Island Life by David Slack

Elsewhere in the western world, the Marlboro Man has lately been getting his back broken. But not here.

Here, testosterone is back. You can just feel it in the air.

We take our lead from our leaders, and for the longest time, the word has been: emasculation.

Call it the sisterhood. Call it the PC brigade. Call it dykescorp - and haven't a lot of men quietly muttered that in the barbecue huddle?

Whatever you've called it, and however darkly you've fumed about it, there's been sweet fuckall you could do about it. You could cast your vote, you could ring up Leighton, you could invent yourself a name so you could write something vaguely defamatory on your blog without anyone at church finding out, but you couldn't stop feeling oppressed.

But there's a light! And not just over at the Frankenstein place.

We will probably always be counter-cyclical here in New Zealand. The rest of the world has a boom, we have a bust. They have a slump, we have lift-off. They vote for Bush and Howard, we vote for socialistic moral relativists.

Once more the wheel turns. Once more the water gurgles down the hole in the contrary direction.

That great big hairy brute of an alpha male, Donald T Brash has found his chest. It would be premature to say that it's getting a Kong-like pounding, but there has clearly been some kind of transformation.

The signs are there if you know where to look.

Let's open the Herald. It's not a promising start. The headline reads: Brash takes blame for leadership speculation.

But look! Right there at the end!

I had swallowed the Government line that we had been doing relatively well relative to Australia, but that of course is crap.

This is what the Rt Hon Paul Keating or if you prefer, Mark Latham, would tell you is showing the voter a bidda mongrel.

Little acorns, mighty oaks, etc etc. This time last year, the strongest word he could bring himself to use in front of an audience was "baloney."

Now, just one week later, he sails into the house and all but rips the Labour Party a new ringpiece. "Pay the money back," he declares.

Dr Brash's speech was barely audible in the chamber, the Herald tells us, because of the din of Government members, but he adopted a crash-through style.

But in this context, the more noise they make, the more you know you're landing the blows. Don, you could be a contendah!

Do the right thing by the people of this country: pay the money back and apologise.

This is rhetoric that has what the advertising people like to call cut-through. "Pay the money back" can fit on a bill board, or a T-Shirt. You can bet that someone like that Bhatnagaar character is making a Flash animation of the thing right now.

It seems obvious really. What's Dr Brash got to lose? He might as well let rip.

Just consider how much further he may go if he can make himself comfortable with the politics of vituperation and the high art of hamming it up for the crowd.

Maybe there's a script.

Stage One: Roughen up the language.

Stage Two: Hand the government a regular and sustained thrashing. Abuse, them, goad them, torment them.

Stage Three: Put the heel on the throat. Belittle them, mock them. Turn it into high vaudeville.

Manage all this, and he'll be able to go on setting the agenda. He's managed to do it almost effortlessly (some might say unwittingly), all the way from Orewa to the billboards. What's been missing is the capacity to ram that advantage home.

Alpha males don't let that kind of chance go by. They compound it with all kinds of dominant testosterone-fuelled politics. Taunting and goading! Worked for Muldoon, worked for Lange.

Go on, Don, get in touch with your inner man. Go for broke. The beauty of this is that all the associated problems will probably fade away as well. Take your pretender, Mr Key.

It's been quite a media week or two for him. I'm sure you've seen him on the cover of North and South. Odd picture that. The facial musculature puts you in mind of Il Duce, but maybe that's just the light in the supermarket. And then there was the ever-reliable Frank O'Sullivan pitching in with that Liar's Poker lionisation of him as a big swinging dick.

It's always intrigued me how sexualised the money market sounds to be. I once had occasion to be in a meeting with David Richwhite, along with one of Auckland's more heavy-hitting PR women. I forget exactly what the purpose was, but it had broadly to do with the media strategy for some stoush his outfit was involved in. The meeting room was an internal one with no windows, soft low lighting, designer furniture, and a table of Viking dimensions. He came striding through the door and made some declaration about the smell of sex in the air. It was a kind of napalm-in-the-morning allusion, but for the life of me, I couldn't catch his point.

Anyway, Don: Reserve Bank, World Bank, you can swat this pretender away with an inordinately greater factor of bigness and swinging capability.

Maybe you buy that stuff about his Navman not working, but seriously, who ever got lost in Orewa?

Frankly, the rapidity with which you have found your feet and chest is an inspiration. A few more months of this Alpha Male assertiveness, and you'll be positively dangerous. I fully expect to see you holding 5000-strong rallies in Wiri wool stores by next summer. You should definitely bring those charts. That has all kinds of retro cred.

I'll come to the meetings, because I fully expect them to be the best show in town. But I think I'll keep out of your way when duck shooting season starts.

The first time I saw Robert Muldoon in the flesh, I was mildly shocked. He had the skin of no pallor I had seen before on any mortal. It was the start of my first year at University and we were in the Botanical Gardens watching the friendly cricket match the parliamentarians have each year.

The Prime Minister and an MP or two came ambling through the crowd with a collection basket. I couldn't tell you who the others were because I was transfixed by the unhealthy state of our leader. The man was yellow! And round! He had to be almost as broad as he was high. He was also, I have to say, disarmingly amiable to one and all, and it took me a good half an hour to get back to my default position of seething at the mere thought of him.

How long ago? With the celebrated exception of the occasional returning student, most of the students who will be starting university this month were neither born then nor would be for, Oh-Fuck-Me-That-Can't-Be-Right-But-Dear-God-It-Is another ten years.

No politician I've seen lately has had anything like Muldoon's colour. Quite a few of them are no strangers to the gym. But all the same, it's still not a regime that lends itself to keeping yourself in trim. So hats off to Mr Dover Samuels for looking in surprisingly good nick at home at his motel in Matauri Bay when we sauntered in there last Saturday morning to pick up a brochure. It was a perfect day in the Far North. Here's a picture so I don't have to draw on my modest powers of descriptive prose.

No picture of Dover though. He was in sunglasses, baseball cap and speedos. And if you're thinking I really don't want to draw that picture in my mind, well: at ease soldier. He was looking buff. It's a rare politician who can manage that.

We were on holiday in the Far North, because one of us would be giving a speech on Waitangi Day. We love it up there. Within half an hour of leaving Matauri Bay we would be at the Mangonui fish shop. More pictures.

This is, has always been, and will probably always be, the best place in the world to eat fish and chips. I could not live there. My heart and I would come to a bad end.

We body surfed at Coopers Beach. We went to the Farmers Market in Kerikeri and had crepes for lunch. We had dinner at the Jerusalem Restaurant. I took a run past the Stone Store. We took pictures of a development along the road from the property Mum and Dad once had there. Mary-Margaret swam up and down the swimming pool whenever she could.

And then on Sunday night I drove down to Whangarei on a road I've covered many nights before, to do something I'd never done before in the town, and that was: talk politics. When I lived there in the 80s my only concern was gaining market share for Dominion Breweries. You meet different people when you go there to talk about the place of the Treaty in any future constitutional arrangement.

You might imagine that few people would be inclined to come out to hear a group of speakers on that subject on a Sunday night in the middle of a long weekend, but you'd be wrong. It was a decent-sized room and it was standing room only. To be sure it was largely a gathering of the progressive faithful: Network Waitangi is a group of Whangarei citizens, mostly Pakeha, who have gathered in solidarity with the Tangata Whenua over Treaty issues. And more power to them I say.

They had been invited to bring some speakers - five of us - to Te Tii Marae on the morning of Waitangi Day. This would serve as something of a preview of those performances. It was a good natured affair, all civility and warm humour. Someone thought Muriel Newman might be joining us to give it a bit more pepper, but she didn't show.

I offered some thoughts on the proposition that we had a philosophical impasse to contend with, in terms Andrew Sharp has described that suggest our best option is to go on fudging policy development and agreeing to endlessly negotiate while we wait to see what might come of the impasse. Or to put it another way: let all the parties stay at the table and agree to keep talking. I'll put a copy up here if there's any interest.

Jane Kelsey gave a fairly lacerating performance in the style you'd expect with a few solid serves at the multinationals while Reverend Bob Scott, Dr Betsan Martin and David James offered more optimistic thoughts.

And the next morning we met at Te Tii Marae to do it all again.

All my life I have blithely worked on the principle that it's safe to agree to do anything, regardless of how little you know about it and then adapt as necessary. This would be one of those times. Protocol's fine: I've trailed in behind others before and relied on others to offer the necessary words, challenges and waiata, but I've never actually stood on a marae and spoken myself.

Oddly enough, when I got to my feet and made my way across the ground to the microphone, I realised it resembled nothing so much as the experience of presenting a trophy at the races. You're down in the birdcage, the crowd is hundreds of metres away from you in the stands. You can't hear them and you can barely make out their faces. If you're used to reading a crowd and taking your cues from their responses, the sense of separation can be a weird and disconnected sensation.

Here, the crowd was a little nearer, and more audible, but it was early: about 9am, and we were up first. The crowd was still relatively thin. The organisers had judged from the evening's speeches that I'd be contributing the ad-lib humour, so they slotted me in the middle to keep things bubbling along.

I knew I had one joke available because in the introduction of the speakers, the title "Bullshit Backlash and Bleeding Hearts" appearing in the midst of a stream of reo had got a good laugh. So I used that as an opener and got some chuckles. But I realised it was going to be very hard to do any more than that when it was hard to hear or see the response, and so I switched to Solemn, and truncated what I had to say, working on the basis that you'd be some poor orator to stand there clasping pages of notes.

I don't know; I'd say it was workmanlike. People said nice things, but you can tell when you've only connected rather than lit any kind of fire.

I realised as I sat then for the next few hours and watched some truly powerful oratory that I'd had an opportunity to be grateful for. I'd got to have the experience with trainer wheels on. I was just one of many. There were no great expectations. I'd had the chance to grasp the dynamic of the thing.

People come and go. Speakers can be brief, they can be long-winded. They can be incisive, they can be meandering. They can be pungent, they can be downright loopy.

It was a fascinating crowd to be amongst. I sat alongside Annette Sykes who was maybe a little intense, but cordial and cheerful all the same. But on her feet? All afire. None of the truly incendiary stuff that once got her in trouble, but some pretty bolshy stuff all the same. And likewise Jane Kelsey. The pair of them had no trouble reading the crowd, and did they ever get the responses.

"Don't expect miracles from having four Maori Party MPs", they said. "Don't assume this resolves everything".

Hone Harawira was the genial commander, getting about the crowd inviting people to "get up and have a blat", and interrupting the speeches at one point to let a young boy take the mic to ask his brother Gabriel to return to the family car "emergently".

Cheerful and courteous, Mike Smith was shooting it all for video. "I'll never live that chainsaw down," he says, "But you'd be amazed how many people tell me 'I wanted to do that too bro.'"

The crowd kept building. Politicians came and went, although the PM kept herself busy out on the water, and then on the other side of the fence walking around the stalls. Backpackers, visitors, white faces, brown faces, children, most people in hats, and all finding the shade as the heat came on. What they saw was civil debate. What they never saw was tension.

By lunchtime Hilda Harawira was at the mic asking "are we going to be doing a hikoi?" In due course, they did, but I was gone by then, off to find Karen and Mary-Margaret. I found the car in Paihia, then found them and we debated the relative merits of spending the rest of the day there, or beating the rush home. There's nothing nice about crawling in traffic all the way from Warkworth. We got the hell out of Dodge.

But we'll be back. You should see the tents. You should see the stalls. You should see the waka. You should wander through the crowd. You should see the sun coming up on the same bay they looked out to in 1840. It's a treat. 45,000 people got to share it this year. There's still room for more.

Sometimes, what's most interesting about a speech is not what's in it, but what's been left out. Consider yesterday's contribution by His Illustrious High Lord of Harken and Leader of the Intelligently-Designed Free World, Not Including France, Bush The Younger.

You didn't have to be a genius to predict that he would play the all-purpose security card, and sure enough, there was plenty of that. Plenty of sunlit uplands to gaze towards longingly as well: the word "freedom" appears no fewer than seventeen times.

It turns out you could have predicted most of the content of the speech by reading the one he gave a year go, as Michael Scherer writes in Salon:

Almost every line was an echo. In his 2005 State of the Union, Bush called for "expanded Health Savings Accounts." On Tuesday, he announced he would "strengthen Health Savings Accounts." In 2005, he promised to fund green projects, "from hydrogen-fueled cars, to clean coal, to renewable sources such as ethanol." On Tuesday, he pledged to invest in "zero-emission coal-fired power plants ... pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen ... cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol." In 2005, he promised to "ensure that human embryos are not created for experimentation." On Tuesday, he pledged to prohibit "creating or implanting embryos for experiments."

But how about the words that weren't there? In the wake of a not-especially inspiring year of Presidential endeavour, and I'm thinking here of such small matters as - say - Katrina or the wire tapping, would a little humility have been in order? Failing that, at least a little empathy?

Let's do a Word search shall we?

What do we get if we enter "Sorry"? Well, we get this, which you'll be able to read clearly if you click the thumbnail to see the full size version.

How about "mistake"? Any luck there?

Nope. We'll perhaps "wrong" then.Now we're on to something!

But…no, wrong is what other people are. When they're not being traitors, of course.

How odd and strangely stunting it must feel to work in the White House for a CEO-President who lacks both curiosity and humility.

Not that it may necessarily have been much more fun to collaborate in the scripting of this week's Orewa speech. The lasting impression I'm left with by that work is neither the dutiful recitation of the National party economic mantra (gut the RMA, gut the employment laws, gut the welfare system, cut the taxes and hope like hell the invisible hand doesn't just give itself a five finger discount) or even the none-too-veiled allusion to swarthy types who bow down to Mecca and who might somehow represent the same kind of threat that is presently vexing the Danes (which suggests a pretty fragile faith in the rule of law).

Instead the thing that really leaves me wondering about the capacity of the leader of the opposition to look out ahead and past his mid twentieth century perspective is simply this: in a speech of about 5000 words which talks about the prospects for New Zealand's economy and its comparative place in the world economy, there's one word that must surely come up, and yet we waited in vain. Dr Brash repeatedly reminds us that he has a marital connection to the place.Why didn't we hear the word "China"?

Four weeks into the New Year I'm quite taken by the colorful character of the minor criminals so far. I especially liked the Micky and Mallory pair of teenage sweethearts who left a Hansel and Gretel trail of trashed motel rooms and swindled Shell stations behind them as they blazed a trail of summer glory across the North Island propelled by corn chips, two-litre cokes and, presumably, young lust. I'm assuming lust on the basis of the last line of the Herald report which conjures so much in a single sentence: The owner found the room covered in red candle wax. Thanks for the entertainment, Amber and Nick. Sucks to be you on 24 hour curfew, though. Mudvayne fuckin' rocked out.

I also like the notion of a burglar who can no longer hold his head up in criminal company because he got hog-tied by a few OAPs in Christchurch. Do burglars have their own magazine yet? There's hardly a niche that isn't covered these days. If they do, you'd want to see this guy on the cover of the next issue, wouldn't you?

I'd also want to see an interview with the Einsteins in Mission Bay who wore balaclavas to kidnap their mate for his stag party 'surprise'. It's not street theatre if people just scream, dude.

Best of all, though, my favourite minor criminal of the month is Mr George Bernard Shaw, who had to face the wrath of the people this week for hiring a couple of goons to carry out a drive-by tree hit. Early last year, two goons came screaming to a halt outside Mr G B Shaw's development site, leapt from the car brandishing chainsaws, and proceeded to drop a protected Pohutukawa tree in ten frenzied minutes, then fled the scene.

"No idea how that happened" said George when the cameras arrived on his doorstep. He was shocked, shocked! Oh, and gutted. Although he had three previous convictions for dropping protected trees, he kept up his steadfast denials until the city council wheeled out a fairly big barrow of evidence that suggested he might be telling porkies. He then changed his tune and fessed up.

If a protected tree falls on a developer does anyone make a sound? The sentencing of Mr Shaw has turned into quite an elaborate entertainment. The judge thought a restorative justice session before sentencing might be useful, not least because it might shed some light on the profundity of the defendant's contrition, what with the three priors for the same offence and all.

And so it came to pass that we got a front page picture in yesterday's Herald of Mr Shaw sitting on his own at the front row of a gathering in Onehunga with several dozen residents in serried ranks behind him, several of them with tight arms folded firmly across their chest in best rugby team photo fashion. George meanwhile clutched something in his fist quite tightly, making it a little tricky to discern what it might be. A hanky, perhaps? He looked a little perturbed. Or were the tear-pricked eyes just a show for the cameras, and was that actually an oily chainsaw rag?

Elsewhere in blog-land, the more fervent wingers took issue with poor Mr Shaw's treatment, for a variety of reasons. Farrar, for example, mocked the girly-man nature of a meeting that might seek to establish how people felt about the death of "poor Johnny Pohutukawa". Mock all you like, buddy, but I got the distinct feeling from the coverage of the meeting that the vehemence of the feelings expressed was not lost on the defendant. It should also be plain to Mr Kiwiblog from watching the energy with which commentors on his site go to their work that there is some therapy and catharsis to be enjoyed in fulminating as loud and long you can about people that irk you. Of course you have to be a bit braver to do it in the same room as the person involved.

The most ruggedly individualist of the commentors spluttered about the abrogation of the my treehouse is my castle principle. Well, put me on the side with the tree huggers. We protect trees because by common consent, we have established that cities tend to look nicer with them than without them. Given that it can take more than half a dozen cycles of property boom and bust for some trees to grow to maturity, they need to be protected from the whims of people whose sole preoccupation is to make a nice profit on their little chunk of the city, and bugger the civic amenity.

We undoubtedly live in age where individualism and self-interest prevail, but it does leave you breathless sometimes to see how rabidly that principle is asserted without consideration for the benefits that have been and continue to be delivered to individuals by the common understanding that the community interest - the greater good - can sometimes deliver a superior outcome for everyone. I can find libertarian arguments by bloggers like, say, Peter Creswell, quite compelling, but I doubt that even he would assert - as some of the more rabid commentors seem inclined to do - that there's never a circumstance in which community interest should trump that of the individual.

Which brings me to the other more celebrated George Bernard Shaw, whose politics were altogether more tilted towards the collective. I don't know if the two are related, but if so, Shaw the developer might have considered the words of Shaw the forebear who offered the prescient thought that Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

'Die' might be putting it a bit strong, but poor Mr Shaw didn't appear to be having much fun at the hands of his neighbours. You couldn't say the same of his namesake, who had a thoroughly splendid time at various public meetings here in New Zealand in 1934, if the newspaper reports are accurate.

Let us turn to the front page of the Evening Post, and its Black Friday edition of April 13 1934. Why look: it begins with the reporter's question that precedes all others: What do you think of New Zealand? "New Zealanders seldom have the opportunity of hearing a frank opinion of themselves and their institutions," it begins.

Distinguished visitors from time to time have told us that we are too self-satisfied but they have left it at that. Last night, Mr G. Bernard Shaw…went a great deal further. Making no secret of the fact that he is a Communist, Mr Shaw made full use of the waiving of Government regulations in his favour, and freely criticised existing institutions.

Waiving of Government regulations! Now there's a Friendly Road story right there. Promise to come back and explore that particular slice of history in a future blog. But back to Comrade Shaw.

He found definite signs of Communism in the Dominion, and concluded by describing New Zealand as "second only to Russia." Yes for the generation who've grown up buying the crock that Ronald Reagan brought the Evil Empire to its knees, you might be surprised to learn that in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the western world was looking over the fence at flourishing Russia, and wondering if there might be a lesson to learn from the Reds.

Oh but Mr Shaw was an entertainer, if perhaps a little on the egotistical side:

I understand that I am being overheard by a neighbouring continent called Australia. I have nothing to say to Australia at present except to give them the pleasure of listening to me. But I have a few things to say to New Zealand. You understand that I am going away almost immediately after this, and you must console yourselves as best you can for the ensuing dullness of the islands.

Uh oh. Dullness? There's more: Mr Shaw said he was not altogether satisfied with New Zealand.

To begin with you have a large number of unemployed. That is absolutely a nonsensical state of affairs. There is plenty of employment everywhere in New Zealand. When I went to Christchurch the other day, I came across an unfinished railway - a main trunk line. You ought to finish that line. You will have to finish it some day. I understand you made a start on it and then got cold feet because somebody said it wouldn't pay. You needn't trouble about that. You may leave that for private companies who will do that for profit. All the things the New Zealand government, representing the New Zealand people, has got to do wouldn't be done for profit at all. You wouldn't expect it to pay. You don't expect your roads and bridges to pay directly and yet you would be much poorer without them.

It would be nice to have him back here (and from the dead, of course) to catch up on ideological developments, don't you think?

Let's get on to the real Commie stuff. The distribution of wealth, was too unequal, he said, but that wasn't the whole of it. We should also be distributing our leisure: "I don't think there is an excuse for anybody having to work for more than four hours a day."

At present, he said, they gave leisure to a certain number of idle (rich) people who did not do anything at all and were extremely miserable. "You can't expect me to regard you as sensible Islanders when you do that. It is perfectly scandalous and I hope before I see you again, you will remedy that."

And on he went: nationalising land, he thought, would be problematic, which had largely to do with the fact that there were "certain men, perhaps 5 per cent of the community, who were willing to devote their whole lives to the making of money by making other people work for them." They had "a certain managerial ability", while the typical modern working man was "more or less helpless."

Then he was on to tariffs and free trade, and finally to the matter of a remarkable thing he had seen in Wellington.

You have in Wellington a remarkable milk supply which is the envy of the whole world. I believe an intelligent town like Nuremberg in Germany has copied the whole scheme from you.

Thanks to Sir Truby King, a man of great ability who probably would never have been a success as a popular politician, you have an infant mortality rate less than half that of England. You have this municipal milk supply, with Sir Truby King looking after what is done with the milk for the babies. But your milk, I think, costs too much.

I just want to ask: why not distribute it freely? This is very important in New Zealand. A little loss on milk doesn't matter. It is of enormous importance that all your children should be a generation reared from first class children. When you have done this, when you have distributed free milk, which is just as possible as free water, I would then suggest that you should go on from free milk to free bread. If you have free bread, and anybody can go to a store and get it, such a thing as a hungry child will be impossible in New Zealand.

And having well and truly got the socialist blood pumping he declared that New Zealand was leading all the world but Russia in Communism even though it didn't know that it was Communist, and had no taste for the ideology.

It actually thinks that Communism is a very terrible thing. I am a Communist. I studied Karl Marx fourteen years before Lenin did. You see, I am a very sensible and well-meaning person. I am sure that when I go away you will regret me very much and you will be sorry that I can't give you a few more talks. Goodnight everybody.

So we know what he thought of New Zealand. What did New Zealand think of Mr. Shaw? The report tells us that a number of the gathering were thrilled:

It is the best twenty minutes I have spent in this council chamber said Councillor P Fraser MP, when some of the problems skated over with superb certainty by Mr. Shaw came forward again in wearisome but necessary detail.

The Mainstream Media in 1934 were nothing if not fair and balanced, and so elsewhere on the front page we discover there was a more muted response from other quarters, and perhaps none more so than from the Chairman of the Auckland Metropolitan Milk Association who declared:

I am certainly disappointed in the views of some philosophers who have recently been visiting New Zealand.

How was 2005 for you? If you had to get it down to ten bullet points, what would they be?

Martha at Wanda Harland had the very interesting idea a while ago of getting your memoirs condensed to that form. I'm sure it's possible, but I think it would be more achievable if you were to start with something a little narrower in scope.

So do by all means click here to try out my 2005 - The Year In Review Bullet Point Generator. In just a few quick clicks, you'll have your own personalised Year-In-Review to copy, paste and email to all your pals.

So how about 2005? What didn't it have? An election of exquisite tightness; Didymo; the world's fastest Prime Minister; intolerable levels of taxation; ceaseless social engineering by the Clarkitects of Helengrad; vaulting fuel prices; the leader of the free world putting his office lawyer up for the Supreme Court because she was "plenty bright" and playing his gee-tar when the levee broke.

I started the year with a book deadline bearing down on me. I got that out of the way, but I'm ending this year under the same yoke. It's poor management on my part that I should have a largely automated business and yet spend so much time at this desk. This New Year's resolution will therefore be a reprise of the previous one.

Not grumbling in the least, though. Life is good. Our little girl is the light of our life. We've contrived to arrange things in a way that avoids most of the malaise that can afflict today's workforce warriors. We count our blessings; although it has to be said we have also tucked away the mother of all disaster survival kits in our garage with a couple of courses of Tamiflu. When hysteria comes calling, we do a little prudent buying.

I remain incurably optimistic and sunny in my outlook, though. I wrote this in the conclusion to that book I mentioned which was hanging over me last Christmas:

If this story isn't true, it ought to be. Apparently there is a shop somewhere in England with this sign in its window:

'We have been established for over one hundred years and have been pleasing our displeasing customers ever since. We have made money and lost money, suffered the effects of coal nationalisation, coal rationing, government control, and bad payers. We have been cussed and discussed, messed about, lied to, held up, robbed, and swindled. The only reason we stay in business is to see what happens next.'

One of the things I like about the New Zealand attitude is that we're quite likely to laugh at bad luck. Perhaps we have the view that it's been a bit of a roll of the dice trying to make a go of a country at the bottom of the world, thousands of miles from anywhere. We've come unstuck often enough, but by any measure, you'd have to say that the roll of the dice has actually paid off. There are more than four million of us generating more than 100 billion dollars worth of GDP a year. We were, for a little while, one of the richest nations on the planet. If you were an adult at that time, though, you probably didn't take too much assurance from that. My parent's generation grew up in the shadow of the Depression, and it seems to me they'll never forget what that meant. They also lived through world war. They remain, it seems to me, a little on guard against calamity.

By comparison, the half century that I've lived through has been remarkably benign by any historical standard. No pandemic, no world war, rising prosperity, no depression. The optimists say it will stay that way. ACT party president Catherine Judd, at their 2005 conference, recommended the proposition by Matthew Parris in The Spectator that 'we should be glorying in the fact that the right has won the argument'. They were, she said, "part of modernity, part of the winning side of the argument." Supporters of individual freedom should be able to grin.

Well, maybe. As the saying goes about the French Revolution and its impact: it could be too soon to tell. The more-market economic orthodoxy holds all the cards for now, to be sure. But to hold, it needs to ensure the cohesion of those societies. Maybe the ubiquity of consumerism and the aspirations it creates among its poorest will be sufficient. But a society short on spiritual fulfillment does seem to go looking for it. And the answers people find may or may not keep them dutifully turning the wheels in their little hamster cages.

Tim Hazledine told me 'I wouldn't want to be born now basically, I must say. There are some really big issues in the world, mainly sustainability issues, I think, that we're not recognising at the moment.' But, he said, 'I like to think I'm an optimistic sort of person and perhaps we'll come to grips with it, sooner rather than later would be better.'

Who to believe? The ideal from this point on sees prosperity and democracy spreading out across the globe, and all boats rising. Who wouldn't hope for that? But history so far suggests that you don't tend to get smooth sailing for too very long. Some of those factors are entirely beyond our control. Tsunamis, earthquakes and cyclones all prove that. Some are arguably within our control: pandemic, environmental catastrophe. If you want something to truly worry about, worry about them. Worry, but also hope that we manage to use our ever-wider accumulated knowledge to meet the challenge.

For most of humanity, the notion of Hobbes' assessment of a solitary, poor, nasty, brutish existence was discouragingly accurate. Enormous catastrophe could perhaps put us back into such a position. But would that be the end? Any number of generations before us had to deal with that: seeking, overcoming odds, and hanging on by an altogether thinner thread.

If you tallied up all the dreadful ways the world could end tomorrow, you'd never get out of bed. Volcano, meteor, transmuting virus, nuclear catastrophe, it's horrible. But we do get up, and we whistle each day past the graveyard. By contrast, much of what we fret about here in New Zealand - as others quite probably do to an equivalent extent in other places - looks like small beer.

Wherever and whoever you are, cheers.