Yawn.. another business confidence survey…
Does anybody else out there wonder why drooping business confidence matters? Okay, business is important but it represents just one part of the economy.
Category archive: NZ History
At last – liberation!
One of the advantages of skirting sixty is arriving at a vast fashion plateau, where peer pressures recede into the misty distance of the 1950s, when our mothers dreaded a hole in our socks.
What a relief it is to window shop today and see tortured blue jeans with unmatched patches, or with gaping holes without patches, and jackets turned inside out with threads hanging off artfully fraying seams! What a joy, to go home and rip apart an old coat taking the scissors to its sleeves, tearing out the shoulder pads and pinning a 1950s rhinestone brooch on its sagging lapel above our heart.
Not the Swinging Sixties
In the big picture New Zealand prospered in the 1960s. Materialism boomed, the economy flourished, brand-new houses dotted the suburbs and pop music and miniskirts and thumbing noses at conventions, gave spice to the day.
But on the edge of the lupins and the sand hills east of Christchurch, Cheryl Nicol’s childhood memory of 60s life, was one of make-do. In her memoir, A Parallel Universe, as the title suggests, a different world existed. Life was hard. The picture, is grim.
Speaking Out
After much hesitation, because I did not want to offend, I put off for at least a year writing a letter to the Otago Daily Times on an issue that had been offending me for some time.
Milking Obama…
Crass materialism leapt brazenly out of the closet in New Zealand the 80s. Money-making was elevated to high social status beyond public service. An American import, the dominance of the mighty dollar had already taken root in other countries. Business finally reached the pinnacle of prestige. Business books proliferated: business management, business leadership, how to succeed in business and, of course, business-speak.
Poverty then – and now…
Sometimes the stuff that spills out of old box files on their way to the bin, are not only worth remembering, but keeping.
One we found was Windows on Poverty, a 1992 Report from the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services on Poverty in New Zealand. It was well on its way to pile in one of those purges we hoarders are told we must do. But caught between the need to clear out stuff – and hoard, we once more hoarded. Why? So we don’t forget, so we don’t allow it to happen again. Not in Godzone.
Kiwiosities – Roddy
The Honourable Roddy, the largest nugget of gold discovered in New Zealand was as big as a man’s hand and weighed 99 ounces, 12 pennyweights, 12 grains.
Pushing the envelope, outside the square…
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:
But we won…didn’t we?
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: