Peters, Seymour, Plague & the Second Coming

Diary of the last eight hours

6.45am

Ten minutes of unplugging and replugging Home Pods and restarting the iPhone so that Siri can quietly, unobtrusively, seamlessly turn on the radio.

6.55am

It is not possible to write about your first world problems without creating a small cloud above those words that reads, in Comic Sans, first world problems.

7.15am

Here in the First World, slugging our coffees, reading our iPads, we have access to many of the world’s great newspapers, and also the Herald. While the radio is quietly unobtrusively doing its work I cannot believe what I am reading in the Washington Post about Florida and people living in motels in squalor and destitution and Jesus it’s all rough beasts slouching towards Bethlehem this morning.

7.25am

Karren is reading from a Herald story about some work the productivity commission did for the Treasury on weighing health benefits against economic costs in your pandemic decision making

It has something of the hopeful tone of the five second  rule: if I drop this but scoop it straight back up off the floor can I put it in my mouth that's okay isn't it?

At issue is their work that found the cost of the extension of the hard lockdown  to have been greater than the benefits.

You may recall Shaun Hendy saying yes but no, it depends a bit on what you're putting into your calculations there, sport. Or, to use his words, failed to take proper account of aspects of the virus spread.

Well yes, that would be important.

You’d hope that such a calculation contemplated the inhibiting effect of an infection being on the loose, to the extent that people might grow reluctant to go out and move freely, and what that might do to your economic activity.

You would hope it would calculate the consequences of patient numbers growing too large for hospitals to cope and clinicians  getting sick and  dying.

You’d want to be doing more than say, nominating a value of a human life, estimating the number of lives saved, and calling that the benefit. 

And you would hope it would look at where we might end up again if we see The Notorious R get back up to the sort of number we had in the first week of lockdown, because that line was going up steeper than a plane doing a Wellington go around.

And anyway how can you weigh health benefits against economic costs? Isn’t the one inextricably bound up in the other?

It's natural to hope that there might be a better easier option. 

But there's no pretending away the out of control mayhem that might follow if the virus is permitted to get some leeway.

What we did and what we’re doing remains the least worst option.

The best way to make lemonade out of these lemons is to take advantage of the door getting cracked open a bit to the possibility of changing things for the better.

Which is vastly more easily said than done but why don’t we chuck around a few new ideas. Stay tuned for the next newsletter when I might try to  make a couple of  suggestions.

But first we have to say OMG look at the state of the house prices.

7.45am

OMG look at the state of the house prices, as reported all over the media like it always is: a stock market report predicated on the assumption that everyone has shares.

House prices across the entire country rose in August, with half of the regions reaching record highs.

Back in the first week of level 4, my old friend  Nigel from Wellington rang to see how we were doing in this strange new world. Great, I said, dumped from the newspaper to save a small part of some executive’s salary, but could be worse, could still be drinking.

He's a lawyer, does the odd property  settlement. I said are you worried about no houses selling? He said we’re getting ready for a rush afterwards. He recalled how it was after the London bombing: we had all this people coming home. Big demand. He expected to see it again.

In a time of great upheaval, great change may become more possible, there may also be great persistence of the old habits and patterns and the unfairnesses may get rusted in a bit more.

Sorry about that, Gen Y, Millenials, Gen Zero and everyone else who feels shut out of this sweet arrangement. Don’t blame you for feeling bitter. Do please consider voting next month for change.

8.16am

Twitter is full of the ACT leader doing his shtick.

Labour's tax policy picks on people who work hard says David Seymour, and these are the words he sprays around and just lets go, like your Grandad in the dark of night standing over his lemon tree letting nature do its work, and it will be like this every day until we get an election.

But in the race for ludicrous he’s still fully a lap behind some called Peoples Radar who asserts:

Well.. so we force wealthy to leave NZ Reduce investment in industry Focus upon social programs What's the endgame here... Germany 1938?

How hilariously heroic to be trying to mount that tired trope at the very time when there have never been so many distant people looking our way and saying can we come and stay in the Jet Park please, ASAP if that’s OK. Me and the family would like to try coming downunder and standing upright.

9.35am

Think I now know how the mythical I’m in a cafe and I just heard people say tweet form originated. You end up keeping your own company too long and you sort of start to imagine a life.

Have not been out of Devonport since lockdown started, except for running, and even that has ground to a near halt.

I did have a run yesterday and as I was coming down the maunga I saw ahead of me the two people hoisting sometime heavy out the back of their van and they were hunched over it and it looked swaddled in a blue sheet and it was about the size of a person and I thought, will you look at that…is it, could it be…but no it was not a loved once recently passed or some deadbeat who hadn’t paid their dealer, it had haunches and a horn. It was a pale blue unicorn.

As I came alongside them I said swear to God that looked like a movie body wrapped up in a sheet. She winked, put her finger to her pursed  lips, said shhhhhh.

You might say nothing like that would never happen around here but Terry Sinclair lived here once.

Anyway here’s my cabin fever

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According to these people at the next table in this cafe that I totally am at, Winston Peters is to be declared a heritage politician whose special character must be retained.

Feel free to join the thread. Some of it’s a bit unkind but it’s also quite entertaining.

3.12pm

Meanwhile, as Richard Prebble liked to say, I’ve been thinking.

I have some free unsought advice for the ACT leader, because mate, your lines, they’re so predictable ATM. Just spitballing here, but the vibe this week is all Second Coming. Yeats wrote it in the middle of a pandemic, you know.

I recommend you bolt that straight on to your perpetual there’s no Father Christmas shtick and here’s what you get.

(By the way if you want a good anecdote to go with it, there’s the one about the helicopter larrikin in Gisborne who did the kids’ xmas lolly scramble with a fake Father Christmas sitting next to him as he tossed out the sweets, then, to the horror of the kids below pushed out Father Christmas himself. Crack up!)

Anyway the line I offer you to use, and no charge, you’re welcome, is:

Things fall apart, the Santa cannot hold.