the books were never meant to balance
I live in a house of chartered accountants, so I really felt the leaders of the minor parties were talking to me. Over the course of TVNZ's multiparty debate (link), which I didn't stay (I get enough of it at home), apart from jumping into the parallel world where culture matters occasionally (apparently in the belief this stuff is dynamite), the politics discussed were economics. Thankfully not a political debate (that stuff is yawn)! It was with great interest that I watched and learnt that a dollar saved here would mean a tax cut there. That was all I learnt. And it was with great interest that I noticed that the spectrum of economic beliefs has become as narrow as the lavender-to-navy blue band of our current political spectrum. Hardly representative of the virulent political hatred (and fear and resentment) out in the street! Or course, I had heard of blue-shift and have seen graphs going from radical to conservative showing politics as practiced in NZ, on the good advice of PR consultants, to have left the beach (that the '68ers said was under the street) and in fact the street as well, and gone inside the compound. It is ring-fenced all around with warnings about the unsanitary nature of political causes and signs exhorting all who enter to wash their hands of them.
So it was with great interest that I listened to Chlöe Swarbrick commit the Greens to supermarket ownership and not slip up once by mentioning the collapse of the natural environment (most of it too, where it is not dirty brown, is blue). A PR disaster would ensue if the Green Party were green. And it was with equal interest that I heard Rawiri Waititi say how health benefits to his people would be paid for (did you hear that?! I said excitedly. Not only are Māori going to benefit from Te Pāti getting the percentage of the vote it's due, they're going to pay for it). And I was shocked when I discovered that Qiulae Wong had been unemployed before, and would do anything, anything any coalition buddy might want, not to be unemployed again. She made good sense in this and in the Opportunity Party's commitment to setting aside its commitments at the first opportunity. I was thrilled (for the short time natural to a thrill) that Winston Peters was there and had nothing substantial to contribute, like the collective unconscious of racial hatred; unconscious, that is, being the conditioned reflex of the reactionary. And who could forget ACT Party's, A.C.T. which stands for Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, who could forget their leader. I learnt he holds a special place in his books for cancer research (we must stop doctors, who can save people, leaving this country). Think of the savings that could be made! He no doubt knows one day he will be old.
Then...
None of the triumphalism pictured above. Two men who look to have taken a more deadly sin than book-keeping into their flesh: one an exhausted sock-puppet with button eyes, the other an engorged honourable member, whose fluttering hands resembled the gills of an axolotl and whose native pink turned red under environmental pressure. The two leaders of the major parties shook hands and were encouraged to hug and kiss by Ryan Bridge because they were, he told them, to be cast as the two ends of a very small dog. And we were brought as uncomfortably close to their deficiencies, the technical deficiencies of the venue notwithstanding, it sounded like a dog in a metal tin and looked like the axolotl's fishtank, as that intimacy which they would share, of becoming a very small dog with a very large tail. (See above for it wagging.)
We sat in front of it and wondered: politics seems to have had the opposite of its intended effect and invalidated them. These political invalids, one of whom said he would balance the books. This moved us. And we saw then that we, a household of chartered accountants, might be getting the government we deserved.
Despite ourselves, or to ward it off, anything but that, we muttered, The books were never meant to balance.
