Island Life by David Slack

Eights and Aces

The arms went up like Rocky. He had pulled off his sweetest deal yet. Into the casino he rolled.

We do things differently here. We launch a new government in a gaming palace. While the rest of the world recoils in horror at the bleeding balance sheets, we tackle our financial Armageddon by giving the job to a merchant banker.

Down here at the end of the world we can't get enough of the dark humour.

I voted Labour Plus and all I got was this lousy tax cut

In their tens of thousands, brave New Zealanders yesterday put a tick next to National for the very first time in their life.

The only thing we have to fear is curly light bulbs said John.

"Fair enough," said the Labour Plus punters, "time for a change."

Buyers remorse? Not overnight. But it may happen. Check that fine print: what did he commit to, specifically? What will he do for you, specifically?

Stephen Joyce was making the right sounds on Agenda this morning. He knows the score. If you want to hold your market share, you have to fulfil the product promise. But can he persuade his fellow Tories? The casino rang with applause for Rodney and Roger.

He is risen!

He was red and croaking, all certitude and expectation.

Roger, like rust, like the P kids, like the undead, never sleeps.

Do you think he will be content to sit on a green leather seat for three years and do nothing? Gotta crash through or crash.

The Prime Minister could make him a minister. He could give give him a big job. Or he could do nothing, which would create a minister in exile. Ask Bassett to explain how it would work. Roger knows what to do. He knows how to keep the gallery enthralled with a new chapter in the soap opera that is Bradford's Parliament. There'd be press conferences, interviews, public meetings. He could have advice to offer; helpful suggestions: How to deal with the bad debts and the layoffs, the winding-ups and the bankruptcies. They're coming, don't you worry about that.

Ideology abhors a vacuum

But John said he'd be buggered if he'd have him in his cabinet. Can't they just ignore him? That rather depends on whether you want to pass any legislation. 59 seats will get you not one bill passed without the co-operation of at least three other members of Parliament.

Get the support of ACT, and you've made a start. If the legislation's not to their taste, you try Tariana. Make friends with the Greens and you may not be cooking with gas, but you have more options.

Last night John looked as happy as a dog with three tails. On Monday he's going to find out how it feels to have them all wagging him.

Roger, would you be interested in heading up a razor gang?

Some of my best friends are bureaucrats

The ironies don't take long to develop. Never mind tired old McCully and Ryall and Williamson and all. You can expect big things from Tim Groser and Hekia Parata. They are impressive, accomplished people. The only mystery is: how did they get past the selection process without anyone twigging that they have spent a large part of their lives working in the public service as other than doctors and teachers?

I have a dream job

The highlight of an election night is usually the winning leader's speech. I remember Lange, I remember Muldoon. I remember Bolger giving the pollsters some buggery. I remember Clark and I remember Mike Moore delivering what might have been a victory speech or a concession - no-one was quite sure - complaining about the temperature in the hall.

They all had their own manner, but I don't believe I have ever heard a New Zealand leader tread with quite such heavy-footed lumpishness through the glorious first minutes of their incumbency. The tone was odd. I wasn't sure if he was accepting the role of Prime Minister or celebrating beating the Thirsty Surfies in the Presidents' grade.

Still, let it not be said there was not colour. We've got great food, great scenery and Kiwi ingenuity. When you put it as poetically as that, who can doubt that we will soon be punching above our weight going forward?

Send in the clones

On the last day of the election campaign I drove past Nikki Kaye and her fellow campaigners outside Victoria Park market waving placards at the commuters as they drove to work.

It was emblematic. Where once an election involved campaign meetings and the exchange of ideas, wit and banter, we now have branding experiences and mall encounters.

I wonder: what would John A Lee have made of it all?

I have heard Nikki Kaye speak at meetings and on the radio. I have yet to hear her commit herself even once to a clear and unequivocal opinion.

Her words are the stuff of modern management. The sentences are embroidered with 'In terms of' and 'the reality is'.

She seems to proceed with the caution of the ambitious young executive who will not speak without clearance from head office, or in this case, campaign HQ. Modern companies are bottom heavy with biddable young twenty and thirty somethings. So too, it seems, is Parliament becoming the smart choice of the young man or woman with an MBA textbook on their bedside table.

The new MP for Auckland Central will no doubt be working on her maiden speech. I'd recommend she mention food, scenery and kiwi ingenuity.

It costs 32 dollars to ride the ferry to Waiheke Island and back. Even the best discount works out at 20 dollars or so, but this will be of no concern to you if you are more than 65 years old, and you're willing to leave after 9 am. In that case, the price to you will be: nothing. Gratis. Buckshee. Not one single dollar. Just take out your SuperGold Card and wave your way through the boarding gate.

All the age-enriched people we know are talking of it.

The SuperGold Card is bounteous. Free bus rides! 5% off your sirloin steak and your saveloys at the Mad Butcher! Other concessions too numerous to mention!

But never mind that; Waiheke for nothing! All of grey Auckland is going down to the sea today.

How much does a cargo of SuperGold Card-carrying seniors weigh? How much diesel will Fullers be burning up on this? And is it all at their cost? Or is it being worn entirely by ratepayers and or taxpayers?

Like the maxim about shoeshine boys giving stock tips, the sure sign that the end might be near for this marvellous perk came to me in a radio ad. Come visit Waiheke, said the ad. Use your SuperGold card and get a free ferry trip, and free buses when you get here! This is good news for the cafes of Onetangi, but possibly not good news for the future of this splendid treat.

For a long time, the best cheap treat in Auckland was the ham sandwiches at the museum. They were as fat as the ones you get in the United States of America; layer upon layer of succulent ham, almost too big for your gob. Some clown wrote it up in Metro and not long after, it seemed, they had remodelled the cafe, and the two dollar sandwiches with five dollars' worth of ham were no more. Good news for the Auckland museum's budget, and good news for the nation's pigs, but sad for the rest of us.

Who is responsible for the largesse? Winston will tell you it was his doing, and for once, he'll be telling you the whole truth. Go to a Helen Clark meeting, though, and you'll hear her taking her own due credit.

The truth is that it's you and me putting our hand in our pocket.

I can't say I begrudge it. It's a poor person who goes into a polling booth without thinking about other people's grannies, and other people's granddaughters.

This weird election seems to have come down to a reprise of the big issue of the 1975 Muldoon landslide. The Labour government had created a vast savings fund to vouchsafe the superannuation of the nation's elderly. To pay for it, money was compulsorily deducted from your pay and salted away in an investment fund, which stood to grow enormous. Muldoon offered a pay-as-you-go scheme that would give old people a pension that was almost as good as the average wage.

Decisions, decisions. Just to make it easier, a National Party TV ad showed the country turning blood red as the government bought up every last standing dairy, factory, farm and woolshed. Bring on the Dancing Cossacks.

A generation or so later, the notion of a government having a stonking big investment fund is now accepted by both major parties to be a Very Good Thing. But that nice Mr Key thinks it would be a good idea to dial back the amount people will have deducted from their wages. Hey, saving is hard, actually. So we'll change the scheme to make it less hard to save, by, er, not saving much. Good idea! I look forward to seeing this excellent approach being applied to next year's Auckland marathon, which will require that you complete only 10 kilometres. My record time will make those Kenyans look like pikers.

Muldoon's plan was short -term. So is Key's.

In the long run, we are all, sadly, inevitably and undeniably, dead; but we have a habit of leaving granddaughters.

In 1975, my granny said she had decided to vote for the nice Mr Muldoon because he was offering her a very good pension. That worked out very well for her, but not so well for her six great grand-daughters.

Poor Peter Dunne. Even his scandals sound dull. But wait! Just as your eyelids are falling, a certain pair of names make it all interesting.

On Saturday, The Dominion Post told us,

Mr Meurant, who had worked for Mr Vela, brokered donations to NZ First and later worked as an adviser to party leader Winston Peters.
While there, Mr Meurant offered Mr Vela the opportunity to help frame friendly policy in areas in which Mr Vela has business interests.
Mr Meurant wrote a report for Mr Vela at the end of September 1999 - two months out from the general election - in which he suggested donating $5000 to Mr Dunne's party.

I have been a fast fan of Ross Meurant since the winter of 1981. Everywhere you turned, politicians and protestors and Ces Blazey were just full of waffle and blah blah blah. Human rights blah blah. Amandla blah blah Mandela. Blah blah too busy dating my wife but a par thide is wrong.

Christ it was tedious. Waffle and wittering. But not from the leader of the Red Squad. Move Move Move he said. How true.

How I yearned for such a strongman to enter politics. My wish came true on May 20 1987. The national party met in Daragaville and chose Ross Meurant as their candidate. I was so giddy with the thought of it that I had to leave the town in an ambulance.

Naturally he was far too good for those gutless wonders in Parliament. He did some undersecretary work, but before long he walked, and that was the end of a short but brilliant career.

He wrote a book. The ending was without parallel. Quite the best I've ever read.

He recalled how the Italians had finally turned on Mussolini by stringing him up by his feet, hanging him from a steel girder and stuffing his mouth with his testicles. "Keep your eye out for a spare steel girder," he concluded cryptically.

If I were the Velas, belting about the country in a sleek, swift helicopter, I daresay I could be picky about my political friends. I could go for the very best money could buy. I could hook up with a straight talker who wouldn't put me crook.

If you want to get amongst the politicians, you need to know how to take care of yourself. You don't want to end up with anyone's testicles stuffed in your mouth.

Halloween is not just for kids. I have some suggestions for a little adult fun this evening.

Here in my leafy suburb, the Greater Depression has not even strolled by for a look.
Yet.
Ever since I first saw Wile E Coyote suspended in clear air with an expression of perplexity and sheer terror, I have understood the concept of pregnant calamity.

We once inherited a large fat ginger cat with the name of - no kidding - Weenie. We gave him a more dignified one. One morning, we heard an odd scraping sound on the roof outside our bedroom window. We reached the scene just in time for the moment of high comedy. Leo had been sunning himself a little too early in the day and had been undone by a light dew on the corrugated iron. He had lost purchase and slid off the roof, bum first. There had been just enough time for him to sink his claws into the rim of the spouting. And there he hung. His expression suggested a small measure of perplexity and sheer terror, but mostly it was indignation.

Karren is generally kind-hearted and empathetic, but the comedy overtook her at this moment. How she laughed. I swear the cat's look of indignation darkened as she chortled, which only made her laugh louder.

And now gravity and adiposity had their way. The spouting slumped and the cat reluctantly but finally relinquished his hold, dropping several metres to the garden below with a thud. And then in one quick ginger flash, he was gone, springing away in great shamed bounds.

This is largely how I recall the ensuing carnage of the 1987 share-market crash. The afternoon it happened, I adjourned with friends to the Exchange Tavern in Parnell, a place favoured then by trader types. The sky was a gunmetal grey, looming and menacing. "What will happen?" we asked each other. The answer was, for quite a while: nothing.

But then the fun began. Jobs were lost, houses were reluctantly yielded or sold up by the banks, companies traded until they ran out of money and then folded, and the BNZ worked its way, alphabetically, it seemed, through the winding up orders over the next four years. Anzon was one of the first to go, but if your company's name was Zenith, you had about three years more grace.

In other words, just because it ain't bad yet, there's no guarantee it won't be; people will cling to the spouting as long as they can, and then they'll take the fall.

What form will this nightmare take when its chilly fog finally drifts towards your door? This is the question to ask as you choose your adult Halloween costume.

Here comes the debt collector knocking on your door.
Here comes the process server, with a final notice from Mastercard.
Here comes your 'personal' banker.
Here comes the real estate agent with a mortgagee sale sign.
And here comes your middle class nightmare, up the steps of your house: a WINZ officer. If only John Key had won that election; he'd have got rid of the bureaucrats.

Oh the fun you'll have, and the places you'll go, putting the wind up innocent householders!

Don't forget to take a big sack. You can collect a lot of food when you go trick or treating, and those sweets can keep for months and months.

So you’re thinking of hiring a caucasian. Good choice! These people have many uses around the vineyard. They invented the printing press, the age of reason, indoor plumbing and biscotti, and although they can’t dance to save themselves, they can make entertaining conversation if you fill them up with a cheap chardonnay.

Caucasians come in a variety of types. You’ll need to get to know them.

For example:

Thick, well-groomed head of blow-dryed hair.
This type is no good around the vats. Won’t wear a net.

White shining teeth, big grin.
Could make a useful maitre d’, if you give them a tight script.

Hangs about with lifesavers, gets photo taken in speedos.
You'll find they spend too much time in the changing room if you let them get away with it, but they'll be good at putting in a strainer post or hanging a gate.

Never married.
Good at designing dresses and coordinating weddings. Can deal with all the phone calls from brides and their mothers - “Yes, our vineyard is fabulous for weddings. Oh, it never rains in Marlborough” etc.

Experienced television presenter.
TV types are best suited to simple methodical tasks, preferably something other than customer relations; they tend to be indiscreet.