-old daughter.

After playing Guitar Hero Murray smoked cannabis with his brother in an adjoining sleepout.

We hear a lot about our low-waged economy, but Mr Murray, a labourer who mainly builds retaining walls, can afford a day at Rainbow’s End, takeaways, a PlayStation and smoke cannabis while presumably paying child support for his two older children.

Meanwhile at 425 Don Buck Road Connor and Millie were at a housewarming party at his sister Cymmion’s home when some of the guests decided to go to get some pineapple juice to replenish their cocktails from a service station down the road. Connor wanted cigarettes so they agreed to buy those as well. They bumped into guests from a 21st birthday party bash at 403c Don Buck Road which was next door to where Mr Murray was entertaining his children and smoking cannabis.

The rest, as they say, is history.

From the comfort of my living room I had concluded that Murray was guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. The jury of course heard more than I did and decided otherwise.

But then again a jury is really just twelve people chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

“Murderers are really very agreeable clients. I do think murderers get a very bad press.” - John Mortimer

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A Disney view of the jungle

When we were first married we built a home on a 200 acre farm our meat company owned in Norfolk Road. I decided to assume the role of laird of the manor and to do this I needed to buy a rifle and go hunting. Rifle as in a 22 calibre model commonly known as a “pea” rifle, and hunting as in rabbits. The back of the farm bounded the Waingawa River where there were rabbits galore.

Mr Harold King, notable gunsmith from King and Henry, sold me a brand new rifle at a modest cost and I proceeded to the riverbed site and took aim at my first wild animal. It wasn’t difficult; there were plenty to choose from and my first shot hit the target, but didn’t kill it; it was now writhing in agony in front of me. I knew what I had to do, but hated having to do it. I put the front end of the barrel between the rabbit’s pleading eyes and fired the fatal shot. I discovered there and then that I could never be a hunter; I was a wuss.

There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that due to the career I was born into, over the next thirty or so years I was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of sheep, cattle-beasts and pigs, but couldn’t bear the thought of actually killing an animal myself.

So you will have concluded by now that I wouldn’t have had much sympathy for the American dentist who paid $US50,000 to go to Zimbabwe and shoot a majestic lion and then find himself hounded by the vociferous and sometimes ghastly sections of humanity who flood the new phenomenon known as the social media.

But there are always two sides to every story, and sometimes only one side gets told.

A Zimbabwean named Goodwell Nzou, writing to the New York Times, had this to say: “Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “loved” or a “local favourite” was all media hype? Did they choke up because Cecil was murdered or because they confused him with Simba from the Lion King?

“In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or given an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.”

He went on: “Recently a 14 year-old boy in a village not far from mine wasn’t so lucky. Sleeping in his family’s fields, as villagers do to protect their crops from hippos, buffalo and elephants that trample them, he was mauled by a lion and died.”

Americans tend to romanticise animals by giving them actual names and then hastily join a hashtag train and turn an ordinary situation - and there were nearly a thousand lions legally killed over a decade by wealthy foreigners who paid serious money to prove their questionable prowess - into to what seems to Zimbabwean eyes to be a maniacal media maelstrom.

Nzou concluded, “We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.”

How things change. At the dawn of time if you killed a lion and could fix peoples teeth you would be the king of everything.

“I like animals as much as the next guy, but if I’m hungry, I’ll eat a panda sandwich.” – Howard Stern

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Change for change sake

The Prime Minister wants to change the flag, Andrew Little wants to change the national anthem and the leader of the opposition, Winston Peters, doesn’t want to change anything, except perhaps the number of Asians we allow to settle in our Godly of nations.

Meanwhile Masterton’s lady Mayor goes on the airwaves exalting the good citizens of the town to buy locally and support our business people. It’s a good message; and timely too.

With no data to confirm this, I suspect the only growing enterprises at the moment are the courier companies whose vans are seen speeding around the town delivering goods from countries afar. If Mr Key and Mr Groser’s claims are to be relied upon, and the Trans Pacific Partnership is passed into law, these goods are likely to become even more competitive.

I walked up the main street of Hamilton one Saturday morning recently looking for somewhere to have lunch. Provided I liked Asian food the choice was overwhelming, but the number of empty shops was surprising and distressing. The once buoyant Victoria Street has all but died. I asked the locals what had happened and they told me the Tainui people, bursting with money from well-managed investments, had recently built a huge shopping centre at Te Rapa with acres of free carparks. They said no one wants to feed parking meters these days and so many main street businesses had failed.

Local retailers here are facing the same problem. Masterton’s pseudo-mall, the Warehouse sells most everything and as a result you can get a park in Queen Street pretty well whenever and wherever you want. But you pay.

The shopkeepers want the council to consider a parking regime-change allowing the first ninety minutes free.

They cite the story of a town in West Wales called Cardigan where vandals smashed all the parking meters and the council can’t afford the 22,500 pound bill to have them repaired.

This has led to a surge of visitors to the town centre with shop owners claiming sales are up by 50 per cent. The small retailers, who were still paying exorbitant property taxes, and seeing an ongoing decline in business, have long blamed parking meters pushing shoppers away from local high streets to out-of-town superstores.

And so change is in the air, the flag, the anthem and perhaps the parking meters.

But it was recently brought to my attention that the biggest change facing my generation is Facebook and not really coming to grips with just how it works.

An old friend emailed me last Friday with these claims:

“Presently,” he said, “I am trying to make friends outside of Facebook while applying the same principles. Therefore every day I go down the street and tell passers-by what I have eaten, how I feel, what I have done the night before and what I will do tomorrow night. Then I give them pictures of my family, my dog, and me gardening and spending time pruning roses. I also listen to their conversations and tell them I love them.”

And apparently it works.

He said “I already have three persons following me: two police officers and a psychiatrist.”

To change and to change for the better are two different things - German proverb

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Farewell to an old friend

A couple of weeks ago I received a letter from the editor of the Dominion-Post. In the first paragraph she thanked me for my ongoing support as a subscriber - and so I have been, for more than fifty years - and then went on to inform me that the price was increasing and I needed to change my automatic payment - upwards.

In a fit of pique I emailed back and cancelled my subscription.

It wasn’t really a fit of pique; I have been contemplating doing this for some time. The price rise in low-inflationary times when interest rates are understandably going down just triggered a decision already made.

My reasoning was valid. My day starts when I wake at around 6 am and I grope in the dark for the iPad on my bedside table. I go to settings and tone down “display and brightness” in the predawn room and then proceed to read the NZ Herald online. Once absorbed, I then go to the Dominion-Post app which for some curious reason calls itself “Stuff.”

Ironically, by just adding “ed”, this is what I have told them to get, in respect of their price rise.

Next I go over to Twitter and read the front page of the Wall Street Journal which has loaded overnight.

I then spring out of bed - that’s an exaggeration - and go into the spare bedroom and jump on the treadmill, and in between monitoring my heart-rate and adjusting the speed and slope I watch my old friend Paul Henry strut his stuff (there’s that word again) on the strategically-placed television set in front of the exercise machine. By the time I have showered and dressed and presented myself at the breakfast table I’m full to the brim with news; much of it bad.

Mr Henry even has a segment called “Five things you don’t need to know today.”

So the trip to the front gate to pick up my Dominion-Post is really superfluous. In inclement weather it is sopping wet even though it arrives each day bound in a plastic bag that is obviously porous. On these occasions I have to set up a drying rack in front of the gas fire and by the time it dries out I have lost my appetite for reading it. I generally just it fold it up and put it in the recycle bin.

And so I fear for the future of the daily newspaper, something I have looked forward to all my adult life. I can’t imagine why the publishers have allowed me to read it for nothing on a variety of devices. But it’s too late to draw back; no good locking the stable door once the horse has bolted.

I’m aware that there is a school of thought that believe there’s nothing quite like the look and feel of a real newspaper. I suspect this group were once closely aligned with the Fish and Chip Shop Owners Association. Now that nanny state has insisted on plain paper wrapping I regard this assertion as null and void.

“A newspaper is lumber made malleable, it is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.” - Jim Bishop

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Multicultural hotel comes good

A few weeks ago we ventured north to attend a significant birthday of a close relative and we decided to break the journey with an overnight stay at a resort town equidistant between the starting point and our destination. I looked up the internet to select a resting place and resolved to throw caution to the wind and go more upmarket than I would normally do. A five star hotel was offering a special at $199 a night and I decided it was past time when the heirs to Conrad Hilton’s empire could become partners in my credit card’s debit balance.

We arrived at the imposing establishment and entered the expansive reception area where an exceptionally wide desk offered the choice of three receptionists. An Indian man, an attractive young Asian woman and a more mature lady whom I was later to discover was of South African extraction and was, I gather, the assistant manager.

I can’t for the life of me think why I opted for the young Asian lady, but she was most welcoming and having taken an impression of my credit card proceeded to tell me that the room I had booked online was at the back of the hotel and did not afford the sort of scenery that I might I have expected from such a picturesque province. There was an available room she allowed in the recently upgraded heritage section of the hotel that was larger, better appointed and had a balcony with glorious views over the scenery that the area is noted for.

She then disclosed that this particular room would cost me a mere $55 extra. So $199 had now become $254, but how could I in all conscious turn down this goddess’s offer and so after the final flutter of her false eyelashes I agreed to the upgrade.

It was that weekend when New Zealand’s weather was most inclement and unaccounted-for road closures due to flooding meant the journey took more than an hour longer than we expected. So first up, once we had settled in to our superb room, was a cup of tea. No sign though of tea bags or coffee sachets, so we rang housekeeping and complained. The condiments were in a black box next to the hot water jug, said the disbelieving supervisor, but given that the shelving unit was black these are often hard to find, she conceded.

“Feel around”, I was advised, “They are sure to be there.” So I felt around - it was a bit like looking for missing Mayalasian flight MH370 - but I assured the doubting housekeeper that there was no black box in sight or even out of sight.

Eventually a statuesque Fijian lady arrived at our door with a black box chock full of a variety of teas and coffee options and after a careful search herself, reluctantly admitted that indeed no black box had been in the room.

Later, while waiting for a lift, the South African assistant manager approached us and apologised for the lack of tea and coffee and wanted to know did we have any other complaints?

I walked in where angels fear to tread and said there was. The bathroom door into the bedroom’s ensuite was made of solid glass. Frosted certainly, but the opaqueness dissipated somewhat when the light in the bathroom was turned on. Attending to ones ablutions was a private affair, I said, and given that the toilet was situated next to the door I didn’t think this was a particularly good architectural feature.

She was mortified; she could fix the beverage lack, but replacing all the bathroom doors was a little more than even a room charge of $254 could stand. She fled back to her desk.

Just before retiring that night the Fijian housekeeper knocked at our door and presented us with a bottle of wine, and some chocolates. This, she said, was an extenuation for the lack of tea bags and coffee sachets.

The next morning we woke to an envelope that had been pushed under our door with a letter from the assistant manager enclosed apologising for the inconveniences we had encountered. To compensate she offered my wife and me two fully-cooked breakfasts at no charge in their award-winning restaurant whose supervising chef was none other than MasterChef judge Simon Gault.

I don’t know what the breakfasts would have cost had we actually paid for them, but I suspect they would have more than covered the $55 extra we were charged for the room with the view.

And the moral of the story?

If you’re going to complain at a hotel, make sure it’s an expensive one.

“Do Not Disturb” signs should be written in the language of the hotel maids. -Tim Bedore

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The NZ Greek connection

When I was in my early twenties I went to live and work in Sydney. In a butcher’s shop obviously and the first culture shock was how hard my colleagues laboured. I thought we worked hard in our shop back home, but I had to step up a notch to keep up with the Aussies. We started work at 7 each morning finishing at 5 Monday to Friday. The shop was open Saturday mornings from 7.30 to 12.30 but not everyone needed to work Saturdays as much of the preparation had been done.

In fact the bosses reward for working hard Monday to Friday was to offer you Saturday morning employment. We were all keen, but only the hardest workers were taken on. Eventually I got up to speed and was invited to do the Saturday morning shift which, wage-wise, was at time and a half.

Once we’d cleaned up on a Saturday we would repair to the pub for a few beers and a counter lunch; then we were off to the footy. Unlike New Zealand where the pubs closed at six, back then in Oz they stayed open till ten. So it was a night out on Saturday, usually at one of the well-appointed rugby league clubs and often a barbecue on Sunday after playing golf on a public course.

I soon came to the conclusion that the Aussies worked hard and played hard.

It was decades later that kiwi retailers decided they too would like to open on Saturday mornings, but the Shop Assistants Union wouldn’t have a bar of it. Strikes were held all over the country; even my own staff went out on strike and were only placated when I promised I would never force any of them to work on a Saturday.

This meant that for the rest of my retail life I mostly manned the shop on a Saturday with help from my family.

Aussie was subsequently to become a haven for New Zealand workers wanting to seek a new life and they moved across the Tasman in their tens of thousands. Most caught the Australian work ethic, but a disproportionate number found that the Aussie climate, in Queensland particularly, was conducive to living on the dole and going surfing and the name “Kiwi bludger” entered the vernacular.

The Australian government eventually decided enough was enough and cut out all welfare payments for New Zealand migrants, even though they still had to pay full taxes on their earnings. Entry was tightened up and passports were re-introduced.

There was often talk of an economic union with a single currency between the two countries, but the Australians were too canny to agree to that. The Australian dollar has always been worth more than its kiwi equivalent and I have generally considered this discrepancy was in direct relationship to how hard people toiled in each country.

So I see parallels with the situation in Europe. I could never fathom how the one currency, the Euro, could apply when work attitudes of varying countries are so diverse. For the dour hard-working Germans to have the same value currency as the Greeks or other questionable European nations seemed an implausible concept.

Although it was response to their socialist Prime Minister’s clear instructions I was shocked to see the Greeks dancing in the streets after overwhelmingly voting “No” to austerity measures that would allow them to pay back the debts they owed.

I imagine they will pay a high price for this moment of mad frivolity; it’s as if the realities of lending and borrowing between nations are just a grand fiction which can be written off without repercussions.

The handsome yet delusional Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras blames the European Union for Greece’s problems, but the voters and their spendthrift ways and their addiction to an unaffordable lifestyle is the real culprit.

What we are witnessing is not just a struggle about repaying money owed, or regional power or even democratic accountability. This must surely be the endgame for the mistaken belief that socialism can actually work. This failed Marxist theology is being continually promoted by sadly misguided left-wing fantasists, some of whom are now leading Greece and its hapless inhabitants into economic ruin and political chaos unless Europe’s hard working economies bail them out once again. No one seems to want to reassess the last fifty years and own up to the fact that to tax the rich and redistribute money that does not exist is never going to work and it never has.

The internet humourists have come up with their own answer. The new Euro they reckon will be printed on Greece-proof paper.

"Voters have some responsibility for the choices they make. That is what distinguishes mature democracy from the students union." - Janet Daly

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