Future Shock - Updated

Did you ever read that old classic book from the 1970’s, “Future Shock”?

I can recall reading it, way back then, and being suitable “shocked” by it.


Click this link to see the Wikipedia entry on the book.

The old issues that the book discusses are very much dated now. However, we now have a whole new spectrum of 21-st century issues that could serve as equally good examples for an updated version of that book.

Just for fun, let’s make up a short list of some of them.

Peak Oil

Climate change.

All the latest tech gadgets and innovations.

The runaway consumer society.

The imminent collapse of the global financial system.

The accelerating gap between the small number of extremely wealthy people and the growing number of the poor.

That will do for now. There are plenty more that we could add to the list, but that’s enough to make the point.

The point being, just as it was explained in that old book, so long ago now: the vast majority of people just cannot keep up with what’s actually happening in this global society of ours, let alone even begin to understand even a small percentage of the implications of what it all means for the future of our society, and our civilization.

So, there is this time-lag syndrome, where just about everybody is living in the past, unable to keep up, and not even trying. Everybody is living their lives as if things were still the way they were at some time in the past. Making decisions in today, with out-of-date data, for reasons, and with reasoning, that is out-of-date, that no longer applies to how things are today.

I believe that this is one reason for many people to describe themselves as being “conservative”. They are not comfortable with the constant change, and especially, they are very uncomfortable with the accelerating pace of chance. So, they cling to the past, and they wear their “conservative” label-badge like it was a badge of honor.

As far as everyday mundane life goes, this might not matter all that much.

But, our leaders, our governments, are very much exhibiting this syndrome.

For example: building more and more hugely expensive motorways, when the looming peak oil crunch means that by the time all the motorways are completed, they will not be needed.

Example: refusing to acknowledge that the universal government-funded superannuation (pension), for all New Zealanders, as of automatic right, from the day they turn 65 years old, is unsustainable in the longer term.

Example: that continuing to promote economic growth as the panacea for most of our economic problems is not only unsustainable, but also is the main mechanism that is causing many of the distortions and inequities that are slowly bringing disaster.

This current blog is not about any of these three issues in detail, let’s leave that for another time. However, let’s have a brief look at one of these issues. Let’s have a quick look at peak oil.

Nobody is denying it now, We are almost there, if not already there. The best estimates, from the world-leading experts who study this issue, is that total world oil production will peak in 2014. No, not 2020, not 2025 or 2030, but 2014.

That’s barely three years from now!

That’s the bad news. It gets worse, though.

Because the total world demand will almost certainly continue to grow at a very fast rate, beyond 2014, there will be an ever-increasing gap between lessening total production and total demand.

The facts speak for themselves. Every year, China adds another four million cars to their roads. That’s just China. Most other Asian countries are increasing their energy demands at a similar rate. There are still many oil-fired and gas-fired power stations being built today, all over the world.

We all expect cheap air-travel for the masses to continue on indefinitely. Relatively cheap air travel has become almost like a “God-given basic human right” to many people. They could not imagine getting by without it.

Every day, millions of people travel long distances, by air, or by car, to attend things like football matches, rock concerts, weddings, business meetings, social gathering of all kinds, and so on. They expect to be able to continue to keep doing this indefinitely.

As Vice-President Cheyney famously said “The lifestyle of the American people is not negotiable”.

We keep building more and more highways, and we keep on encouraging bigger and bigger trucks to ply their trade on those highways, carrying for us an every-increasing deluge of cheap consumer goods, to satisfy our consumerism addiction.

Like the out-of-control addicts that we are, we just have to have our fixes of the latest technology. Bigger and bigger flat-screen TVs. Louder and louder sub-woofers. Fancier and fancier home-theatre systems. A deluge of i-pods, i-phones, i-pads, i-whatever’s, smart-phones, smart-whatevers, video cameras, netbooks, etc, etc.

Most of it destined for the trash within the next five years, to be replaced with the very latest upgraded models, loaded with even more features that we never use.

It’s plainly madness.

Yet, it’s one way that many of us attempt to keep up with Future Shock. As if having the very latest technology somehow makes us “hip” or “cool”, or “modern”.

Anyway, let’s get back to the issue of peak oil.

Have you seen those two documentary movies “The End of Suburbia” and “Escape from Suburbia”?

This blog is not a review of these movies, but if you want to find out about some of the implications of what peak oil will mean for all of us, within a few years, I strongly suggest that you hire those videos. Hear in NZ, you can get them from Fatso.com, or your local video hire store should have them.


Click this link to go to the movie website

Basically, as per the title of the movie, peak oil will eventually bring in, literally “the end of suburbia as we currently know it”.

No more sprawling suburbs, miles out of the town centre, with no local shops, no local services, no public transport: just street after street of houses.

Yet, we are still building such suburbs, thousands of new houses in such places, every year, here in New Zealand, and most other parts of the world. As if such places are sustainable.

It’s actually already happening, to a very limited degree, not because of peak oil, but as a consequence of the global financial crisis. For example, in parts of Florida, areas of suburbia that are in the process of being abandoned. This is just a foretaste of what is to come.

There is a book that I recently read about this. “The Long Emergency”, by James Howard Kunstler.  Most libraries should have a copy. It’s illuminating, and chilling, reading.


Click this link to go to Kunstler's Blog.

The “long emergency” being the future emergency that never ends, it just goes on and on, for ever. As global oil supplies dwindle and dwindle, the world economy stalls, suburbia become uninhabitable, with all the likely consequences that all this will bring.

Yet, most of us continue on, oblivious to the impending disaster. The “Titanic-society” steams on a full-speed, into iceberg territory, and our captain, officers, and most of us passengers are oblivious to what’s really happening.

It’s now time for some of us to wake up.

What can be done about it? Let’s leave that for a future blog.

To be continued shortly…..

The Trouble with Labour

What’s wrong with the New Zealand Labour Party?

Why are they in such a poor state, reduced down to their rock-bottom core support?

I believe that there are several factors at play, which I will outline below.

The first is the natural cycles of politics. They had nine years in power, nine long years of the natural process of the erosion of support that happens with every party that is in power. Nine years for more and more people to gradually get more and more pissed off at them, for all sorts of reasons.

It is only natural that, the longer one is in power, the more anger and resentment that builds up against one. It’s a simple law of arithmetic.

It doesn’t matter all that much what the specific reasons were. “Shit happens”, and some of it sticks to the perceived perpetrator of that shit.

Yes, they made plenty of mistakes, but that’s inevitable in politics.

The next reason is their personnel. They currently have no David Lange or Norm Kirk to lead them back from the wilderness. They basically have nobody with much of that “X Factor” at all.

National have John Key. I shudder to think how National would be doing without Smiling John. Without John, National’s line-up would look rather thin. Think back to when Don Brash was the leader, and how fragile and unconvincing National was with him at the helm. That’s how much difference a really good leader can make, and Labour do not have one.

Labour has no-one. Just look along their front bench. A line-up of has-beens, wannabes, and never-will-be’s. A collection of academics and politically ambitious hacks.

Both the above are important factors, but there is another factor that is even more important.


They lost their way. Politically, they lost their way, and this was inevitable, it was always going to happen, and nothing they could do could prevent it.

Think back to the days of the original roots of the Labour Party. The 1920’s and 30’s. The Great Depression. The old class wars, between the bosses and the workers.

After centuries of oppression by the ruling classes, the workers finally wake up to the fact that they have been had. In a crescendo of people-power, at the 1935 election, the workers have had enough, and the old order is swept away at the ballot box. They repeat the dose in 1938.

The political “right” is in disarray. The animals have taken over the farm. We can all march together, united into a glorious future!

After years of struggle and disappointment, the representatives of the ordinary workers finally get into power. They set about their reform agenda with a great zeal. The social welfare system, old age pension, minimum wage, decent award wages, better funding for universal free health-care and education, the state housing system….  The list goes on and on.

Their day in the sun lasts until 1949, but then the reformed “right” gets back into power, and we have the disasters of the 1951 waterfront dispute, the abolition of subsidised prices of basic foodstuffs, and many more reactionary policies.

Fast-forward to 1957, and then to 1972.

Labour gets back into power, but each time it all turns to custard, and they are thrown out again after only one term.

There were various reasons for that, each time, and it’s beyond the scope of this blog to go into them.

However, there is an overall trend, a trend of history, that no-one can change, that is an overriding reason for Labour’s fall from grace.

My dear old father stated it to me, many years ago. He was a life-long Labour supporter, and it saddened him to see this happening.

“The trouble with the Labour Party, is that they are always too successful. They get into power when times are tough, and the workers are downtrodden by a Tory government. They then set about correcting the injustices, and giving the workers a better standard of living.

“This is great for everybody but are the workers grateful for this? Some of them are, but many of them now aspire to become little Tories themselves. What us? Vote for Labour? Don’t be silly, we are far too well-off to support them!”

In other words, a proportion of Labour’s natural base support erodes away, as those people become yuppies, climbing the social ladder, and henceforth forgetting what made it possible for them to do that. They become “political snobs”.

Some of these people start up their own businesses, some go to university, some work their way up the corporate ladder into higher-paid managerial positions.

They become “little Tories”. The superb irony of the situation being the fact that they only got into those yuppified positions, they only became bank managers, or university lecturers, or business-owners, or corporate accountants, because of the efforts of a Labour Government. But now, the worm turns, and they don’t want to have a bar of that government.

This is a natural process of history, and nothing can change it.

What has the Labour Party done in response to this natural process of history?

It’s obvious. They have moved further into the “centre”, following those former supporters, desperately trying to retain their support.

The Clark government did succeed in this, in that they had nine years in power. But, to do so, they sold their soul to the highest bidder. The classic example of a Clark-era policy that illustrates this is Working for Families, which really should be called “Welfare Payments for the Well-Off”.

They took their traditional working-class constituency for granted, after all the people at the absolute bottom of society have nowhere else to go.

Michael Cullen became a master at using our own money to bribe us, and thus bribe his party back into power. Which is no different to what National habitually does.

So now, in 2011, the Labour Party has painted  themselves into a corner, with nowhere else to go. They cannot go back to the “old Labour” of the workers. There are hardly any genuine workers left anyway, as all the low-paid jobs have been exported to Chinese factories and Indian and Phillipine call-centres, etc.

Labour are desperately casting around, trying to differentiate themselves from National, in a search for some kind of “National Lite”, that might be less unpalatable than the real National Party.

But, as I said above, Phil Goff is no David Lange, and every twist and turn they take, they are out-smarted and out-manouvered by some very smart political operators in the form of Smiling John and his team.

What can they do? Nothing much, apart from wait patiently for the eventual erosion of support that Smiling John and his colleagues will inevitably suffer from eventually.  That will take at least two terms, possibly three.

In the meantime, they cannot do much, apart from refreshing their ranks for the future, and waiting.

Mr Nice Guy?

What is it about John Key?

What is his “big secret”? Why is it that, right from the very first moment when we first heard of him, he has been a favourite darling of a majority of the NZ voting public?

I can vaguely recall when I first saw mention of his name in the media. It must have been when he arrived back in NZ, in time for the 2002 election, freshly head-hunted by the National Party, lured back home from his stellar career in London at the very top of his money-market dealer profession. Persuaded to come back home and start over as a novice politician, albeit with the promise of a flying start with a guaranteed safe seat earmarked for him, plus a strong indication that they saw in him future party leadership potential.

I recall wondering “Who is this guy? Never heard of him.” A similar thought must have occurred to many others around this time also.

And then, once he entered Parliament, representing that safe National seat of Helensville, I recall the media interest in him, partly because he had already been unofficially anointed as a future leader of the party, and partly because of his unusual background, and the fact that he was definitely not your typical “career politician”.

In fact, I believe, it is his status as a relative “outsider” that partly drives his popularity. Many people are sick of the same old slick “political animals” who inhabit the House and the Beehive: the Helen Clarks, the Nick Smiths and the Phil Goffs.

You know the ones…. They became politically active at a very young age, often while still at high school, they joined the youth section of the party, they were active in politics while at university, they studied politics and law at university, they maybe worked for a time as a parliamentary researcher, or for a union, they entered Parliament at a young age, they never had any other job out in the “real world” outside of politics.

Many people are turned off by that kind of politician, and I can understand why. Somehow, those kind of politicians are often just a little too “slick”, a little bit too much “politically committed”, a little bit too much one-dimensional in their loyalty to their party. It turns many of the average voters off.

John Key is different. For starters, as mentioned above, he is not a “professional politician”, and this shows in the way he behaves. He comes across as straightforward, honest and sincere.

He successfully projects an image that says “I am currently here in this job because I genuinely wish to do the right thing for my country. I don’t really care much about politics for the sake of politics. Power and influence and making more money does not interest me. I already have plenty of money, so I am not in this for the salary. I had plenty of power, influence and satisfaction in my previous job, and I came here because I genuinely wish to help, because lots of people told me that I had something unique to offer my country.

“I am not interested in the old politics of the left and the right. That old duality belongs to history, to earlier centuries. I believe in the “new politics” of the twenty-first century. A new form of genuine consensus politics, where everybody works together for the common good. I see my role as being the facilitator of this “new politics”, bringing a diverse range of people together, for the common good.”

John might not have ever actually said this, but it is, I believe, a summing up of his personal political philosophy, even if unstated out loud.

And, the key thing is (pardon the terrible pun!), a lot of people believe him. A lot of the ordinary NZ voters buy into his basic message.

And, why not? He is obviously sincere in his own personal belief in his philosophy. It show, it is obvious.

Also, when he is faced with the difficult challenges of national tragedies, and there have been plenty….  the Pike River Mine disaster, the earthquakes, the casualties in Afghanistan, he has always come through as a straight-forward, straight-talking, honest and empathetic leader. His handling of each of these national tragedies has been superb.

Some of his political opponents, and the more cynical of the media, have sometimes more-or-less accused him of using these occasions to further his own popularity, by way of “favourable photo opportunities” and “sound bites”, but the average NZ public does not buy into this, he comes across as being so genuine, that they believe in him.

Any efforts by the likes of the Labour Party to criticise or adversely comment on this aspect of our PM have always rebounded on the people making the comments, as being attempts at political point-scoring and also as being mean-spirited.

It must be terribly frustrating for the Labour Party politicians, to be up against “Smiling John”. Contrast this with the field-day they had against Don Brash, when he was National Party leader, and made so many gaffs! Remember the walking of the plank!

There is something about politics, and public life in general. People get type-cast, into a certain type of mould. Past examples include David Lange as the clever orator (which he was) and also as the “defender of the poor and downtrodden”. Muldoon as the big bully (which he certainly was), and poor old Bill Rowling as “the mouse”, which he actually was not, but the label stuck, and he was doomed.

John Key has been extremely fortunate in that his type-casting has been mainly favourable, and his opponents have been unable to turn it around. They have tried very hard to do so. Labour politicians like Mallard have tried their best to re-align John’s image into that of the “smiling assassin”. They have attacked his personal integrity, they have hinted that he was involved in some dirty business during his currency-trading career.

But, apart from hard-core Labour supporters, the public are having none of it.

So, what is the image that the average Kiwi voter has of Smiling John?

I would sum it up as “local average bloke, made good”. By his own efforts. He was born poor, his mother was a widow, he grew up in a state-house, but he went out into the big wide world and became a very successful self-made man. In short, a modern-day fairy tale, with a happy ending. And, who can resist such a story, especially if it is one hundred percent true.

To many people, he embodies the kind of self-made success story that they themselves would love to aspire to. “There, but for the roll of fortune’s dice, goes I. That could just as easily be me.”

People identify with him. They do not identify with Phil Goff, Helen Clark, or even Bill English. Those professional politicians seem almost “alien” to many people, a breed apart, career politicians with their noses in the trough, and people resent them for that. “Who do they think they are? With all their airs and graces, they look down on us common folk.”

But not smiling John, he looks down on nobody. He is one of us, made good.

Can Labour do anything about all of this? Can they come up with a game-changing plan?

Probably not. These things move in natural cycles, just like National could not do anything to change the game in 1987, or in 2002, nor Labour in 1993. There is the simple fact that, in a three-year election cycle, it is really hard to throw out a first-term government after only three years.

There is also the sour taste of the “Clark legacy”. By 2008, too many voters came to resent “Queen Helen”, and they turned on her in decisive numbers. Many of them have not gotten over this yet.

Also, in the present case, there is the “Mr Nice Guy” factor, for the reasons that I have outlined above, and it would take a shift of monumental proportions to change this public perception of “Mr Nice Guy”.

The Reluctant Activist

I never did intend to become a political activist.

It sort of happened by chance.

Thirty years ago. 1981. The Muldoon years. Springbok tour. Think Big. Muldoon’s one-man-band bullying government, with all his crazy price freezes, wage freezes, rent freezes, freezes on government expenditure, and so on, and on.

Watching it all from the sidelines, I became so annoyed with it all, so incensed, that I just had to do something about it! I had to do my bit to get rid of this monster, who was ruining my country.

The final straw for me was when our local Nelson MP split off from the Labour Party, and declared himself independent.

I decided to act. I joined the Labour Party, and for most of 1981 I spent my Saturday mornings doing door-knocking canvassing for the Party. I can recall that we covered the whole of the large suburb of Tahunaniu, week after week, with our red ribbons pinned to our lapels, and by election-time we had canvassed over 90 percent of the Nelson electorate, on behalf of the new Labour candidate, Phillip Wollaston.

Well, we won back the seat for Labour, by a margin of about 900 votes, but Muldoon somehow scraped back into power, largely thanks to the provincial and rural backlash against the violent protests during the Springbok Tour.

We were faced with another three long years of the hell of a continuing Muldoon government. These was nothing more that could be done for the next three years, other than prepare for 1984.

Which we did.

By 1984, we were more determined than ever, and so was most of New Zealand.

Muldoon was swept away by the David Lange-led Labour Party, in the four-week snap-election campaign of July 1984, and “the rest is history”, as they say. We held the Nelson seat, with a hugely increased majority of over 3000 votes.

My part in that resounding win in the Nelson Electorate was that I created, and ran, a full-blown “election-day computer system”, where we canvassed the whole electorate, entering the names, addresses and phone numbers of all known supporters into a database, and then on Election Day, we had scrutineers in every polling booth, writing down the Electoral Roll numbers of everybody who voted, on little slips of paper that were taken back to our headquarters, and the names of all supporters who had voted were crossed off of our supporters lists.

Then, twice during the afternoon, the remaining people, who were not crossed off, were phoned and reminded to vote, and asked if they needed any help with transport to vote, or maybe they needed to cast a Special Vote.

Well, my system worked, brilliantly, it probably increased the victory margin by hundreds of votes, and I was well pleased.

I was doubly pleased later on election night, when we had our huge election-night victory party. I recall it that the party was at the Nelson Underwater Club clubrooms, and we all got drunk, cheering each result from around the country as it came it, and celebrating the new government.

“Goodbye, Pork Pie” indeed.

The days and weeks that followed were exciting times. The currency crisis. The handover of government crisis. The toppling of Muldoon from the National Party leadership. The nuclear-ship visits row with the USA, leading to the ANZUS crisis. David Lange debating the nuclear issue at Oxford University. The French sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Our new government’s sweeping policy changes. The lifting of Muldoon’s various freezes and heavy-handed policies.

Hardly a week went by without some new excitement.

I had, at some stage along the way, joined in the inner circle of the local Labour Party, joining the Electorate Committee, and (later on) being a delegate at two of the Labour Party conferences.

In 1987, we repeated the whole performance, I ran the computer Election-Day System again, this time a much more sophisticated system, on proper IBM-clone PCs this time (1984 was done on Commodore 64’s, believe it or not!)

We scored an even bigger victory, and it looked like the Lange Labour Government would be around for a long time.

And then, the wheels fell off, in a spectacular fashion.

This is not the place to debate all the rights and wrongs of what happened. The asset sales, the gutting of the railways and the Post Office, etc. The Telecom and Postbank sales. The BNZ collapse and sale. The 1987 financial crisis.

It’s all history now. But, bit by bit, it all led to my gradual disillusionment with politics in general, and with the Labour Government in particular.

By the time that Mike Moore took over the leadership, I had had a gutsfull. I was ready to walk away from it all.

I hung on until after the 1990 election, hoping that things might turn for the better, but it just got worse and worse, culminating in the Bolger-led National Party thumping us at the election.

Phillip Woollaston had decided, at the very last minute, to stand aside. He had only intended to stay for one more term in order to support his mate Geoffery Palmer, and when Geoffery walked, Phillip walked also.

So, we had to choose a new Labour candidate at very short notice. A process that I took part in.

For me, the absolute final straw came during one of the candidate selection meetings. It was a “closed” meeting for party members only, just prior to the actual selection meeting, with all of the hopefuls lined up at the front of the hall, answering questions from party members.

It had already emerged who the favourite was, John Blincoe, a Wellington-based lawyer whose “local credentials” were that he had grown up in Nelson.

I asked them all a question. I asked them, that, in view of all the failed attempts in the past, by governments of both major parties, to do something really game-changing about the unemployment situation, all of the failed job-training and job-creation schemes, none of which had made any material difference, did they have any game-changing ideas of what to do about unemployment?

Because, what we had already tried had obviously not worked, so maybe some more radical option should be looked at, and what might that “more radical” option be?

Well, it was like they never actually listened properly to my question. One after the other, they all parroted out a litany of support for the old (failed) policies. They would try harder with more job training. They would implement some more of the same kind of job-support and job-creation programs. And so on. The same tired old failed policies of the past.

In disgust, I turned and walked away.

At that moment, in a flash of realization, I finally got the message. The message being, that I was wasting my time here, working for positive change from within a political party. Such places cannot, by their very nature, create real, meaningful positive change in society.

Real meaningful positive change usually happens despite the actions of the political parties, not because of it! Real genuine change actually comes from within each individual person, not from some political party.

The parties are, mainly, about feathering someone’s nest, protecting someone’s status quo.

I stuck around until after the election, because I had made a commitment to do so. I ran the local Labour Party Election-Day Database system for the final time, and then I walked away, for good.

In 1992, I moved to Wellington, and a new life, so I was gone from Nelson before the 1993 election.

I never returned to politics, not for over twenty years.

I had had my “decade of political activism”, right through the 1980’s. It had been exciting at the time. I certainly do not regret any minute of what I personally did during those activism times. If was a lot of fun, it was a great learning experience, it was incredible at the time, but then it was time to move on. It was time to focus on a fresh goal, the goal of changing myself, from within, and not trying to change “the world” from without.

















I never did intend to become a political activist.

It sort of happened by chance.

Thirty years ago. 1981. The Muldoon years. Springbok tour. Think Big. Muldoon’s one-man-band bullying government, with all his crazy price freezes, wage freezes, rent freezes, freezes on government expenditure, and so on, and on.

Watching it all from the sidelines, I became so annoyed with it all, so incensed, that I just had to do something about it! I had to do my bit to get rid of this monster, who was ruining my country.

The final straw for me was when our local Nelson MP split off from the Labour Party, and declared himself independent.

I decided to act. I joined the Labour Party, and for most of 1981 I spent my Saturday mornings doing door-knocking canvassing for the Party. I can recall that we covered the whole of the large suburb of Tahunaniu, week after week, with our red ribbons pinned to our lapels, and by election-time we had canvassed over 90 percent of the Nelson electorate, on behalf of the new Labour candidate, Phillip Wollaston.

Well, we won back the seat for Labour, by a margin of about 900 votes, but Muldoon somehow scraped back into power, largely thanks to the provincial and rural backlash against the violent protests during the Springbok Tour.

We were faced with another three long years of the hell of a continuing Muldoon government. These was nothing more that could be done for the next three years, other than prepare for 1984.

Which we did.

By 1984, we were more determined than ever, and so was most of New Zealand.

Muldoon was swept away by the David Lange-led Labour Party, in the four-week snap-election campaign of July 1984, and “the rest is history”, as they say. We held the Nelson seat, with a hugely increased majority of over 3000 votes.

My part in that resounding win in the Nelson Electorate was that I created, and ran, a full-blown “election-day computer system”, where we canvassed the whole electorate, entering the names, addresses and phone numbers of all known supporters into a database, and then on Election Day, we had scrutineers in every polling booth, writing down the Electoral Roll numbers of everybody who voted, on little slips of paper that were taken back to our headquarters, and the names of all supporters who had voted were crossed off of our supporters lists.

Then, twice during the afternoon, the remaining people, who were not crossed off, were phoned and reminded to vote, and asked if they needed any help with transport to vote, or maybe they needed to cast a Special Vote.

Well, my system worked, brilliantly, it probably increased the victory margin by hundreds of votes, and I was well pleased.

I was doubly pleased later on election night, when we had our huge election-night victory party. I recall it that the party was at the Nelson Underwater Club clubrooms, and we all got drunk, cheering each result from around the country as it came it, and celebrating the new government.

“Goodbye, Pork Pie” indeed.

The days and weeks that followed were exciting times. The currency crisis. The handover of government crisis. The toppling of Muldoon from the National Party leadership. The nuclear-ship visits row with the USA, leading to the ANZUS crisis. David Lange debating the nuclear issue at Oxford University. The French sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Our new government’s sweeping policy changes. The lifting of Muldoon’s various freezes and heavy-handed policies.

Hardly a week went by without some new excitement.

I had, at some stage along the way, joined in the inner circle of the local Labour Party, joining the Electorate Committee, and (later on) being a delegate at two of the Labour Party conferences.

In 1987, we repeated the whole performance, I ran the computer Election-Day System again, this time a much more sophisticated system, on proper IBM-clone PCs this time (1984 was done on Commodore 64’s, believe it or not!)

We scored an even bigger victory, and it looked like the Lange Labour Government would be around for a long time.

And then, the wheels fell off, in a spectacular fashion.

This is not the place to debate all the rights and wrongs of what happened. The asset sales, the gutting of the railways and the Post Office, etc. The Telecom and Postbank sales. The BNZ collapse and sale. The 1987 financial crisis.

It’s all history now. But, bit by bit, it all led to my gradual disillusionment with politics in general, and with the Labour Government in particular.

By the time that Mike Moore took over the leadership, I had had a gutsfull. I was ready to walk away from it all.

I hung on until after the 1990 election, hoping that things might turn for the better, but it just got worse and worse, culminating in the Bolger-led National Party thumping us at the election.

Phillip Woollaston had decided, at the very last minute, to stand aside. He had only intended to stay for one more term in order to support his mate Geoffery Palmer, and when Geoffery walked, Phillip walked also.

So, we had to choose a new Labour candidate at very short notice. A process that I took part in.

For me, the absolute final straw came during one of the candidate selection meetings. It was a “closed” meeting for party members only, just prior to the actual selection meeting, with all of the hopefuls lined up at the front of the hall, answering questions from party members.

It had already emerged who the favourite was, John Blincoe, a Wellington-based lawyer whose “local credentials” were that he had grown up in Nelson.

I asked them all a question. I asked them, that, in view of all the failed attempts in the past, by governments of both major parties, to do something really game-changing about the unemployment situation, all of the failed job-training and job-creation schemes, none of which had made any material difference, did they have any game-changing ideas of what to do about unemployment?

Because, what we had already tried had obviously not worked, so maybe some more radical option should be looked at, and what might that “more radical” option be?

Well, it was like they never actually listened properly to my question. One after the other, they all parroted out a litany of support for the old (failed) policies. They would try harder with more job training. They would implement some more of the same kind of job-support and job-creation programs. And so on. The same tired old failed policies of the past.

In disgust, I turned and walked away.

At that moment, in a flash of realization, I finally got the message. The message being, that I was wasting my time here, working for positive change from within a political party. Such places cannot, by their very nature, create real, meaningful positive change in society.

Real meaningful positive change usually happens despite the actions of the political parties, not because of it! Real genuine change actually comes from within each individual person, not from some political party.

The parties are, mainly, about feathering someone’s nest, protecting someone’s status quo.

I stuck around until after the election, because I had made a commitment to do so. I ran the local Labour Party Election-Day Database system for the final time, and then I walked away, for good.

In 1992, I moved to Wellington, and a new life, so I was gone from Nelson before the 1993 election.

I never returned to politics, not for over twenty years.

I had had my “decade of political activism”, right through the 1980’s. It had been exciting at the time. I certainly do not regret any minute of what I personally did during those activism times. If was a lot of fun, it was a great learning experience, it was incredible at the time, but then it was time to move on. It was time to focus on a fresh goal, the goal of changing myself, from within, and not trying to change “the world” from without.