Please don't go Mike I'm on my knees babe
Diary of the last ten hours
6.05am
I wake up a year older, but on the plus side I have 40% less prostate than I did at the start of the year.
Sorry, I had no idea when I started it that the previous sentence was headed in that direction, but here we are. A body part no bigger than a walnut has been able to push me around quite a bit this year.
On the 20th of May, I turn a year older; Karren turns a year older; multiple-Grammy-winner Cher turns a year older; and my heart attack turns a year older. It’s a big day, especially if Cher comes to visit.
How many candles? God, way too many candles. Let’s just say my heart attack turns 34 this year. It’s now a lot older than I was when I had it.
I have a fascination with the backward shadow thrown by your date of birth. That is to say: if you’re born in 1999, on the day you turn twenty you will have a more distinct sense of what two decades amount to, and what the distance in years from 1999 to 2019 means. Equally, you can better imagine going back that far in the other direction from your birth year of 1999. Welcome to the far and distant remote year of 1979. Your Prime Minister is Robert Muldoon, and the number one song is Heart of Glass.
And congratulations and birthday greetings to me. My backward shadow has now reached the Siege of Mafeking.
Also, I hope my maths is right - 20 years from 1999 does take you back to 1979, yes?
If you’re a daily subscriber you will have been here yesterday to watch me colossally fuck up a throwaway calculation. It’s always the throwaway calculations that will undo you. You're just idly thinking, oh hey I’ll throw this little figure in for some extra rhetorical effect even though your point was already strong enough. So you do a quick mental calculation of $1.2 billion over a population of 5 million and somewhere along the way, possibly where you're calculating how many of us are over 18, you forget that you’re dividing billions over millions and not just dealing with two sets of millions and, well, fuck me days what a colossal cockup in an otherwise if I do say myself halfway decent newsletter.
Apologies, readers; must try harder, will try harder. Do feel free to add it to the collectors’ pile of first edition howlers which I know more than one of you is compiling.
8.25am
Dear Uncle Dave
I write a daily newsletter where I set out my thoughts on stuff that is happening, especially political and economic matters and I have worked quite hard to present myself as a person with a clue.
Anyway yesterday I failed to allow for the difference between a million and a billion and put a howler of an error in my newsletter. My question is do I have any credibility to write anything about the budget?
Birthday Boy
Gidday Birthday Boy
I’m no Nostradamus but I think you're about to see something on Twitter that purports to pass for informed budget commentary, which was broadcast on a Radio network for glowering reactionaries and republished as ‘Premium Content’ in the Waikato Invader and let’s just say it should make you feel all good about writing any old shit at all.
Uncle Dave
10.45am
Totally not kidding. This, helpfully shared by MTAF reader Dave Cormack, was actually written down by economic sage Mike Hosking and not disavowed by him when made public.
State of this guy. Honestly, this is just dyspeptic reactionary drive-by babble.
Dear Uncle Dave,
why do they publish this knuckle-dragging know-nothing bullshit?
Bright eight year old
Gidday bright eight year old
Because the media business has become dismayingly skewed to people who want to have their uninformed prejudices massaged and leg-humped.
Hope that helps, even though I know it doesn’t.
Uncle Dave
10.46am
Moving swiftly on to just mocking the guy, I wish to record that this is a lovely birthday treat.
Oh no! Not the briar patch!
Lew writes:
It's cute that the Hosk thinks he could have a career in Australian media
I get out my favourite Celine Dion CD to sustain me, and - who knows - perhaps all of us, through this emotionally charged revelation.
11.15am
Some poor bugger has been enduring Magic Talk in order to report back to Twitter
Peter Williams brings up the fact that Maori did not have the wheel as a gotcha for positive colonisation .....
I wish to copy and paste something from a couple of weeks ago, because really, this whole bullshit has less variety or surprise to it than Sisyphus and his rock.
Whenever some bigot starts in on that whole We brought them all this bounty shit, it's worth asking them:
We? How much of that bounty was your personal contribution? Which bit did you invent, champ? The cell phone? The blender? Or is your greatest invention dunking Drambuie into a handle of Speights, you knuckle-dragging uninformed-opinion-having warmed-over excuse for a human being?
11.48am
Thinking about the Budget this afternoon and thinking particularly about something MTAF reader Linda predicted last year: that the election would be a contest between remaking things in a new and better way and restoring things as much as possible to the way they were before.
In yesterday’s newsletter I wrote briefly about a conference last week whose theme appeared to be OMG NZ INC COULD BE CAPITALISING ON COVID BUT WE ONLY HAVE FIVE MORE MINUTES, and I wrote that the vibe I picked up was the world is hot for NZ right now but only if we bend over backwards in the customary manner.
What I’m keen for is not more of the customary manner and the fake urgency about what may really be just an unseemly scramble for a fleeting opportunity and yet one more chance to feel used and abused by fair-weather investors from far shores.
Never mind fake urgency, how about just steadily working on a model that is less hit and run, more designed for durability, sustainability and a fairer share for everyone of opportunity and reward; more focused on the people who live here, less preoccupied with keeping visiting investors sweet.
And on the question of urgency, and doors about to close, I wish to say just three words and one is climate, the second is crisis, and the third is FFS.
There is a better model for us to follow, and it’s real, and it’s spectacular, and Peter Williams may find this hard to take but that model is the work of iwi like Ngai Tahu.
Their whole approach is to invest, and hold. Their horizon is not quarterly results but generations to come.
How many times now have we seen a story where some aspect of the South Island economy has been righted, strengthened and the prospects now are good, and we learn the reason this is happening is that Ngai Tahu have become an investor?
There’s your model.
12.15pm
Cheering news from down-country as forward-looking bike riders make their way north for the May 30 Liberate the Lane Rally.
Patrick is coming from Wellington, Jeff’s coming from Kirikiroa. Who else wants to join us? Truly, all are most welcome. The bigger the crowd the better.
There’s a warm welcome awaiting you in Tamaki Makaurau.
2.14pm
No way I’m doing 3000 words for a hot budget take on my birthday, not when those things are everywhere today. But I fully mean to let the fizz settle down into the bottle and come back with thoughts in the next few days.
Let’s just say that giving benefit levels a bloody good push is bloody good to see, and so is all that money for rail, and so is the feeling that this government is not as cautious as you might fear, and maybe there's some remaking in prospect.
But I’m not going to be doing any off-the-top-of-my-head maths calculations this afternoon.
I’m getting too old for that.
4.20pm
Happy Birthday Dave & Karen! It's been a good day for inequality, or at least a good start. Even when the arithmetic is dodgy, your hot takes are always exactly right. My favourite read, every day. Have a fabulous evening.
Happy birthday youngsters (even if one of you is a pensioner)!
Gawd - is Peter Williams trotting out the old "they didn't have the wheel" bollocks again!
Here is what I wrote 10 years ago in 'New Zealand by Design' - p.23:
It is not surprising that Maori did not invent the wheel. Nobody did. The wheel evolved. The most likely scenario, in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, began with the hauling of heavy loads on sleds by large animals. The first improvement was to place roller logs under the sled runners. It was eventually observed that the loads on logs in which the sled runners had worn grooves travelled further with the same effort. Decreasing the diameter of the groove, or axle, then increasing the diameter of the part in contact with the ground were logical progressions over time. Although Maori did use rollers to transport large trunks to be carved into waka this was not a constant activity, so the wearing down process did not occur.
Also on p.32-33:
An account from 1801 may explain why the wheel had not evolved in Aotearoa. A wooding party from the Royal Admiral had failed in its attempt to shift kahikatea trunks across marshlands either with a timber carriage or with rollers over a slab road. In return for axes and red cloth, local Maori laid down flax, hauled the timber to the riverbank and helped build rafts to transport the logs to the ship.