It's election time in New Zealand

It's like once every 3 yrs the country politically menstruates – moods tip, blood flows, then realizing we’re not pregnant, we pick up the pieces and move on.

I’m intrigued by our individual story’s. The events in our lives that shape our beliefs, the tribe we feel most represents us, the things that decide how we vote.

So here’s a bit of mine.

My wife and I have four kids. We live on Waiheke where I base my business making videos. We’re lucky living here, no small thanks to both our parents giving us a leg up.  I’m probably your middle class white guy.

Growing up, my dad built power stations and roads for the Ministry of Works, a government department, while mum worked as a nurse in public health. By the time I was 16 we’d lived in Wanganui, Otematata, Alexandra, Greymouth, Tauranga, New Plymouth and Hamilton.

Dad’d be 95 today if he was still around. He went to war, doing tours though Alamein and Casino, kept a cool head and had a pretty mean rugby sidestep. He made it back but his brother didn’t. Dad got the military medal for bravery, but he kept quiet about it all, turning up at dawn parades in civvies. No uniforms, medals or fanfare.  He always said to me, ‘son if you score a try don’t make any fuss, just run back to the halfway line like nothing happened.’

My folks worked in the public service, rented state houses – I remember lots of weatherboards, finally making the deposit for their own house when they were in their fifties. Before that they’d saved for a brand new Mk2 Ford Cortina.

I can still smell the new vinyl.

They always voted National.

The attitude of the day was a bit racist from memory.

My dad said ‘You can never trust a hori with money’. When I became head prefect at my high school, first day on the job the Principal gave me a camera with a telephoto lens. He wanted me to lie under a prefab and ‘photograph the Maoris smoking down the back of the field'.

I said I wouldn’t do it. So he did.  He printed the photo’s, put them on the noticeboard and then expelled them.  I thought that was a pretty mean thing to do – bust them, shame them, eject them. 

He would have made a great reality TV producer.

In later life I realized that the ones not to be trusted with money generally wore suits. 

But hey, both my parents stayed together till dad died, and my home environment was stable and safe, shoes to wear, food on the table, never any family violence. Good times.

They encouraged me to go to university. Not only was it free in the late 70’s, we even got paid to go. There was never a shortage of well paid part-time and holiday work.

I graduated in economics and went teaching. Other mates of mine with similar qual’s took off to make their fortune, but growing young kiwi’s, rather than a stash of wealth was more my thing. In saying that, I did plenty of cashies over the years to top up the teaching salary. Lots of us did.

Global economics fascinated me, the swings and roundabouts, and I collected stacks of that smoke n’ mirrors trade mag ‘The Economist’.

Then shit got real.

In the early 1980’s, prime minister of the time Robert Muldoon tanked the NZ economy by blowing the public kitty, thinking too big and over-borrowing.

The incoming Labour government tried to stop the wheels falling off.

They cashed up a slew of public assets. My dad wasn’t so sure.

He’d spent his working life building these utilities. He saw them as public assets.

Then it was all on. New Zealand became the global guinea pig for privatization. Those in power bought the story and what we now know as neoliberalism shot off with the wind at its back.

We watched as regulations like the Bretton Woods agreement and the Glass-Steagall Act, put in place to avoid a repeat of the great C20 depression and the rise of populists like Hitler, were dissolved. There grew a new social persuasion.

Public good became stuffy, and new thinkers hawking prosperity for all were really whispering, “it’s every man for himself “.

It was all a bit casually cruel. 

With it came job uncertainty and mass redundancies. Fresh men stepped forward, the new righteous with glib solutions, buying and selling national entities like stocks, and many kiwi’s livelihoods were tossed about and tossed out.  If you were there right place, right time, and of that persuasion, you too could make money. To not be taking part in that goldrush - assuming you even could, was seen to be a bit lame. The public service needed a jolt, but this was a pendulum swing dissolution. 

There was cultural shock – like when we realized Trump was actually going to be commander of the worlds most powerful military. We steeled ourselves, hardened and changed.

And now here we are.

Blaming each other, mental health issues all around, our anger like a lens hunting for something to focus on. How did we let ourselves become so hard? Where did we lose empathy, our openness to share, our basic understanding that we’re all in this together?  

Most weeks I walk up Queen st in downtown Auckland to play folk music in an irish bar. I try and load my back pocket with a few coins to give to those sleeping rough – they often have a paper cup out. I do it cos I want them to know that someone gives a shit, that they are worth something.

It’s a small thing, maybe it’s my guilt, whatever. Human detritus on any level bums me out, and whatever the reasons, I can only turn the other cheek part way.

I think our system of economics is reaching the end of it’s shelf life. It’s gotta go and that’s something none of us are comfortable discussing – especially we that are comfortable.  However we view it, we’re going to take a hit, all of us … the less comfortable already are.

As a tail end baby boomer I realize that we are wrecking the playing field for our children. I’m not naive, there’s no money tree and we’re fools to keep borrowing on the global market from finance casino’s that will demand their pound of flesh. We’ve got to live on less.

For all their brilliance and fantastic work, the likes of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk aren’t going to save us, and I’ve still seen no sign of the messiah walking up the harbour.

I don't see water intensive industrial farming - especially animals with a big eco footprint, as a valid future. I say ramp it back, not ramp it up. How about we aim to export physically small value added items, not logs and bulk dairy product.  Step forward the left field thinkers please.

Maybe Richard Branson on his recent NZ visit, had something with his hemp/cannabis suggestion. High end blends of manuka honey and cannabis resin ?  Who knows!  But I’m gonna get all Steve Jobs on it and say that that ones a winner. They’ll be spreading it on their toast from Sydney to Seattle. And that stuff wasn't called the peace pipe for nothing. Could be just what the world needs.

Get ready to not have stuff we’ve become accustomed to. We may well find that our lives become as far as we can walk, cycle, paddle and sail – wouldn’t that be interesting - food sources and skill bases traded locally. There are groups working on this, eg Transition Towns.

If you want to talk tax, well, if we expect any decent public education, health or other utilities, then we gotta pay it. If we want good services we pay more, it's basic maths.

User pays is fine on a case by case basis - especially fine when it comes to water rights and global corporate's paying fair taxes.  But if we have growing sectors of our community that can’t afford to pay, we’ll still need a system that assists them – or in their desperation to feed and shelter their kids, they’ll come after us for our stuff.  It happens, google the past. If the disaffected reach critical mass, and we’re not sharing … we’re toast.

Recently, rich guy Nick Hanauer suggested in a viral post that ‘The pitchforks are coming’.  Well, if I was desperate to feed and shelter my kids, I’d do anything necessary to provide too. Any parent would.

These elections I’m looking past the mainstream media’s vacuous chatter-rings, the cock-of–the-walks with their trumpeting and their takedowns.

I’m looking for courageous leadership with a long view that gives our kids even half a chance.

My dad was a clever considered guy. Voted National but had a lot of time for 1970's Prime Minister and Labour leader Norm Kirk. I wonder how he would vote now?