Fearless

Well, at least Key's having a good time. After all, we're mostly just bits of matter for him to shift about into ever more economically viable positions. 

But surely even John Key is having a Jeff Bridges moment right now. After a wonderfully bizarre campaign season that should have ripped his nice-guy persona to shreds, he's still standing. Possibly atop the ANZ Centre in the Auckland CBD. Arms stretched wide, cheeks reddening in the crisp night air, the blustery waterfront winds whipping off the harbour and up the side of the 35-stories-tall skyscraper and across his thinning hair, as he breaks into laughter and begins to twirl and spin on the ledge while his estranged wife looks on. Fearless.

Sorry. I'd like to apologise. 

I'm being another aloof left-wing pundit, commentating from within my detached media smug-pod located in deep outer space. Like the Listener. I've never read Metro. Or North&South. They're the same thing.

This government trades on apathy. They thrive when no one's looking, and know that answering a question is to acknowledge that question -- just see John Key's shrill schoolboy cries of "Whatever! Whatever!" during the Stuff debate. 

The political conversation never gets off the ground, leaving whatever scraps of left-wing print media we've got devoting their time to trying to out-wry each other, while the right-wing press (i.e. all of the press) cheerleads endlessly for Team Key. Everyone who isn't an old white fart has long given up on even noticing who's in power. It's like a Mexican-wave of shrugging from one end of the country to the other. 

I wonder when morals and human decency went from being civilised human behaviour, the base level of society, to just another ideology. These things are not a theory to be messed about with. This isn't Objectivism. These attributes are not optional. 

New Zealand didn't exist until the first Labour government. Everything that is good and proper and normal and taken for granted about post-colonial New Zealand is due to Michael Joseph Savage and its been a slow erosion since then. 

Only when that erosion reaches ground zero can the Labour movement return. Only when we start stuffing kids down chimneys again will those 1 million National voters and 1 million enrolled non-voters notice something's askew. 

Because Key's got a formula and he's not going anywhere.