Beware the beast man
The last scene in Planet of the Apes is the best, the worst, and a study in dismay. On an empty beach, a crumpled, broken Statue of Liberty looms over Charlton Heston and his horse. ‘‘You maniacs! You blew it up!’’ he says, dropping to his knees, realising at last that he’s not in a galaxy far far away, but back in the old neighbourhood. ‘‘Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!’’
He was at his best then, in an imaginary world. In real life, he got hopelessly unreasonable about guns, along with about 5 per cent of Americans. But you couldn’t fault his performance in the monkey movie, raging at humanity’s utter failure.
What happens when things go really wrong? What is a suitable response? And do politicians really mean what they say when they pledge to fix a thing, or is that just a performance for the cameras?
How have we responded, for example, to the news that children are dying because the homes they live in aren’t warm enough? How have we responded to news that twothirds of our rivers are now too polluted to swim in, and nearly half our lakes are irreversibly damaged, as reported this week on Al Jazeera? What on earth have we done? Visitors from such places as Canada and Finland, where it’s so cold out you can literally freeze to death, are astonished to discover the chill of our homes. Reporting this week revealed an actual, quantifiable and deadly cost: 20 deaths and 30,000 hospitalisations each year caused by housing-related illnesses.
How do you fix this? The government has a programme that identifies need. The intention is that something then gets done: maybe insulation, maybe carpet, curtains, bedding. The need gets identified, but often that’s as far as things get. No insulation, no curtains, no nothing.
People shake their heads at the fecklessness of tenants. ‘‘What’s wrong with them?’’ landlords ask. ‘‘I put in a heat pump and they didn’t use it.’’
People don’t leave a heat pump off in the depth of winter because they don’t want it. They leave it off in the depth of winter because they can’t afford the power bill.
On the campaign trail, better solutions are on offer: a healthy housing bill requiring warm, dry and healthy rental properties; $2000 insulation grants; a $700 winter energy payment for beneficiary families.
If you like the sound of that, do by all means track down the party offering that and vote for them. You might want to ask them about their water tax while you’re at it.
If, on the other hand, you accept the proposition that things are coming along nicely, then don’t for heaven’s sake vote for change and put it all at risk.
And have some faith that bigger and larger problems are under control, like – for example – a report on climate change and what it’s expected to do to New Zealand, and what’s been done so far to prepare for it.
The Climate Change Minister is Paula Bennett. She has the report on her desk, where it’s staying for now, in order to maintain constitutional convention, she says.
Constitutional convention matters but there are times, Sir Geoffrey Palmer has suggested, when public interest matters more. The dire effects of climate change might be such an example. He thinks we should be shown the report.
Can we not see it now, minister, given that climate change is quite a big deal? Or is this the kind of shameful thing you’d rather people didn’t get to see before the election? Because that sounds like monkey business.
Do politicians really mean what they say when they pledge to fix a thing, or is that just a performance for the cameras?