Island Life by David Slack

Here comes an inquiry into the competitiveness of the oil market. Do you want to be better informed? It probably depends on your preference at the firing squad: blindfolded, or defiantly facing your despised enemies.

Transparency may well help at the margin and, at these fat prices, every little bit helps. We might as well have the inquiry and learn what muscle might or might not be exerted over hulking multinational cartels.

Peter Creswell and his fellow enthusiast for tiny government, Shaun Holt, have another suggestion for transparency: Why don't petrol stations advertise the cost of petrol as $1.25 plus taxes?

To be sure, a better-informed consumer may be a more discerning one, and knowledge is power. Where are we without hope?

Meanwhile, though, and leaving aside the cleaner, healthier and less costly alternative of the bicycle, there is one remaining option: thrift.

A useful web page tests various pieces of driver folklore: How much petrol can you save by turning off the air conditioner? If you drive as though there’s an egg between your foot and the pedal, how much gas might you save?

Everyone likes a quiz! Take the test, then click the link.

One tip: if you pick a number above zero for the saving you'll make by turning off the A/C, think again.

1. If you drive less aggressively you may save up to

A. 87%
B. 37%
C. 17%
D. None of the above




2. If you drive more slowly you may save up to:

A. 84%
B. 34%
C. 14%
D. None of the above




3. If you use cruise control you may save up to:



A. 84%
B. 34%
C. 14%
D. None of the above

4. If you turn off the air conditioning and wind the windows down you may save up to:

A. 80%
B. 38%
C. 18%
D. None of the above




5. If you maintain the correct tyre pressure, you may save up to:

A. 80%
B. 38%
C. 18%
D. None of the above

6. If you avoid excessive idling you may save up to:

A. 80%
B. 38%
C. 18%
D. None of the above

7. What is the correct response to reading in this week’s Listener cover story that you will only get the keys to Julia Hartley Moore’s SUV from her cold dead hands?

A. Buy a Hummer in solidarity.
B. Hire only private detectives who drive hybrid cars.
C. Write to the Listener and tell them you would prefer Julia Hartley less.
D. Put your pedal to the metal when the rubber meets the road.

Answers here, except for the one about private detectives.

You know the joke about the two friends who are out hunting when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing. His friend calls 111 and gasps out his story.

"I think he’s dead! What can I do?"

The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead."

There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Then the voice comes back on the line. "OK, now what?"

I feel for everyone involved in the full page story this week in Le Monde entitled: The organ donor wasn't dead.

The 45-year-old man suffered a massive heart attack and rescuers used cardiac massage to try to revive him without success before transferring him to a nearby hospital.

Due to a series of complex circumstances, revival efforts continued for longer than usual for a patient whose heart was not responding to treatment, until doctors started preparations to remove organs.

It was at that point that the astonished surgeons noticed the man was beginning to breathe unaided again, his pupils were active, he was giving signs that he could feel pain - and finally, his heart started beating again.

Several weeks later, the man can walk and talk.

Such a dilemma: we have a huge demand for organ donors; you never want to turn the ventilator off too soon. The only comfort I find in this chilling tale is that such incidents are said to be rare.

Perhaps for, safety’s sake, you could add a rider to the document that declares your willingness to be an organ donor: Do resuscitate if at all possible and please keep trying for at least [insert number of hours here].

If you are missing the National Party’s WasteWatch site as much as I am, there are two bits of good news. The first is that The Standard resurrected the service last month with real numbers and, heaven forbid, analysis. The second is that National has outsourced the job to the Herald. Click over to this week’s John Key interview with Wammo and hear it for yourself! Wammo asks him what happened to WasteWatch.

I don’t know why actually, I mean they ran it for a while, it was before I was the leader actually. Not that we don’t think there’s enormous waste out there, we do. But I guess it was just a matter of keeping tabs on things and it’s always hard to run them. We’re now relying on the Herald's Pork-o-Meter as an indicator of expenditure. I see Labour at 16 billion and we’re at 1.6.

I’m transcribing accurately, but the missing context is that there’s a jocular tone as he comes to the Pork-o-Meter, so I’m somewhat twisting his words. To use one of his favoured expressions: In a way that’s strictly not correct really . A Herald beatup, if you will.

But seeing he’s raised the Pork-o-Meter, Wammo has to ask: Don’t you think that thing’s a bit misleading, given that you guys have released hardly any policy to be costed? John is candid:

That’s right. I mean the reality is that it’s a bit of an imperfect science, let’s be honest. We will release our tax cut programme and that will obviously push up things in a pretty large way so it’s a bit of an imperfect science. But I mean it is a useful device, I suppose, just simply at one measure, to say “well look, politicians when they make promises have to be accountable for them” and I think that’s actually going to be a really interesting challenge for Labour, because in theory Michael Cullen has got up and said “I’m going to stick to a very tight new budget spend” which, let’s be honest, his track record has never been keeping to his budget, he’s always spent a lot more. And he’s essentially said that in relation to all of the, you know, deficits and things that are now being run in terms of, not so much the operating balance but the cash deficit and the likes, he’s not comfortable with them being any larger. So by definition he hasn't got a lot to spend on the campaign trail. So if he does come out and start spending large on the campaign trail - and our expectations will be that they will do exactly that if they continue to be a long way behind in the polls - then that is going to be very problematic for explaining how they’re doing that.

These guys seem pretty sure this campaign may become a bidding war. They seem to have concluded that they were outflanked by the student loans pledge last time, and it aint gonna happen again.

Let’s run the tape back a little, though, to the the words Key used to describe the Pork-o-Meter. Imperfect; useful. I wonder how many traders working for him managed to earn themselves a Boxster-sized bonus on the basis that they had been imperfect but useful?

There’s more in the interview, so click over and listen. Later in the piece they traverse the philosophy of wafer-thin policies: does it matter that you're light on detail? No, says candidate Key. You can trust us to honour them because we might get booted out if we don’t.

Interesting, that. Might the force of the question not be: can we please see the detail in order to judge for ourselves whether the policy is as viable as you assume it to be? One certainly hopes he does indeed feel obliged to honour his pledges and one can't help but wonder why he felt the need to say so.

One might characterise his response as imperfect but useful.

The Labour party is once again putting its hand in your pocket to pay for an ad that lets you know they’re putting more cash in your pocket.

But what if those leaflets were never meant to fetch up in your letterbox? What if the glossy picture of a family lolling in a warm sun on a green lawn and smiling the white-toothed smiles of the prosperous was not meant for your eyes?

What the Herald omitted to report in this morning’s front page story Pledge Card Rises From Dead is that this ad is in fact pitched at the all-important Ohio voter.

Skinny is a designer. He knows his designer stuff. When the glossy brochure hit his letterbox last weekend, he wasn’t fooled.

Perhaps it takes an ex-photographer to spot a stock photo, and an American one at that…I went straight to www.istockphoto.com and on the 3rd page of a search for ‘happy family’ there was exactly the same image.

Skinny sees a cock-up, but I just can’t imagine they would be so slow to learn their lesson. Not after the flak they copped for their Working for Families ad with iPod-bedecked kids in a designer kitchen. Not after the mockery they had to endure for the riddle-wrapped-in-an-enigma that was the dangling baby ad. Not with David Farrar waking each night from a tormented sleep to blog fresh insights on the horror that is the Electoral Finance Act.

Clearly they have concluded that there are no happy families left to be found in these gloomy isles. Like so many New Zealanders before them, the Labour Party has concluded that their only route to recovery will be export-led. Ohio is the beach-head. The haka for Laura Bush was no coincidence. And Scott Dixon? Labour voter since that afternoon many years ago when he raced against Helen Clark at the go-karts.

Expect the momentum to build from now on. It will be formidable. By the time Barack Obama faces the cameras to make his historic running mate announcement, no-one will be saying: Helen Who?

This might not be the recipe for a perfect day, but you might find it self-improving. You begin by reading about the new Jesus phone. Half the price, twice the speed! I still like my Nokia 95 better for its five whole megapixels but my word there is plenty to drool over in those perfectly-designed iPhones. You spend the remainder of the day lamenting the rising cost of petrol and the cramped cost of living. You conclude your day by going to a free screening of Black Gold, courtesy of the Wild Bean people. They announced yesterday that they will henceforth be offering only fair-trade coffee, and put it in context by rolling this film.

Free! Cinema 4, Rialto, Newmarket, 6pm on Tuesday 10th, Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th June. Email blackgoldmovie@peadpr.co.nz nominating the day of your choice and the number of tickets you’d like.

It is chastening to watch the documentation of the straitened existence eked out by coffee growers in Ethiopia. They earn a handful of cents for a kilogram of their beans. You know what your coffee costs you. 50 beans to a cup. Magic beans.

The documentary tracks the many hands in the chain who take their cut. Fair-trade seeks to diminish the number of intermediaries. It’s laudable, and I would, if I were still drinking it, buy my coffee from that source. But in the long run the Ethiopian farmers we see in the documentary clearly apprehend the only viable way out: spend their meagre funds on schools and trust that their children will acquire skills that might be parlayed into a better life.

Labour-intensive primary production is a dead end street. My Dad urged us off the farm for not dissimilar reasons. I was and remain temperamentally unsuited to the life, but he either didn't notice or was kind enough not to put it that way. Perhaps he saw I needed to live in a big city where you could go to well-appointed cinemas to see interesting documentaries about the ineffable tragedies of life elsewhere on the planet.