Your guess as good as mine
David Slack sees a hazy, green, chilledout future.
I love looking into the future. The thrilling things that will happen! The exciting things we’ll do! But Donald Trump’s taking the fun out of it for me right now. I look ahead and I see cattle skulls. Cattle skulls, tumbleweed and something I can’t quite make out. They might be giant cockroaches.
Maybe Bobby Ewing will step out of the shower and tell us it was all a bad dream. Maybe the future will be bright again.
When I was 23 years old, I got the job of my dreams. ‘‘Here’s your car, here’s your credit card,’’ said Dominion Breweries, ‘‘visit all the pubs. Write us a report. Tell us the future of bars.’’
Deep In the Heart of Taxes by DD Smash was in the cassette player, Mangakino, the future, and the bonnet of a Ford Cortina were all in front of me.
I reported back that intimate cosy bars were the coming thing and booze barns were dying. If the government hadn’t changed and we hadn’t deregulated everything I would probably have been a mile off. But Rogernomics happened and inside a decade I was right on the money.
Nobody goes to a booze barn of 2000 people and buys beer in plastic jugs and has a scrap in the car park in their best flares any more. They preload and hit the fancy bars with $20 craft beers and have a scrap outside McDonald’s after the bars have chucked them out. We’ve come so far.
Dave Dobbyn gave a marvellous talk at the Wintec Press Club this month. He hopes we’ll see the booze barns again. Driverless cars could make it happen, he says: put everybody back in a big room, drinking and loving the band. He has a road-safety conscience. He also knows what’s good for our musical culture. There’d be no Be Mine Tonight if Th’ Dudes hadn’t had the booze-barn circuit to hone their work.
There’d also be no Loyal to listen to on hold for 40 minutes, of course, but all art has its price.
Dobbyn is endlessly creative, and creativity is what actually gives you a brighter future. Tax cuts? Give me a break.
People tell me I’m too hard on the Government. Go on, professor whining commie, they say, tell us what you’d do. Show us your brighter future.
Pleased you ask me! Take a seat, and possibly two Panadol.
New Zealand green
We’re the world’s best at making money out of paddocks. Why not stop acting like most of us have never smoked weed and make the stuff legal? Then we can grow it, lush, green and abundant, wherever dairy cows are standing, forlorn and debtridden. Fill the boats with high-value mind-soothing produce! Once President Trump is in office the United States of Donald will take whatever we can grow.
Singapore, but with good coffee
Having the Government pick and choose what happens in your economy is a really bad idea except when it works. Everybody wants a high-value, high-tech economy. Singapore actually worked out how to do it. Intervention is not a dirty word when you get it right. Let’s copy them. I nominate Russel Norman to run clean technology, Rod Drury to do software and Dobbyn to sit in an office with his guitar for an hour each morning and tell us what’s on his mind.
Community hubs
What if your local school was the village square, with community services available, and people coming and going all day? You could have adult education, a health centre, citizen’s advice. You could have something like Work and Income, but resourced properly to help you move out of your car. It could mend lives. It could put education at the centre of people’s lives. You want to transform an economy? Start there.
Cycleway 2.0
I love what this Government has done for cyclists. It’s mighty. But let’s not stop there. Imagine a continuous cycleway from Kaitaia to Bluff wheeling through lush cannabis plantations where you can stop for the night. NOW you’ve got a tourist boom.
I also fancy an underwater travelator running from Devonport to the downtown ferry building, but when I bring it up people just don’t seem to get it. Some of them even ask me what I’ve been smoking.