Allan Dick’s Blog

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CATCHING UP

Where have I been since the New Year? I'd like to say I've been in Monaco, or Honolulu, or the Caribbean. Truth is, I've been working harder than I've ever had to work in my life before and all because of the greed of a relatively small number of people who have brought the global economy to its knees.

But, things are now pretty much under control, so I have surfaced again here on GrownUps.

Photo Caption: Central Otago in Autumn is gorgeous. Allan Dick drove a Mazda MX5 sports car with the roof down from Auckland to Cromwell and back over Easter just to capture the colours.  This is on Felton Road at Bannockburn.

But I'd like some talkback on what you read here. You can add comments at the bottom of this, or you can Email me at editor@nztoday.co.nz

NZTODAY

The latest NZ TODAY is out and has destination features on Taupo for the North Island and Marlborough area for the south. Both destinations amazed me. Taupo is more than the lake and tourism. I went looking for the mysterious Kaimanawa Wall that some people think proves there were people here before Maori — but I couldn't find it. But what I did find was an amazing development at Mokai, north of Taupo. This former sawmilling town is quietly decaying back into the ground, but the local Maori have put together an amazing development that includes using geothermal steam to heat a glasshouse that grows tomatoes and capsicums for the world. But this glasshouse is massive — 11 hectares of it! They have also built a geothermal power station that delivers electricity to the national grid. All done without fuss.

(Photo Caption: The South Island cover of the latest NZ TODAY features a colourful scene in the Marlborough Sounds)

And Marlborough is more than grapes. Although I did meet Peter Yealands who is an incredible man with enormous vision.

He bought nine farms, turned onto into a subdivision and the other eight into a huge vineyard — the biggest in NZ and surely one of the biggest in the world. Crest a rise in the Awatere Valley and you see an ocean of green to the horizon in every direction.

Last year Yealands had their first harvest — 350,000 cases. This year they will have 550,000 cases of wine. In a couple of years they will be producing one million cases of wine a year — that's 12 million bottles.  Gulp!

But I also went out into the Marlborough Sounds — one of the last frontiers in New Zealand. You can drive a long way out there — but it's demanding. I saw a sign — 21 km to where I wanted to go. I thought that will take 20-30 minutes. It took at hour and a quarter. This is an amazing, and little known part of New Zealand.

NZ TODAY also has stories on Quail Island in Lyttleton Harbour, walking the Milford Track, a visit to the Tongariro National Park, food on the road and much more.

There are two covers for this issue — the North Island one shows Taupo Mayor Rick Cooper with a painting of TV's Tony Soprano, the South Island cover is a colourful scene in the Marlborough Sounds.

It's a great read and is available at most bookshops and supermarkets.

If you can't find a copy, send $10 to Allan Dick, P O Box 8673, Symonds Street, Auckland and say whether you want the North Island or South Island cover.

RECYCLING

I've just spent a month relocating my office. A nightmare job. Over the past 14 years I’ve been running my own business, I’ve surrounded myself with a collection of memorabilia from my motoring adventures and travels. The office was a bit like a museum, with glass cases filled with little treasures, posters on the walls, photographs, bookshelves jammed with thousands of books and cupboards crammed with mementos. It was not an office as much as a bloke’s shed.

It was sad to pack everything away, knowing that I will struggle to find space to display it all again. At least in the near future.

Much of the memorabilia was small stuff and to pack it we fell back onto something I had not thought of for years — the banana box.

Bananas used to come in wooden crates, divided in the middle into two areas. They were nasty, splintery things.

Today bananas come in strong cardboard cartons, with tight fitting lids and holes in the side to carry them by.

They’re perfect for the sort of job we had in mind. And the beauty of it is that they are free. Supermarkets and fruit shops don’t know what to do with them and are glad to help you put them into the back of your car, station wagon, van, light truck to get rid of them.

THE ECONOMY

As I have said before in this column, I am at a loss understanding the lack of action in correcting the economy. It is not a tsunami, a volcanic eruption, a cyclone or a bush fire over which we have no control. It is the human race that buys and sells shares. It is the human race whose greed drives the search for excess profits. It is the human race whose greed drives the desire for bonuses for achieving fresh levels in human greed. If there was a united desire to correct the current situation it could be fixed overnight. All it takes is a shift in the attitude of human beings.

Around us there are signs that the RECESSION has hit — For Lease signs everywhere, mortgagee sales, crippled car yards, fewer jobs, company closures, redundancies. And it continues. But I have just come back from Marlborough where there is still such a shortage of labour for mundane jobs like picking grapes, that the vineyards are importing people from places like Ethiopia and the Pacific Islands to do the job.

The experts in such matters tell me that many of the secure financial institutions around the world have never had so much money held in reserve, just waiting for the right moment to start lending again. What constitutes the right moment is something I don’t entirely understand, but I guess it includes governments around the world imposing some new regulations to stop the so-called toxic loans situation ever occurring again.

THE ECONOMY II

There are very clearly mixed messages about what is happening to the economy. While the USA and Britain in particular are hurting like hell because of the greed and stupidity of a relatively small number of people, in NZ there is widespread belief that we are in “better shape than most to avoid the worst of it and head into recovery mode ahead of many other countries”.

Today I drove down Ponsonby Road in Auckland. It was 11:30am and every cafe had slick young people outside, enjoying the sun, laughing, chatting, drinking coffee, talking into cellphones and looking like they didn’t have a care in the world. I wondered how I could get a job like that.

It’s not that good everywhere.

SUPER AUCKLAND

You can probably count on one hand the people who are really interested in the probable amalgamation of the various local body governments in greater Auckland into one council that the media has, in its cliché ridden way, labeled super-city. Super-city my foot! It’s only about 1.3 or 1.4 million people, which, in global terms, is a village. How we like to talk ourselves up into something far bigger and more important that we are.

All of the talk of amalgamation of the councils bringing reduced costs is pure bunkum.

I remember the promises made in the Elwood reforms of 1987 in the last round of council amalgamations. There were promises and predictions made then of greater efficiencies and lower rates. We got amalgamation all right, which resulted in more power for few people, greater levels of bureaucracy for us to fight and no reduction at all in rates.

I preferred it when we had smaller boroughs like One Tree Hill Borough in Auckland, St Kilda Borough in Dunedin, Picton Borough in Marlborough and Naseby Borough in Central Otago. If you were lucky enough to have lived in one of the smaller boroughs or counties you probably had the mayor or chairman as a neighbour and the man who could unblock your drain was a relative.

When Auckland gets it’s amalgamated council and a “Lord Mayor” can you imagine how difficult it’s going to be phoning the civic offices and getting anyone to take the slightest bit of interest in the fact your water supply is down to a dirty brown trickle. Or your rubbish hasn’t been picked up.  Or why your rates haven’t come down, as promised?

POVERTY

I used to get into trouble with the ultra-liberals when I argued against their assertion that there was “poverty in New Zealand”. I thought that devalued the reality of the word poverty. Poverty is what you find in the slums of Calcutta. Poverty is what you find in refugee camps in Sudan.

Poverty is people living in appalling conditions, fighting for life, living on scraps that New Zealanders would throw into the rubbish as unfit for human consumption.

Nobody in New Zealand lives in those conditions.

There are people who have a lower standard of living than is acceptable, but often that’s of their making and it’s far from the real meaning of poverty.

What’s brought this up is I’ve just heard a news report on the radio where the union that looks after some Air New Zealand cabin crew claim their members are living in poverty because “they are having real difficulty in making ends meet.” I have no issue with the fact that if these staff members are being paid 26% less than fellow cabin crew, doing the same job, then there’s inequality that needs to be fixed. But it’s an insult to my intelligence and an insult to the dignity of the beggars in Calcutta to say these people live in a state of “poverty”.

SHEEP

There’s an uproar over the restarting of live sheep exports — it’s a barbaric practice that we shouldn’t be involved with. We’ve had live sheep exports before and they’ve generally been when times were more buoyant than they are today.

Today though, sheep farming is in trouble. I never thought I’d reach a stage in life where I actually liked sheep — but I do. Driving around the country I am relieved when I see sheep in a paddock, or on a hill, rather than the black and white dairy herds that have changed much of the face of New Zealand.

I have grown to like the stupid, unthreatening nature of sheep and I want to see sheep farming continue in New Zealand and remain a part of our heritage.

Seeing a mob of sheep being driven along a quiet country road on a warm summer’s day is one of the real pleasures in my simple life.

The first time I visited Whangamomona was on a hot summer’s day and there was a large mob of sheep being driven through the town. It was picture perfect.

But do hard times for sheep farmers mean that we have to approve live sheep exports? No. Emphatically no. But in saying that, I feel hypocritical because, apart from eating more mutton and lamb and insisting my jumpers are made from NZ wool, I don’t know what else to suggest to assist sheep farmers. And I am not joking when I talk about eating more mutton and lamb.  As a kid, Mondays and Tuesdays were always “cold mutton” days after the Sunday roast — always a leg of mutton. By Tuesdays I had the job of cutting the last vestiges of meat off the bones and feeding it through a mincer and Mum, would make Shepherd’s Pie.

I live in Greenlane in Auckland where the Foodtown supermarket has recently had a major overhaul and emerged as a Countdown. But it’s still a supermarket that caters for the wealthy and the elite. No mutton here. In fact no lamb’s fry, kidneys, hearts or any of the other good stuff. All prime cuts and no offal.

Driving through Tokoroa recently, the Navigator and I decided to have a look at what was off SH1 in the way of shops and saw a traditional butcher’s shop that was offering sides of mutton at something like $50.

That was too much for the both of us, even given the fact that Kate, the Editorial Border Collie, would also get some, so we asked if a leg was possible. It was and for $28 I revisited my childhood.

The Navigator’s kitchen is equipped with a device that looks like a TV set and you can see things like legs of mutton rotating on a spit. She put it on a long, slow cook and the house was filled with childhood smells for the next three days.

It was delicious hot. It was delicious cold and it was even more delicious as thick chunks between two slices of fresh white bread, with plenty of salt and pepper.

Do your bit, return to the past, demand your posh supermarket or trendy butcher’s shop stocks legs of mutton and do your bit to stop the live export trade.

BOY RACERS

I was a boy racer. Only I was called a milkbar cowboy — and a terror to the neighbourhood. That was a long time ago.

In the late 1950s I was a part of the youth revolution. I drove noisy cars too fast and I didn’t care what the older generation thought. No, that’s not true. I did care, I wanted to shock them.

So, Judith Collins, there’s nothing new. People who claim that today’s boy racer issue is new, is anti-social and want police armed with water cannon to clean the vermin out, are living in a state of self-denial.

They are saying today what their parents said about the younger generation of twenty years ago, their grandparents before that and their great grandparents before that. Ad nauseam.

The cars the boy racers of today drive are faster than the cars I drove, but they’re safer. The cars I drove were old, had non-existent brakes, loose steering, bald tyres, doors that flapped open and there were no such things as seat belts, airbags, ABS, or deformable structures. They were killers.

I’m not sure what the difference is between then and now, if there is any except maybe our memories and our recollection of how we were.

Is the fuss over today’s boy racers just another generational thing?

GOODBYE MIKE

Jeremy Parkinson has just phoned to tell me Mike Baker has died. I worked with Jeremy, and Mike, at Radio Pacific for many years. But it was Michael John Baker who got me started in radio back in 1979.

He was the Managing Director of Radio Otago in Dunedin in those days, having come down from Auckland where he had been one of the pioneers in private radio.

Mike was blessed with a voice that could call the angels down from the heavens. He was also incredibly creative and tended to work out in left field a lot. He was a radio junkie.

He parlayed Radio Otago from a near defunct outfit into a profitable company, which included creating Radio Central (Otago). Despite this success, Mike was much more the performer than the businessman. I met him when the radio station got into publishing a weekly newspaper for a ten-week period. When it was over Mike found himself running the radio station’s newsroom as well as the entire company as his News Editor had left. That was Mike’s way — working 15 hours a day, seven days a week, running on nearly empty all the time.

He asked me to give him a hand in the newsroom running the breakfast news for “a week or two”. Mike and I clicked. More importantly radio and I clicked and at the end of the “week or two” Mike showed incredible faith in me, gave me the position of News Editor and off I went in my radio career. I owed him a lot for the chance he gave me.

Like many creative people, Mike was not always easy to work with, he fell out with the board and he sold his shares in Radio Otago when they were at top dollar and retired to Central Otago, where he tried his hand at baking bread and running a cafe in Alexandra. But it wasn’t for him, he squandered much of the money he’d made in turning Radio Otago around and he returned to wireless, and Auckland, by joining Radio Pacific.

For the past decade or so he’d been running a small radio station based in Auckland’s Devonport that he called “The Flea”.

Thanks Mike.

CRIME RATES

We all know that crime is out of control in this country. I’m not sure that it’s as bad as some of us think. The vast majority of us can still walk down a dark street in the middle of the night and still come to no harm.

But we do have a world-class problem and there’s no denying it.

One of the growth industries in New Zealand is building and running jails. We need more and more jails because we have more and more criminals who need to be locked up and we’re locking them up for longer.

And the cry for us to get even tougher on criminals is a popular one that has a lot of voices.

New Zealand does have too many evil people who simply don’t care about anyone’s life or property, not even their own.

What is the answer? Is Garth McVicker and his Sensible Sentencing Trust right? Do we need tougher sentences?

The sad fact is that we already have some of the harshest sentences in the world and it ain’t worked.

Why is it that in New Zealand, the land of milk and honey, the best place in the world to live, the best country in the world to bring up kids and all of the other great things we think about ourselves, has some of the worst statistics in the world.

One of the highest child murder rates, one of the worst youth suicide rates, violent crime that’s one of the highest in the OECD per head of population, one of the highest and longest incarceration rates in the world. All that’s missing is the death penalty.

My theory is that we are still a frontier nation in the same way that Australia is still basically a nation settled by convicts. Frontier nations are traditionally hard places and we pride ourselves on our blokishness. It’s why we love tough sports like rugby and rugby league.

Tough sports breeds other things like excess drinking.

But I think the single thing that’s at the core of much of our serious and deeply worrying level of crime is the social welfare system.

I grew up with my Scottish, and thus Labour-supporting parents, telling me what a great country this was because of the social welfare system that provided free education, free medical care and State houses. We were world leaders.

And there was nothing wrong with that level of social security.

The problem started when the unemployment benefit, child support and invalid’s benefits became widespread, too easy to obtain and became an established way of life for many. And the social welfare system went along with it and was managed by people who actively encouraged their “clients” to take full advantage of the system.

We have ghettos in New Zealand that are as rotten and dysfunctional as anything that Charles Dickens ever wrote about.

All too often, the worst crimes in New Zealand, the crimes that shock an appall us, are committed by people from these ghettos where there is entrenched generational dependence and abuse of the welfare system.

To me, that is the root cause of most of our serious crime. People with too much time on their hands, with no respect for anyone or anything who are angry or get fuelled on alcohol and/or drugs and wreak havoc on those arose them.

In every crime that has sickened me to the core over the past ten years, the perpetrators have come from this sort of dysfunctional family.

The cure isn’t in building more jails, locking people up and letting them rot. Nor is it shooting them. That sort of draconian measure may be needed short-term. But, long-term the cure is in demolishing the social welfare system and bringing it back to a sane and sensible level and giving people pride in themselves and a feeling of community worth. And you have to break up the ghettos where people are shoved into, fed money and forgotten about — until they break out and shock us all with their level of violence.

Easy said. But how do you take a 12-year-old kid who lives in South Auckland who is the third, fourth, fifth or even sixth generation of one of these families and give him, or her a chance at a normal life?

I don’t know, but I know we have brought this on ourselves and we have to provide the answer.

ASHBURTON

Plenty of feedback on the feature on Ashburton in the last issue of NZ TODAY. Much of it was disbelieving. Was Ashburton really that good? Was it really the sort of place that NZ used to be? Yes it was.

The last issue of NZ TODAY was special for two reasons. The first was Ashburton and the second was White Island.

Both were “bests” for me. Best tourist attraction and best town in NZ in which to live.

GOING NORTH

So far I have avoided going North out of Auckland and using the new toll road, but I know I will be angered by it when I do.

I have no objection to toll roads. I know that roading is expensive and we need to pay for it to get it done. I’ve driven across France on their magnificent Peage motorway system and have been happy at stopping every so often to converse with someone inside a booth and pay the money. Gives me a chance to practice my French.

My gripe over the toll section of SH1 north of Auckland is the entrenched and bloody mindedness of the people who tried to show us they were smarter than anyone else and invented the stupidest system ever invented to pay the toll.

They have been shown time after time after time that the system doesn’t work, it’s inconvenient, prone to breakdown and just plain daft.

But, will these dunder-headed dimwits accept that they got it wrong and fix it by putting in toll booths where you can actually pay as you use? No way.

I have long despised these people. They have their own agenda for everything, they breed in a hot-house and don’t understand the real world.

And to think that we pay them.

MAORI BUSINESS EXPERTISE

Books on New Zealand history show that Maori were very quick on the uptake when it came to learning to use Pakeha ways of doing business. Within a few years of European settlement, enterprising Maori were growing wheat and exporting it to Australia in their own sailing ships.

But there’s an arrogant perception among many Pakeha today that Maori are lazy, indolent and don’t have a clue about running a business. The way the Tainui went about blowing much of their Treaty settlement money is often held up as the way Maori run things. But that ignores the superb job done by Ngai Tahu in the South Island and the many other very successful Maori enterprises.

Maori are not becoming a powerful economic force in New Zealand — they already are!

If you care to look you will find Maori making a major impact on the New Zealand economy. They do it their own way at their own pace and often without telling the world about it.

What I saw in the tiny, remote, central North Island village of Mokai recently was simply amazing. Can you imagine a glasshouse covering 30 acres growing tomatoes, capsicum etc for export? A 30 acre glasshouse! But that’s just the start. Read about it in the Taupo feature this issue.

HOW DID WE EVER DO WITHOUT . . .

Cellphones. Bob Jones loathes cellphones. He says when he sees someone walking down the road, cellphone to ear, chatting away, he wants to tear it from their hands and smash it on the road. A bit violent for me, but I am one of the few people I meet on a daily basis who’s not welded to their cellphone. I have one and I use it, but mostly when I’m out of town.

It’s not one that takes photographs, has GPS, allows me to receive and send Email, keeps track of appointments and can give my car an oil change. It’s just a basic little silver job that when I use it in front of my techno-freak colleagues they fall about laughing. Even more of a joke is that I refuse to use it for texting!

I have trouble keeping track of it. In fact, as I write this, I don’t know where it is.

We all know people who cannot be separated from their cellphone. Go to dinner and the bloody thing sits on the table.

I was in a Subway recently and a mid 20s bloke in front of me was so involved in texting someone that it took several times as long to place his order as it should have. I felt like doing a Bob Jones on him!

RED CONES

In this issue is a story within the Taupo destination feature about a drive deep into the Kaimanawa Forest to look for a mysterious wall. The road was so long that I began to fear I was lost, but then reassurance! A red cone! And a little further on another!

We knew we weren’t lost! The red cone men had also been in here.

It seems we can do nothing in New Zealand without surrounding what it is we are doing with several million red plastic cones!

If a contractor digs a hole, up springs a forest of red plastic cones!

I think the best use I’ve seen for them is an artificial snowman in Ohakune that uses one for a nose like a big carrot.

ZAPPING

There’s a foodie climate in New Zealand. It’s fashionable to read about food. Half our TV programmes are about food. Peta Mathias is a real celebrity and we’ve embraced Jamie Oliver as one of our own and that appalling Ramsbottom fellow has abused and cursed his way into our lives.

We think we’re cool because we’re now growing our own olives and producing olive oil.

In the past two months since the last issue of NZ TODAY I’ve been around the country a lot and visited many cafes for a quick bite to eat and a coffee.

And I have seen food that’s beautifully prepared and displayed in a pristine cabinet taken and destroyed in 30 seconds of zapping in a microwave.

In one cafe where food was clearly the centre of the universe I took my hot, soggy mess back and complained. Complained nicely mind. The manager understood perfectly. “Yes, I know what you mean. I won’t have a microwave in my kitchen at home, but you know, we’re busy and we need to heat the food quickly. . . ”  She wouldn’t have a microwave in her kitchen at home, but it was alright to destroy customer’s food! And most of us are silly enough to accept. Either that, or we simply don’t know and we’re not really a nation of true foodies at all — just pretentious wankers who think we are!