The frantic quest for the Next Big Thing

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 17.)

Ever get the feeling the consumerist society is getting just a bit out of hand?

I certainly do. For the status-conscious, life seems to be an endless, frantic quest for the Next Big Thing.

Allow me to give you an example. A year or so ago a New York bakery started selling something called the cronut, so named because it’s a cross between a croissant and a donut. People queued for five hours to buy them.

Inevitably the cronut craze quickly spread to New Zealand. We like to be up with the play on such things.

They weren’t cheap but they flew out the door. Everyone wanted them. Suppliers couldn’t keep up with the demand.

In foodie circles, admitting you hadn’t tried a cronut – or worse still, didn’t even know there was such a thing – was tantamount to revealing you had a paedophile in the family.

Having scoffed a few cronuts myself, I can confirm that they are indeed wickedly desirable. But here’s the thing: I haven’t seen a cronut in months, or even heard them mentioned.

Cronuts, it seems, are just so last year. Exciting new diversions, such as Lewis Road Creamery Fresh Chocolate Milk, have elbowed them out of the way.

As for cronuts, so for the Lewis Road product. The Waikato dairy factory that made it (which is not, as far as I can ascertain, in Lewis Road) couldn’t keep up with the demand when the product was launched.

Wellington’s temple of gastronomy, Moore Wilson, had to ration it: one bottle per customer. On Trade Me, 750ml bottles – retail price $6.29 – were selling for up to $26.

Supermarkets had to put out signs advising when stocks had run out. Anguished shoppers who missed out were dousing themselves with petrol and setting themselves alight in New World car parks. (All right, that’s a slight exaggeration.)

As with cronuts, though, the Lewis Road chocolate milk frenzy quickly subsided. You could probably stroll into your local Countdown this morning and fill your trolley with the stuff.

Better still, you could try making your own at home. It was just chocolate milk, after all.

So what made this particular brand so desirable that everyone simply had to have it? I’ve never tasted it, but logic and experience tells me it can’t have been that sensational.

As advertising people know, creating demand for a product is often about selling the sizzle rather than the steak. Words like “creamery” and “fresh” seem irresistible in a world obsessed with naturalness and authenticity. And it’s surely no coincidence that Peter Cullinane, the man behind Lewis Road, is a former worldwide boss of Saatchi and Saatchi.

Clever advertising (and I suspect social media was a key tool in this instance) can build an aura of mystique around a brand. The same happened with the New Zealand vodka 42 Below, which made a multi-millionaire of another former ad man, Geoff Ross.

I’m not suggesting Cullinane’s and Ross’s products were not good to start with, but their success was about much more than quality. It was about creating a sense of desirability and exclusivity.

The marketing campaign for Lewis Road didn’t just tap into a hedonistic society’s hunger for new sensory experiences. More subtly, it exploited that peculiar form of social anxiety known as FOMO, or fear of missing out.

Psychologists define this as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) Status-conscious people can’t bear the thought of being excluded from something new and exciting. 

You see this same phenomenon played out when a trendy new restaurant opens. It’s typically swamped by fashion-conscious foodies … that is, until another trendy new restaurant opens. Then they move on, like so many reef fish.

There are innumerable other examples of our cultish obsession with newness.  In the 1990s we were captivated by wine, in the noughties it was coffee, now it’s craft beer.

Our forebears, who fretted about being able to put food on the table and having enough warm clothing to survive the winter, would find it very puzzling. They would call us an effete society, if they knew the word existed.

And what does it all amount to? Ultimately, the longevity of any brand relies on much more than novelty. In the long run it’s consistent, dependable quality that counts.

The women’s fashion business is hilariously capricious, yet the little black dress, created by Coco Chanel in the 1920s, endures virtually unchanged. Will we be queuing for cronuts and Lewis Road chocolate milk in 90 years? Somehow I doubt it.

Tiny Tinui paid a high price for patriotism

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 3.)

SHORT OF Gallipoli itself, or perhaps the famous Menin Gate in  Ypres, there can be no better place to observe Anzac Day than the charming rural settlement of Tinui, in the Wairarapa.

Several things make Tinui perfect. First, it’s an enchanting little place, tucked away in a pretty valley and proudly preserved to look much as it would have decades ago. Even the original village jail is still intact.

Second, Tinui has profound historical significance. It was there that the world's first Anzac Day ceremony was held in 1916, when Anglican vicar the Rev Basil Ashcroft held a service in the tiny Church of the Good Shepherd (still in use) before leading a procession up nearby Mt Maunsell to erect a permanent memorial.

A cross stands on the hilltop still, though the original wooden one had to be replaced in 1965 after being battered once too often by the wind. It has become traditional for people to climb the steep track to the cross after attending the Anzac Day service at the Tinui Memorial Hall, where the local women’s institute provides a classic country morning tea: asparagus rolls, bacon and egg pie, club sandwiches and, naturally, Anzac biscuits.

But perhaps the most striking thing about Anzac Day at Tinui is that it brings home, in a way few other places can, the human impact that the two world wars had on small communities.

As part of the service, schoolchildren stand in front of the war memorial and recite the names of the men who went away and never came back. Thirty-six locals died in World War One, including seven at Gallipoli, and 12 in World War Two.

It’s hard to imagine the impact those losses must have had in a small, isolated rural community. Among those killed in the 1914-18 war were two lots of three brothers.

Masterton mayor Garry Daniell told me after last week’s service that many farms in the Tinui district were run by strong, matriarchal women who, when the menfolk failed to come home, rolled up their sleeves and took over.

He also recalled that as a boy aged about 10, he met a local spinster who mentioned that her husband had died in the war. When the inquisitive young Daniell asked his name, she answered: “I don’t know. I never met him” – a poignant way of explaining that marriage was denied her because the war took the lives of so many eligible local men.

* * *

ONCE AGAIN, Radio New Zealand has debased the word “debate”.

It’s currently broadcasting what it calls a series of “debates” on the current review of New Zealand’s constitution. But they are nothing of the sort. 

They are cosy consensus sessions featuring safe speakers who can be counted on to agree broadly on the key issues. While the participants are learned and articulate, it’s dishonest to pretend these affairs are a genuine contest of ideas.

They are a sham, creating the misleading impression that the highly contentious issues under discussion – such as the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in our constitutional arrangements – are largely settled.

The only hint of dissent comes in the few minutes allocated for questions at the end, when one or two brave souls have the temerity to ask pointed questions – such as whether the speakers favour a society in which rights are allocated on the basis of race.

Even my left-wing fellow columnist Chris Trotter is appalled, pointing out that there are plenty of people willing and able to challenge the politically correct orthodoxy of the “debaters”. (Ironically, the same Chris Trotter recently denounced me for suggesting some Radio New Zealand programmes were biased. Perhaps he has had a change of heart.)

This charade closely follows a series of pretend “debates” on the Treaty, also broadcast by Radio New Zealand, to which I referred in an earlier column. The state broadcaster and Victoria University, whose Centre for Public Law organised the events (and stacked the panels with its own academics), should be ashamed. It is a misuse of power – nothing less.

* * *

FASHION, both female and male, is a source of endless amusement.

I keep a close eye on the fashion pages and can pronounce that for women, the frumpy look is "in" this winter. Shapeless clothes designed to disguise the female form are big, along with colour combinations that appear to have been thrown together in the dark.

Stick-thin models continue to predominate, with the added requirement that they must now be pigeon-toed.

For men, the desired look this season is suits that appear at least one size too small, making the wearers look like schoolboys who have put on a sudden growth spurt.  Designers have gone the American way, opting for trousers that end at least an inch above the ankles.

And as always, the most ludicrous examples are the most expensive.

 

A crushing letdown for the Apple faithful

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, October 11.)

A COUPLE of years ago I was taken aback at the sight of a lunchtime queue stretching along Lambton Quay. It turned out they were standing in line to buy the latest Apple product, which was being released that day.

It must have occurred to them that they could return the following day, by which time the rush would have subsided, and buy the item without having to wait.

They must also have known that if they waited a few months they’d get it 50 per cent cheaper, which is always the way with cutting-edge technology. But the compulsion to get their hands on it right there and then was obviously too powerful to resist.

Last week we saw another outburst of Applemania with the release of a new Apple phone called the iPhone 4S. The event was anticipated with much the same eagerness as a fervent Jehovah’s Witness might await the Second Coming. But oh, dear – the new model wasn’t quite what the Apple faithful were hoping for.

They were expecting an iPhone 5 and all they got was a “refresh” of the iPhone 4, said one. Another complained that it wasn’t as sleek and curvy as he’d hoped, and wouldn’t let people make credit card purchases by waving phones in front of sensors. (I ask you – how primitive is that?)

The sense of disappointment – betrayal, almost – was palpable.

The parallels with religion are striking. There has been much comment in recent weeks about rugby being elevated to the level of religion, but here’s a segment of the population for which technology is the new God.

On the other hand, it’s tempting to make comparisons with drug addiction. The tech-heads constantly crave a bigger fix. The iPhone 4 doesn’t do it for them anymore (though it was released only last year) and the 4S, which they were counting on to recreate that exhilarating rush, has let them down. They demand a more potent hit.

But what happens if and when the information technology industry can no longer satisfy the appetite for ever-faster, more powerful devices? The desolation of the Apple devotees in that event can only be imagined. Life will cease to hold any meaning.

* * *

RETURNING home after spending time overseas, you often see New Zealand in a new light.

Coming back from a trip to Japan years ago, I was struck by how big and ungainly we dairy-fed New Zealanders seemed. Compared with the grace and delicacy of the Japanese, even our women had the appearance of front-row forwards.

What struck me on my latest return, this time after six weeks in America, was how drab and sombre we all look. Killing time in Auckland Airport while waiting for my flight to Wellington, I watched a constant procession of people scurrying past clad in what appeared to be funereal garb – all blacks and dark greys.

And it wasn’t only the clothes; it was their demeanour too. They looked a thoroughly joyless and anxious lot – brows furrowed and no one talking, still less smiling or laughing. I’ve seen happier faces in waiting rooms at VD clinics (just fibbing, but you get my drift).

What is it about us? We seem perversely proud of our gloominess. How else to explain the dark, bleak tradition in much of our art (what other country could celebrate the despairing works of Colin McCahon?), our films and our literature?

Even the much-acclaimed movie Boy was deeply depressing, and it was touted as a comedy.

America’s economy is stagnant and its normally irrepressible self-confidence is wavering, yet Americans still seem to enjoy life. In the streets, shopping malls and restaurants, the mood is buoyant and people are smiling. But we New Zealanders seem to need a Rugby World Cup - a once-in-24-years-event - to induce any joie-de-vivre.

* * *

IMMIGRATION officials aren’t employed for their conviviality, so I wasn’t surprised by the stony-faced look from the officer checking my passport at Auckland Airport when I commented brightly on the speed with which the passengers on my flight from San Francisco had been processed.

I was, however, slightly taken aback when he wanted to know how long I had lived in my home town. Now why would he need to know that? It almost sounded like an attempt to catch me out on some irregularity.

His manner reminded me of the coldly officious American border security officer who had pulled our car over near the US-Mexico border, examined our passports and interrogated us about our recent movements. But at least the US border official had the excuse that we were foreign nationals in an area notorious for people smuggling.

Perhaps the Auckland immigration officer was trying to be sociable, but he didn’t seem the sociable type and the question wasn’t asked in a sociable way.

Then again, perhaps I’ve just seen too many films where Gestapo officers stop people in the street and demand to see their papers.

A genius, or just tormented?

I don’t claim to have closely followed the career of the British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who sadly took his own life this week, or to have made a close study of the surreal world in which he moved. But I have read and seen enough to conclude that he was a disturbed man. What the sycophants of the fashion world (or art, or pop music, or literature for that matter) describe as genius is often mental or emotional torment desperately looking for an outlet.

Few people outside the fashion industry would doubt that McQueen’s bizarre creations were the products of a damaged mind. His parades looked like out-takes from a Federico Fellini fantasy film, full of models so grotesquely pale and thin that they looked like creatures from an alien planet, wearing garments (for want of a better word) that seemed designed to strip the wearer of all dignity and humanity. To watch those blank-faced, asexual, other-worldly models parading clothes by McQueen was to understand the view of some feminists that the high fashion industry is fundamentally misogynistic, created to humiliate and demean women. (His 10-inch heels were too much even for some models, who refused to wear them for fear of injury.)

Of course his clothes provoked gasps of astonishment, which is why the fashion industry loved him. It is an industry that craves novelty like a drug. Having realised long ago that there were only so many ways classical design themes could be re-invented, high fashion has left itself nowhere to go other than to that edgy place we call out-there.

McQueen appears to have been in his natural realm there. A gay boy from working-class London, he apparently viewed himself as an outsider and seems to have been ambivalent about the adulation heaped on him. According to The Times, he was shy in private but foul-mouthed and confrontational in public. A “powerful fashion journalist” who crossed the Atlantic to meet him is said to have been left “white with shock” afterwards. Good. There should be no such thing as a “powerful fashion journalist” in the first place. The notion is preposterous, and an example of how inflated with conceit and self-absorption the alternative universe that is the fashion industry has become.

It was no surprise to read that McQueen was “discovered” by Isabella Blow, the “eccentric, aristocratic former fashion editor of Vogue”. Blow killed herself in 2007 by drinking weedkiller. Now McQueen too has taken his own life, which leaves me wondering whether the fashion industry, like rock music, attracts talented but inherently unstable people or whether the excesses, adulation, pressures and temptations of the culture and lifestyle render previously normal people unstable.

No doubt McQueen will be ostentatiously mourned for a few days – his funeral, if there is one, should be rich in air-kissing and photo opportunities – and then the Beautiful People will move on, anxious to find the next big thing; some other tortured soul who will satisfy the industry’s appetite for newness, outrage and entertainment.

It’s getting perilously close to cliché territory to say that McQueen was devoured by the celebrity culture that created him. The real explanation for his premature death may be far more simple. In the end, it appears that all the adulation in the world couldn’t compensate this fragile man for the recent loss of his mum. Who knows; she may have been the one person in his glitter-filled life whom he felt loved him as someone other than a fashion darling.

Playing along with the fascinisti of style

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, Dominion Post, March 31.)

THERE CAN be few expressions more irritating than the phrase “fashion crime”, as used recently by the clothing designer who created a range of T-shirts based on the home-knitted jerseys worn by David Bain at the time of his original trial for murder.

Robert Ewan, criticised for capitalising on a tragic event, told journalists he wanted only to comment on – for which read “make fun of” – David Bain’s “crime of fashion”. But the real criminals are people who use this offensive term, which implies the existence of a fashion priesthood to whom we all anxiously look for guidance on what we should be wearing.

We frequently hear the term “fashionista” used to describe these style-meisters but perhaps fascinista would be more appropriate, given their obvious intolerance of people who dare to dress in a non-approved manner.

Sadly the media often buy into this nonsense. A One News reporter played along with Ewan by referring to Bain’s “notorious” jerseys. This assumes the entire populace is party to a running in-joke.

I was reminded of the snooty disdain with which some political journalists condemned former prime minister David Lange’s first wife Naomi because of her fondness for cardigans. It’s surprising how easily petty snobbishness can assert itself in a supposedly egalitarian country.

The phrase “fashion victim” is a different matter. Now there’s an expression that has some validity, especially when applied to the countless men and women who so lack confidence in their own taste that they allow themselves to be enslaved by whatever is currently deemed “cool” (which of course can never be cool again next year, meaning that the dictators of style laugh all the way to the bank).

Having said all that, I must confess I quite liked Ewan’s T-shirts.

* * *

IN MY peregrinations around the Wairarapa I see a lot of big, shiny new buses. But I have yet to see one carrying more than a handful of passengers and many are empty, save for a lonely driver.

These buses have appeared on the roads over the past year or two because the Greater Wellington Regional Council is determined to promote greater use of public transport, whether people want it or not.

The Wairarapa, unlike Wellington, has virtually no history of public transport patronage. It’s a rural area where people are accustomed to getting around under their own steam.

I understand this was pointed out to council officials, but they chose to ignore the advice. Reality must not be allowed to intrude on the utopian visions of the planners and bureaucrats.

So the buses resolutely trundle back and forth, at God knows what cost to the ratepayers and taxpayers who subsidise them. I have yet to count more than five passengers; more often there are two or three, or none at all.

You’d think the council would at least consider downsizing from full-sized buses to the cute little ones that are used on Wellington and Hutt feeder routes. Then the low level of patronage wouldn’t be quite so painfully obvious.

* * *

I NOTE that the international insurance group that used to be called Norwich Union is now called Aviva. This is another triumph for the fraudulent industry that has built up around rebranding.

Everyone knew what sort of business Norwich Union was. Aviva, on the other hand, could be anything – a fashion label, a cosmetics brand or a cute Toyota convertible.

The new name is meaningless. It is an invention, just like Kordia, Fonterra, Axa and all the other nonsensical corporate names created by branding consultants.

I suspect the costs of such a name change far outweigh the benefits, once all the downstream feeders – stationery and website designers, ad agencies, PR firms, printers et al – have shared the spoils.

I read recently that the Aviva rebranding campaign cost £9 million. For that money, you’d think they could at least have got bigger names than B-listers like Bruce Willis and Alice Cooper to promote the new name.

To make matters worse, rebrandings provide an excuse for advertising campaigns that drip with nauseating insincerity. A recent full-page ad for Aviva in a British magazine went like this:

“Financial companies are not exactly well known for putting their customers first. We know how frustrated that makes you, because we asked you. So we’re going to be making a few changes. This is not business as usual. This is a company being built around you.”

Aaaargh. Do they really think anyone believes this ingratiating bullshit?

* * *

HAS ANYONE else, ah, noticed that TV3 political editor Duncan, ah, Garner has taken to, ah, inserting the word “ah” between, ah, every few words in his, ah, live reports? Is this, ah, an affectation picked up from, ah, sports and racing, ah, commentators who are in the habit, ah, of doing the same thing? In our house he’s now referred to as Duncan-ah Garner.

Style a late scratching at Trentham

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, February 3.)

STYLE is hard to define but you know it when you see it. A person with an innate sense of style can look good in clothes from The Warehouse. Conversely, those who haven’t got it are never going to have it, no matter how much they spend on designer labels. You can dress a turnip in Working Style or Starfish but it’s still going to be a turnip.

The recent male fashion contest at Trentham demonstrates the point. Judging by the published photos, style was a late scratching – with the possible exception, that is, of 83-year-old Norm Rodley, who managed to make even the clichéd safari jacket look acceptable. He carried it off because he has natural flair and panache.

As for the other contestants, oh dear. The cravated fellow who was initially adjudged the runner-up, and ended up sharing the main prize with Norm after the winner was disqualified, looked like a 1950s spiv from London’s East End.

The 50s look is obviously in. Another Wellington male stylemeister who posed proudly in the fashion pages of this paper a couple of weeks ago was a throwback to the same decade, except that in his case it was more the Neapolitan handbag-snatcher look. I could have pictured him on the pillion seat of a Vespa, cruising the narrow streets looking for unsuspecting female tourists.

And what of the women fashion hopefuls at Trentham? Tragically, not much better. It seems a tradition that women racegoers must dress in a fussy frou-frou style that is the fashion equivalent of gaudy chocolate boxes.

Raceday fashion is a peculiarly sexless branch of couture, one that seems to have forgotten that the fundamental purpose of dressing up is to make oneself look attractive to potential partners. At Trentham, there are better-looking fillies in the birdcage than on the catwalk.

* * *

THERE’S a new class of have-nots. On Newstalk ZB last week, a Wellington woman complained that her son’s high school seemed to assume that all pupils’ homes had Internet access, when his didn’t.

She couldn’t find out when the school re-opened for 2009 – apparently the information was availably only on the school’s website – and even more astonishingly, she said many of her son’s homework assignments last year were delivered online. She had been fighting a running battle with the school administration and getting nowhere.

I suspect this is the tip of a very large iceberg of disaffected and disconnected citizens. People without computers find themselves excluded from a steadily widening range of activities, from taking advantage of cut-price deals to participation in public affairs.

It can be argued this is simply the market at work. Technology changes and people eventually have to adapt if they want to stay “in the loop”. But have we reached the point yet where vital public institutions such as schools are entitled to assume that everyone is plugged into the Net? I wouldn’t have thought so.

* * *

WHEN I was a boy I would save my paper-round money and send a postal note to a mail-order firm for an item I coveted, such as a sheath knife or watch. Invariably the product would be delivered within 10 days or so.

Fast-forward several decades, and we are able to use the miracle of technology to buy things online. Sometimes this works – stuff I’ve ordered from US-based Amazon has arrived only days later – and sometimes it doesn’t.

In a previous column I mentioned my experience with online retailer Fishpond. I ordered a DVD from Fishpond last November 3 and was told it would be dispatched within days. To cut a long story short, it turned out they didn’t have my requested DVD in stock, though it was advertised on their website, and eventually they advised me I wouldn’t have it till early January at best, and possibly several weeks after that. I cancelled the order.

I can now report that my relationship with Fishpond has gone from bad to worse.

On December 31 I ordered a book via their website. A confirmation email advised that it would “ship” (sic) within 6-11 days.

On January 20, I got another email saying there had been a “temporary delay” in sourcing my item. “At the time of your order, the supplier was showing stock on hand but they must have mis-counted so it has been ordered from another source.”

Oddly enough this was precisely the same wording as in the email I had received advising of the delay in the arrival of my DVD the previous month. There seems to be a lot of miscounting going on. Or perhaps Fishpond is misleading its customers into thinking it has certain items in stock when in fact it doesn’t.

You might well wonder why I would risk doing business with Fishpond again after my earlier experience, but I was given a Fishpond voucher as a present and am determined to use it, no matter how hard this outfit tries to frustrate me.

Incidentally, I’m still waiting for my book.

Celebration, or degradation?

Every year at this time we get a peek into a strange alternative universe called Air New Zealand Fashion Week. It’s a fantasy realm that has some of the trappings of a religion, or perhaps more accurately a cult, whose devotees worship at the altars of strange deities called designers.

I am never able to work out what relevance this event has to anything in the real world, but that doesn’t stop the media lavishing what seems an inordinate amount of attention on it.

The defining qualities of most garments seen at Fashion Week seem to be (1) that they are invariably re-arrangements or re-inventions of things that have been done before, confirming that in fashion, as in most other things, what goes around comes around; and (2) that their grotesque impracticality ensures they will never be worn by real people. But never mind: every year, fashion writers gasp and gush on cue, dipping into the same old grab-bag of superlatives which they recycle in much the same way as the designers recycle old ideas.

The gullibility of fashion writers is matched only by that of art critics who, when confronted with works that are plainly worthless and nonsensical, are transported with awe. In fact art and fashion have much in common, both depending heavily on shock and the illusion of novelty to provoke a reaction. And exponents in both fields can usually depend on the wholly uncritical acclaim of their fawning admirers.

As with art, too, a special language has evolved which can mean anything and nothing. Just as art critics have mastered a form of writing whose inscrutability perfectly emulates the unintelligibility of their subject matter, so fashion writers exhibit a remarkable ability to portray the bizarre, the banal and the tacky as fresh, profound and inspired.

With fashion, though, there’s an accompanying circus of camp followers that even the art world can’t match. Media reports breathlessly tell us which celebrities have been given front-row seats – celebrities these days being, by definition, people you’ve never heard of – and what was contained in the “goodies bags” handed out by way of inducement (as if it were needed) to the squealing fashionistas.

Of course, none of this need bother anyone out here in the world of Hallensteins, Ezibuy and Glassons, where most people get their clobber. Fashion is a world that exists of and by itself, and just because its flaky followers take it seriously doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. Or do we?

Today’s Dom Post has a telling picture by John Selkirk on page 3. The main point of the photo is that it shows a model taking a tumble on the catwalk because of her preposterously high heels. The accompanying story revealed that one other model also fell and several others wobbled and staggered.

But possibly more significant is that the photo also shows a model walking toward the camera whose body looks so painfully emaciated that you wince just looking at it. So all the furore in recent years over the fashion industry’s use of anorexic models – the so-called heroin-chic look – appears to have counted for nothing.

Young women who take notice of Fashion Week – and the fashion industry spends large sums of money to ensure that they do – are thus exposed to images of unnaturally skinny women, some so incapable of a normal walk that they look almost deformed, teetering precariously on shoes that are scarcely less cruel and inhumane than the vile old Chinese practice of foot-binding.

I have some sympathy for feminists who argue that the fashion industry is inherently misogynistic and that far from celebrating women, it degrades them. Fashion Week certainly seems to support that hypothesis.

Labour's new aristocracy

CURMUDGEON COLUMN - FIRST PUBLISHED DOMINION POST AND PRESS, JULY 8

I HAVE a friend who works part-time in the emergency department of a hospital. She is literally at the front line of the health sector, dealing with patients who stumble in at all hours of the day and night with all manner of injuries and illnesses. She gets them to fill out the necessary paperwork – of which there is never any shortage, this being the health sector – and then refers them to the appropriate clinical staff.

It can be stressful work and the hours are often anti-social. For this her hourly rate is $13.95. Her teenage son gets paid nearly the same amount for his after-school job.

Contrast this with the fat cats of Sparc, the government sports funding agency. National Party leader John Key revealed last week that 47 of Sparc’s 86 fulltime staff were paid (I refuse to say “earned”) more than $100,000 last year. Of those, 14 got more than $150,000. Fourteen!

They must surely be doing work of the utmost importance; work that requires the very highest and rarest of skills. It must also be work of a highly secretive nature, because no one has explained exactly what enormous contribution Sparc’s highly paid employees must be making to the wellbeing of the nation in order to justify such generous emoluments. In the interests of transparent government, I think we should be told.

The gross discrepancy between the extravagant salaries paid to pampered Wellington bureaucrats and the pittances earned by people like my friend, who perform vital but under-valued functions, illustrates how skewed our system of rewards has become. The result is a growing and corrosive cynicism about what the state truly values.

It is ironic that much of this has happened under a Labour-led government supposedly committed to looking after the battlers on Struggle St. The people who have prospered most from eight years of Labour rule are, in fact, the new aristocracy of the public sector, whose numbers have multiplied at the same time as their salaries – which are subject to no market discipline, since it all comes out of the pockets of the obliging taxpayer – have moved inexorably upwards.

***

I’M PLEASED to see that nice young man John Campbell on TV3 is wearing a tie again. For a while he fell victim to the peculiar fashion of going tieless despite still wearing a suit and business shirt.

Apparently he hoped that by looking less formal he would boost his ratings outside the big cities, but plainly the experiment has been abandoned – and rightly so.

The thing about a business shirt is that it makes sense only when it’s worn with a tie. In turn, the only purpose of a tie is to make a business shirt look good. The tie and the business shirt exist in a state of co-dependency, a sartorial symbiosis.

The prevailing corporate fashion for wearing one without the other, in a misguided attempt to look casually cool, is nonsensical. The collar of the business shirt collapses under the lapel of the jacket and just looks unsightly.

I’m not sure who pioneered this trend, or why. Presumably it was initiated by some rebellious accountant aching to stand out from the crowd. But imitative behaviour is nowhere more rampant than in the corporate world, and soon everyone was doing it. So what may have begun as a subversive gesture of defiance rapidly became a fashion cliché.

Anyway, why stop at throwing away ties? Once the tie is discarded, the rest of the corporate uniform looks even more pointless than it did before. Why not jettison the whole outfit?

***

COULD there be anything more tedious than going to a dance where the band played the same tune all night?

I get that feeling every time that suave crooner John Key steps up to the microphone in his tuxedo and announces that Johnny and the Keynotes are going to launch into the Tax Cuts Samba – again. You can hear a groan run around the dance floor as the opening chords ring out for the umpteenth time.

Aren’t there any other songs in their repertoire? When are we going to hear the Benefit Cuts Boogie, the Employment Relations Shuffle (well okay, a few bars of that leaked out last Sunday when someone left the rehearsal room door open), the Resource Management Reform Rag, the Privatisation Polka and all those other catchy tunes they’ve supposedly been working on in secret all these months?

And what about Johnny Key’s rumoured signature tune, the U-Turn Blues, with its complicated dance steps (two steps to the left, three to the right, then back again – or is it the other way around?). The crowd is starting to get restive.

Heck, even the tax cuts number isn’t original. It’s a cover version of a song originally recorded by Rodney and the Prebbletones, whose much grungier rendition never cracked the charts. It’s bland Pat Boone ripping off raunchy Little Richard all over again.