Making sense of all these rogue polls

Diary of the last 3 days and eight years

December, six, maybe eight, years ago, it’s all a blur

I have already put in a few hours drinking at a Metro christmas party, I am now at another.

I am drinking the way I did for forty booze-sodden years: reaching for another like they're about to confiscate all the liquor in the world. 

I am talking with Gary Steel. Karren comes over to join me, I turn to her and enthusiastically  tell her this is Gary, the strong-minded journo and vegan and lover of prog rock and technology, and then I turn to Gary and say, this is my wife…..um…….um….

And they both stare at me as I find myself wholly completely and unforgivably incapable of putting the word where a name should go.

The hole in the conversation grows deeper and deeper as I wrack my brain but for the life of me I cannot locate the name of my wife.

Jesus. I fully expect this will come up at my funeral. It also says a lot about the forbearance of my beloved wife Karren that my funeral did not take place later that week.

Last Friday afternoon

The Friday edition of More Than A Feilding is just about ready to go at you and I’m checking it scrupulously, because I’ve written about the importance of producing clean copy, and promised to do better. Final check, yes all good, press send.

Steadily, over the next few hours, various people - some gently, others with half a dozen tears of laughter emojis - are in touch to say: does she spell her name Karen or Karren because bro you’ve got it both ways in your copy LOL.

Please also enjoy today’s edition, which has been digitally transmitted to the lovely Jaq Tweedie for professional proofreading. 

Saturday afternoon

Out to Westgate to do some shopping and not at all to labour the point, but it's an easy trip to make from the other side of the city on an e-bike. Everywhere in Auckland is a pretty easy trip  to make because it's a hill-killer, the e-bike. I’ll happily say this again too: these things might be costly now but so were cell phones to begin with. Also, compared to the costs of a car, they’re still a really great proposition.

Coming back down past Lincoln road on the Great Northwestern cycleway I see a hoarding, and well, it tells its own story really doesn't it? 

I see the future in front of me, and it’s made of concrete and it's full of contented healthy people on bikes. The hoarding has a future in sight too, but the vibe for me is, to coin a phrase, a vision of a world that has passed.

In his Newsroom column Rod Oram writes, with perfect acuity:

National listens to laggards not leaders, it is setting itself up for a mighty fall, and its policy will dismay any farmer, processor or marketer who knows what’s going on out in the real world where our food is sold.

Sunday morning. 

Slugging coffee in bed and reading a tweet from my old mate Foxy saying give us a caption for this photo and I'm moved to poetry. This one didn’t get mailed out, so if you didn’t happen to read it on the site yesterday, here it is in your newsletter.

So. Farewell then 

Paul Goldsmith

when your leader decides that you are 

rooted 

she lets 

her eyebrows do the 

talking 

right now they say 

JFC this text i just got says 

these numbers r bullshit u are so 

dead

so now your career is 

shovel ready 

which seems a little bit 

unfair really 

because if you put out stuff that is complete bullshit 

& all wrong 

& full of lies 

and says yay national vote for money 

well I’m no

expert 

but isn’t 

this what you call in marketing

being completely on 

brand?

Sunday 6.01pm

Yet another rogue poll and well, you wouldn't want to bet the farm on the National party roaring back into contention at this point, would you? And yet the pop-up leader has been doing more or less that, trying to stoke up the old rural/town divide like it's a real thing. 

The developing consensus appears to be she's just doing the job they gave her, namely: protect the core vote because the rest is lost. 

I suppose that could be it, although is the core really ever going anywhere? If that's all you plan to do you might as well just put up a sign saying closed for repairs sorry, we just can’t be the natural party of government this year, if you’d like something nice to think about here's some YouTube motorway construction porn.

Other winners in this scenario: the ACT party. The numbers suggest they haven't just peeled off votes from National but some from Labour too. Really? How? There’s a theory that they could be disaffected hunters who didn't like to see the State confiscating firearms. I suppose it's possible. But I wonder if they will have the same experience I recounted here the other day: setting out to vote for them but bursting out laughing in the voting booth.

Also if these numbers hold up, please stand by for a poem that begins: 

So. Farewell then, 

New Zealand 

First

I expect the ending will be something like 

they kept saying Shane, Shane come 

back

but every time you wearily got to your feet and picked 

up your dictionary 

they said

no not you LOL

where’s the flash 

Doctor? 

Monday 8.35am

Flicking through Facebook, and here's a dude from Feilding called Glenn Davies getting trashed for spreading the worst kind of shit extolling the usual deranged UN deep state world order conspiracy theories and advocating among other things the use of deadly force against our leader and firstly: Fuck him, and secondly: Fuck him, for saying any of it.

And third: maybe we might want to consider this in the current talk about hate speech laws. It’s possible we have enough powers in our existing law to deal with something like this, but that doesn’t make it a certainty. It is also quite possible that new and stronger hate speech laws would not be inimical to our fundamental rights. There is no such thing as an entirely unconstrained right to speech, not as our law currently stands. 

It's possible that our existing laws are sufficient to encompass the online world. But that contention is not inarguable; not while Zuckerberg’s monster is accommodating this much mayhem and evil.

10.46am

Yesterday's poll had discouraging news for people who hoped for a YES result in the cannabis vote. Twitter this morning is full of declarations of positive intent. Well sure, count me in. Here's something I wrote for our local newspaper last week. 

Voting YES

I’m in favour of putting better controls on the nation’s second most popular drug after booze.

I’m in favour of taking money away from the black market and putting it into healthcare. 

I’m in favour of a better saner arrangement than the way things are now. 

I’m not in favour of just leaving things to go on the way they are. That would mean no controls on potency. That would mean little protection for young people. That would mean little access to treatment for people with a problem. That would mean perpetuating a regime that typically sees people on the prosperous side of town getting a slap on the wrist for minor drug offences while Maori and poor people are stopped, searched, arrested, and convicted.

People who tell me I’m getting this wrong tell me it’ll be bad for our kids; that if we legalise it, the kids will use it more. I understand the anxiety, but we’re not going first here. We have the experience of other jurisdictions to reassure us. Nowhere it’s been legalised have young people proceeded to use it more.Their rate of use has either stayed stable or declined. If you regulate, you can direct young people toward safer ways to consume it. If you regulate, you can make the whole scene less thrilling and enticing.

I do see a hazard in a black market targeting underage buyers and I recognise the hazard that gangs deprived of the cannabis market might try to supplant it with heavier drugs. But the proposed bill carries with it very tough punishments for those who sell or supply cannabis to young people. That looks like a better arrangement than the way things are now. Meanwhile, a NO vote means the current policies remain, and the current problems remain.

So I’m voting YES to:

a legal age for consumption; cannabis sold at licensed stores; access to the health services people may need; an end to injustices; and hundreds of millions of dollars in new taxes providing the funding for health and education programmes.

The consumption will go on, whatever we do or don't do.  Legalisation will simply be making things saner, fairer, and safer. That feels like a better way to go.

4.15pm

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