Why good neighbours must find travel plan

Areader wrote a good letter recently on the subject of neighbourliness. He compared the low, friendly fences of suburban sections in the 60s and 70s to the 2m-high privacy fences of modern suburbia.

“Our lives were lived quite openly before friendly neighbours

. . . if Mum happened to be in town and it threatened rain our neighbour would jump the fence and get the washing in and poke it in the unlocked back door.” Ah, the good old days.

He’s right that people today are more privacy conscious in their home lives — though an argument could be made we share a lot more of our lives with a much larger audience online. I don’t know anyone who leaves the back door unlocked any more.

But I would paint a different picture of modern neighbourliness.

I’m friendly with the folks next door in our tightly-packed suburb. We share keys, tools and produce. We feed pets, supply ingredients, collect mail and take emptied bins in on windy rubbish days.

We’ve nipped the odd bit of washing in/out for each other. Traditions of yore continue.

But with modern times come new methods of being a good neighbour.

We share door security codes and post security camera footage of dodgy-seeming strangers in our neighbourhood Facebook chat.

We rescue each other’s Roombas (robot vacuums) when they get stuck on a “ledge” midclean.

We’ve worked out signals for a sleeping baby so mowers aren’t started or dogs allowed to go off barking under that window.

If anything, I think the close quarters make us be more thoughtful and communicative with the people next door.

Technology enables a lot of this and high fences don’t necessarily mean we have walls up.

The global situation is similar. Technology has made the world seem smaller and more connected, even when we haven’t been able to travel freely.

Today, we find out a date for a transtasman travel bubble with our favourite neighbours.

It’s hard to predict whether this will be a near date or a far date, but if it’s the latter, we need to know a lot more from the respective Governments about what the holdup is, so we can hold the correct authorities to account.

There has been a dearth of information, in my opinion, about exactly what hoops — reasonable as they may be — we must jump through to get this over the line.

Stakes are high, but as good neighbours we need to get everyone on the same page and get this done right.

We cannot stay cloistered behind closed borders forever.