Travelling to the ferry for Wellington I stay at a camping ground in a wine growing area. I usually stay there the night before catching the early ferry. It used to house some Northern kids on their backpacker holiday. They’d spend a summer here working for a contractor who provides labour to the vineyards. But now the place is crammed with parked up motor homes and caravans, plus a few old men living in cabins – otherwise they’d be homeless. The motorhome people have sold their house perhaps and need to pause, like those yachts people who wander the globe.  One of the old men tells me that the big contractors, who now use Pacific Island workers, have bought most of the local camping grounds and put in eco pods with solar panels for their workers, two to three hundred Islanders, who can lift a crop of grapes in a day.

There’s no cutlery in the kitchen. Why? It gets stolen it seems – the old man lends me a fork so I can eat my meal. There’s a surveillance camera, microwaves, fridges etc, but no implements.  In the morning, like early homo sapiens, I’ll need to find a stick or a concave stone. In the toilet block the local radio station is piped in. I’ll be home by eight, have to work late…sung to a calypso beat. There’s a dimly lit tv room and traffic on the main road busies past. This is an American level of alienation. Humbert and Lolita might be holed up here. We’ve finally made it.

Surfing the web I come across the Emergence Network, the star of which is a Nigerian professor who’s coined the term post activist. He argues that to challenge and protest is to recognise power and that we need to be more devious, like the runaway slave. We need to recognise the gifts of the South: the oral traditions, the gift culture…, rather than want the resources of the north.

A bunk, a communal kitchen

With the required notices

An old man with a stick

Blenheim FM in the toilet block

 An Asian flosses his teeth,

a French girl huddles in a blanket-

this is the realm of the homeless.

I see possible tragedy, Oedipus

stumbling in, imitating the slave

Fleeing the plantation, head bowed,

secretive feet…

I sleep slowly

The capital:

The election becomes a strange event as the governing team becomes dysfunctional, the bright sparks falling apart and doing questionable things, yelling and screaming and getting drunk and crashing cars, not declaring assets and investments, betraying, disappearing in shame and regret, minor Oedipuses, riddle solvers suddenly realising they misunderstood the riddle. Or perhaps it’s simply that politics can’t just be a career, any more than the Elizabethan Court was a career, that it is best if people have been in the world, done some plumbing or carpentry or engine driving, then had the desire to run things. Anyway, the performance is no longer working and they know. It has the quality of student theatre (except that’s disappeared); anyway, a desire to tackle big and serious themes but a gaucheness seeps through, precocity is not enough. Everything seems stuffed: health and education and the economy and constant natural disaster. Add Ukraine and a crazy imperial master and a wise person pauses: Do I really want this?

I have lunch with a young relative, a professional, who reports that he is looking forward to moving to Switzerland. He tells me that many of his peer group are finding New Zealand insular and inward looking, obsessed with the ‘treaty business’ and would prefer to be somewhere more dynamic. They’re sick of the obsession with past wrongs and present failures and victimhood and the whiff of third world corruption and the excuses and the imposed ‘spirituality’. Ouch!

The important bureaucrats and the CEOs

Swirl like courtiers, jockeying for position,

the whole business feudalised: God and gods

bishops and tohunga, swapping utopias and

possible healings, funding and KPIs, reports

and teams, couriers and uber drivers, IT and

health and safety, whakatauki and karakia,

kaumatua and kaiwhakahaere, boards and

accountants, leases and macrons, and at the

end of it, some poor bastard, young or old,

with a problem: could be colour, could be class,

could be cancer. Could be me or could be you.