On Income Inequality

   I was really encouraged to see Brian Gaynor's Herald piece on the doubling of income inequality in New Zealand in the last twenty or so years. I was fascinated to see his lucid explanation of how rocketing salaries and bonuses for the top people have insidiously spread themselves around the global community.
   But, like a lot of sermons in which we clergy have castigated the congregation for some failing or other, I suppose, this interpretation left me wondering what I can do about it. I just am left with a feeling of helplessness.
   Having lived through a lot of tax changes over half a century, I recall the days when even clergy paid 48c on the top dollars of the stipend. So what about returning to a more progressive tax regime, so that the rich make a greater contribution to the public good?
   Brian’s answer is that shareholder vigilance will work better.  The problem is, as I see it, those who are the worst victims of income inequality have no voice for change. 
   They don’t vote at shareholders’ meetings.

Fishers of all ...

      We snuck off for a couple of nights at Hihi Beach on Sunday afternoon. Our mini satellite dish couldn't pick up any TV for the trees so there was quite a lot of reading and walking.

     We watched our camp neighbours pull in a flapping stingray and get it safely back into the water - no skate steaks for them. I wasn't much interested in fishing; but at one point I did become aware that there was a tumult of seabirds over the beach.

     I stepped out from behind the hedge and saw the biggest and noisiest flock of white-fronted terns I'd ever observed. The water was steaming white with spray as the birds dived and splashed to the surface with sprats. But big fish were also throwing themselves all over the place competing for the same prey. Yellow-eyed mullet were the targets of both groups and they were so close inshore that the big kahawai were running aground and stirring the water into a muddy cloudy mess.

      At times the whole eruption was only two or three metres from the shore, totally undisturbed by our wonder and curiosity. A couple of much more experienced fishers than I said they had never seen anything like it so close to the beach. 

      From the shore, a young lad cast a lure through all this turmoil of feathers and scales and splashes and pulled in two or three very nice fish. By the time three or four boats were hastily launched and a few more surfcasters set up around the beach the big camp smoker would be filled to capacity.
      Home tonight, we dined on an excellent smoked kahawai and potato pie. The experience seemed a serenditpitous follow-up to Sunday's account of the calling of the fisher-disciples.

A snail for Christmas

Special friends Shirley and Joan sent me a very small book at Christmas: “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating”.
It’s Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s reflections on a snail that came to share a year of her life as she lay completely bed-ridden.

Poetic insights into the meaning of life for this tiny creature beside her bed, and voluminous scientific and literary research on the family of gastropods have been distilled into a tiny book with a huge heart.

I read it slowly and pondered my own life. I marvelled at the incredible life of the common woodland snail. I absorbed something of the author's passion for the incidental, the almost invisible.

As I came to understand that if humans totally annihilate their species on this planet, snails may well outlive them, I felt my self-importance diminishing and shrinking.

Better reviewers than I have written about this wonderful little book.  Suffice it to say that I—increasingly discovering the limitations of ageing and medication—found it totally uplifting and inspiring. It’s given me a new perspective on my own existence.

What more could a Christmas gift bring?

Give a Goat?

It was Fran’s idea. She pointed out that there are gift cards for all kinds of overseas aid; you give your friends a gift card instead of a present and the money goes to buy a goat or feed a child or share in digging a well.
But, said Fran, “My family don’t need Christmas presents—I want to do something for our own country’s people who won’t get a decent Christmas.”
So we printed some special cards and mentioned them to the congregation one Sunday just before Christmas.
It wasn’t a project authorised by the Parish Council, just a low-key, informal suggestion. But others asked for cards and we eventually sent off around $600 to provide Christmas cheer for some needy Kiwis.
At Christmas, a dozen family and friends got our little red and green printed cards instead of the presents they hardly needed anyway.
And we were all reminded of a central reality of Christmas.

Windows 7?

I’ve joined the ranks of those who are struggling to convert their minds from to Windows 7 from XP. With the latter being about to lose the Maternalistic Microsoft’s support, and a dying computer, I've had the change forced on me. And, like many, I am having a lot of trouble with it.

I see one W-7 complainant was admonished to remember that a Model T did a great job for its day but we all have to move on. He was told to consider the advantages of, say, a Prius.

Well, I’m not impressed with that argument. My Model T will still do about a dozen different things that I need now and then. But after three weeks the Prius can still do only three of them.

I don’t need this new Prius; I just need a Model T—or perhaps, I concede, a Falcon—that works…

There must be a moral for small churches in there some place…

The Innocent Man - and the Small Church

I’ve been somewhat absorbed in John Grisham’s The Innocent Man in my spare moments during the last few days.
A true story, it records the astonishing series of seriously unjust events in the investigation, arrest and trials of Ron Williamson of the small town of Ada, Oklahoma, between 1987 and 1999. The catalogue of errors of omission and comission by Police and the justice system has to be studied to be believed. Williamson was reprieved only five days before his execution was to be carried out. I find myself boiling with indignation that so many one-sided processes were applied to this man.

But I’m not sure we’ve always done a lot better in the church. When things go awry in the small congregation and outside help is sought, there can also be problems of blinkered vision. Even the wider church can make mistakes of judgment and lose its grip on natural justice. I can think of at least three conflicts in small churches with which I’ve been connected, when those who were asked to investigate allegations of improper behaviour listened with compassion and sensitivity only to the complainants. In both cases, the other side was not invited to make any response. Rather, those whose stories were never told were advised that the matter was now “all in the past” and they should “move on”.

Forty years ago our denomination conducted excellent “Lay-Clergy Dialogues” a few months after the arrival of a new minister. Sometimes, a crucial function of those events was “exorcising the ghosts” of the previous ministry. It was a conscientious attempt to air and lay to rest any resentments or grievances arising from the former ministry or the discomforts resulting from its winding up. There was at least an attempt to recognise the effect of lingering issues of the past upon the present and the future.

I guess the church doesn’t offer this excellent programme these days. Certainly, the way in which the national jurisdiction sometimes relates to local problems doesn’t seem to suggest that kind of understanding.

A Happy Beneficiary Christmas!

I'm one of those dinosaurs who was in Christian Social Services at the time of the Woodhouse Report and the Social Welfare reforms that followed it in the early 1970s.

Hearing of the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots this morning reminded me of the innovative principle behind those reforms. It was that people on benefits and their children should be able to enjoy a "reasonable quality of life" not just a meagre existence.

One of the "reforms" was the institution of an extra two weeks' benefit, paid in mid-December, to provide a contribution towards the cost of Christmas celebrations and holidays. It wasn't a fortune but it was an imaginative and compassionate way of emphasising that the little extras that most of us take for granted should be available to people who have to be supported by the State.

Alas, all that compassion went out in later "reforms" and now the word is taking on a quite different meaning that suggests further savaging of the standard of living of people and their children at the bottom of the heap.
It's really gratifying to hear that the OECD has drawn attention to the widening gap in Godzone. But will those newly installed in power hear the message, never mind understand the issues and do something about them...?

Last Past the Post

My two bits’ worth in the Mixed Member Proportional debate would have been that it MMP isn’t perfect and needs some adjusting in obvious areas. But I am gratified that there is no strong support for the suggestion of returning to First Past the Post.

Up until MMP came in, I never cast a meaningful vote in my life. I was always in electorates where there was no way that my vote was going to change anything. In rural electorates my vote would never have got my candidate past the post and in urban electorates my vote would have contributed only to the overweening sense of importance that some high-majority partliamentarians displayed.

It was on such a nominal event that I took Paul, aged ten, into the booth with me, and let him vote; he’d studied the issues at school and his vote didn’t change anything more than mine would have.

In those days it only mattered to vote if you were in a marginal electorate. Those were the voters who swept governments in and out. Sometimes a swing of a handful of percentage points in key electorates across the country made a huge change in the balance of parliament. Often we lost skilled and experienced politicians in the carnage.

In the 1970s I proposed on radio a reform which turned out to be almost exactly what we got in MMP a good few years later. I still think mine was better, but then - and now - anything would be better than going back to FFP.

Over the Tasman

I’m all out of blog at the moment. We had a great three weeks in Australia and our three Murder Mystery Evenings were a great hit and raised nearly $5000 for various charities, thanks to a huge amount of effort by the locals in Canberra and Sydney As well, we had an interesting and relaxing time doing some very different things from home. It was good to spend time with the Aussie rellies and to see some new parts of the countryside in NSW.

Coming home was bound to return us to the problems with our old No 1 computer. Its replacement was almost ready for duty. But Windows 7 was not happy with the most important programs I use and getting printers to run with them has been a nightmare. Lots of my most commonly used applications and systems have died. Not surprisingly, it will be some time before everything is running reasonably well. So things are a bit stressful around here at present. However, as the fellow said after accidentally swallowing a peach stone, This, too, will pass. It’s just an uncomfortable process.

And by the way, if anyone still hankers after getting NZ wages up to Aussie levels, they had better price a few local commodities and look at basic wages in that country before making a commitment. We expected things to be dearer but, in some supermarket areas, costs were well above what we might have expected. And the price of prosperity in tearing resources out of the ground has yet to be calculated. The grass, or what is left of it after droughts and floods and fires, is not all that greener on the other side of the Tasman fence.

Flying the Flag

In the last few weeks of seeing flags of twenty nations all over the place – even permanently painted onto the pavement in our town! – I have been reflecting again on our country’s aspirations about a national flag.

The fact that Australia blatantly copied ours a century ago doesn’t mean that both nations should hang onto a dated design forever. It’s time for a change, and this 2005 competition winner by Kyle Lockwood still seems to me to be one that we could have proudly waved alongside the others. It has just the right balance of the traditional and the imaginative.

There were two embarrassing moments at a Jetboat Sprint competition in Idaho a few years ago. The Australians won and had to do a winners' circuit with their big flag and there was quite a lot of discussion between Kiwis and Aussies as to which flag was which. The selection was eventually agreed and off went the winners for the victory lap. However, halfway round, the flag caught on their hot exhaust and burst into flame. As if this weren’t embarrassment enough in USA, where burning the flag is a real no-no, it was later discovered that everyone was wrong. The Australians had flown – and set alight – the New Zealand flag.

I know it's not the most important issue in the country today. But let’s at least keep the discussion going.