Island Life by David Slack

At Auckland International Airport, who do they worry about most?

a. Knife-wielding Somalian fruit pickers
b. Islamist terrorists
c. Jesse Ryder
d. Canadian pensioners

Russia has just elected a new President. How do you pronounce the name of the man who will lead the country for the next five years?

a. Poot - in
b. Pew - tin
c. Pweet - in
d. Clin - Ton

John Key will be Prime Minister by Christmas. What new colour will he choose for his Beehive office?

a. Beige
b. Taupe
c. Neutral
d. Same as Labour

You are TV3 reporter Kate Lynch, in Georgia trailing America’s Most Wanted New Zealander. In a passport mixup, you are detained as an illegal alien. In what kind of facility are you incarcerated?

a. Federal prison with the worst kind of murderers and felons
b. Guantanamo Bay
c. That one on an island that was in that movie
d. A virtual holiday camp where pampered prisoners lead the good life

On Sunday night’s 3 News, Duncan Garner ran a list of policies pinched from Labour by National and then a list of the converse. Which was the longest?

a. Policies pinched by National
b. Policies pinched by Labour
c. Stories pinched by Kiwiblog

Which of these Labour Government policies did the Royal New Zealand Herald and the National Party (or its ideological antecedents) support at the time they were first mooted?

a. Welfare state
b. Nuclear-free New Zealand
c. Rogernomics
d. Cullen fund
e. GST
f. No sporting contact with South Africa
g. Jim Bolger to chair Kiwibank

Google will readily tell you how to make a pipe bomb, how much tax Kerry Packer contrived to not pay, and where to find Paris Hilton looking like a racoon, but it’s more coy about telling the world just how many thousands upon thousands of computers it has yoked into service in its many, many server farms. They are not state of the art computers; they're basic PCs bought at good rates and loaded up with the operating system you can depend on: Linux.

They are silicon-chipped battery hens.

They work to satisfy your urgent requirements, your idle curiosity; your panting lust.

How many of them are there? Wikipedia takes a stab: “a 2006 estimate cites 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters at data centers around the world.”

And where are these data centres? As close as they can get to nuclear power plants, according to the man who knows the inconvenient answers, Juha; anywhere where the power is cheap, because boy, do they hoover it up. Here beginneth the carbon footprint lesson.

Is that search really necessary?

If this is news to you and you care about the planet, your immediate thought will doubtless have been: what can I do to cut down my Googling? You may wonder if there is some kind of Google ride-sharing option available. Is there a Google bicycle alternative to the Search Engine SUV you have double-parked outside MySpace? Can you recycle some of your old searches?

These are all good ideas, but if you punch them into Google, you won’t get far. (Disclosure: this may be incorrect. I am interviewing my keyboard at this point. The surname is what it is.)

Something needs to be done.

Every time you type Britney nude into Google, the servers suck a little more juice off the grid, and you know the rest. Fossil fuels burn, the greenhouse gets warmer, a tiny butterfly flaps its wings one last time, drops to the floor of the rain forest and, as ever, God strangles a kitten.

Think global, act local. We’re all in this together. Let’s pool our ideas.

Like I say, I’m just interviewing my keyboard, so I have but a few modest ones. But it’s a start, eh? Here are my suggestions.

Idea one: Make Kiwiblog your friend. Don’t go using up energy to seek out your current affairs information! If it’s news in New Zealand, it will be relayed from the original source to the columns of Kiwiblog. Not only that, entire wasteful paragraphs will be eliminated in the retelling, in the style of Reader's Digest, (if Reader's Digest were your noisy uncle). Excerpts of columns and editorials will also be offered at sufficient length to save you the bother of seeking out the original. Likewise the time-saving Kiwiblog humour service, in which a link to a YouTube clip is prefaced by a precis which includes the punch-line. You can be laughing at Sarah Silverman and back into the billable minutes in 30 seconds without using up a single Google CPU cycle.

Idea two: The five dollar test. As you type in the name of your ex for the fifteenth time today, ask yourself: would I be doing this if it cost me five bucks each time? If you find the answer is still “yes” beyond a hundred dollars, you should disregard anything Pharmac has said this week about the efficacy of antidepressants.

Idea three: Leave it all to John and Bill. Look, they haven’t announced a lot of policy yet, but that doesn’t mean the next Government doesn’t have a plan. In a funny kind of way they would love to start saving the planet now, but there’s an argument you can make that if they told us their solution right away, Labour would just pinch their ideas, and then what? But hey, if you’re worried about what might happen in the meantime just stop using the Internet until the election. It’s full of stuff that’s frankly not all that good anyway.

When supper time came the old cook came on deck

Saying fellows it's too rough to feed ya

At 7PM a main hatchway caved in

He said fellas it's been good to know ya

Old songs take you back. So can new headlines. I have been reading about the widening polling margin between National and Labour, or perhaps that should be: John Key and Helen Clark, and it takes me back to doomed days on the 9th floor of the Beehive in 1990 when we tried in vain to avert the sinking of the good ship Labour Government IV.

The similarities are many.

In 1990, the Frontline programme asked questions about political patronage as it pointed the cameras into the dining room of Vogel House at a gathering of knights of the realm and captains of industry taking tea with senior Cabinet ministers.

Mortgagee sales were on the rise; the property market was in the doldrums.

Television was full of dross.

People weren't sure if Winston Peters would support the leader of the National Party if they were to win the election.

And with just months to go, Margaret Wilson quit.

I liked working with Margaret Wilson very much. She is smart, and she is a realist.

She would no doubt look at the list I’ve just recited and point out significant differences.

The issue that outweighed everything else in that election was unemployment. More than 10% were out of work; worse yet for Maori, for whom the rate was nearer 25%. Economic prospects looked miserable.

You could say that LGIV was punished, in the end, for doing too little in the face of enormous problems. This lot looks likely to be turfed out for doing too much about problems that did not warrant the attention: the so-called social engineering issues. Such legislation has been but a small part of the business of the last three terms, but it has served to mark out Helen Clark and her governments as intrusive and meddling and them voters, they don’t like it up ‘em.

It’s a broad phenomenon, he said, turning to personal anecdotal experience. A friend who is immune to the hysteria of political fashion, broadly liberal, but an independent thinker all the same, declared over drinks a few weeks ago that he had reached his limit at a TV ad imploring him not to drink and fry. For God’s sake, he said, we’re grown ups.

Mind the gap. It's now about twenty polling points, and widening.

The fashionable political meme has become: there is a disconnect. The phone is off the hook and the electorate is not responding. I doubt that people stop listening altogether, and I doubt that they form an opinion that can't be unmade, but it certainly takes something quite unexpected for political leaders to be cast in a new light. The idiot son in the White House, for example, notwithstanding his thoroughly unheroic initial response, was made a great man by two planes hitting the twin towers. If it takes an event of such proportions, let us hope there will not be a fourth term. Having said that, unless the man who would be Prime Minister can become a little more clear in his thoughts or at least in his technique of conveying them, one rather hopes for a cataclysmic circuit breaker that might take place without anyone getting hurt.

I spoke this morning to Greg Robertson of the Bay Report, who has been fielding many media inquiries about a story he ran just before Christmas that offered the remark by John Key that “we would love to see wages drop.”

The story has become a he said/she said did/didn’t trail of confusion, and it may well be Mr Key’s good fortune that the tape recording has not survived the two months that elapsed between publication and the sudden flurry of interest in the exchange.

According to Robertson, he invited the president of the Kerikeri business association to sit down with Key in a local cafe and put some questions to him. Robertson recorded the exchange and, he says, the results were transcribed accurately and verbatim. The words yielded by the tape were these:

Another point raised by Ms Brookes-Quan concerned the exodus to 
Australia by New Zealanders, lured by attractive wage compensation, 
and the recent call for employers to pay more.

Mr Key would like to see the opposite occur.

"We would love to see wages drop," he says.

"The way we want to see wages increase is because productivity is 
greater. So people can afford more. Not just for inflationary reasons, 
otherwise it's a bit of a vicious circle as it comes back at you in 
higher interest rates."

I think the sentence that Jon Stewart would repeat, before meaningfully pausing, would be "The way we want to see wages increase is because productivity is 
greater." I can’t help feeling that this would have made more sense if Milton Friedman had been trying to explain it, or even, dare I say it, Don Brash.

We could really do with a good debate about productivity, both about how the spoils of that are shared and how we achieve it in the first place.

Now would be good. Let’s just hope the incumbents won’t be too busy bailing water to take part.

The Captain wired in he had water coming in

And the good ship and crew was in peril

And later that night when his lights went out of sight

Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Owen Glenn stood in the rear of a gaming room at the Monte Carlo casino, among the croupiers and Russian call girls, watching. It was an evening like so many others. The croupiers, the girls, the biased roulette wheel -- these had been what Glenn first saw of his adopted country. The years had changed nothing.

He could not measure himself exactly how substantially he had been under the influence when he offered to take on the title and thereby ‘give something back’ to the country where he had been raised and where he had learned to pick the winner of the second leg. Once to a mannish woman who had cornered him in Soul Bar he had said, "I left Auckland to get away as far as possible from the socialists."

The sky was dark by now so the holiday makers who had been trailing him all day would likely have retreated to their budget hotel. Since the morning months ago when he had begun receiving the calls of tourists who had mislaid their travellers’ cheques or been rolled by con artists, Glenn found he was ill at ease in his fellow New Zealanders’ company.

The Honorary Consul had never caught anyone else doing a selfless act in the whole principality. When he dined out he saw only leather faced millionaires attending to tax haven business. There were sometimes tourists with misty eyes collecting mementoes of the late Princess, but few lovers on the benches or contented women with shopping baskets, and scarcely any socialists.

People when they had first heard of his new title had looked at him with fresh curiosity. Perhaps they thought it was a custom peculiar to Antipodeans. It was not exactly unmanly, but it was certainly foreign. The men here preferred to strip assets or stand at the deck of their yachts and compare lengths, or sit at their desk with lawyers and scheme, or ring up a tax consultant and make her jump though some hoops and all the time, while she jumped, they touched themselves. In public Glenn touched nobody. It was a sign, like his New Zealand passport, that he would always remain a stranger: he would never be properly assimilated.

He began to read the letter again. "She has been working in an unbroken silence, accepting the media torment, like the bad polling, as a law of nature. We have to do something."

It could not be said that Williams wrote badly. There was a heavy music in his style, the drumbeats of destiny were never very far away, but Glenn sometimes had a longing to exclaim to him, "Life isn't like that. Life isn't noble or dignified. Nothing is ineluctable. Life has surprises. Life is absurd. Talking to the media is absurd. Because it's absurd there is always hope. Why, one day I may even talk straight with them.”

I am a man with machismo, the Honorary Consul reflected ruefully, as he picked up the receiver.

Another mannish-sounding woman reporter. ‘Frank’?

He listened to her for a moment and sighed.

"Why do you always want the truth? Contrary to common belief the truth is nearly always funny. It's only tragedy which people bother to imagine or invent. If you really knew what went into this goulash you'd laugh."

He paused to listen to a long stream of questions and assertions.

"Check again," he said. "Mate."

He added, "You people usually lose to me more easily than that."

"Your game's improved."

Could Katherine Rich be the first politician in a generation to actually mean it when she says she’s quitting politics to spend more time with her family? As soon as I say that, I realise I’m forgetting Paul Swain, whose intention also sounded sincere, and of course there may be inside knowledge I’m not privy to. Perhaps she was hoping to be a part of a Velvet Revolution and she has dejectedly concluded that it’s not worth hanging around for something as slight as a Beige Makeover.

If she does mean it, though, I can entirely understand. We see many friends with young children who have found that a pair of high-pressure careers is one too many to sustain.

Sometimes the father has made the change, more often it has been the mother. In some instances, ours included, the father has made the larger initial adjustment, but in the end the mother has been the one who has made the greater and more enduring change, and has been left feeling uneasy about the consequences.

The conversations we have had about this – both among the two of us and with friends - have been many, long, and generally lacking any clearer conclusion than: this is lopsided and disheartening. Biology might not be entirely destiny, but it for certain is no level playing field.

Looking at the way parliament works, I don’t see any obvious way to change that peculiar and somewhat unreal existence to make it better for young parents. Male or female, you give over a ridiculous amount of your time to the life.

Out here in the real world, though, we must surely be able to do better. Just for starters, there is the tyranny of simple arithmetic. There are thirteen-odd weeks of school holidays a year, and, typically four weeks of annual leave. For most families, sheer economic pressure mandates that both partners work.

This is not having it all; it’s having it all up against you. For all the prevalence of the computer, and the potential for job-sharing and portability it carries, our enterprises don't seem inclined to rearrange themselves sufficiently to accommodate a parent who hopes to maintain her career past the first epidural.