I’m in great need of a break from this ‘gwate country’. Now don’t get me wrong I voluntarily and even with malice aforethought left Singapore in the mid nineties having lived on the equator for a dozen years. New Zealand seemed an obvious choice for this bloke and his family at the time and it was one of the best moves I have made for many a year. When you do such a fundamental thing as move countries you tend to do it for mainly superficial reasons. I should know because I have done it twice now.
I’ve been lucky because both moves have turned out just fine. You never get to know a country by spending only a short period of time there. How much do you get to know about Fiji, for instance, by spending five days sitting by the pool in Denerau and buying a few useless souvenirs at the airport that no one will want? I moved the Obald tribe to NZ because it looked like a good cruisey sort of a place with excellent fishing and a reputation as a good place to bring up kids. The latter reason had to be taken pretty much on face value because how would you know? How, as an outsider, could you know about what the PPTA had been up to for years? Nothing that can’t be fixed by throwing a shedful money at the problem in the form of private education.
I knew a reasonable whare could be purchased for not much dosh and so it has proved to be. I obviously knew that the top rate of income tax was 39% and had a sharp indrawing of breath – for about a month. The significance of this usurious rate kicking in at $60,000pa registered somewhere in my consciousness and was filed along with piles, bad haircuts and unfavourable footie results – a bloody nuisance but not much more. But how could I be prepared for the profligate spending habits of those who would nick over a third of the profits of my toil?
The previous decade living under the auspices of a right wing, pragmatic, benign police state had certainly not prepared me for the brand of politics I was in for. Singapore doesn’t have politics. The country is run by technocrats as a large (not large enough for their liking) and, in general, very successful business. Their ‘Members of Parliament’ are really no such things. They are selected individuals hand picked to perform a particular company function. They are then ‘voted‘ on by the great unwashed, get an 80% slice of the poll and off they go to work. The selection process is simple. You want a Minister of Finance. Right oh, we’ll have a look in the Department of Economics in the University and wave $50,000 a month under the nose of the brightest and best. ‘All this can be yours as long as you work bloody hard, don’t rock the boat and perform. If you stuff up on any count you’ll find lawn-mowing rounds in Singapore don’t pay much as there ain’t no lawns. If you stuff up on more than one count you’ll find out that there is another establishment at Changi other than the Airport’. All this may not be very fair or just, but I can assure you it works and the place runs like a Swiss watch. I had been there for so long that I had thought the whole world was run along these very sensible lines.
Underpinning all this is the cultural belief of the population that the good of society takes precedence over that of the individual. Being a baby boomer from South London this took me a long time to get my head around. But get my head around it I did and it is taking an awful long time for me to try and get rid of the notion.
I was thus ill prepared to immigrate to New Zealand. I knew I couldn’t live my whole life in Whangaroa (although I now know this is entirely possible) but I had so many shocks in store for me. I had never heard of ‘political correctness’. I was used to a government that did things for the good of society. I was used to paying taxes that were employed sensibly on things like defence, nice big civil engineering projects and the secret police. What was such an innocent to make of a Union for the Unemployed? Why is the Government made up of failed school teachers? Why does the Minister of finance have a history degree? Why don’t we have a defence force? What the hell is a DPB?
Slowly I have come to get used to most of these aberrations. I don’t like almost all of them but I have come to put up with them. But over the time I have also come to realise that the daft way the country is run is not sustainable. I cannot see how having a third of a country’s population receiving a benefit of one form or other long term is sustainable. 65% of a population cannot support the other 35% in an economy of the size of New Zealand’s – the sums just don’t add up. The ever-increasing lurch to the left the current administration is taking us on has to end in tears. As Monty Python said many years ago ‘You can have you Marxist ways, but it’s only just a phase’. Centrally controlled economies propped up by a burgeoning bureaucracy don’t work. History tells us that and perhaps Cullen could eventually put his degree to some use and just stop it. He won’t of course.
What is the attraction of the left? I have never seen it even when I was a spotty youth? My younger daughter joined Amnesty International when she was in the fifth form. I smiled a paternal smile and passed it off as something you do when you are sixteen. She got to the sixth form, let her membership lapse, joined nothing at all and world order was returned to Obald Towers. The headmistress was apparently a student left leader when she was at University. OK for a year or so whilst you are waiting to get a decent haircut and a real job. But to go on and become Prime Minister? Why? What is wrong with buying a farm, designing cathedrals, going longlining, inventing Velcro or something and making loads of loverly money. What is wrong with leading your own life and keeping your bloody beak out of mine? Why do you have to waste my taxes on things I don’t want? Why do you have to, in nine short years, dismantle a system of running a country that has served us well for decades? (Topically, getting rid of the Privy Council is top of my list as I type.) Why, in order to live in the best country I have run across in my life to date, do I have to put up with such an incompetent administration made up of life’s failures? Why have we allowed a system to come into being that has the country run by such spectacularly useless people? Why have we allowed a system to evolve that invented the List MP? You not only bounce back into parliament having been rejected by the great unwashed, you bounce right into all the top jobs. Margaret Wilson wasn’t wanted as anyone’s MP so we’ll make her Speaker of the House. What’s that about?
So as I sit in great comfort somewhere over New South Wales on my way back to spend a week where I used to live I am ready for a big dose of pragmatism. I wonder if the things that used to get up my nose in the latter stages of my life there will still do so. I wonder what will have changed. I suspect very little – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I wonder whether a week will be long enough to get back into Singapore thinking mode. I have only spent a couple of days at a stretch in the place since leaving and never got even close to thinking Singlish. I wonder whether this time next week I will be hankering after Keith Locke, Sue Bradford and Mallard. If I do, I don’t think I’ll come back. Would someone please buy my wife an air ticket to join me (I’ll send you the money in South Sea Pesos) and Boulder can have my boat.
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