It's one of the curiousities of living in Auckland Central that it's possible to take a get-away-from-it-all family holiday in your own electorate. So, secure in the knowledge that Judith Tizard would still be our MP, we headed for Waiheke Island.
Ironically, the furthest we got from home, philosophically speaking, was the suburbs of southeast Auckland, through which it is necessary to pass to reach the Waiheke car ferry at Half Moon Bay. I exaggerate only a little when I say that I get panicky in Howick. It's Auckland, Jim, but not as we know it …
But we reached the island at the same time as the fine weather did, and consequently had a great time. I can see why people choose to live there. And, by dint of knowing two or three people on "the rock", I got to know several more, including some Italians, both resident and visiting, at a most enjoyable barbecue. (Memo to self: as well-founded as it might be in fact, "But your Prime Minister's a crook, isn't he?" is perhaps not the best way to open a conversation with a visiting Italian, even after everyone has had a few.)
The Saturday market in Ostend was a highlight: it's not large, but it was very busy and quite the best market experience I've had in a while. There was no art to speak of, but some good market jewellery. Books were plentiful, and cheap: I picked up Michael Fowler's coffee-table book The New Zealand House for $4 (lovely pictures, captions in desperate need of an editor) and Upgrading New Zealand's Competitive Advantage (1992) by Michael Porter et al. It might come in handy.
The role that Waiheke's immigrant population plays was evident at the market: there were Italians (so many Italians!) with their breads, a Chinese man quietly selling brilliant spring rolls, and Poms hawking any old thing. I spent $110 and went home happy.
The house we hired from friends-of-friends came with quite a trove of holiday reading. After flicking through a collection of Hunter S. Thompson's letters, I settled on John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992), which I gather is required reading for people in my line.
I'm still ploughing through it, and still waiting for the author to actually define the "common sense" he proposes as a sort of Holy Grail (I skipped forward to its last mention in the index - still no real help). If reason is capable of being tasked to dark ends, then "common sense", an idea that ships with its own built-in justification, would seem doubly so. Ask Dubya.
Saul's declaration that "never have so few people been willing to speak out on important questions" is questionable, his suspicion of science is wearisome and his way of sweeping over detail seems to reflect the kind of bullying argument against which he spends 500-odd pages railing. Still, he emphatically lives up to his argument for clarity of language - his prose is highly lucid - so I'll press on.
Saul's proclamation, on "the invention of the secret", that "until recently, very little was considered improper to know" would surprise, say, the 19th century British Parliamentarians who considered it deeply improper that the public should know of their deliberations by means of news reporting. That story is told in Andrew Marr's My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, which I review in next week's Listener and heartily recommend.
Meanwhile, back on the block, the Sunday Star Times contrives an entirely new definition of "top" (meaning "bottom"), with a news section story headed Morals, ethics top New Zealanders' list of concerns. It refers to an interesting set of feature stories around UMR Research's 2005 Mood of the Nation survey, including one noting that we're notably happy about the state of the nation, and another that "moral/ethical decline" ranked sixth of the top six issues noted by New Zealanders in 2004, at 5%, behind race relations and the Treaty (28%), health (11%), economy (8%), crime/violence (6%) and education (6%). The figures are an average for the past year, and ethical decline apparently peaked in November, during the civil unions hoo-ha, at 11%. So the news story might actually have been more accurately headed "concern over moral decline begins to ebb". Honestly, sometimes you'd think that the SST actually really wants a moral backlash …
The Herald also sought to take the moral temperature with a survey which indicated that two thirds of New Zealanders believed in some sort of God, but only one in five regularly attended church. Just over 60% said they believed in an afterlife, but it would have been useful for subjects to have been further probed as to exactly what their faith encompassed. Are we anything like the US, where a new Gallup poll found that "almost half of Americans (45%) believe that human beings "were created by God essentially as they are today (that is, without evolving) about 10,000 years ago"? Or is ours a more practical faith?
Well-known lefty rag the Financial Times claims that Colin Powell was told to step down after giving the wrong answer to his President ("we're losing") when asked how Iraq was going.
In the local blogosphere, Dog Biting Men's MediaCow (so many quadrapeds!) declares 2005 The Year of Going Too Far, and Ben Thomas does a devastating fact-check on Rodney Hide's latest scandal.
No Right Turn pondered Don Brash's sudden conversion to the idea of referenda (do you think there are any other policies National can swipe from New Zealand First?) and Tim Barnett's depiction of Brash's new line as "desperate".
And I do like the cut of the new group blog Three Point Turn, one of whose founders has been obliged to explain that he's not that Nick Eynon.