If you don't want them to take your house from you, Don't Vote Labour

Diary of the last 100 hours and 82 years

Early afternoon, Saturday 29 November 1975

There are three characters in this scene: Mum, Dad, and me. Google Docs wants to correct ‘scene’ to ‘acne’ and Jesus is there anything their algorithms are not wise to? Yes, I am a 15 year old with spots and strong opinions and I'm impressing them with great passion upon the other two characters in this scene, and brandishing the glossy manifesto of the Values Party and Dad is saying nothing and just waiting for it to end and Mum is saying words to the effect of we’ll see and off they go and I bet you there was not single vote cast that election at the Kiwitea polling booth for the Values party. Nevertheless he persisted.

Early afternoon, Sunday 11 October 2020

Mum is on the phone, I ask will they be voting; she says we already have. You might be a bit disappointed in us though. Then she adds brightly: but I voted yes for cannabis. 

That’s excellent! I say. Yes, she says, don't you remember I rang you months ago to ask about it. And I voted yes. I think Dad was horrified. 

Thank you for coming to my TED talk about persistence. And thank you for voting Yes, Mum. 

Sunday 8.15pm

Out for drinks, out for dinner, there is terrine and prosciutto and roasted cauliflower and this food at Apero is mighty. Yes, algorithm, feel at liberty to shove that into Trip Advisor. 

Anyway, it's a happy crowd for all of us. It's been a long time without seeing friends like this, much, and even the ragging is good hearted when one of our party, the builder, is getting taken to task by his long-suffering partner about a gate for their fence. It's been weeks, months, years, she says. 

And you know how that goes, who likes taking their work home with them? 

Now, as the table waits for him to defend himself, Julian looks into space for a moment, before he says: what is a gate, anyway?

French dining: doesn’t just make a great night out; also makes you more contemplative. 

Today 7.20am

My radio is full of tripe that kicked off last week and has been running through the weekend, and it’s  some bullshit being talked by National and ACT and the Taxpayers and Subsidy Claimers “Union” and some proxy called the Campaign for Affordable Home Ownership which has been stuffing scaremongering mendacities into letterboxes.

If you want to get the flavour of it, here: enjoy this National party poster for the 1938 election where Labour is about to be returned with a landslide majority for doing a pretty good job of taking care of people after the depression.

Let us examine the semiotics and whatnot.

What appears to be about to happen is Labour will be nationalising private homes!! If you don't want them to take your house from you, Don't Vote Labour.

How weird though, that Labour got reelected and forgot to do that ‘take away your whole house’ business. How weird that no subsequent Labour government ever got around to it. 

Never mind, according to a coalition of Strong Teams and Ayn Rand lovers and some nerds and incels, they're about to grab your loot, New Zealand.

What these people clearly want us all to do is keep repeating the words of the phrase they are using for this. The second word of that phrase is tax and the first is wealth. Whether or not any of the facts are correct is very much a secondary consideration here. Their primary object is to have us use the phrase all week long  and do their advertising for them.

I have a two word phrase for them however and the second word is fucked and the first word is get.. I’m not playing your dead cat game thanks very much.

Rather than using their phrase I will use a longer one to describe the Greens policy and that phrase will be small contribution from the wealthiest New Zealanders. 

I mean come on National and ACT and the Taxpayers and Subsidy Claimers “Union” and your proxies, do you think we came down in the last shower?

You keep saying: the Greens want their small contribution from the wealthiest New Zealanders and they’re going to get it.

You keep saying: Labour say they won't agree to it but when it comes to negotiations, the Greens will be pushing for their small contribution from the wealthiest New Zealanders.

And you keep saying it's all very well to say that Labour won't give in to it but we’ve already seen them give in to the Greens before.

Maybe negotiations will see them get their small contribution from the wealthiest New Zealanders and maybe they won't. But there’s no way I'm getting sucked into your efforts to paint small contribution from the wealthiest New Zealanders as a pejorative phrase.

Come on. You must think I'm stupid to buy that whole routine. 

You must think I'm so dumb I would walk into Hammer Hardware and ask for a long wait, or striped paint. You must think I’m so poorly informed that I might ask out loud: Given that EV cars have a wee electric motor, why do the manufacturers charge so much for them?

You must think that I’m as naive as a day old baby when you run ads on Facebook saying the small contribution from the wealthiest New Zealanders will cost an average Auckland retired couple $140 a week, when your example in terms of who gets caught, cuts in about a million dollars in assets too low.

Maybe you need to put more sharp fingernails in your posters, because at this point your Strong Team is looking a bit anything-goes-at-this-stage-dear-god-when-will-this-end.

9.25am

Twitter has been reading an Auckland morning newspaper out loud and saying, Jesus, talk about the wrong end of the stick.

What appears to have happened here is: it’s from news.com.au; always a wilder shore when it comes to ‘content’. 

The story, which will before long be updated to be less, well, wrong, declares that the WHO has backflipped on the organisation's original Covid-19 stance, regarding locking down their countries.

As Jin Russell explains here, what they are really saying is: there is a sequence of steps you can take that put you in the best place to go forward with much diminished likelihood of needing any further lockdowns and that's the approach we took here, and let us be thankful eh.

In due course the story is updated to read This story has been amended from the original which said the WHO, rather than a WHO doctor, had changed its stance.

Meanwhile people who know what they fuck they are talking about, like Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, press on with providing sound commentary.

What’s needed? You don’t need continual lockdowns. You need robust testing and isolation; public health guidance pushing mask wearing and avoidance of closed, crowded spaces; strict border measures. 

If only all the nations of the world had gone hard and gone early eh?  

Plan B types and mansplainers and cynics like to point out the bleeding obvious that we are an island nation with a small population. They contend that the much larger, more connected UK could not have done what we did. 

But when you look now months down the track and consider the immense cost of being half-hearted and partial, really, just how untenable does that look from this vantage point?

No matter your size, no matter your connectedness, you could still if you really wanted to have come to an emphatic halt, taken the enormous hit, got control of things and then put up a safety barrier of limited and controlled entry and isolation and taken advantage of what you had meanwhile ramped up: the means of tracking down fast and stamping out.

That’s what happened not just here but in nations larger and more densely populated and less isolated than ours. It's not a function of size, it's a function of willingness.

3.45pm

Looking for a poster of Labour totalitarianism and finding a bunch of remarkable advertising. Please enjoy this small exhibition.