KEY POINTS:
More bad news on the economic front: most of us aren't taking the recession seriously enough.
It seems that despite our best efforts in the media to send the nation into a fearful, depressive spin, cheerfulness keeps breaking through, as Leonard Cohen would say.
According to a 3 News poll, only 5 per cent of us are seriously worried about losing our jobs, and just 35 per cent have cut our spending. The other profligate 65 per cent aren't spending any less and, in some cases, are spending more. (Including me, I have to say. With a mortgage, growing teenagers and a house in need of repair, I have certain inescapable realities.)
A few of my fellow spending sinners were captured by TV3's cameras at the weekend, displaying a reckless disregard for the impending economic downpour by dining al fresco at a central Auckland eatery where there was, alarmingly, no "skimping on the hollandaise sauce". Didn't they know the sky was about to fall in? Why weren't they at home eating last night's leftovers and tending to their vege gardens? "I guess I'm still waiting for it to affect me," said one woman, almost apologetically.
Was she seriously deluded, or just getting on with her life? After all, as TV3's poll showed, the vast majority of New Zealanders won't lose their jobs or suffer any significant ill effects from the recession (which is why they're not all that worried). So who would they help by staying home and pretending that they're hurting too?
A financial expert told 3News that we should be cultivating a "nice balance" between pessimism and optimism.
I've no idea what that might mean. Should I feel guilty that I replaced my clapped-out dishwasher and fridge last week, or virtuous because I bought Fisher & Paykel, thereby doing my bit for a local company that hasn't always shown the same loyalty to its New Zealand workers?
But it's a sign of the times that we should feel even the slightest twinge of guilt about this. Have we really left the wild, guilt-free days of excessive consumption behind for a new kind of economic asceticism? And if so, is any of this really likely to help the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed, and those others who stand to suffer most from this crisis?
It would be nice to think there is an upside to the global crisis and that it will go deeper than a little belt-tightening by the well-off.
Certainly, church leaders see the recession as an opportunity for New Zealanders to get back to old-fashioned values, like self-sacrifice rather than self-gratification.
"There is a consensus that we have been a bit greedy and individualistic," the acting president of the Christian Council of Social Services, Ruby Duncan, told the Herald. "People have been out for what they can get and we haven't stopped to think about how getting what we want impacts on families, communities and society. So for me there is an opportunity here to look at that and say, what does it take to have a healthy society? We don't want to go through this recession and come out worse off as a society. We want to come out healthier, having learned some things and realigned some of our values."
But a change of values might be asking too much of people who have no real incentive to change - like the former head of Merrill Lynch, who handed out US$4 billion ($7.9 billion) of bonuses to his financial geniuses as his ailing firm was being bought by the Bank of America, and then spent US$1 million renovating his office as salaries and jobs were being cut.
We may still get such obscenities in the new climate, but at least they won't be met by the same unquestioning acceptance of former years.
The crisis has done us a favour by allowing us to challenge the primacy of the free-market model and the values that have too long governed business and government - the kind of values which have seen us tolerate widening gaps between rich and poor.
It's done some necessary damage to what the Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman describes as "the innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolise men who are making a lot of money, and assume they know what they're doing".
Let's hope it's also put paid to the endless moralising from the rich about the supposed deficiencies of the undeserving poor.
I don't know that we'll see real change come out of this. It took more than greed to get us here. Gandhi's seven deadly social sins seem particularly apt: "politics without principle, wealth without work, commerce without morality, pleasure without conscience, education without character, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice".
But at least we can now start to have a conversation about the things that really matter, about those institutions and relationships that nurture us - family, friends and community.
* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com
