Nostalgia lives – in triplicate
Paper might be gone but, strangely, paperwork lives on, writes David Slack.
Iwrote in this column last week about going to sleep in an exam and people had questions. Mostly they wanted to know: did you pass? I had to dig out the papers from four decades ago. The answer turns out to be yes, but only with a doctor’s certificate.
When you dig around in your old papers you step into another world. Just look at this. It’s a document from 1980 headed APPLICATION FOR PURCHASE OF OVERSEAS FUNDS UNDER BANK’S DISCRETIONARY AUTHORITY. It is a single page Reserve Bank document in small print. There’s no logo, no mission statement. I had to fill it out to get 300 dollars in traveller’s cheques.
It’s hard to make out all the details because they are written with carbon paper. Yes, carbon paper. Kids, gather around, an old man has a story for you. When you ask someone to CC you in an email, this is where that expression comes from. You’d write on one sheet of paper and it would magically Carbon Copy everything you wrote onto another.
Hey, where are you going? Come back and I’ll tell you how we used to make dinner without a microwave.
Robert Muldoon’s government granted permissions. Permission to import ball bearings, permission to import golf balls, permission to import electronic components and make colour TV sets out of them and charge monopoly profits because you were the only one with a permission slip.
So long as you didn’t say anything bad about Muldoon, and so long as you weren’t a troublemaker who wanted to go on strike and wreck our way of life, so long as you had permission, you’d be mostly left alone.
I don’t think the Reserve Bank was very worried about me. I found myself one day sitting in a car in the Reserve Bank carport. We had to get permission from the bank to take a photo of twenty dollar notes for a magazine ad. My colleague Brad Fischer was meeting someone in a cardigan while I waited in the car.
Waiting, waiting. I was bored. I opened the glovebox to find something to read. There was Brad’s pistol, which he had brought with him from Los Angeles along with a Stetson hat and an affected Texan accent that would revert to Australian after a bottle of whisky.
I admired the gun, turned it in my hand, held it up to the light. Then it occurred to me I was sitting in the carpark of a bank holding an unregistered deadly weapon. I quietly put it back, closed the door and looked around. No-one came running. Wellington glided on.
And then all of a sudden it was 1984 and Muldoon was Suddenly it was 1984 and Muldoon was gone and everything was different. gone and everything was different. People lost farms, lost jobs, lost livelihoods. Others flourished. None more so than the money people.
Boy have they gone everywhere. They raise loans in Frankfurt for your city council and clip the ticket and talk about what they think the council should be doing infrastructure-wise and how it should probably be borrowing more. Pick your sector, pick your industry, the money guys are the ones handing out the permission slips.
Chris Trotter says, darkly, the one good thing the country got out of it was better coffee. He wonders if it was worth it.
You do have to look past a lot to see it as change for the better. Perhaps it might look more like a success if one of the fundamental ideas of that revolution had become more real.
Competition was going to give us better prices. It was going to reward the most efficient. It was going to create opportunity. But this is really not what we have. We have a cosy duopoly arrangement in building supplies, another in supermarkets.
The banks maintain a cosy position of advantage, taking a fatter margin on mortgage lending here than they do in Australia.
They get rewarded with our inertia and they return the favour by overcharging us. And their money people help them on their way.
My old-man advice to young people is: see those fat duopolies taking advantage of you? Start up a low-cost competitor. Get everyone you know to support it. Make your own future.
There will always be someone wanting to decide what’s good for you, handing out permission slips. Only the stationery changes.
@DavidSlack