As life returns to normal, it’s necessary to wonder about lost opportunity. The gist of the recovery is to recover a temporarily-halted consumerism. The government has been generous in terms of subsidising workers and companies, keeping an eye on rents and mortgages, giving money to artists, rugby, racing and beer. Millions here, millions there and doubling the government debt in doing so. But money is not an issue. The world is generally awash with capital, with debt tolerated except for the severely irresponsible (like the Greeks). All that fiscal responsibility the coalition signed up to was a fig leaf to confuse the recalcitrant business sector. The irony is that there wasn’t anything to hide. Obviously the tourist industry is in dire straits, as is Air NZ, with a very slow recovery in the offing, for closed borders will continue for some time. Environmental concerns have taken a back seat, farmers are triumphant and extractivists are saying, I told you so. There’s a sort of return to the fifties. In terms of foreign policy we’re minding our own business and turning a blind eye to the malevolent treatment of Cuba by the US and its encouraging of Israel to continue colonising the West Bank. And the China problem? Let’s keep quietly quiet. After all we’ve defeated the virus which everyone is tired of hearing about so it will somehow disappear into being a third world problem.

If ever there was a time when a Universal Basic Income could have been introduced it was the last month or so, for many were on an unofficial UBI. It would still have been a difficult process for it would have meant a gentle restructuring of the economy. With the UBI, livelihood is separated from the capitalist merry go round of futures, derivatives, global milk prices and so on. There is, as well as the merry go round, a coherent community and government economy which generates livelihood rights as had to happen with the lockdown. There remains a dialectical relationship but one can learn to move between cultures. The market will continue to stumble, rise, swear and sweat, endlessly change, produce its millionaires and billionaires, its celebrities and scandals and like peasants, we will watch with screwed up eyes. People will participate as they can and as they want, but some choice exists, for the basic platform of life, which we all need and struggle for, would be a little more secure. In countries without national super, the sight of old people begging is dreadful, but surely children and parents begging is equally dreadful, yet begging and the accompanying charity, is taking place on an industrial scale and no one really protests.

In a time of increasing turmoil, to have introduced the UBI would have been a kind thing to do. So why not seize the opportunity? Why not, like the capitalists, use the crisis? Was it a failure of nerve, a lack of belief, a cultural problem of ministers being of an urban, petit bourgeois, liberal persuasion? Was it simply a betting on winning the next election with crisis-earned capital? Hard to know, but as a result, there is a feeling of ennui, a lack of motivation, a lack of courage. It seems some people are having anxiety attacks at having to return to the bustle of the stranger, suffering from a sort of agoraphobia of the soul, something my adopted mother suffered from. Some then will stay in the shadows, others will party up with the intensity of the six o’clock swill, we’ll watch Dan Carter play for the Blues and the America Cup will go ahead. Corona will disappear because people are literally, sick of it. The establishment wants rid of Trump and the crazies won’t be able to save him, nor will the military bosses roll in the tanks – he’s not their sort of guy and he’d had more than his ten minutes of fame. Uncle Joe Biden will stumble through and there’ll be enough media space for the climate events as the planet continues to rid itself of this problem species, helped of course, by the problem species.