House madness, car madness, tourist madness

Diary of the last ten hours and 30 years

5.45am

Dawn’s early light. Somewhere in the sky above, a little bar-tailed godwit named 4BWWY is coming to the end of her 13,000 km flight and very soon now she’ll be in Pukoroko-Miranda. We know all this thanks to tracking and the tweets of Global Flyway Network.

Little 4BWWY doesn’t know it but a whole small army of admirers has been cheering her on down through the Pacific, tweeting encouragement, nodding sagely when she stops at Noumea to have a bit of a look because it’s always lovely at la Baie des Citrons, don’t you worry about that.

What a journey. What a way to live in this world, soaring, crossing hemispheres, not getting caught as by-catch.

Her timing is impeccable. Tomorrow morning, just after midnight tonight, spring begins in Aotearoa.

6.50am

In spring, one plants, one votes, one watches the debate on One tonight. Maybe.

The radio is calling the customary first debate “appointment viewing”, and I suppose that’s true for some of us. I suppose I’ll watch, I hope it will feel productive. The border between sports contest and democratic exercise gets hazy in this sort of carry-on.

People on the Twitter are speculating about what form the surprise question might take. That’s the bit where you get asked the unpredictable question to reveal the inner Judith, the concealed Jacinda.

I have a suggestion, and it’s mostly just for the purpose of propping up the stale carcass of an old gag, namely baiting John Campbell, who once left his computer unguarded for Lachlyn Forsyth to slide in and masquerade as him on Twitter, professing ardent Eagles love and admiration, but I reckon it could be worth the heartache tonight.

Question: what Eagles song best describes you?

Please feel most free to participate in the comments section.

7.15am

My radio is taking us through arguments for and against making Level 1 back up into level 1.5 for a while and keeping our masks on. The zero days accumulate and back comes the feeling that once more we might be holding the plague at a workable distance is lifting. Not the giddy feeling of the first time of having been shot at without result, though; more that we’ve got it where we can see it.

I’m all in favour of staying a bit protected and not getting in each others faces. Why not keep the masks on, when we’re in shops and on buses and planes and ferries? Why not keep everyone seated where there’s eating drinking and talking going on? Why not go on acting as though the plague could still be in the vicinity? A comparatively small imposition has to be preferable to vastly greater degrees of difficulty and hardship in lockdown. Well, comparatively small for those of us who don’t own those bars and premises; I don’t mean to understate the difficulty for anyone whose business revolves around socialising. But there needs to be some innovation and remaking applied here, doesn’t there? Are there really not some more workable possibilities that can’t be tried?

9.12am

Reading feedback to yesterday’s newsletter and quickly coming to the conclusion that e-Bikes may well be this month’s cheese-puff content.

You love your e-bikes as much as I do, don’t you, e-bike-owning More Than A Feilding readers?

This does not surprise me at all. It’s a come-to-Jesus experience to become an e-bike rider and discover that everything you hoped and imagined about them is all true. They are hill-killers. They make any trip you might have done in car in a 3, 4, 5, oh what the hell, 10, suburb radius entirely viable and comfortable and enjoyable.

And this brings me to the point I may have glided past the clearly yesterday as I wrote about an altogether different kind of second harbour crossing. These wonderful machines are the more likely hero of an e-vehicle revolution than the e-car. They’re selling in big big numbers. The sales graph, he trending up steep, señor.

The great promise here is a replacement scenario of a very good kind. A great many e-bike rides stand to take the place of a great many car trips. Not all trips, but many of the shorter ones. Result: the whole transport network is freed up for the trucks and the tradies and the cars on their longer trips.

Thank you for coming to my TED ride, please stay seated while I lay out an altogether larger thesis.

10.30am

Newsroom is reporting that a Government plan to charge people for emergency housing like motels, suspended by Covid-19, will now come into effect two days after the election and oh boy, this is sounding like one more tortured and awful wrong turn as we try to find our way back to that place where social housing used to work well.

A thing I have been hearing from people who own motels:

The government could have bought these motels outright instead of paying by the room by the week and been way ahead.

Another thing I have been hearing from people who own motels:

people ring up to book and ask if the rooms are being used for social housing and the Moteliers are not supposed to say, but they do, and the punters say no thanks.

Thank you for coming to my TED airbnb, please stay seated while I lay out an altogether larger thesis.

11.30am

Short story in two tweets

1.35pm

Reading about an announcement from Gerry Brownlee, I think it’s an announcement, possibly it’s a movie called Border Force With a Vengeance

They want to add their favourite magic ingredient to our managed isolation facilities regime: the private sector. Anything the government and military can do, Serco can do better, kind of thing.

Or in words they might prefer: give private accommodation providers the chance to join the government-controlled network.

One is tempted to write screeds, but one might also just write: Novopay.

As ever, reading their policies is like plain with a kaleidoscope. At a certain angle it has the look of an entirely admirable search for new ways and means for our little nation to earn a living. Shift it a little and it looks more like an unquenchable appetite for a quick easy buck.

Here, hold this up to the light, then give it a twist.

Our lack of Covid-19 here is a massive advantage going forward. We take advantage of that by having very secure border policy that will gradually let more people come into the country.

Thank you for coming to my TED slideshow, please stay seated while I finally get around to the altogether larger thesis.

2.30pm

Thesis: there are three things we rely on way too much in this little nation at the bottom of the world and they each of them impede us from doing better.

1. Houses as a way to acquire wealth

2. Cars as a way to get around

3. Tourism as a way to propel our economy

Each of them can be just fine in their way, but it’s possible to lean upon them way too much.

Property first: We’re beset by a something-for-nothing mentality that imbues the notion of the housing ladder with some sort of sacred reverence. But it’s a false idol. It gives a blush of respectability to sustained bullshit. The value of properties are forever pushed up, sustained by bank lending, and not in any way reflecting a true value but simply the expectation of gain by all the participants.

And everyone who isn't in the game pays for it in higher and higher rents and in the prices they pay in the shops and bars and cafe’s whose own rents are carried higher on the ever lifting tide of bullshit.

And the government pays an accommodation supplement on top of all  that to the tune of a couple of billion dollars.

This is how you end up with motels for houses and it won’t get any better until we reach a point where a sufficient part off the property market is owned and provided by the state or social organisations on terms that seek only a return in social wellbeing.

Cars next: people love their cars and they will love them right off the cliff without seeing that other forms of transport, deployed well, can make it much happier for everyone to get around. Bring on the hill-killing e-bikes, bring on the mass transit, bring on sanity.

And third: tourism. Bound up in the Brownlee border announcement is an attitude that has carried us past 2 and 3 million visitors a year: easy money! Come on in everybody, help yourselves, trash this at will, let's clip the ticket. 

In many economies, embracing tourism is the Convention Centre syndrome writ large. If you can’t think of a good idea to get economic activity going you say let’s build a convention centre. Too much tourism seems to rest upon an easy buck out for not too much effort in. Figuring out how to come up with valuable goods and services and sell them well is harder. But that’s where we need to look.

Thank you for coming to my TED rant. Stand by please, readers, for tomorrow’s newsletter when I see if I can answer the question: well how would you fix all this, Einstein?

3.24pm

Reading more about birds. Bells sound welcome for Toroa, reports the Otago Daily Times.

In a long-held tradition, Dunedin’s schools, churches and public buildings pealed their bells across the city at 1pm yesterday, to celebrate the return of the first albatross for the 2020-21 breeding season.

It sounds beautiful and there’s more:

People tell us they cry when they hear the bells. They know the albatross are back and we’re all celebrating.

For the record I’m full of admiration for these returning tourists.