In the devastated years after my youngest daughter died and left us adrift in her loss, I found myself watching clouds a lot, vaguely puzzled at how little I had noticed the infinite variety and beauty of each celestial iteration over the island and its surrounding waters.
The fabulous back-lit dawns over Coromandel, the plays of light that have drawn film-makers to our fortunate latitudes, the changes over the course of every bright, lush day.
With the quietness of the lockdown years in the past, I’ve grown to noticing, with a similar odd affection, the return of spikey, improbable silver airliners that pass overhead.
The thought is tinged with the hope that the travellers aboard them will bring back stories of the astonishingly low price of vegetables and a couple of quid for coffee in London and of house prices that dismay Sydneysiders and Brits alike but sound ludicrously low to us.
Maybe the glaring differences will galvanise us into action.
We live in paradise, but we are neglecting – and inflicting quite unnecessary economic poverty – on our young, on families, on working communities and a future of life-long deprivation on the poorest.
We are not – never were – a poor little country at the end of the world, as the neoliberal narrative still runs, but future generations will not be kind to us with our Think Bigs and the greedy economic myopia of Rogernomics.
We are a tidy little earner for Australian banks, global tech companies and offshore monopoly owners of our grocery and mining chains and procurement for lucrative infrastructure projects.
Not to mention our quite remarkable export produce and the highly successful manufacturing economy that also slid away into the global economy over the last 30 years.
Regrettably, in this land of extraordinary abundance, we are being slapped back into a whole new round of selling off assets to overseas interests and monopoly practices that are the inevitable end game of unfettered capitalist neoliberalism.
So here we are, back to flogging off the family silver.
Literally.
Gold from the Martha mine, a globally important gold and silver producer for much of a century, paid derisory royalties to New Zealand for the thousands of tonnes of gold extraction. In 2004, a further series of underground mines running under much of the town of Waihi, produced approximately 100,000 ounces of gold each year.
Over the past six years the company has paid an average of $5.7M in company tax and $1.3M in royalties per year.
No wonder that the gold and minerals in our hills are now up for (Australian) mining again and we are expected to swallow such pap as we saw this last week over proposals for a new mine under conservation land on the Coromandel. Royalties were again skipped over. Look at the jobs!
And even the Auckland daily is dismayed at the number of people who will go deathly hungry, cold and insecure for the rest of the winter, scrimping between food and children’s health while power companies post record profits and punish defaulters with penalty reconnection fees that alone dwarf any ‘tax cuts’ that those households may ever see.
The realisation that we’re letting an earthly heaven be turned into hell in front of our eyes quite so blatantly is – shocking.
So where’s our fighting spirit? One of the learnings from the UK’s election of a pretty staid prime minister in Labour leader Keir Starmer is that western citizens may be fed up with the rich food of rowdy populism and unfettered wealth and will relish a sensible political diet.
That the breathless prose of personality politics ad nauseum, as with Trump and Biden as well as the Sunaks and Boris Johnson, is playing into a toxic dead-end of broken cities and deep inequality.
The taste on the husting, Guardian columnist George Monbiot said, with some irony for New Zealanders, was for “normal politics” which would “put [the UK] back on track”.
“Justice and decency will resume, public services will be rebuilt, our global standing will be restored, we will revert to a familiar state. Or so the story goes,” he said.
The “back on track” normal, in rich nations, was 1945 to 1975.
Unprecedented, the years played out in the absence of great war, revolution, state collapse or devastating plagues. Wealth was redistributed and there was a shared sense of national purpose, a strong economic safety net, high employment, good wages and robust public services.
In the absence of one of the four great catastrophes, income and capital inexorably accumulate in the hands of the few, and there is a return to oligarchy where inordinate economic power translates into inordinate political power, building a politics to suit them, Monbiot said, warning that even a modicum of democracy, equality, fairness and functioning states would require not political accommodation but “the mother of all battles”. • Liz Waters
