Ladies, bring a plate please
We’re letting ourselves down when our billionaire mate Pete doesn’t get a beer and a barbie, writes David Slack.
Even if you’ve only seen it in The Piano, you’ll know Karekare is special.
Once I took two Israeli teenagers there right after they’d finished their compulsory military service; from the desert to Tel Aviv to Devonport to a black-sand beach in 72 hours. Welcome to paradise, always swim between the flags.
The air was salt spray, the car park was littered with bourbon cans. A beautiful summer morning. They followed me along the path: sand, grass, nothing special, no hint of what was just ahead and suddenly there it was, and it was Karekare, and even two Israeli soldiers, trained to silence, audibly gasped.
New Zealand can tilt your perspective. Not inside Westfield Albany or SkyCity, but we have places that are last, loneliest, loveliest, and they can dislocate you.
We say we’ve become more sophisticated, no longer offer pikelets, have more worldly cool, but some of us – people like me – will still maniacally pump the hand of a foreigner and offer them a deranged grin, and a beer. Do you like a drop, Pete? In this column last week I wrote about Peter Thiel’s overtures to French Polynesia, and had no idea he was in fact one of us, a KayOne-W-One, a citizen of our country. Go the mighty ABs, eh Pete.
I welcome our billionaire comrade. As our PM says: ‘‘If people come here, invest and get into philanthropy and are supportive of New Zealand then we’re better off for their interest.’’
I’ve never been one of those who reject newcomers just because they’re not like me.
Thiel walks his own track, no question. He has described government as an ‘‘almost literally demonic entity’’. He’s quite keen on warding off death by injecting himself with a young person’s blood.
I, on the other hand, can’t get enough of government and I’m paralysed with boomer guilt about how hard we’ve made it for young people to own a house.
As a fellow New Zealander I respect his right to live the way he chooses, even if it mostly involves not living here at all.
But I also believe we should extend the pumping hand of welcome, to try our best to learn from the newcomers’ values, and they from ours. Have we dropped the ball here?
From what I read about his great wealth and the huge success of his Did anyone think to put on a shout? Where was the onion dip? Where were the chips? good friend Donald Trump, he has so much to be happy about. And yet I can’t help noticing that like many of the people now occupying the White House he doesn’t seem to smile.They look almost angry.
I look in his face and see no sign he has yet felt the joy it is to be a New Zealander.
He has described New Zealand as utopia. I’m guessing he means our Lord of the Rings mountain scenery and not our socialist system of health care.
Bitter people have been saying things such as ‘‘Billionaires like Peter Thiel get citizenship abroad so they can run from the problems they create.’’
But I am a fair-minded Kiwi and a glass half-full sort of person and I think I see where things have gone wrong. When old mate Pete became a New Zealander, where were we? Did anyone think to put on a shout? Where was the onion dip? Where were the chips? Did anyone even pop around with a plate of cheese rolls?
We’ve let Peter down, we’ve let the Manhattan White House down, but most of all who have we let down? That’s right New Zealand, we’ve let ourselves down.
It’s the putting right that counts and I want to see it happen. I want to see 20 schools inviting him to stand for the board of trustees. I want to get him listening to barbecue reggae and trying our finest weed. I want to see him at an A&P show. I’d like to buy him a fundraising sausage at Mitre 10 and I’d like to see him in a tinny in the Manukau Harbour hauling up snapper. I want to see him in a tent at the Anaura Bay camping ground, and I want him to hear the sound of rain on a DOC hut roof.
And I want to take him to Karekare. That should put a smile on his dial.