The local body elections analysed

I first stood for the mayoralty back in 1992. There were three of us vying for the title; Bob Francis and myself and a lady whose name I won’t mention because I have not sought her permission to do so. In the event more than 11,000 votes were cast and in round figures Bob got 6000, I got 4000 and the lady, who was a credible candidate, got 1000.

Twenty-one years later, when the town will have grown, though perhaps not as fast as we might have envisaged, there were just over 8000 votes cast in a similar three-way-contest featuring again two males and a female.

Interest in local body elections seems to have waned in the interim and you have to wonder why.

By all measures Lyn Paterson did well. She risked splitting her votes by standing for both the mayoralty and a seat on the council, but still beat the incumbent Mr Daniell, who has run a pretty steady ship over the last six years. Mr Daniel put all his eggs in one basket, standing for the mayoralty alone and will now have spare time to spend.

Gary Caffell polled well and will wonder if it might have been more prudent for him to have also stood for the mayoralty alone. He got 3600 votes for the urban ward; some of these may well have gone to him in a single mayoralty bid.

Surprisingly Mr Daniell also lost his seat on the Trust Lands Trust after a term spanning more than twenty five years. His claim that he was deprived of the mayoralty by the “women’s vote,” was not well received, but could also apply to his departure from the Lands Trust. His place will now be taken up by newcomer Sandy Ryan.

On the District Health Board two-term incumbent Viv Napier lost her seat meaning the South Wairarapa now has no elected representative on a board that is responsible for the health of the whole Wairarapa. Mrs Napier was an exceptionally effective board member and there were other excellent southern candidates. Among these were Greytown resident Paora Ammunson who was the initial chairman of the Wairarapa Primary Health Organisation and would have represented Maori well on a board that has a strong focus on improving Maori health and also new Martinborough resident Michael Lamont. Lamont is a physiotherapist by profession and is currently the CEO of the Mangere Community Health Trust in Auckland.

This lack of South Wairarapa representation doesn’t bode well for the potential combining of the three district councils. Those communities south of Carterton who already run their affairs extremely efficiently may find their influence on a combined Wairarapa Council easily compromised.

The Licensing Trust gained two members of the fairer sex after the last one, Josephine Maxwell, left the stage in 1989. Lucy Cruickshank and Mena Antonio will no doubt add a fresh perspective to the organisation, but in the process the Trust have lost the experienced and very capable Steve Blakemore. Craig Roberts, who took local body advertising to new heights, missed out after being highly critical of the Trust’s financial reporting.

That just leaves the Greater Wellington Regional Council where first termer Gary McPhee was re-elected. Three years ago McPhee stood on the platform that the Rimutaka summit toilets would be reinstated. They weren’t and after his success this time he is reported as saying that he is keen the see the Wairarapa become a unitary authority resulting in the regional council withdrawing its myriad of essential services to our neck of the woods and in the process causing him to lose his handsome stipend.

I think I’m now starting to get a handle on why so few people vote.

                                                          **********************

I’m also starting to get a handle on why many women are reluctant to report a rape. The affair between the mayor of Auckland and his paramour was certainly not rape, but I’m surprised how the left-leaning press have come down so hard on the mistress in this case; though of course Len Brown is their darling.

Writing in the New Zealand Herald Kerre McIvor, in a rather vicious attack on Ms Chuang, said she was “no doe-eyed virgin and that it would probably be a good idea for her to give up blokes for a while and sit at home reading self-improvement books to increase her chances of finding a real boyfriend.”

Although Ms McIvor conceded Ms Chuang is single and can therefore sleep with whoever she chooses she went on to say that “she will be lucky to find a soft toy willing to share her bed with her in the future, far less a real live man.”

No support from the sisterhood then.

Don’t you just love local body politics?

“He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” - George Bernard Shaw.

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In faint praise of the salesperson

After we were married and were creating a stable of young children we were accosted one evening by a door-to-door salesman selling encyclopaedias. The brand was Britannica, but it could just as easily have been Collins. Both products were sold by slick marketers who seldom left a household without extracting a sale. If you think accost is too strong a word to describe someone who is merely plying their trade I checked my trusty Chamber’s dictionary and saw that accost means: To approach and speak threateningly; to solicit as a prostitute. Both, in hindsight, applicable in this case.

The encyclopaedia salesmen always used the guilt factor to endeavour to sign you up to buy. Your offspring, they’d reckon, would be hugely disadvantaged if you didn’t expose them to this fountain of knowledge as a reference library to propel them to the top of their class. A purchase would eventually lead to tertiary education and a life of untold wealth from a professional vocational field of their infinite choices.
In the ultimate case they might even end up as encyclopaedia salesmen.

Door-to-door salesmen weren’t confined to selling encyclopaedias. The Rawleigh’s man sold elixirs for all sorts of ailments and essences for the most discerning of cooks. Vacuum cleaner salesmen called regularly too, and with a few sweeps over what you imagined was a spotless carpet they would produce so much dirt from the bag you were often compelled to buy. The most famous brand – and the most expensive – was the American-made Kirby. I know because we bought one.

Now Sir Bob Jones always espoused the theory that if a product was any good, it didn’t need anyone to sell it. The only merchandise worth buying, he would intone, was the one you sought to buy of your own volition - like going into a shop and purchasing the product off the shelf. If someone had to come to you and talk you into buying the product then the product wasn’t worth procuring. He particularly exampled life insurance. If life insurance was any good, he’d say, then it should be called by its more appropriate name death insurance, and there would be shops selling it across the counter.
To rename life insurance death insurance of course would put paid to the industry. I think it’s almost gone anyway.

And yet sales men and women, slick or otherwise, certainly have their place. It’s even been said they are the most important people in the industrialised society. The factory floor comes to a halt if there are not sales people at the consumer end of the chain pushing the product whether the customer needs it or not.

But todays salespeople tend not to go door-to-door. They’re ensconced in the advertising agencies making ordinary products irresistible. Salesmanship now originates in the factory backrooms where for instance they plot to apply superb paintwork and added features on the new car you don’t really need.

Perhaps the best examples of the hidden hawkers are the artists and technicians who come up with enticing brightly lit graphics on addictive gaming machines.
Incidentally, we didn’t buy the encyclopaedia, even though a redwood bookshelf was being thrown in for nothing and creative methods were offered to pay for it over an extended period. We didn’t intentionally set out to disadvantage our children either; we simply couldn’t afford it at the time, despite all of the above.

And anyway we were still paying off the Kirby.

Today, families only need to invest in a computer and go online. Encyclopaedias and all the knowledge of the world can be found in a word - Google. The Google brand is now so entrenched that the noun has become a verb. Google any subject and the popular search engine will likely as not lead you to another important word in the quest for knowledge - Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001. This community-edited  nline encyclopaedia boasts more than four million articles in over 125 languages. You can add your own knowledge on any subject to the text, so the information grows.

Wales is reported as saying: “My passion is captured in the vision statement that guides my work. Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” and he went on to say, “And by free I just don’t mean ‘free’ as in free beer, but also, free as in free speech. People must be empowered to copy, modify and redistribute - commercially or non-commercially - the knowledge that we have to share.”

This is a remarkable statement from the founder of this incredible tool and provided the knowledge sought is not destructive, it must surely have the potential to change the world for good in a relatively short time-scale.

T. H. Huxley disagreed with Alexander Pope’s claim that a little learning is a dangerous thing. He wrote: “The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is to my mind a very sad adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that it is other than a very valuable possession however infinitesimal its quality may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?”

I think I just heard a knock at the door. It’s probably a guy selling computers.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring.” - Alexander Pope.

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The good old days not that good

Those standing for office in the upcoming local body elections, having rushed to media outlets to inform the public of their excellent attributes, will have found that it was not only an expensive exercise, but they will also have been given an infinite variety of choices.

There are at least 5 radio stations and three newspapers that will have plausibly endeavoured to convince the incumbents and aspirants to choose their particular vehicle for their message. As each option tends to have its own defined audience, and as you need to reach a wide cross section of potential voters to promote your cause, they may have felt it necessary to spread themselves across the lot.

It wasn’t always like that. When I first stood for public office we only had one newspaper and one radio station and in those days the news was left entirely to newspapers. Radio stations had no news segments on the hour or half hour. They played music, advertisements and mid-morning and in the evening “serials” which in those pre-television times you found yourself fixated with.

Mums, most of whom were at home in the mornings, would tune into ‘Portia Faces Life’ or ‘Doctor Paul’ and in the evening we kids would listen to ‘Life With Dexter’, ‘Hagen’s Circus’ and as the night wore on cops and robbers shows like ‘Night Beat.’

Night Beat starred an unlikely newspaper crime reporter named Randy Stone. “I cover the night beat for the daily” he would intone in his opening stanza. Near the conclusion of the thirty minute drama, after numerous criminals had either been jailed or shot, he would noisily recall the outcome on an outdated typewriter and then yell out: “Copy Boy!” addressing apparently a young lad who would no doubt hasten the story to a grateful editor.

Radio provided great entertainment, but almost everybody got the daily newspaper. I used to do a paper run in Lansdowne and we only needed to know the names of those households who didn’t subscribe.

It was a very short list.

Today, news has become big business and radio and television stations have encroached on this once sacred preserve of the newspapers. Now each media competes for audiences and the news is packaged and presented with more gore than Randy Stone would have dreamed of.

A study conducted by the New York University made a list of ‘Journalisms greatest hits of the twentieth century.’ You might have expected news stories about new vaccines, fantastic inventions, the rise in living standards or the spread of democracy from ten per cent of the countries to sixty per cent over that 100 year period.

Well you would have been disappointed. The greatest hits were all about war, natural disasters, dangerous chemicals and unsafe cars. 

We don’t really want good news at all.

The problem with an interconnected world is there is always a flood, a war, a plane crash, an earthquake, a serial murder or starvation somewhere and with the proliferation of video cameras, now even an integral part of your mobile phone, there is a constant supply of horrific scenes to fill our TV screens and to be fleshed out later in print in our newspapers.

These disasters were always part of the world order, but by bringing them to us daily, particularly with such clarity as allowed on our modern highly pixelated TV screens, we risk imagining our world is getting worse, when in fact it is vastly improving.

In a town that has barely grown, the rise of news media outlets, despite causing unwanted increases in your advertising budget, should be applauded not bemoaned. We tend to look back wistfully as though there were better times, but life improves daily, even if we are loathe to recognise it.

When 19th century liberal historian and politician Lord Macaulay, wrote his History of England he couldn’t understand why the English always talked about ‘the good old days' and he warned later generations - and that’s you and me – not to romanticise the past.

He wrote: ‘In spite of overwhelming evidence that living standards are improving, many will still image to themselves the England of the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England in which we live.

‘It may at first seem strange that society, while constantly moving forward at eager speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender regret. But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of the state in which we are.

‘That impatience, while it stimulates us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful for us to be constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly improving.

‘But in truth there is constant improvement precisely because there is constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present, we would cease to contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the future.’

“Copy boy!”

“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire” – Voltaire

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Important questions for our age

From time to time I devote the column inches of my article to searching locally, nationally and internationally for the most important questions that currently need to be contemplated.

Here they are:

1. If Oracle’s catamaran was designed and made almost entirely in N.Z., and if their CEO is Sir Russell Coutts, and if Jimmy Spittle owns a multi-million dollar home in Auckland then how come Peter Montgomery didn’t say as he concluded his commentary of the last race “And the America’s Cup is once again New Zealand’s cup?”

2. What will happen to the All Blacks if Larry Ellison sets his sights on the next Rugby World Cup?

3. If next year’s general election is fought on the notion of a David and Goliath battle between Cunliffe and Key won’t Cunliffe have the advantage given his Christian name?

4. Does anybody find it odd that the people who gave us golf and called it a game are the very same people who gave us bagpipes and called it music?

5. And while we’re on that subject, if there were no golf balls, how would we measure hail?

6. Why do vegetarians never care about the insects killed to produce vegetables?

7. Are people more vigorously opposed to fur than leather because it’s easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs?

8. If Good King Wenceslas ordered a pizza, would it be deep pan, crisp and even?

9. If you mixed vodka and orange juice with milk of magnesia would you get a Phillips screwdriver?

10. Did the ANZ Corporation purchase the National Bank in Lincoln Road so you could buy a pie when you walked out the front door?

11. Why are “Save the Trees” signs made of wood?

12. When will TV One finally abandon Seven Sharp and give us back a decent current affairs programme?

13. There is a lot of comedy on TV. Does that cause comedy to break out on the streets?

14. Why do we call countries that haven’t yet trashed their environment “undeveloped?”

15. Is Sir Russell Coutts another Lord Haw-Haw?

16. Why do women’s libbers have trouble with chairMAN but not feMALE?

17. How come no one said “it’s only a boat race” when Team New Zealand was winning?

18. Why don’t we refer to the Northern Hemisphere as “up over?”

19. Kim Dot Com says he will sponsor Team New Zealand next time. Will that be before or after he pays for the undersea telecommunications cable he promised us?

20. Why is it our children can’t read a Bible in school, but they can in prison?

21. Have you ever heard any one call February, Feb-roo-air-ee?

22. If Fonterra lost millions of customers worldwide after its “Botulism scare” how come they are forecasting a record pay-out for next season?

23. If you left your windscreen wipers going all the time, could you park illegally without getting a ticket?

24. What’s the difference between a pioneer and an illegal immigrant?

25. If the GH in enough is pronounced like an “F” and the O in women like an “I” and the TI in nation like an “SH” how come fish isn’t spelt GHOTI?

26. Why don’t we ever see the headline: “Psychic wins Lotto?”

27. Would you ever buy anything from Briscoe’s that didn’t have 60 per cent off?

28. If the pen is mightier than the sword and a picture is worth a thousand words how dangerous is an email?

29. If every country in the world is in debt, where did all the money go?

30. And finally, a question with an answer. Ever wondered why gorging on delicious puddings makes your kids hyperactive? Try spelling desserts backwards.

The rest of the answers I will give to you in my column of the 29th of Feb-roo-air-ee next year!

“That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realises that in truth his wisdom is worth nothing.” -Plato

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