Island Life by David Slack

Take one step forward, everyone who likes MMP. Clark and Key, where the hell do you think you’re going? Helen Clark may well have come to love this ugly little monkey as her own, but she was agin it at the time of the vote. You might also recall the sick look on her face on election night 2005. Had she gazed into the crystal ball and seen the pinstriped consequences?

John Key says he likes MMP. But John says he likes everything and everybody.

He’ll tell you he likes you right up until the moment he’s taken your job as leader and then decided your face doesn't actually fit as a heavy-hitting shadow spokesman.

He’ll tell you on the phone that you’re his special friend right up until the moment you give him a special price on a trade and then, even as he goes on telling you what a great guy you are for doing him a favour, he’ll be gesturing to the boys in the dealing room: he took the bait. We got the special price. Pile in!

He tells Pita Sharples in private that he won’t scrap the Maori seats because he likes Pita and he likes Maoris and I’m one of you fullahs.

John Key gets MMP. But really: who can say whether he likes it or not?

We do know that as a tribe, the Nats hate MMP. Jim Bolger understood MMP. He threw away the long spoon and sat right down next to Winston to sup the whisky on cold winter nights. But the Nats were sore filled with rage and did cast out the great helmsman. Even as the country cried abandon Shipley! That Williamson guy is an idiot! the Nats believed they were right to turn their back on the traitorous and odious and loathsome Winston.

Meet a National Party member at a cocktail party and stand by to hear how wrong-headed MMP is and how much better this country would be it if it were run like a business. (Merrill Lynch, for example?) I explored this canard once before. It never goes out of fashion and neither does its paucity of vision.

So what does a Nat dream of as Colmar Brunton whispers in his ear? 50% and better. We could govern alone!

"Ah, but it can’t be done," say the commentators. We cast our minds back. "Even under First Past the Post, a party only got more than 50% in the 1951 Waterfront election." We say to ourselves: must go and check that.

I checked. Those of us who have said such a thing are awry. Here are the numbers. Seddon’s Liberals managed it at will, but the landscape was so different then, a comparison is all but meaningless.

In more recent times, with two major parties splitting to the left and right, the comparison is more useful.

Labour garnered 51.3 in 1946, then the Nats beat them in 1949 with 51.9 and in that infamous election of 1951 they collected 54%

It didn’t happen again. Not in the Labour landslide of '72, not in the Muldoon one of '75. And then along came MMP. See the big parties shrink! 1996 Labour gets 28, National 33. ACT, the Alliance and NZ First all get stonking big numbers. The trend since then has been back to the big parties. Last election, Labour got 41, the Nats 39.

What does that leave us? It leaves us with 50% looking like more of a possibility for one major party than it was a decade ago. But it’s still a very big number. Surely too big. What’s more, for a majority - assuming a Maori Party overhang - John could need 52% to go alone.

Can’t see it. So then it’s ACT and Peter and maybe Pita. If you want to sketch what the next National-led coalition will look like, you must factor in the ACT party, and ACT party philosophies. John seems happy enough to embrace any old ideology as long as he gets the flash job. Roger should do fine. What will you choose, punters? Will it be a Brasher future?

Obama
Stocks on Wall Street leapt 38% today on the announcement that the Obama campaign will continue to accept donations after their candidate has been elected. The site is now raising a billion dollars an hour and is forecast to have sufficient funds by Christmas to enter world markets and settle all delinquent Credit Default Swap positions, or “bets” as they are more commonly known.

“It’s just this totally awesome money machine,” a spokesman said. “The only other businesses taking in more money online are a site called MILFs in the Military, and James Packer’s casinos.”

She said the President-in-Waiting was humbled by the “appreciation of the American people” and looking forward to “sharing the love”.

“It’s beautiful. It’s like everyone’s paying their taxes without even being asked. Except for the Republicans. But we think that will be less of a problem once we’ve bought Fox.”

Labour
Helen Clark said today that a plan to buy every university graduate a Prius had been “sadly and regretfully” shelved. “Trust me,” she said, “If the money was there, we would have spent it.”

Greens
Jeanette and Russel announced today that, if elected, all members of the Greens will continue to breath in and out in the usual manner for the full duration of the term. Their story appeared in second place on the One News bulletin and fourth on Three. “They really are having quite a good run.” said political marketing lecturer Sarah McTavish who appeared in the fifth story on One and sixth on Three.

ACT
Sir Roger Douglas announced that the Act National coalition had re-worked its First 100 Days package to enable a flat tax by lunchtime of Day One and privatised hospitals by the Seventh Day. As the announcement attracted no media, he made the announcement again later in the day at Rodney Hide’s lunch date with a squash player.

National
A political blogger has shed some light on a cryptic note found on the National party campaign bus. The handwritten note, which embedded reporter Francesca Mold discovered beneath John Key’s seat, read:

What else? Anything really evil. Frighten underbelly. Close Kuras. End dole.

Commentators had been at a loss to explain the words until Gordon Campbell noted yesterday in an aside to a 15,000 word analysis of the fiscal options for a December mini-budget that “the clue’s in the first letter of each word, for pity’s sake, now we can we get back to some actual policy?”

Press gallery life member Barry Soper said “It’s all very well for Gordon, but he has the whole day to do that highbrow stuff. By the time we’ve got through TV makeup and drinking godawful cups of coffee and listening to godawful speeches, there’s stuff-all time left.”

The Party Formerly Known as Jesus Loves A Pig Shooter
Peter Dunne, visiting the Robo-Kids daycare center in Courtenay Place, expressed his alarm at eroding family values. “This is the third daycare I’ve visited this month where a brothel in the same building has closed down and unemployed investment bankers have moved in,” he said. “It’s only happened three times so far, but there’ll be more of them, mark my words. Why should decent hard working kiwi parents who pay their taxes have their children exposed to such people? Someone ought to do something.”

Choose a brighter minister

Maurice Williamson: Labour Party plant or just a vegetable?

Thelma, Louise or Schmidt?

David Farrar hits the campaign trail in a Winnebago and puts the hard questions. Briefs or boxers? When were you first voted blackboard monitor? Would you like to count my corks?

A pledge card you can take to the bank

If you nationalise the banks we won't run them the way my mates and I have been doing it.

I have been busy writing some words for someone who wishes to buy a newspaper business, I have been taking my daughter on school holiday outings, I have been sitting at microphones in radio stations offering potted thoughts, I have been hanging out at film premieres and listening to new music by The Checks, but mostly I have been reading the world's financial websites and being alternately consoled by the calm thoughts of Warren Buffett and perturbed by other more troubling observations.

I have also been bemused by the paucity of the so-called economic plan of Mr Key, late of the world’s financial markets.

Some thoughts:

Firstly, I endorse this YouTube clip. Living for today and discounting the future is how we ended up with Muldoon's super scheme instead of the Labour one. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Secondly, I recommend Gareth Morgan’s article in the new Listener for a clear-eyed and chilling assessment of the world credit crisis and what it might mean to deeply-indebted NZ and its vastly expensive housing stock. (Take a stab at the implications of what he's written - house values down 20%? 30%? 50%?) There are distinctions you can make between our position and that of Iceland, but we have at least this much in common: we both borrowed a huge pile of offshore money in order to push up the price of houses and live large on the proceeds.

Thirdly I offer this modest proposal for any political party to package up for us punters. Never mind the tax cuts, what about the big economic plan?

We have a free trade agreement with China. It was, they told us at the time, a Big Deal. Well, why don't we make the most of it?

What about an audacious export project to capitalise on next year's 9% growth in that vast market?

We could be exporting goods, and  services, and people; whatever might have a market.  Of course there are people doing it already, and of course, it's far more easily said than done, but if we at least point our guns in a direction where we can score some hits, would that not be prudent in these perturbing economic times? If our traditional markets are going to be contracting alarmingly, shouldn't we, as a matter of urgency, be shifting our attention and efforts to a market that might have better prospects?

What might come of a great big swaggering Man-on-the-Moon-in-a-Decade plan to make ourselves big in China? I'm thinking of tax breaks, export incentives, training programmes, workshops, trade missions, and a whole lot of brainstorming with investors and exporters and smart business people to answer the simple question: how can we really capitalise, as a matter of urgency,  on this trade agreement?  I am only slightly kidding when I also propose we get those two schoolgirls who cracked the Ribena code to pitch in on this. We need smart people with new ideas.

I don't deny that there are plenty of objections you can make to this ( too broad, too vague, too risky, too Statist to name just a few), but if ever there was a time for some fresh thinking and some new departures, it must surely be now.

Let us deal with all the cliches in one groaning paragraph. All this doom and gloom is impacting negatively on investor intentions, but not mine; I am a glass-half-full kind of person and when life hands me lemons I make lemonade. Let’s start shovelling and see how many ponies we can find. Just off the top of my head I can think of ten reasons to greet the coming Greater Depression with a broad smile and a cheerful disposition.

1. Soup for everybody! And not just thin turnip broth! Since the last depression we have acquired a vastly more sophisticated cuisine. We all know so much about reductions and foaming that any fool with an apron can create a soup that is to die for. That expression will, of course, fall out of favour as we return to times of near starvation. Soup kitchens will be everywhere and for everyone. Except for you Mr Merchant Banker. This is all your fault. No soup for you.

2. Depressions are a time of exciting public works. In the last one, we got Tamaki Drive, we got pine forests across the North Island and how many damn hydro dams did we get? America got a colossus. It’s so big, they say you can see it from space, if we ever find the money to get back out there. I’m going to put my request in first. Prime Minister Key, may we please have a travelator under Auckland harbour? I have written of this before: you make a perspex tunnel like the one in Kelly Tarlton’s, and you run it from the bottom of Queen Street to Stanley Bay here in Devonport - conveniently one minute’s walk from my front door - and you put an airport travelator in the thing. Plenty of work for everyone, especially labourers who enjoy swimming.

3. Speaking of our coming Prime MInister, there will be great entertainment to be had in watching his policy agonies as he grapples with fiscal turmoil. Will his coalition partner Roger Douglas exhort him to do something groovy and dangerous just like he did the last time there was an economic crisis? Or will Honest John “None Of Those Derivatives Ideas Were Mine” The Trader evolve into a kinder gentler sort of chap? Might he embrace the Keynesian spirit of the 1935 Labour government and become a folk hero in the manner of Michael Joseph Savage, with his portrait being fixed to every PC screen saver in the country? There’s a movie in this, every bit as savage and philosophically gripping as The Last Temptation of Christ, or at least that scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House with the angel on one shoulder exhorting our hero to be a good boy and the devil on the other whispering “fuck her.”

4. The Greater Depression will be a time of moral re-calibration, and not a moment too soon. I predict the end of the party for Cathy Odgers and all the other ship girls of the SS Avarice who have been tending the desires of High Net Worth Individuals. When we get to the show trials for moral bankruptcy in a gilded age, the tax lawyers will be in the dock next to Jeff Skilling and Paris Hilton.

5. A new depression is sure to bring us a new dawn in music. Abject despair hardens, in time, into indignation and protest; at that moment, someone picks up a guitar and starts to sing. It begins with Woody Guthrie, it flowers into Bob Dylan. The bloated sanctimony ultimately yields Bono, but the game is still worth the candle.

6. In a depression you mostly make your own fun when you’re not trapping possums and wekas, but there’s always going to be an impressario ready to lighten your heart for the price of a ticket. You’ve seen those marathon dances in the movies. In this celebrity age, we can no doubt expect expect Jason Gunn to do what’s needed, and offer us non-stop fox-trotting celebrities and inanities without end. If you liked Dancing With the Stars for two hours on a Sunday, imagine how much you’ll enjoy it when it's running from Saturday to Saturday with only a five minute break once a day for Suzanne Paul to touch up her natural glow.

7. We will rediscover the romance of rail, because we will, naturally get ourselves about by jumping aboard boxcars to ride the rail from Auckland to Marton and Swanson to Sandringham. We do, however, now live in an electronic era, so don’t be surprised to swing aboard the carriage to find Beth Roach or Donna-Marie Lever broadcasting live and exclusively to the nation. Carry a comb.

8. There will be no quarter final All Black loss in the 2011 Rugby World cup, because in the absence of the investment bankers and the Hooray Henrys filling up the corporate boxes, there will be no 2011 Rugby World Cup.

9. The low point in the desperate years will come when an Asian consortium of investors buys our entire nation in an IMF mortgagee sale. Our spirits will soon begin to lift, however, as we thrill to the spectacle of Winston Peters being repatriated to Taiwan.

10. I have saved the best for last. No-one will be able to afford to drive a car. And you know what that means. Every lane of the harbour bridge will be a cycle lane.