Hart’s claim young can do the same a bit rich

TODAY is Saturday, August 27, the 239th day of 2022. There are 126 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:

1660 — Published books of poet John Milton are burnt in London because of his attacks on King Charles II.

1813 — French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte wins his last great battle, at Dresden, Germany, against a larger Austrian, Prussian and Russian force.

1858 — Queen arrive in Dunedin.

1904 — New Zealand Governor Lord Plunket lays the foundation stone for the first building of Victoria College (now Victoria University of Wellington). He also opened the building on its completion in 1906. It was named the Hunter Building in 1959 and remains in use today.

1911 — Joseph Pawelka, who notoriously became part of New Zealand folklore, escapes from custody for a final time and is not recaptured or heard of again; in Dunedin, Caversham men O.

Wood and B. Hughes successfully fly their locally built glider.

1928 — The KelloggBriand Pact (Pact of Paris) is established, by which countries vow to solve conflicts by peaceful means. It is eventually signed by most of the world’s nations.

1939 — German pilot Erich Warsitz flies the first jet plane, the Heinkel He 178.

1943 — US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt arrives in Auckland for a surprise visit.

1966 — French president Charles de Gaulle arrives in Ethiopia from Somaliland, where his visit is marred by bloody rioting.

1974 — Fire causes extensive damage to the tannery of Windward Skins Ltd, near Balclutha; the Local Government Commission agrees to double the size of the borough of Alexandra. The town boundaries will spread from the top of Bridge Hill in the south to the aerodrome road in the northwest.

1979 — British war hero Lord Louis Mountbatten is killed off the coast of Ireland in a boat explosion; the Irish Republican Army claims responsibility.

1997 — Police enact ‘‘Operation Lowburn’’, declaring four farms ‘‘restricted places’’ and placing roadblocks throughout the area after reports of the arrival of the rabbit calicivirus in the Cromwell district.

2003 — Mars passes just 55.76 million km from Earth, making it the closest such encounter since the Stone Age.

2005 — Captain Tana Umaga makes a trysaving tackle in the dying minutes to contribute to the All Blacks’ 3127 victory over South Africa at Carisbrook. The All Blacks performed the Kapa O Pango haka for the first time.

2020 — Australian Brenton Harrison Tarrant (29) becomes the first man in New Zealand’s criminal history to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, when he is sentenced by Justice Cameron Mander in the High Court at Christchurch for the mosque attacks in the city on March 15, 2019. .

MONDAY

Our story begins in the second century of the Queen Ja Cinda dynasty, when all seemed well at Queen’s Landing. No power could stand against it if only because the opposing forces mustered by the House of

Luxon were such a goddamned toxic mess.

But the Queen knew the cold truth. The only thing that could tear down the House of Ardern was itself.

The Queen’s Hand, Kieran of House McNulty, approached the Iron Throne and said, “Your Grace, what are we going to do about Guarev of House Sharma? He refuses to bend the knee.”

She ran a finger across her throat.

TUESDAY

They came for Guarev under cloak of darkness, and threw him out of his nice warm Labour Party bed.

“You’re a total dickhead, mate,” said the Queen’s ruffians.

“You’ve all always been so mean to me!”, wept Guarev, gathering his coins and making sure none were lost. “None of you have ever liked me!

None of you have ever gone out of your way to say nice things to me! None of you have ever given your unswerving loyalty and enduring love to me! Me! Me! Me!”

WEDNESDAY

Guarev was exiled to the faraway polar wastes of Queen’s Landing.

“I’m so cold,” he trembled. “Poor me!”

A rider approached on a mule. It was the eversmiling David of House Twerk. He made Guarev a gift of blankets and some hot chips. “Join us, friend,” he said. “We’ll listen to your pathetic bleatings if it’s to our advantage.”

Guarev said through tears of gratitude, “I will most certainly consider it. Thank you for thinking of me! Me, me, me!”

THURSDAY

Guarev spent the day happily accepting gifts from all of the opposing forces in Queen’s Landing.

He stuffed himself with chocolates, admired his new range of ermine coats, and was especially pleased with a range of fulllength mirrors.

Christopher of House Luxon sat with his new friend, and filled his cup with mead. “I gather the mirrors were a gift from the newly formed Freedom NZ

Party,” he said. “They seem like reasonable people. I wouldn’t rule out working with them. Imagine all of us together, storming Queen’s Landing, deposing Ja Cinda, and taking the Iron Throne!”

“With you beside me, as the King’s Hand,” said Guarev, his face glowing.

“Yes, something like that,” replied Christopher of House Luxon, refilling Guarev’s cup.

FRIDAY

Queen Ja Cinda consulted with Kieran of House McNulty.

“You had no choice but to get rid of him, Your Grace,” said The

Hand.

“But I have unleashed dark furies that threaten my reign.”

“Do you want me to silence him? I have ways of shutting a man’s trap. Diabolical ways, most cruel and yet delightful.”

“No. Let him talk. The more that people hear him and get an understanding of his character,” she said, “the better it is for us.”

Our story ends with an unusual sentence. The Hand bent the knee. ‘‘YOU can do what I have done.’’

So says Graeme Hart, New Zealand’s richest man with an ‘‘estimated worth’’ of about

$9.7 billion (‘‘estimated wealth’’ would be more accurate), who was this year inducted into the Young Enterprise Business Hall of Fame.

He left school at 16, and worked as a towtruck driver and panelbeater. His first entrepreneurial venture was a trucking business, that he bought about 50 years ago with a $500 loan from his father and a $2000 bank loan (which he suspects his father, who had taken him to meet his bank manager, had guaranteed).

Mr Hart obviously has keen financial acumen for buying businesses at below their real value (in 1990, during the mad selloff of government assets, he acquired the Government Printing Office for 1.4 times its annual earnings, with generous payment terms), and for leveraging assets to borrow to fund further acquisitions. But he lacks insight.

Setting aside motivation (many may prefer a reasonable worklife balance to vast acquisition of wealth and what it can buy), and the effects on the planet of an obsessive drive for business growth, it is simplistic for him to claim there is no reason why young people today cannot do what he has done.

How many children of parents who work long hours at low wages just to feed their families have a father who can lend them $7766 (today’s equivalent of $500 in 1972) or even have a bank manager to introduce them to, let alone can guarantee a loan of $31,063?

The major factor in worldly success remains the accident of birth.

One doesn’t expect every facet of historical dramas, on paper or film, to be provably accurate — after all, noone has a record of all they have ever said or done.

Imagination is necessary in telling any historybased story.

But inventing a totally fictional death for the main historical character, when that death is well documented, is a step too far.

Civis and spouse viewed writerdirector Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage during the New Zealand International Film Festival (top marks to Rialto for ensuring that each of the four films attended, unlike some of those shown at previous festivals at another venue, started on time) with some knowledge of the story of its central character Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary through her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph.

The acting and filming were superb, and parallels with 21st century concerns, such as eating disorders as a result of bodyshape obsession, and Elisabeth’s doctor offering her heroin while assuring her that it was harmless (like promotion of Oxycontin more than a century later), were, no doubt, intended.

Set in 1878, when Elisabeth was 40, some anachronisms have been noted by reviewers, although not at the time by Civis: diamorphine was first synthesised in 1874, but wasn’t available until resynthesised by Felix Hoffman in 1897, when it was named ‘‘heroin’’ by the Bayer pharmaceutical company, which commercialised it; moving pictures weren’t recorded on celluloid film until the late 1880s; some palace doorways didn’t accommodate hooped dresses, and there was a brutalist concrete finish on the interior of a hall.

Jessica Kiang, reviewing the film for Variety, describes Kreutzer’s ‘‘gradual departure from recorded history in the final act [which] allows . . . a deliciously devious, fictional finale for her newly revivified heroine, that cleverly circumvents the tawdry drama of the real

Empress’ 1898 assassination at the hands of an Italian anarchist’’.

Rather than ‘‘a brilliant reclamation of the Sissi legend’’, to have Elisabeth, in an almost ecstatic state, leap suicidally from the bow of a ship travelling at speed, is not ‘‘deliciously devious’’ but an outright lie, inexcusable in a story based on a historical character, which may encourage unhappy people feeling trapped by circumstances to take a similar route to oblivion.

Much of the film was interesting and enjoyable, but the indefensible ending shattered the willing suspension of disbelief and ruined it.