Some useless hints for wrestling with the referendums
DON’T take the election too seriously. In spite of all your agonising, perusing of pamphlet promises and chicken entrail examining you will still end up with a grab bag of about 120 MPs, some of them sincere and worthy, some recognised as misfits with criminal tendencies, and many more, especially among the list MPs, you will never have heard of.
They will emerge from obscurity, flutter briefly in the euphoria of landing a $160,000ayear sinecure and then be extinguished at the next election, known only to their immediate family as ‘‘poor old Dad’’ and to their party caucus as ‘‘What’s his name? That exlist MP.’’ And so it goes on, election after election.
But the trouble really starts with referendums (I prefer referenda but then I’m old enough to have been at school when Latin was taught).
Some referendums, like the 1949 Compulsory Military Training issue or John Key’s $21 million new flag debacle of a few years ago, are neither here nor there. No great moral issues were involved.
But this End of Life Choice Act business is more than I can handle and, as usual, I shy away from reality by taking comfort in reading something from long ago. With elections, my cheerup reading is the Eatanswill election chapter in The Pickwick Papers but for euthanasia nothing comic sprang to mind. Then I remembered Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period. Not only because it is quite unlike the Barsetshire clerical life or the political shenanigans of the Palliser novels for which Trollope is bestknown, but because it has a New Zealand connection and happens to be about euthanasia.
Trollope visited New Zealand in 1875 and when it came to writing the Utopian/ science fiction mishmash which is The Fixed Period he set the story in Britannula, an island off the coast of New
Zealand, an ideal setting for such a work for, as Trollope had discovered in 1875, New Zealand was as far away from the real world as you could possibly get.
The story, set in 1980, was written in 1880 and what makes it relevant for the present referendum is that it centres on a plan for compulsory euthanasia for those aged 6768. When I first read The Fixed Period over 40 years ago it seemed a reasonable idea but now that I’m well past 68 it seems just a little drastic.
What they call the back story goes like this. Britannula had been settled by a group of young emigrants from New Zealand whose Utopian legislation included measures (in the words of the narrator John Neverbend), ‘‘to right two mistakes. First in allowing the world to be burdened with the continued maintenance of those whose cares should have been made to cease and the second, in requiring those who remain to live a useless and painful life’’.
The aim of compulsory euthanasia was ‘‘to convert death into a civic duty carried out with honour and dignity.’’
Along the way Trollope, normally a fairly humourless writer, has some fun. Neverbend has a steam tricycle capable of 25mph and in the cricket match between Britannula and a touring English side the teams have 16 players and use mechanical aids such as a ‘‘steam bowler’’ and a ‘‘catapult’’ which require the batsman to wear wicker helmets and protective clothing. The match is won by Britannula after Neverbend’s son scores 1275 runs obtained with a special ‘‘springbat’’.
But time passes and eventually the Britannula legislators are themselves in their late sixties and some appeal to London to have their imminent demise avoided. A gunboat is sent and its ‘‘250ton swiveller gun’’ persuades the locals to give up the idea of compulsory euthanasia.
It seems, though, that Trollope might have been taking all this nonsense seriously. When he finished the book, he wrote to a friend, ‘‘I am now an old man, 66, and shall soon have come to the end of my tether.’’ He died at the age of 68.
The Fixed Period may assist you little in making up your mind about the End of Life referendum but it’s worth a read: if you can find a copy, that is. My own copy has long disappeared and the Dunedin Public Library does not list the book. The university library has a copy, but it’s on loan until October 20! How that borrower votes will depend on much more than an old novel which is pretty well forgotten. Just like exlist MPs.
But take heart. The marijuana referendum is easier to tackle. After all, our own dear Jacinda admits to having a puffed on the weed. However, the fact that she gave it up years before she became the greatest woman ever born on this or any other planet is food for thought.
Tough calls, eh?