Island Life by David Slack

Hey Mr and Ms Ordinary of Auckland, you wouldn’t think of doing brain surgery without going to medical school would you? Of course not. So why are you piling in on this beautiful new Auckland logo without a design diploma to your names? Listen to the guru. Kevin Roberts thinks it’s so grouse he’s put mags on it.

I know it's not protocol to customize a company's logo, especially when it has just been launched, but I couldn't resist adding a Lovemarks touch to Brand Auckland. Some bloke once said "Lovemarks are not owned by the company but by the people who love them..." and I've taken his message to heart...KR

You really have to hold your breath when you take a trip to KevinWorld. New Zealand is just entirely and wholly exciting because we are, you know, at the edge! Not in a world-is-flat kind of way, because Kevin knows what Earth actually looks like. Round. He spends a lot of time in planes. He has plenty to say about flying in them, much in the manner of the best kind of gentleman who cannot keep from praising his footman.

No, it's not that we’re nearly falling off the edge of some flat Earth; our edgy-ness is more in the sense of Simon Upton’s memorable phrase: the last bus stop on the planet. We’re just so damn remote, it’s thrilling. We make our own fun and we’re going to king-hit this world any day now because you’d better believe that we’re punching way above our weight.

“All new stuff comes from the margins, “ writes Kevin, “So if Wellington is the capital of New Zealand, then Auckland is the capital of the world's edge. This is a great place to be,“ he says. Wait, Kevin, wait! My orientation is failing me. Be at the margin. But go to the capital. But that would be the centre, not the margin, surely? I need to sit down. I’m feeling edgy.

I lack vision. I just write down what comes into my field. First I saw the logo. A day or two later I saw the new Listener cover.

I don’t know about you but I think that picture just pulls it all together. ‘City of Sails’ is surely exclusionary. 60,000 sailors, 130,000 boats, but more than a million people? Minority pursuit at best.

But put those two images together and you have it all: volcanic, hairy Auckland; and everyone scared shitless about the P. You cannot get more edgy than that. Throw in the rural heritage and what do you have? “The hairiest A and P show on Earth”. That fits on a letterhead, easy.

I don’t blame the designers for coming up short on their $300,000 brief. We all have our off days.

Think of an office rubbish bin. Think of a sticky orange cough lolly sitting atop the crumpled paper, wreathed in detritus - lint, fine hairs, chads hanging from...the edge. I wonder if there was such a hairy cough lolly lying in the designer’s wastepaper basket?

You may scoff, but I know what it is to be a creative bankrupt, up against deadline. I was writing a speech one day in the Prime Minister’s Office. I looked out across Parliament grounds to the sun dropping behind the Tinakori hill. It was a hazy, smeared spectacle. I typed: “History is a window through which we can see only dimly”.

Denis Welch had not at this point shown his political hand and so was still permitted to write the Listener’s weekly politics column. A few weeks after I wrote that sentence, he produced a column in the question and answer style, and I have not until this day had the chance to tell him how true he was.

Question: What does the Prime Minister mean when he says: “History is a window through which we see only dimly.”

Answer: The Beehive windows need cleaning.

Bike-riders of Auckland! Gaze upon this mighty vision and tell me your heart doesn't pound a little. GetAcross.Org.NZ prepared this lovingly fashioned artist's impression of the proposed cycle and walkway extension to the Harbour Bridge.

If you like the look of this, then you should be at the rally tomorrow afternoon, Sunday 21.

Where: The park below the bridge at the city end.

When: 2PM Sunday 21 September

Why: To let the politicians know how much we want this cycleway.

More information here and here.

Extensive discussion here and here.

I’ll be there tomorrow with a microphone to join a bunch of politicians, a crew of dedicated but perfectly well-adjusted activists, and, with your help, everyone in Auckland who has a bike.

UPDATE

Great show, great turnout. I can remember a time when people used to say wistfully how great it would be to have cafes with tables on the footpath like they did in Europe. We worked that out.

I think how great it would be to have the streets full of cyclists like they do in (parts of) Europe.

This cycleway could serve as a linch pin for a network of cycleways that could make it so.

We called a show of hands at the rally today. Motion carried unanimously.

Cruising down the Information Super Highway in the people’s browser, I came upon these lyrics a moment ago.

Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn

Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal
Die Sonne scheint mit Glitzerstrahl

Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band
Weisse Streifen, gruener Rand

Jetzt schalten wir ja das Radio an
Aus dem Lautsprecher klingt es dann:
Wir fah'rn auf der Autobahn...

In English:

We are driving on the Autobahn

In front of us is a wide valley
The sun is shining with glittering rays

The driving strip is a grey track
White stripes, green edge

We are switching the radio on
From the speaker it sounds:

We are driving on the Autobahn

Ah, Kraftwerk, you enigmatic Germans. I first knew that song as a teenager. Decades later I stood in the Boiler Room at Mt Smart to hear it again. Men stood upon the stage in shadows in front of a vast multimedia screen, faces down, working their laptops.

I had not the first idea, in 1975, what they were singing about, save for the inescapable sense that the song concerned itself with the Autobahn experience.

Thanks to the Internet I now see that the song concerns itself with the Autobahn experience.

I just thought I would share that with you, firstly because I find the Internet ever-giving, ever-surprising, and secondly because I find that if I write something about the Germans, I get an email from Philip Temple. Generally he writes to correct or chide me, but it is nonetheless nice to know that in a world littered with bloggers, an eminent man of letters cares.

Matt McCarten thinks John Key would make Rodney Hide Minister of Education. Would Rodney settle for that? And are we counting our chickens before they’re ready to be caged or gassed or macerated?

First things first. If National gets better than 50%, they don’t need nobody. Theoretically. John Key says he’d get himself some partners anyway, even if he didn't need them. Theoretically. The man is making a first rate job of the world’s longest job interview. He relentlessly provides the approved answers. I believe in thinking outside the box.
There’s no ‘I’ in team.
My greatest weakness, Paul, is that I’m just so keen to get stuck in.

What’s the reality, John? The reality is they won’t make 50. MMP militates against it. The sheer size of that group of voters who are not responding to the pollsters militates against it.

The reality is that John picks up the phone and talks to Rodney. And maybe Pita. And maybe Peter.

Let’s say Rodney and three or four other MPs - Sir Roger, for example - get their chance to shine. I see Lockwood and Maurice being happy as sand-boys. I see a reasonable chunk of National party voters being no less happy. The Labour Plus punters might feel rueful.

My reference point is an outing last month to Wild Bill’s Rib House restaurant here in our little seaside village.

I am determined to give our little girl a good civics education, but it’s easy to put a foot wrong. Into our mailbox fell a letter from Rodney Hide. He promised to take 500 bucks a week off our tax in a very crisp and clear pamphlet, and he accompanied it with an invitation. Come to a meeting to hear how we’re going to do what’s right. Wild Bill's Rib House.

I said to Karren: that could be interesting. Karren said she thought so too. We’d need to get a baby sitter. Or, I said, recalling how much she’d enjoyed our recent encounter with the judicial system, Mary-Margaret might like to come too. We asked her. We explained about an interesting man called Rodney Hide who wears a yellow jacket and yet still manages to get people to take him seriously. We explained about the ACT party and Roger Douglas, and the argument he had with David Lange and what it was like in the Beehive when Mum and Dad worked there. Would she like to come and see what a political meeting was like? Well sure she would.

When someone is trying to sell you something, read the material carefully. Even if a politician closes the letter with words like
look forward to seeing you there, don’t take that to mean that he himself will be attending.

We arrived at Wild Bill’s Rib House on a cold Monday night. When Roger Douglas was a cabinet minister, this site was one of the best restaurants in Auckland. By the time Derek Quigley was on TV telling Lindsay Perigo about a new Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, it had become the Devonport Bar and Brasserie and it was a drinking hole for real estate agents, who make up 87% of the village labour force.

Hard times in the late nineties put the pinch on and the regulars drifted away. The proprietors put in pokie machines and it became the kind of bar you can smell at a ten-paces remove from its open doors.

A year or two ago it changed its name to Wild Bill’s Rib House. This was our first visit. There were a half dozen patrons in the front, and to the rear of the bar, where the bench seats offer a cosier setting, a smartly dressed man was arranging chairs. We got our drinks, found a seat and waited patiently. Over the next quarter hour, the little gathering swelled in size and by the time we ready to begin, there were fully a dozen people gathered to take part in the democratic process.

Mary-Margaret asked: Is Rodney Hide here? We looked around. No.

At the back of the room a neon sign blinked on and off: “Gaming”. Out of sight, the pokies were cranking. A trail of customers would appear from behind the wall fetching their empty glass, or clutching their packet of Rothmans, heading for fresh cold air, squeezing behind the man with the rosette.

A wreath of smoke ran from the front door through the bar and back to the gaming machines. Mary-Margaret wrinkled her nose.

There were two speakers. The first began by telling us the problem with New Zealanders: Everyone with get up and go had got up and gone. He plunged ahead with his oration, but Karren and I sat there beside our daughter aborbing what this man had just said. None Taken, I thought to myself. Karren was working to suppress a laugh.

We listened to a careful substantiation of the calculation that would yield us a tax rate fully half of what the government is presently imposing on its long-suffering citizens. It was delivered with the expertise of the most assured of multi level marketing consultants.

But inevitably a point was reached when the audience interrupted to put questions and offer contending arguments. The spending on health is a tricky beast to wrestle with at the best of times, and clearly tonight we were going to see a protracted struggle.

Unfortunately at this point, we had been going for twenty minutes, there was no sign of Rodney, and Mary-Margaret was finding this episode of the democratic process rather less captivating than a murder trial. We took our leave.

But the philosophy of the party rang in our ears as we made our way home. What should we do? Get up and go?

Or at our age were we already too far gone?

More significantly what about that stonking tax cut Rodney told us about? This election may indeed be, as Helen Clark avers, about trust, but in our household, it will be as much about reading the brochures carefully.

“I am not here to shoot Liberty Valance,” Owen Glenn assured the media throng; and yet everything about his swarthy Mediterranean tan, his assured bearing, his finely-tailored suit and his steeply arched eyebrows told us He Was The Bravest of Them All. In he swept and before long the air was thick with Gunsmoke.

It is my sorry task to now step forward and poop the party. That is not The Smoking Gun. I am in possession of The Innocent Explanation.

It dawned on me yesterday as I sat wedged in in my front row seat between two right wing bloggers, pecking away at their keyboards with their podgy fingers like some 21st century Mesdames Defarge. So ample was their girth I was obliged to sit forward, nearly pitching me into the lap of Mr Glenn and the telephone log he was brandishing. And that was when I saw it. There was the number he had dialled to speak to Winston Peters, and wouldn’t you know it, the number was mine.

It all came back in a rush.

To understand the problem, you need to know a little about cell phone numbers.Take yours out now and study the keyboard. Tap in 021 946 7866. Did you notice anything interesting about that combination? Well done Mr Hide! Yes, it spells out 021 WINSTON. And it was once mine.

I still remember the bafflement that ensued just days after I bought it. One morning I answered the phone to a low, barking voice. “Ross here. You want me to collect the Fish and Chips today boss?”
“Who is this?” I asked, and the line went dead.

Over the next few months, all manner of callers would wake me at all hours of the night. “Ya piker, where are ya? We’re at the Green Parrot, and Soper’s putting the steaks on your tab.”

Once a month, someone would ring and say “Remember - Carbine Club this Friday son,” and hang up before I could ask them what on earth they were talking about.

It was only when BNZ credit cards rang and began by saying: “We just need to confirm your identity first”, that I realised what was going on. People thought that you could get hold of New Zealand's most enigmatic politician just by dialling 021 WINSTON!

I should have told him, I suppose, but he had just slandered a family friend under the protection of parliamentary privilege and I wasn’t feeling charitable. Instead I played along, and one day I got a call from a man named Owen. Oh what sport I had that day! I put on my best matinee idol combination voice of John Rowles, Howard Morrison and Winston Peters.

But I felt contrite in the morning. I repressed all memory of what I had done. I tossed away the phone, got a new one with a new number, and thought no more of it.

The rest, sadly, we all now know.

It pains me to spoil the lynching of the season, and truly, this one’s a cracker, but The Truth is what matters most, and I can handle it.