Welcome to our middle aged hellscape

Would you like a side of orthopaedic shoes with that?

Morena fam!

How are we? I hope you’re all feel young, hungry, well caffeinated and restless this morning. (Even if your body feels old, decrepit and mildly alarmed at the prospect of standing up too quickly. I swear, ever since I hit 30, my knees sound like someone is playing castanets whenever I stand up to quickly.)

I’m writing to you from a freshly purged office. All the old paper is in the bin, all the old outfits are in bin bags, my collection of rhinestoned parrots are looking shiny.

In short, I’m welcoming in the year of Fire Horse with some big fck yeah energy.

I know that a lot of you (and I imagine my Dad’s face when I type this) are not here - at aalllll - for anything that vaguely resembles astrology.

But the Fire Horse, is the Chinese Zodiac, and it kicks off in Feb. Last year, the snake, was all about showing you everything you’d been avoiding. This year, Fire Horse, is about action. It’s about looking at all the things you learned last year and taking big, bold action on them. And I’m very much here for that.

Quite frankly, I bored of being shitty. I think last year was a year when (quite justifiably) we all put our head in our hands and said, wtf is happening.

But I think you can only do that for so long before you become disgusted at your own self indulgence. Maybe it’s the gritty Kiwi spirit in me, but I think you can only hear yourself talk about your own misery for so long before you get sick of yourself.

At some point, you sit up and think, fck it, I’ve had enough. Let’s try some things and see what happens…

I suppose I’ve come to that energy in my writing recently as well.

Quite a few people have said to me recently they’ve really enjoyed me ‘getting political’ or ‘calling out BS’ recently. And I’d never really thought about it - I suppose I’ve always been political, you should hear our family dinners.

But I did realize that since about mid last year, I’ve definitely been feistier.

That was about when Nicola Willis told us off for being ‘merchants of misery,’ and unfairly doomsdaying about the economy just to be dramatic, all the while hospo and retail spending was down 60% and it was the worst the economy has been since the GFC. That was the point when - having run a small businesses through covid and now the worst recession since the GFC - I got pissed.

I wrote my “We’re broke, exhausted, doing everything right - yet still called ‘merchants of misery” column. And it really kicked off. And since then, I’ve been trying to keep that fire of ‘speak unapologetic truth to power’ going.

Largely because I think we’re living through an era of unprecedented bullshit.

And the only way things are gonna get better is if we keep the bastards honest (to steal a line of Bernard Hickey’s.) That means calling things as they are - not how the Government, or our late-middle aged hellscape of a nation, wants them to be.

I wrote about that this week. How NZ has turned into a late middle aged hellscape.

Basically I wrote it because I’ve been getting so pissed off at our repeated indifference towards all things long term planning in NZ.

From our natural disaster prevention, to our house market now relying on parents buying their kids houses, there is such little concern for how the decisions being made now (or more accurately, NOT being made right now) will impact those living here in 15 years. It’s short term AND selfish.

I’m mad because at some point the prevailing logic shifted from, “how can we build a better NZ?” into,

"Well, this is complicated and expensive and I’ll be dead by the time this is a real problem so I’m not gonna fix it. Future generations can just deal with it…”

And that logic underpins everything from our attitude to climate change, to our refusal to invest in proper water infrastructure, to our inability to ever get real reform in our energy sector or our supermarket sector.

It’s such a cop out. It’s basically giving up on future generations, and selfishly managing the present. BTW, I don’t think all middle aged people think like this. I actually have a lot of people in their 50s and 60s tell me that they’re super pissed at this too - that they feel like they’re failing future generations with this prevailing thinking. And so I think that boomers are actually just as pissed as I am about this. (It’s more of a mentality than an actual age thing.)

And, as someone who wants to be alive in 15 years time, I think it’s outrageous that this our attitude. When did it become ok for us to give up on our young?

(And by young, I mean anyone under 55 who will still be here in 20 years trying to sort out this mess.)

Equally, I think it’s really easy to despair and be hopeless on the subject too. To think, oh we’re bankrupt and broken and we always will be.

But I read this column by Luke Malpass in the Post, who pointed out that NSW was bankrupt and broken 20 years ago. And look at it now.

It gave me hope. Hope that we can get out of this mess. But the only way out is for us to grow some balls - and start calling BS.

Anyway. Here’s my column, have a read.

As ever, email me back here and I’ll reply. (I’m just a slow replier but rest assured I do read it all! And keep it on an open tab in my head…)

And in the meantime, keep fighting, stay caffeinated, and I’ll see you fine folks soon

Much love

Vee xo

Ps. If you’d like some good, Waitangi day reading, I’ve just finished reading The Invasion of the Waikato, which told the story of how the 19th century (largely Auckland based) government invaded the Waikato region and took the land from the Tainui people there - who, ironically, had actually been protecting and feeding the Auckland based settler population from invasion from the north.

And I hadn’t realized how much of a naked land grab it was - how it made a few Auckland property speculators very rich, didn’t actually help the Government that much, but utterly broke the back of Tainui who had their thriving economy smashed and their land taken - then given to the Militia who’d been paid to invade them.

Even more interestingly, the militia groups were largely Irish. Who were so pissed off and disillusioned by the colonial government’s naked land grabbing afterwards, that they refused to fight for the crown anymore and settled with the local iwi. Some even married them. Interesting right?

Pakeha identity is kinda commonly and casually assumed to be ‘English aristocracy / merchant / second son types’ who’d been in favour of the ‘the Crown.’ But reading about Irish settlers staying in the Waikato after getting pissed with the Crown is fascinating, because it means there’s a big streak of ‘fck the English’ (aka. anti colonial identity) in Pakeha identity too. Wild.

Highly recommend this book by the way, if you want an easy to understand historical book that explains our complicated colonial legacy in a way that doesn’t make you feel stupid.