David Slack

Discovers similarities between a high-profile motorway development and the otherworldliness of Antarctica.

Facebook can show you a 20-storey hotel being built in China in 48 hours. You can see an entire overbridge added to a motorway in the Netherlands over the quiet hours of the weekend. Because we’re all very busy people, we don’t have to watch the paint dry. They speed the video up and you can watch the whole thing happen in about two minutes. You think: boy, aren’t we clever, us humans? You also think: ‘‘this is more real than the stuff about Hillary, right?’’

They could maybe do it for Auckland’s new Waterview tunnel, too, but it surely cannot be scientifically possible to speed video up that much. It was not built in 48 hours, or even 48 months. But it has been built, and it’s sitting there, ready to whisk you from Albany to the airport without ever coming off the motorway. But it’s also still not open, because the software for the ventilation system won’t work. Or something.

That old TV ad for cheese told us good things take time. They weren’t wrong, but those four simple words have aided a whole lot of people who can’t get something done by Friday. Motorways, and building renovations, and items not currently in stock, all seem to take the longest time in New Zealand.

But I do feel the pain of the people trying to get Waterview open. I was the PR person for the opening of Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic experience. My friend was one of the engineers. He described it to me when it was still just a perfect idea on paper: we would be climbing into an all-terrain Antarctic vehicle and it would be just like an amazing Universal Studios ride, and we’d be plunging into a blizzard and a whiteout and the otherworldliness of Antarctica, and there’d be an orca bursting out of the water and savaging a seal, and an actual penguin colony, living on ice, half a mile from Mission Bay’s pizza restaurants.

Good rides take time. Opening day kept getting pushed back and we ended up doing the press briefing before it was ready, and by that I mean the software didn’t work, and you found yourself sitting in a nonmoving make-believe all-terrain Antarctic vehicle in a non-icy but nonetheless chilly atmosphere with underwhelmed reporters, holding a tepid glass of chardonnay.

It was a tough sell. The blizzard simulation was in fact a rotating barrel with fake ice fixed to it and looked more like a slowly moving crusted concrete mixer barrel and boy did you have to use your imagination as the recorded commentary by famed outdoorsman Graham Dingle told us how bewildering it can be in a whiteout.

The orca was made in a West Auckland warehouse, a guy up on a ladder chiselling it out of fibreglass. He was a craftsman, but no chatty Cathy. I took a photographer out to get some publicity shots. ‘‘Go on, crack a smile you know you’ve got a smile’’ the photographer said, as the guy kept chiselling, saying nothing. ‘‘Come on I know you’ve got a smile,’’ the photographer pressed him. Up on the ladder he just kept chiselling and filing at the Orca as he said levelly: ‘‘come one step closer mate I’ll brain you.’’

I do feel the pain of the people trying to get Waterview open. I was the PR person for the opening of Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic experience.

If only the actual orca experience had had even a little of that charged menace and tension to it. It lifted out of the water like a black and white flutterboard, come loose from its fiveyear-old. At the press briefing, I pretended not to hear the snickering. It didn’t help that the orca came to a halt mid-lunge. ‘‘Wow’’ said Graham Dingle’s disembodied voice, not quite hiding the absence of astonishment and terror, ‘‘that was an orca!’’

And yet years later I discovered that all those times we took her to see it, that orca had awed our little girl. She also says that’s where she learned ‘‘what an angry Dad looks like in a queue’’.

It can be hard to get these things right. Perhaps there was an expectation of a lot of ride for not enough money. Perhaps the wrong people were trying to do a bold thing. Perhaps you only get a Barry Brickell and a Driving Creek Railway once in lifetime.

But it would be nice if more of the things that take time could actually turn out good.

My alarm clock has been set for 2.30am these past few weeks as I returned to inhabiting the early hours, this time on Newstalk ZB. It’s a station driven by opinion, so I’ve been merrily drumming up things to riff on as people start their day. You call for feedback... and it comes thick, fast and sometimes vicious. Who is this bimbo on the radio? I didn’t realise your appeal was primarily visual Nadine. Who is this kid trying to tell us what to think?

This isn’t a whinge about the haters. We all have unkind thoughts sometimes, but I’ve never been motivated to contact a stranger on the radio or anywhere else to tell them they’re a waste of space, so I know those people are not my people. The stuff that did start to grate, though, was when my arguments were constantly greeted by ‘‘Oh, you bloody lefty’’.

Not only is it a weak way to combat another’s ideas, but I think reducing issues to political ideologies is simply a way to avoid debating the point at all. Any discussion of fairness or equity seemed to rile my listeners the most. If that’s considered the sole preserve of the left, are all National voters selfish, greedy bastards? Of course not.

Ideas should be weighed up and deemed good or bad regardless of where on the political spectrum their advocates sit. For example, Winston’s attack on two journalists who dared to analyse immigration data whilst also being immigrant is racist no matter what political colours are nailed to your mast. That’s not left or right, that’s just the lowest of the low.

I’ve agreed with policies from parties as disparate as the Greens and ACT, I’ve voted in different directions at different elections, so where does that leave me? I’m sure I could spend more time trying to diagnose where I should sit on the political spectrum, but I don’t care. (I tried one, it put me next to Gandhi, which, let’s be honest, is more than a little unrealistic).

The political scientists out there will want to point out the importance and the intricacies of neo-liberalism, fascism, socialism, conservatism and many of the other ‘isms’ we use to categorise our beliefs into boxes. But while we get lost in who is on The Left and The Right, many people are just Left Right Out.

Politics needs to be less about labels and more about ideas. Less about shouting each other down and more about trying to understand each other’s viewpoints. If Donald Trump’s election has taught us anything it’s that it’s dangerous to become deaf to anything outside our own echo chamber. Writing each other off based on our distance from the centre is a poor substitute for honest debate and critical analysis. We’d all do well to remember that this election year. Ideas should be weighed up and deemed good or bad regardless of where on the political spectrum their advocates sit.