Property values vault, nation’s workers asked to show restraint

Diary of the last ten hours, written by Outliers

May 06, 2021

7.15 am

There is static on my radio this morning, and by static I mean the opining of a libertarian.

A designated mouthpiece for the Incel-Adjacent Coven of Taxpayers, Media Astroturfers and Ayn Rand Onanists, has been invited onto the programme to praise the public sector pay freeze.

Yeah, I know that’s not their correct title, but to hell with playing along with their ‘Union’ Dad joke.

Anyway the dude is saying yeah fair enough it's not like a three year wage freeze is all that long and if you're in the public sector you're on a sweet number anyway because your job’s secure.

Not that I feel like lifting a finger to help these risible dweebs but if he really wanted to stress that second point, surely he might rather have said a public sector job is safe as houses. If there is one eternal truth about this government and this economy, it’s this: there is nothing within its jurisdiction so safe as a house, and its prospects for making shitloads of money.

We are now in a Bizarro world where the protective fiscal steps the government took last year have seen property values vault ahead while the nation’s workers are asked to do ever more and show restraint.

I can see some headwind for arguing the case for government employees earning over $100,000, but it looks just completely lopsided to be telling people getting between $60,000 and $100,000 that they’ll be frozen as well unless they can prove exceptional circumstances.

Although now, as I type this, I’m thinking, wait a minute, what was I just calling it? Bizarro? There's your word, right there. What circumstance could be more exceptional than being adrift in a Bizarro world?

Tell it, friends, tell it all. Tell the government that the rocket ship they put under the housing market has made your position untenable. Get absolutely stuck in. Get bidding with them like you're at Barfoot and Thompson’s auction rooms on a Friday morning.

Also, while you’re negotiating, maybe chuck this in: how much do we value our nurses? Do we recognise the hard work they do, the long hours, the understaffed shifts, for so much less than they could be getting in Australia?

Do we recall how the lamentable Boris Johnson had his life saved by a Kiwi nurse, praised her lavishly, praised all the nurses lavishly, endorsed all the standing around outside each night clapping, then gave them a two-goddam-penny pay rise?

Who in the world wants to be as low as Boris Johnson?

Ask them, friends, ask the government, if they’re prepared to be as wrong as Boris.

Ask them for relief, in this time of untrammelled capital gains and bank-sustained mania.

Ask them for a fair go.

And if they tell you they’re worried about runaway borrowing, ask them to say it with a straight face while you show them the past year’s property data.

7.40pm

Pick up the phone and chat with Zoe at 95bfm about the week’s politics - Samoa, Trevor Mallard and New Zealand’s denunciation, in soft language, of China’s abuse of the Uyghur people, and what it says about our moral convictions and courage. Which is to say: trade, and the extent to which we are forever softening our language lest we put export markets in jeopardy.

I say that I concur with Judith Collins. This is probably a mistake because the last time I said it, I found myself resiling inside 24 hours. Anyway, she had said we keep making the mistake of putting all our eggs in one basket. I embrace this by offering the vision of a better brighter non-egg-basketed future New Zealand; much more self-sufficient, much less obliged to bite its tongue. I do not consider this fanciful, for reasons I set out here, at length, last year. Do I still embrace this fantasy? You bet your life I do.

8.05am

The government is in touch asking for my help. Readers, if you’re not already taking part, it’s very quick and easy and a not-at-all-bad way of beginning the working week with some simple box ticking.

Dear DavidSlack,
Will there be historically low flu again in 2021?
We need more participants all over New Zealand to help us track flu and other viruses like COVID-19.
Please ask 2 friends or colleagues to join us by forwarding this link:
https://www.flutracking.net/join/NZ/inv65
A simple online survey that takes less than 15 seconds each week during flu season can tell us so much. In return you’ll receive a weekly report and a map of influenza-like illness to keep track of where the flu is!
Thanks for your time and support.
Flutracking New Zealand
https://www.flutracking.net
nzmoh_flutracking@health.govt.nz
Public Health Group
Population Health and Prevention
Ministry of Health

8.15am

To coffee with MTAF reader Finlay and he’s asking how the hell are you and I recount what the surgeon told me on Tuesday: you’re an outlier.

He gives me the same tell us something we don’t know look I’ve had from everyone else so far.

In this case outlier means: a bit more of a propensity to bleed. Not a whole lot, but enough to create clots and keep putting me back in hospital.

The good news: this is day 11 of no bleeding, so that makes me feel positive.

The plan is to steadily resume activities: swim, gently, two weeks from now; run, gently, two weeks on from that; bike only after another month, because the look in the surgeon’s eyes told me everything: you’ll be sitting directly on the wound, let’s be careful.

I will be, oh yes. I will be a goddamned outlier on the scale of fastidious care-taking.

9.55am

Thinking about this slightly wacky bit of job applicant screening someone shared yesterday. My first thought was: glad I’m no longer in that evil-clown three-ring circus.

But my second thought was, God there are so many possible responses, aren’t there? I guess an outlier would say that, but anyway I have some serving suggestions. Help yourself if it sounds like a bit of you.

First thing I would do is make a list of people who have really pissed me off
I have always wanted to ride an elephant from here to China so OMG this is like you people were reading my mind or some shit
This obviously calls for a scoping study. I would task a working group to….
Not been funny but you know how the forestry people use trucks to get the logs out? I would go to them and ask….
Four words: Westfield Albany. School holidays.
I would totally set it free. As a vegan I believe…..

2.05pm

Retweeting this excellent bit of design by MTAF reader Carol, much more to come.

Bike Auckland @BikeAKL

Why wouldn't you?

Some misanthrope was quick to call it all lies but have no fear, misanthrope! I have responses to all your questions and bad faith objections!

I was just getting ready a couple of weeks ago to respond to the many reasoning-impaired responses to Simon Wilson’s Herald story when the hospital claimed me. But like McArthur, I’m rolling up my trousers. Stand by.

4.20pm

The singular Jaq Tweedie - DJ, screenwriter, wit and GC - joins us today for the magnificent Fourth Form music series. This, surely, is Outlier spirit. Love it.

Guest Writer Jaq Tweedie

FOURTH FORM 1981

I spent my childhood behind a wall. It was David Bowie who cracked it. He nailed me with a brilliant one-liner, an intimate joke just between him and thirteen year old me.

While my newly wed sister tended to her new baby I sat alone on the new leather sofa in her new Lockwood house watching Fashion - the new release on Ready To Roll - and David looked straight into my eyes with a conspiratorial snaggle-toothed smirk and sang

The people from good homes are talking this year.

I laughed aloud as a snooty blonde lady plopped a big red pill into a cup of tea. I was trapped in a Good Home and I didn’t belong there. I felt seen.

My parent’s house had no television, no computer, no video games - no screens at all. I had no friends and I didn’t want any. I had books and music and that was enough.

My reading had always been unrestricted - I devoured everything - but since I was four my musical knowledge had been carefully cultured by “the best piano teacher on the North Shore”, the draconian Miss Mary Nathan. Hours of practice every day, before and after school. Forbidden to listen to any music except Classical. Forbidden to play any music that wasn’t written on staves. Miss Nathan scorned “playing by ear” for endless scales, arpeggios and Dvorak exercises. The Bach 48 was my bible.

The hothouse had started to splinter when my mother looked up from her orchids and said “Don’t worry about making friends at high school, that’s not why you’re there. Just be yourself.” I was already a strange weed, but now I leaned into it. I danced alone at the Third Form social to a woman with a bored crisp English accent intoning

Money don’t get everything it’s true. What it don’t get I can’t use, I want MONEY!

while the Flying Lizards shook the beat out of a cutlery drawer. As the third form ended I was weird and I was happy. And then the balloon went up.

The first day of fourth form I was dropped into a B stream class away from any girls I knew. By lunchtime my best friend Alison - who’d spent New Years Eve alone with me and a marathon of her Bowie and Pink Floyd albums - had a brand new best friend. Devastated, I realised that grading systems and human affections were completely arbitrary. I’d always been a loner, but now I became a rebel. I started playing by ear.

After 10 years of playing the piano every single day I finally learned something without written music, by picking the notes out myself. Pink Floyd “Nobody Home” was the perfect track for a newly minted cynic. It had all the things I wanted in my life. A television playing background noise - with thirteen channels! A bag with a toothbrush and a comb in, a favourite satin shirt, a grand piano. The orchestra swelled under the emotion I already felt - a strong urge to fly and nowhere to fly to. I had everything and nothing, but now I had made this song my own, with my own hands, and I could play it anywhere. Maybe one day a heckler would scream at me to play it.

I’ve got a little black book with my poems in...

Pink Floyd “Nobody Home”