Public Address - Heat (Home)

Santa Helena | Jun 26, 2003 13:25

When living here in Aussie you keep a close eye for news from and about home. It's odd what turns up.

Every few months over here, for instance, there is some sort of item tracking the progress of the Kakapo. I don't know who the Kakapo uses for PR, but whoever they are, they're doing a great job.

Here the Kakapo is seen as one of the strangest, funniest and least worthy animals ever to walk the face of the earth. And walk it must – being flightless – with its trump defence mechanism, to play dead, bizarrely ineffective against cats and dogs. The male Kakapo's low booming mating call, that scarce females have trouble hearing, simply completes the a picture of evolutionary incompetence.

The Kakapo achieves this media attention, I think, because that's pretty much the way the Aussie media likes to think of all kiwis (the people, that is, not the bird): Slightly naïve, unworldly, a chip on each shoulder.

Bumpkins, in short.

It is the oddball stories that really get legs in the media here. Last week there was an item on the Auckland moth spraying. Now when I was there I didn't really think about it. Spraying an Aussie moth to hell and back seemed perfectly reasonable – even if it was in the middle of the city. But when you see it on the telly from here it looks very odd, very eccentric indeed; helicopters and planes spraying in the middle of the city and seemingly no comeback for the people being poisoned below.

Recently there was the tragic case of the kiwi backpacker who was tortured for his bank account details. The crime was certainly newsworthy in its own right, but the abiding impression from the comments was the naivity of the unfortunate victim come fresh off the boat to the big town.

Going back, the Ansett debacle fitted this mould perfectly - bumbling kiwis screwing up an Aussie icon.

But there is another kind of story emerging now. It isn't being clearly enunciated as yet and may never be, because it runs completely counter to the Aussie media's "country cousin" angle on New Zealand news.

First there was the New Zealand government bailing out Air New Zealand. It has been a spectacularly successful intervention both in business and political terms. The company's balance sheet is much improved – to the point where some reasonably question whether Air New Zealand really needs to go cap in hand to Qantas any more.

The move also offered the opportunity to bring former Business Roundtable chairman Ralph Norris closer to the Labour camp when he was selected to lead the bailout. Not only was Norris given a great high-profile opportunity, he was lured to the left and put in charge of – shock, horror! – a government intervention in the market.

Sweet irony!

More recently the government changed the rules from under Fairfax's feet to protect $100 million in tax revenue following the company's purchase of INL. And then it moved in on Toll Holdings' New Zealand railway bid, and effectively became a competitor in that transaction.

For years New Zealand governments have been passive in the face of private sector activity. Markets could and should look after themselves. We had our garage sale of state assets, some sold ridiculously cheaply because of our one-dimensional 1980s adherence to a private = good, public = bad ideology. (At this point I should say much of what was done in the 80s and 90s simply had to be done. I hit the streets of Onehunga to get Roger Douglas' Labour a second term and an opportunity to finish the job.)

Our adherence to market economics was possibly the purest in the world – pure to the point of indifference to our own national interests.

No more.

Around the world rightist governments, including Australia's, are abandoning fiscal responsibility – spending big on defence and security and war while simultaneously cutting taxes. This is a sign to me the right, dominant for so long, is now losing the battle of ideas. They are losing their religion and their legitimacy. They are becoming the new Keynsians, spending and hoping, trying to stimulate their economies back to life to avoid the specter of a global deflationary spiral.

In New Zealand fiscal responsibility rightly remains a cornerstone of policy and is honoured in word and deed. In its cause, the highest marginal tax rate was increased. You have to pay for what you spend.

And leading all this activity is Saint Helen. Politically untouchable Helen. Hardball Helen, who is willing to mix it with Aussie's iconoclastic businessmen, so used to being able to do whatever they want in New Zealand, buy whatever they want at whatever price they deign to offer.

She learned a lot from being trapped on the tarmac at Sydney airport, unfairly blamed for one of Aussie's many private sector failures of recent years, and she's been applying those lessons ever since.

Go you Kakapos.

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Funnier than thou | Jun 17, 2003 12:29

Okay, I know what it's like over there when the All Blacks lose. I'm sure you are all feeling a bit deflated. But hey, the ref was a cock, it's a new team and it stood up really well considering it was their first game.

And they can only get better with Justin Marshall gone.

I wandered out to Homebush to see the Aussies beat Wales but watched the main event in the bar at the Homebush Novotel. A forty minute queue for the bar and lot's of Welsh cheering the ABs whenever there was an Englishman in hearing distance. My Aussie mate going "go you kiwi fucks" cos he hates Clive Woodward and the exciting style of rugger the Poms are developing.

The Aussies looked a bit tentative but put their game away okay. I think they could harden up dangerously in the next month. The Yappies are starting to come right too, so we could have a humdinger of a World Cup.

Anyway, I thought there were a lot of good signs from the ABs.

I've been spending a lot of time at the bottom of the Public Address list recently. As I say, it's a busy time over here.

I had both Girlies in residence for a week, which was great. They haven't seen each other for six months, so day one they had a fight and stopped talking. Next day we headed up to the Hunter Valley in silence. The thaw started at lunchtime and by early afternoon we were rocking and rolling.

Did a winery, Undercliff, and bought half a dozen including a very nice "basket press" shiraz. Shirazes can be quite taninish but by using a hand press this can be reduced markedly. So it was a soft shiraz but still with that big shiraz flavour. We saw some kangaroos and a monster open cast mine and then headed down to Port Stephens for the night.

Next day we took a walk to the top of the headland, Girlies whining in unison. They don't like walking. They like shopping. So we had lunch and headed back to Sydders.

After a long fallow period I've started reading a bit again – getting back into a routine from a few years ago where I read on the bus to and from work. You can really cover some ground if you do it consistently.

Anyway, I've just finished John Birmingham's Leviathan (the unauthorised biography of Sydney) and it really is terrific and great fun. Birmo, as we call him, has an adjective for just about every historical character and brings out the fear and loathing of early colonial Sydney wonderfully well.

Obscure fact of the day: the first brewery in Sydney was highly regarded, the beer had a very distinct flavour. Little did the punters realize the water used was draining through the local cemetery.

Now I'm reading William Brandt's The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life. Talk about a laugh! This book is genuinely funny, not witty, not humorous – funny. It would have been laugh-out-loud funny if I wasn't reading on the bus and worried about looking a dickhead.

Here's an appropriate example: Our hero, Frederick Case-Carlisle, has broken up with his partner Sophie, who after giving the first blow job in a mainstream movie has fallen in love with the blowee.

Frederick is wandering the streets of London when he comes across a fellow kiwi, an attractive prostitute from Levin. She gives him her business card, on which she claims to be Australian.

"People don't respond to New Zealand, she explains. "Australia is more sexy."

They chat. Frederick tries to come up with marketing angles that would allow her to be kiwi - or at least South-Pacific.

They part: "She waves a saucy little goodbye. The poor thing has no idea. Talking to me she might as well be a liquor wholoesaler cultivating Saudi connections. Still, I am moved to stop and turn back and watch her go. And I feel sad. I feel such sadness. That a young woman like that, so full of promise, bright and perky, her whole life ahead of her, has sunk to such a terrible, deluded, degraded existence. Pretending to be an Australian. It's enough to make you weep."

Brandt could well be funnier than me...

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