Photo: Ollie Neas (left), Asher Emanuel and Racheal Reeves (not in this photo, clearly), have put hundreds of unpaid hours into their site to help voters by summarising and comparing party policies. It was launched on The Spinoff website today.
I went to see the documentary film, The Farthest, on Friday morning. It felt funny to go to a movie in the morning, on a work day. I was programmed by my parents to work all day until the 6pm News and not be inside on a sunny day. My mother never missed THE News, as it was then, and used to drop everything and sprint inside to switch the TV on. She took an unusually keen interest in current affairs and was a loyal supporter of Bruce Beetham and Social Credit.
The documentary was the story of the men, and surprising number of women, who launched Voyager 1 and 2 in the 1970s, when Bruce Beetham was a political force – in so far as he could be under the previous “first past the post” system.
In August 2012, Voyager 1 finally left our solar system – freed from the Sun’s gravitational force – the first manmade object to venture into interstellar space – and it is mainly space. Before it left, it took one backward look at the planets it had revealed to us, and captured Earth as a one pixel, speck of dust in a sunbeam. Is it possible that another civilisation might intercept this small metal object one day and figure out how to play the golden record on board. They may not find the music to thir taste, and will be mystified by the sounds of Earth. Sound is a figment of our imagination, “designed” to interpret subtle air pressure differences in our unique atmosphere. The aliens won’t be able to make rude jokes about our anatomy as NASA refused to include photographs of naked bodies.
The documentary was highly recommended by Seattle-based space engineer, Dr Charles Polk, whom I met 10 days earlier in Wellington, in a hotel named after another great explorer – James Cook. Charles has chosen New Zealand as the politically stable and innocuous centre of a global funding scheme to establish human habitation on Mars – for research purposes, not as a tourism or property development scheme. You might have seen the announcement about the launch of The Martian Trust hidden inside the Dompost on Tuesday 01 August.
After the film, we emerge from the dark and lonely outer solar system into the warm noonday sun, have a quick beer, which wasn’t so quick to choose because there are now so ridiculously many of them, and scoot down the street to St John’s in Willis St to attend the launch of the new Opportunities Party (TOP). We had gone to an earlier presentation by party leader, Gareth Morgan, which we all agreed was one of the best, if not the best, of its kind we had ever heard. The only one I’d ever heard, to be honest. We discussed it afterwards at The Green Parrot Cafe – another first for me – where I had a ham steak the size of a flying saucer. It was hard not to murmur agreement with everything Gareth said, though he has our homes in his sights. But if you’ve read The Spirit Level, you’ll be convinced that our increasingly unequal society is costing us way more in healthcare, mental ill health, prisons, and general discontent.
At St John’s, we encounter Gareth’s wife, Jo, who was driving the candidates to the venue. She has a heavy vehicle licence and can drive buses and very big motorbikes. She’d just come back from climbing mountains in Russia, having conquered over twenty of ours. I admire her physical courage and practical ability with plumbing and mechanics generally. She is the youngest of a big Southland family and lost her father when she was very small. It must have been difficult for her mother. Jo is very unconventional. Inside the meeting room, we sit behind two young men in white T-shirts, one wearing a black and white camouflage sunhat.
Wellington Central candidate, Geoff Simmons, speaking at the TOP launch, Supporter in camouflage.
At the previous TOP meeting, Gareth, when asked to characterise party supporters, described them as “the Film Festival crowd”. A frisson of self-satisfaction passed through the audience before they quickly collected and stifled their pride. We have lived many lives vicariously – thanks to the Film Festival. I can take whatever screen life throws at me from a plush Embassy armchair, glass of wine in hand.
It was a lucky accident (and probably was an accident in those days) to be born in NZ, in the 1950s and 60s, get a free degree – with the option of distance learning from the pub – and effortlessly move in and out of jobs and houses. Most of us had the further advantage of rock solid families who made meals from scratch, policed bedtimes, and tucked us in at nights. We scoffed at our parents, their religion, their narrow-mindedness, and moaned about the food. Now, we binge on film, buy cabernet drizzle (I know what Dad would have had to say about that!) and pomegranates at Moore Wilsons superior food purveyors, and weigh the merits of Amalfi vs Cinque de Terre for the next European holiday.
You’ll be starting to despise these self-indulgent, PC, film festival-going wankers. Let me say a few words in our defence. Despite being enmeshed in an enervating web of comfort and security, the film festival patrons I know are trying to “care, think, and vote” for less fortunate citizens. They settled down after their wild, heavy drinking early years to take up and stick at a variety of worthwhile occupations: researching family violence and the care of disadvantaged children, drafting laws to protect workers, adjudicating Maori land grievances, administering our health and veterinary professions, organising medical staff to help out in third world countries following sundry disasters, nursing terminal cancer patients, teaching chemistry, helping regional economic development initiatives, saving our native species and managing ecological restoration projects. We paid our taxes, repaid our education debt to society, and saved for retirement. We did not knowingly rob the next generation blind. We were all subject to dark energies.
I admire people like Jo and Gareth who could be at the movies, or sailing the Pacific in a super-yacht, but instead put themselves under enormous pressure and cop a lot of vicious hate mail in the process. Gareth was silently applauded by ecologists, and deliberately misunderstood by many, for talking about the elephant in the room: cats. He has really put his money where his mouth is.
I admire the three young people who have spent hundreds of hours of their own time formulating a party policy comparator. Ollie Neas, Asher Emanuel, and Racheal Reeves, in their mid-twenties. Well done to Xequals, led by Alex Matthews, for doing all the back end stuff. The site launches on The Spinoff website today, 14 August https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/14-08-2017/introducing-policy-nz-a-frankly-magnificent-new-tool-for-election-2017/ Don’t give The Spinoff itself too much credit. The site just picked up all their unpaid work, not that Ollie and co aren’t grateful for the platform, I’m sure. Thank you Chapman Tripp and Victoria University for giving them some support. I once went on a trip around “Darwin Britain” with Ollie and two other brilliant, funny, creative boys from Nelson College. It was their prize for winning a national school video competition to celebrate Darwin’s birth 200 years ago and 150 years since On the Origin of Species was published.
I hope that people bother to take a look at the policies these “kids” have so carefully gleaned and aligned for our convenience, and are not blinded by love of Jacinda, dislike of Gareth and Winston, furious annoyance with Metiria, or indifference towards Bill. There’s no escaping to Mars just yet.
Here’s to the big thinkers and doers!
