He arrived at the wrong address at the right time and his pride was ruffled slightly when we told him as much. A middle-aged Indian, he had come for some maintenance on our house and loosened up when he realised his office had given him the wrong address.
As he worked, we began to chat and I asked why he had made the trek from India to New Zealand.
Somebody said my computer was old, they did, they did.
Then another blessed with a pronounced sense of humour, asked what Windows I used. And as if this was overheard somewhere out there in some cyber conspiracy, website after website wanted to know my computer’s credentials – then turned it away…
I don’t know what other boomers expected from this election but here’s what one, not a million miles from this keyboard hopes for:
Hope. In the arid landscape of ideology over the past 30 odd years it was as precious as water – but there’s an oasis ahead and room for hope. Just look at what’s happened abroad, as Martin Jacques wrote in the Guardian recently:
It’s not easy being green… and especially not in Auckland. The most common suburban sounds here for the past five years has been the angry buzz of chainsaws. To hear them is bad enough because you know that another beautiful tree is about to fall because, well it’s in the way of sunlight/developers/over-sized houses. One third of the city’s residential trees have been felled in the past five years according to the Tree Council.
The results are in. The swearing-inners have sworn. The dust has settled – but the whining,the utter incomprehension of the bewildered born-to-rule shows no sign of abating. Judging by the first week after confirmation that a coalition of Labour, NZ First and the Greens would be the Government, the first of the moans is the least accurate, but makes a good slogan for the newly dispossessed and it goes – and will go – like this:
It’s over… sort of. Yet something seems missing, something so boring it wouldn’t make it to the debates about the pressing issues of homeless, inequality and the other depressing social indicators.
It’s not so much a policy as a theory which has guided this and other Government’s policy since the Reagan-Thatcher years. A time so brainless it ran on the empty slogan of ‘there is no alternative’.
Man starts to shave. Sees his reading glasses on the basin shelf. Wonders why. Wife tells him breakfast is getting cold. Hurries to the table. Spoons down porridge. She gives him a peck on the cheek (when did they stop kissing the way they used to? ) and rushes off to work the way he once did.
“If I am in the privileged position of being Prime Minister, my expectation is that politics will be based around ideas and policy” – Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report.
What’s this? Ideas defrosted from the ice of ideology? Policy untrammelled by The Market, that blinker on political imaginings.
So here’s an idea:
Say what you will about Jacinda Ardern but we’ve rarely seen a polly who slips so easily into disarming self- deprecation. It’s part of the appeal of the new Labour Leader who can rally supporters to come to the Labour launch at the Auckland Town Hall while adding: “There’ll be a special musical guest – and I’ll be laying out my relentlessly positive vision (is this getting annoying yet?”)
And then after a PS urging supporters to volunteer, a PPS saying: “Hey Mum… this is me checking you’re reading all of my messages!”