Public Address - Island Life (Home)

Don't need no steenkin' lockup | May 26, 2009 07:43

Here's how they will spin it:

"You voted for us because we told you we're the Tax Cut party, and gosh-darn it, we still really want to be. But Standard and Poors were going to push our cost of borrowing up half a billion if we didn't drop the Tax Cuts and the super fund contributions, so we had to ditch them. Sorry about that."

My question remains: weren't Tax Cuts supposed to be a growth engine? And isn't a growth engine what we need as the jobs dry up and the banks take back the houses?

Perhaps now we can start talking about growth engines that actually work.

(62 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Credit where it's due | May 25, 2009 14:02

We have a blog post ready to go, but we can't post it here yet, sorry. The new protocol requires that we first show it to either Standard and Poors or David Farrar.

We are confident of a positive outcome going forward.

(22 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Burn fat, not oil | May 25, 2009 09:08

You may have seen images on your TV last night of mild-mannered types such as myself storming the Auckland Harbour bridge and causing chaos. I blame Rod Oram. Whenever he turns up, things just go feral.

Optimist that I am, I had little expectation we'd get onto the bridge. When it happened, I had the sinking feeling that we were being set up for blow-back. Get two lanes of the bridge, and you'll merely slow it down. Get all four, and you will piss people off. If I were marooned on the motorway for an hour and a half, I'd be pissed off too.

And so it came to pass. The Herald says there were 2,000 of us; my own guess would be 5,000. Happy people. What we asked for was the chance to ride and walk across the bridge and remind everyone that there are other ways of moving Aucklanders around their city. We say our way is healthier, cheaper, and kinder to the planet. We say that it's time to do some fresh thinking. Time and time again, the only mode of transport that gets the lion's share of public funding is the almighty car. Even though it costs a fortune. And even though the oil is running out.

Cycle lanes could do us so much good, and make so much economic sense in the long run, it's remarkable, really, that we're having to argue over the soundness of them.

We fielded several very good speakers - because the affair began with a rally - and the best of them all was Christine Rose. She is on the ARC, and she is without question someone you want to vote for when Rodney Hide finally decides how you're going to do it.

What's the motto, Christine? Burn fat, not oil.

I was hoping for big things from last week's entrepreneur huddle, but if Give it a go bro is the best they've got, really: come on, guys. You're branding yourselves as something you're not.

How about you give this one a go: If there were a cycle lane on the harbour bridge (in the next three years, not in the thirty years time, thanks very much, Wayne Macdonald) - what do you think that might do to give Auckland tourism a shot in the arm?

Imagine a cycle lane that ran along the bays from St Heliers, across the bridge, around a ring road of the Devonport peninsula and up the East Coast Bays.

Wouldn't that help to persuade those thousands of tourists who arrive at Auckland international airport to stay here in the Auckland region more than one night? Sounds too good to be true doesn't it? Well, you can have it for vastly less than the billions being spent elsewhere in Auckland. It's practically spare change when you put it up against the car money.

And I now conclude by offering the magic incantation:

in time for the Rugby World Cup.

(117 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Symptoms persist | May 21, 2009 09:40

Since Deborah Hill-Cone moved into the neighbourhood, our local pharmacy has had to take an occasional media spanking. I wouldn't be surprised if there is now a note taped behind the counter alerting staff: if a woman with Harry Potter specs comes in, give her whatever she wants. Especially Pseudoephedrine.

I myself am the diffident respectful type who does whatever the chemist tells me. But I am beginning to feel stirrings of dissent. I turn to well-informed readers of this blog for their formidable medical, chemical and biological savoir-faire.

The pharmacist, upon filling your prescription for antibiotics, draws your attention to the information leaflet accompanying the pills. She explains its message: while on antibiotics, you will need to replenish various vitamins. She uses the words "your immune system support". She then draws your attention to the refrigerated cabinet that now sits on the counter and holds little plastic bottles. The bottles contain 14 capsules and are labelled: antibiotic support. Probiotic and vitamin combination to support the gut while on medication.

My antibiotics cost $3. The pills cost 14. I am no scientist, but I know a little about business and marketing. Scientists, can you please tell me if after nearly five decades of taking my antibiotics neat, I might now benefit from these pills and their promise to "help restore beneficial flora"?

****************
I am bemused by the inability of our fearless media to draw the obvious dots between recent international news stories.

This man is in jail in California.

A couple of years ago he took home an actress. Within minutes there was a great wall of sound, then silence. The actress was no more, and the man was tried, not once, not twice, but thrice for her slaying.

Meanwhile, this man has spent three decades perturbing New Zealand rural folk.

He started out by snarling at Her Majesty, Brenda, Queen of New Zealand. More recently he has been responsible for the greatest indignity offered to our butter since Marlon Brando rented an apartment in Paris.

This man claims to have grown up in New Zealand.

He would have his fellow countrymen believe that he cherishes the traditional cuisine: meat pies, sausage rolls, lamingtons, roll-your-owns. But the veneer is gossamer thin. He also knows that we were unable to detect French spies even as they seduced our women, wearing berets, blue striped T-shirts and garlic necklaces. He therefore makes scant effort to conceal his true identity: Teutonic roots, with sinister Somes Island connections; a fascination with English footballers. He is not one of us.

Compare the photos: the three men are one and the same. Given that one is incarcerated and yet appears to move about at will, the frightening truth is all too clear: the man is a shape-shifter, albeit a lazy one. Not to be approached.

*****

I will be spending this Sunday morning rabble-rousing.

Click here for details. Please join us if you believe, as we do, that bikes are a gift from God himself.

(153 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Effective Immediately | May 13, 2009 07:40

Poet Laureate
The Mad Butcher


Race Relations Conciliator
Tony Veitch


Governor General
Matthew Ridge


Commissioner for Children
Graham Capill


Chief Executive, New Zealand On Air
The guy who makes the TV commercials louder than the programmes


Reserve Bank Governor
Goldstein

(44 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Dairy dairy me. | May 05, 2009 15:33

So many exciting things happened in my student years. I saw Toy Love go nuts at the Student Union, and Chris Knox mummified in bandages. I learned what a Tort is. I poured sixty eight million litres of Lion Brown into glass jugs for wharfies, taxi drivers and convicted burglars. I sometimes got invited home by the young women who bought their carafes of Blenheimer from the bottle store. I only once fell asleep in an exam. It was a good life, and I look back with just one great regret. I could have done a better job of my one attempt to buy a dairy.

There has never been a time in my life when I have not been too ready to say yes to any job I have been offered. I like novelty and I do not like to disappoint people.

Once upon a time you got your milk in a bottle from a corner dairy. They had the freshest bread, a big stack of newspapers, and on Sunday morning when your head was fogged and dully aching they were the only place you could go to buy the fixings for a righteous plate of bacon, eggs, fresh white bread and butter, instant coffee and Rothmans.

We lived in a bungalow at number 9 Richmond Ave in Karori amongst quiet retired folk. We were neither.

Down at the corner there was not only a dairy but a 4-Square as well. We favoured the dairy because it was open later. The owner was a man from Wales named Dave. He was short, roundish, bearded. His face was probably once cheerful, but the arch expression told you that his love for human beings had been diminished by standing in one place too long, putting notes and coins in the till.

Our first exchanges were just banter. Gradually they became longer. I would describe what had happened last night, last week; he would chortle happily. His wife would occasionally take a turn, but he seemed to favour the chance to take the stage.

One day he asked: "do you go into the shop next door at all?"
"No," I said, "why?"
"Oh, just wondered," he said, "I have an idea."
A few days later he said, "That idea I mentioned - I might want some help. Would you be interested?"

There has never been a time in my life.

"I'll tell you what I've got in mind once I've done a few things, " he said, conveying as much of an air of mystery as you can achieve when you're scooping pineapple lumps and jet planes into a paper bag for school children.

A few more days had gone by when he gestured for me to hold up as another customer gathered her bags and shuffled out. "I want to buy the shop next door," he said. "I've heard the Indians want out."

"Go on." I said.

"They won't sell to me. I need someone to be a a go-between. Do you fancy buying a shop?"

"With what?" I said.

"Nothing," he said. "I just want you to get them talking, and find out if we can get a look at the books and get a price.

"But they won't swallow it," I said. "I'm just some student who lives up the street."

"But you don't shop there," he said.

"No, but they might know my face. Anyway, who would believe I had the dough? I don't."

"Yes, but your people are on a farm, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"So tell them your family wants to buy a city investment."

I like novelty and I do not like to disappoint people.

A few days later I pulled on the suit I had worn just once thus far in my life. Bury your grandfather, buy a dairy. It took me some minutes to get the tie right.

The Simpsons depiction of Apu is faithful to life. You are treated much more graciously as a customer than you are as a person coming through the door of a 4-Square store in the prosecution of commerce.

The proprietor was a man in his fifties, and his expression had long moved on from arch to entirely unsurprised by any damn thing.

I had prepared an opening line, which I offered up so fast each word was shoving the one in front of it, and the lot of them struggled to stay on their feet. My parents were farmers looking for an investment property, and they'd heard this store might be on the market.

Oh really. Where had they heard that? My careful preparation had not anticipated this question. I said I was not sure. If I ever had command of the conversation, I was at this moment relieved of it. The man's wife had arrived carrying a cardboard box from the back. He turned to her and asked in a stage voice if she'd heard that the store was on the market.

"We'd have to see what they're offering," she said.

Would we be able to see the books then, I asked.

"Bring your parents in and we'll talk," he said. His expression might have been a little arch.

As I made for the door his wife added: "Tell them next door if they want this place, it will have to be a good price."

I made sure not to look in as I walked past Dave's window, but felt quite ridiculous as I crossed the road in my suit in the middle of a winter afternoon in Karori. Later that evening I reported back to Dave, who could see that if he was going to do any empire building, he was going to have to hire a sneakier class of weasel.

While others of my generation signed up to be money market dealers and brokers, I opted for less weaselly pursuits, recognising my limitations. It's funny the way these things turn out.

****

*****

(54 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Q+A. Fill in the blanks. | May 01, 2009 07:34

Q: If tax cuts bring about growth, and growth is what we need to bring an end to our present problems, wouldn't tax cuts be a good idea around about now?
Why would you be wanting to give up on this magnificent beast of an economic weapon at the very moment when you need the biggest guns?
Could it be that the mighty gun actually fires blanks?
A:

Q: The boot camp idea got a bit of a slippering from the experts this week. Paraphrasing: the results suggest they don't appear to do a jot of good.
The reporters went to get a quote from Paula Benefit, whose response, to paraphrase again, was: "experts can say what they like, but we think they work."
My question to the minister: Based on what?
A:

Q: I have been oiling up my chain in great anticipation of the cycleway that will take us all the way to Invercargill boy, but I sense some slippage in the certainty of purpose that under-girded the mighty idea at its birth.
How much of a track are we likely to end up with, precisely?
A:

Q: How many politicians besides John Banks have used the words "I leave that to Whaleoil?"
A:

(145 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

Take A Chance on Me | Apr 29, 2009 08:31

ABBA! My favourite band of all time! You cannot begin to imagine how excited I was to read that they were coming together for one night only to play at the Sydney Opera House. And tickets were going to be just ten dollars each. With airfares thrown in for the first hundred buyers! Naturally I sat up until midnight to get the very first tickets when they went on sale. Naturally the server went down. Click refresh. Wait. Timeout. Click refresh. Wait. Timeout.

At seven the next morning, I was still there. My darling appeared at the door of my office in her dressing gown. Told you it was too good to be true, she said. Had she done so any sooner, she would have got an indignant retort, but to my great surprise and delight, at that moment the site finally came to life.

We sincerly apologgise for problems wit our server. We are working on it and will belive again very son.

Sad to say, I spent the next four days checking the site every ten minutes. No change. But then, just as I was about to give up, on Friday night up came a new message:

Due to problems with the Swedish currency, we regret to advise that tickets for the ABBA Rebjorn show will now attract a handling fee of $49. Also, our Jetstar airfare offer has regretfully been withdrawn due to fuel issues. We are working on a server upgrade and tickets will be on sale from midnight.

Well, fair enough, I thought, the cheap tickets were nice, but it's Agnetha and Frida I care about, so it's all good.

Midnight finally arrived and I was feeling a bit ill, having made the mistake of reading Cactus Kate while I waited. The way that woman writes, she must be super hot, for sure, but she's a bit too right wing for my taste. You wouldn't believe what she thinks should happen to people in prison.

Anyway, midnight strikes and there it is: a working server! But what's this? Tickets are now $110 and the handling fee is $99. Bastards! But there's no time to get upset. I've got to grab my seat. I click on the link to enter my credit card details. Uh-oh. There's a warning: the security certificate for this site is invalid. Do you wish to...

Of course I do. Click. Click. Click. Expiry date. Address. Send. Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

Small beads of sweat form on my forehead.

I'm about to pick up the phone. No, false alarm.

Thank you. Your card has been accepted and will be charged $ AU687.95. Follow this link to print out your tickets.

Motherfucker! Seven hundred bucks! You charlatans! It takes me a few minutes to calm down, but when I do, the warm glow of Fernando's firelight settles upon me. How fondly I remember those carefree days of the seventies, listening to ABBA on 2ZM. Back then, Paul Holmes was just a DJ, spinning hits and giving away records and movie tickets. It was only later that he discovered how dangerous a radio man can be on a Sunday night.

Anyhoo, the days pass and I start making plans for the trip to Sydney. Dinner at that Beefsteak and Bourbon place in the Cross. An afternoon at Randwick. I love jet-setting.

But then there it is in my inbox.

HMM entertainment wishes to advise a minor line-up change to the ABBA Rebjorn show. Benny will no longer be able to appear. In his place, however, we are pleased to announce that Billy Ray Cyrus will be taking over, and we look forward to an even more exciting night. Regretfully, we must place a $20 surcharge on your seat to cover this act upgrade, which we have charged to your credit card.

Well, you're probably getting the picture by now. Over the next two months, there was an email almost every week. Bjorn dropped out, then Agnetha, then it was going to be Frida with Billy Ray and his daughter Miley. Then Frida dropped out, and then Billy Ray and Miley. So they put up John Rowles, Suzanne Prentice, Ray Columbus and Yulia. It sounded like a good show, but by then my heart wasn't in it and I stayed home.

My wife said you must feel very let down.

I said: the thing that hurts most is I should know better by now. I'm the one who voted National.

(22 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

You both get sprayed with twits | Apr 28, 2009 07:19

The experts all told us it was a matter of "when", not "if", the virus would jump the species barrier. They said we should be prepared. They said we should take precautions.

But we didn't.

In just one week, 415,000 pigs, in 63 separate countries, have taken up Twittering.

How did it happen? Experts following the tweets believe the likely source to be an advertising campaign by Nokia for its new N99 model. The campaign sought to capitalise on worldwide resentment of investment bankers with the strapline: "only pigs use Blackberries".

The news has dominated the 24/7 news channels for days now, and although experts admonish us to remain calm, there is no sign of any easing in the panic buying of bacon, christmas hams and packets of pork scratchings.

Why? Perhaps it's because the twittering of the pigs has proven to be so uncannily human. How long before they get up on their two hind legs and walk amongst us?

The very popular tweets by English boar SundayFry have a great familiarity to them.

SundayFry
Feeling virtuous after trot around paddock. Then I bump into Gordon Hamsay who ran the marathon y'day: trumped , for sure. Shall I try that next year? Hm..

Geek enthusiasm is also evident.

TrimO'Really
Looking forward to using TroughTop candidate 7.2 as soon as SlopsHopper 3 is released.

Some show a perception rare even amongst human twitterers:

Napoleon

Finally saw the Susan Boyle clip. What kind of fucked up people would think that you wouldn't be able to sing just because you look a bit homely?

Meantime, amongst the two-legged pigs, it's twittering as usual.

michellemalkin

Hey, unhinged liberals: Guess who else opposed flu pandemic money in stimulus bill? CHARLES SCHUMER. http://bit.ly/djZfL

And the human loves it.

(24 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!

The Prime Minister will see you now | Mar 11, 2009 07:23

Your doctor knows it's best to wait until you're lying down to raise bad news.

"I've got a lot of very stressed and worried people coming in here," he told me.

He was stitching my back. We were swapping stories about the wounded economy.

I told him what a visitor from Cambridge had told me. Many people she knows are having their homes sold up. They wish they'd never heard of Blue Chip.

I related this to Karren as I poured us a drink that evening. She had her own story to add. There is a Chinese doctor she visits for the gentlest of acupressure treatment. She and her husband, both doctors, came here a decade ago with very little. They work long hours.

"How's business for you these days?" Karren asked. "Good," the doctor told her. "It's just as busy as we were a year ago." And then she paused. "But it's different now. When I get to the end of the massage some of them cry."

Does it do us any good to keep counting the corporate corpses in America? When can you last recall so many hundreds of thousands of jobs vanishing so swiftly into thin air?

Still the profligate bankers in America go right on scooping up the taxpayer billions, stopping only to stuff in another mouthful of swan, pheasant and gold-leafed truffle from the banquet table. You wouldn't put these characters in a work of fiction. They would seem too ludicrously exaggerated.

Meanwhile down here in the antipodes where the banks are just plain-vanilla mortgage lenders, they tell us they're doing all they can to help customers through trying times. Talk to the customers; you may hear it differently. A friend runs an exporting business, long established, well-capitalised. From time to time, if a customer doesn't pay on time for a deal, it may leave a hole of, say, a hundred thousand or two. For a day or two. Will the bank let the hole sit there? "Will they, fuck," says my friend. "They're being complete cunts."

Mostly I feel terribly sad for the anxious, the fretful, the investors facing the imprisonment of poverty in old age, the people crying at the end of their massage.

Now and then I have a harder heart, and see a crowd of children who were not so long ago elbowing the others out of the way at the lolly scramble. Now, in the evening, they discover that the sweets they crammed in their pockets were bad and have made them sick, and they have commenced to wailing. I do feel sorry for the ones who ate just the one lolly they were given as they left the party.

There are the blameless, there are the rest.

What will become of us all?

Each day, a fresh prediction. It's a relief to know that some of the most apocalyptic are much too far past their predicted time of landfall to remain credible. There is nothing so exhilarating, Churchill used to say, as being fired at without result.

The ammunition is not all spent, however.
Firstly, Thomas Friedman:

Let's today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall -- when Mother Nature and the market both said: "No more."
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more US T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...
We can't do this anymore …

Alternatively, Warren Buffett remains confident.

"It's fallen off a cliff," he said yesterday.

He predicted that unemployment will climb a lot higher before the recession is done, which presumably means that the tent city in Sacramento may grow larger yet. Nonetheless:

"Everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that man has ever created."

Fear and confusion is the problem he says.The government has to act to stop it. Talk clearly and spend up. You'll pay for the spend-up with future inflation, he says, but that's the way its gotta be. "We're in a big war, and we're going to use money to fight it," he said.

As for the banks, good news! "The banking system largely will cure itself." Let us hope this is so.

In so much of this, we are mere bystanders, but I wonder if John Key isn't on the money when he says we should spend this time re-tooling ourselves for the coming recovery.

"We can use this time to transform the economy to make us stronger so that when the world starts growing again we can be running faster than other countries we compete with."

Even if the world market is shrinking, it's a lot easier to pick up new business if you're only after a tiny fraction of that market. If we really are so very ingenious and inventive and adaptable, are we not capable of seeking out markets and finding places to do business even in these most difficult of days? Let us stop being the fools who think you can grow prosperous by selling houses to each other. Let us become the exporters we have endlessly declared we need to be. Let us join the four per cent or so of businesses who have the right idea. (And, heeding Thomas Friedman, let us try to do so on a sustainable basis.)

And here's a thought: could we perhaps hear a little more from our Prime Minister about what he thinks of the global economy?

During the election last year, Richard Harman wrote in a blog about a conversation he had with John Key as they waited with an hour to kill. He said the man delivered chapter and verse on the state of the world economy and showed himself to be deeply and widely informed. Just the kind of person you might find useful in interpreting and explaining things to the worried citizens of the nation, when and if he should become their leader.

Well, now you are, Mr Prime Minister.

But if I might be so bold, you seem to be going about your business in rather the same way it worked for you in the corporate world. The senior executives and the directors on the board get the benefit of your wisdom and insights and vast experience. However the rest of us are just the working stiffs; all we get is the jaunty corporate video and the genial conversation when you drop by to shake our hand.

We're grownups, we can take it on the chin, honest we can. You opened up to that Wall Street Journal reporter in a most interesting way. Could we hear a little more? How about an hour on the TV? No ads; a good interviewer. You have a digital channel at your constant disposal, ideal for the purpose.

Just tell us if we should lie down before you start talking.

(326 responses)
Digg this Scoopit!