Paleo Pete and the Icing on the Donuts

Diary of the last ten hours

6.40am

My Twitter is full of people objecting to Newshub giving prominence to the epidemiological views of Paleo Pete, saying:

It is entirely legitimate to question the DG about the failures of his department, but we can do it without promoting dangerous conspiracy theorists

and,

YOU DO NOT NEED TO PUBLISH THIS SHIT

Lying here, with the dawn’s early light, recalling simpler days when Paleo Pete's special person Nicky Watson was always on our news; but presented invariably as the icing, not the donut.

You can see her here as Close Up joins her in the dunes to search for her little dog Cricket.

Crickeeeet, she calls plaintively, into the falling light, Crickeeeeet!

She stops to share her feelings with Close Up at this sad time in her life. No answer has come from little Cricket, even though she's called and called and called and called. You're hoarse? Asks reporter Michael Holland. No, my dog, says Nicky, sadly and kindly, to this reporter who clearly doesn't know his animals.

A decade on and Mark Weldon and Zuckerberg later, our media is all icing and no donut. Yes, I know that's not remotely paleo but come on let’s stick with the metaphor and bon appetit and would you care for a bucket?

7.40am

Take to the airwaves to be this week's political commentator on bFM. Do I think 4000 more 18 year olds might be a decider in the Cannabis Legalisation and Control referendum?

I’m looking out at grey skies and being pessimistic on the telephone. I say it's been striking to encounter so many people over 30 expressing doubt, even though this is such a sane proposal to bring safe health and equitable justice to the nation’s second most popular drug after booze.

I continue in a pessimistic vain by saying that despite stellar work by people like Chloe Swarbrick and Helen Clark and The NZ Drug Foundation there still seems to be an unwillingness amongst people to get acquainted with a proposal to make things substantially better, and apologise for being a downer. 

No, no, that’s okay, but what do you think can be done about it?

My answer is buggered if I know. But then I say: actually I saw something when we were with friends in Wellington. My old mate Rick - last seen in these pages telling a customer to fuck off - was there. He was my principal supplier through university and no objector to a good time. Yet here we are 40 years later and he’s saying I don't know about this. 

The campaigning daughter was with me. She laid out some comprehensive  data and rationale. Around the dinner table we went and I don't know if any voting intentions were shifted but, well, maybe this thing could benefit from a hundred thousand cottage meetings.

Here's some useful material to table at such a cottage meeting, if you’d like to see an end to  injustices created by the current law and a decent health regime to look out for the team of several million who like a bit of weed.

9.40am

Out running, coming along Clifton Road. This is the fancy street that takes you down to Takapuna Beach. Cliff top houses there are so fancy that there are never fewer than a couple of dozen tradies vans there, making them fancier.  

At some point in lockdown, I began noticing this car, clearly not going anywhere. Eventually I started taking photos.

You hear about hundreds of cars getting dumped in the suburbs near our airports as people come to the end of their 100 per cent experience and make their way back to Berlin and Dusseldorf and Amsterdam. 

But this looks a little different, somehow more local. Like, maybe a guy who does the odd cash job and and a bit of, I don't know, let's take a stickybeak shall we?

Make your guesses, I have one coming in a moment.

Weeks passed, the car grew steadily less welcome and more vandalised.

Eventually, almost as though it was too good to be true for a blogger collecting stories, swear to God I came jogging down the road just as this happened.

So long little van, what comes next in your story, I wonder?

11.49am 

The National party has some sort of policy for running the border and now I believe I know what the story is with the van.

This was the location for the whiteboarding and spitballing of the policy: a broken-down van on Clifton Road. Simeon go get another six dozen meatlovers pizzas will you.

This feels a lot more like a reflex than a considered package. The reflex being: we need to look staunch. No worries, here’s a photo that looks like an ICE officer.

And:

We need to have some sort of rule that sounds like a genius shortcut to fix everything. Here you go: no one can come here without a test that says they’re Covid-negative. 

Never mind the validity of the testing, never mind the inordinate logistical difficulties it might create for people trying to get here, the staunch is what matters.

What else did they cook up in the van on Clifton road? Well, how about a whole new border protection agency? Who will they get to run it, do we think? Novopay? The same crack force that they put in charge of the PSA outbreak?

The unavoidable truth is that you'll make mistakes as you get these kinds of things working. Pretending that the actual problem is merely an absence of toughness is just simplistic and daft. But if you’re siting in a broken down car on a cold night in Takapuna, I can see how you might end up convincing yourself you're making some sense.

All of this is predicated on the proposition that the management of the virus here is a shambles. And yet somehow, while being completely useless, we have managed to end up with some of the world’s best numbers: at eliminating coronavirus and, now, at tracing and testing.

We were free of community transmission, for a time. It perhaps gave many of us a confidence that is now working to our disadvantage as we try to settle on an appropriate sense of proportion.

It seems a mistake to ever assume your bubble is safe while the virus is at large.  It seems to be a virus that is pretty good at making a fool of your protections, lax or entirely otherwise. If you have any traffic across your border at all, the risk is real that your shell will be pierced, no matter how protected you manage to make it. 

What matters most is finding a fair and reasonable and workable system to deal with the flow across the border.

Here's a question, bearing in mind the proposition that we’re in a catastrophic shambles:  where, of any country in the world, would you feel safest right now?