Bruce Bisset: Plenty of crazy lessons from 2015

Bruce Bisset

LIFE'S lessons are a collection of instructive moments bound in years, whose content we weigh as memorable or forgettable - or plain mundane - as we prepare for the next instalment.

So what, dear reader, have we learnt of late? Well, unless you're sunk in the mire of apathy, quite a lot, really.

For example, that there's no such thing as a final deadline on financial close for the proposed Ruataniwha water storage scheme - unless the regional council suddenly develops a conscience and stops funding the expensive apparatus of HBRIC's underperforming sales team. But they won't, will they? No, setting aside the excuse of ongoing appeals, this drain on ratepayer funds is pre-ordained to keep wading along until the magical number of cubecs are pre-sold, the dam finally constructed, and the select few large in-zone landholders make their millions onselling the rights.

We've learned the Local Government Commission has no clue what may or may not be good for a region but reforms solely in accord with the neoliberal "big is good" mantra - which, much to our credit, we good citizens of greater Hawke's Bay staunchly rejected. Mind you, given the cowboy attitudes prevalent in CHB and the less-demonstrative but somewhat needy folk of Wairoa, some boundary revision may have been a good thing; a fact all mayors and chairs have acknowledged in promising to "unite" to do better - a promise they need reminding of up to and at this year's local elections.

Nationally we've learned telling porkies or being caught out doing dodgy deals may win you some time on the naughty chair but it won't keep you out of Cabinet for long or stop you being prime minister, and that not being able to remember or never saying anything unequivocally is not so much misleading people as sinning by omission - and sins are not so much unlawful as immoral, so it doesn't matter. For instance the TPPA wasn't going to increase drug charges or allow more foreign ownership. But, flip-flop, it will (and much else).

GM-Free might give the Bay an edge, but not if government can help it; apparently organic niche produce is not the "premium brand" National supports; for that, read Fonterra. Don't start me. Also that charter schools and private prisons are generally failures, but that won't stop millions being paid out to reward them for failing; that even without gutting the RMA, taking away a council's rights to restrict tree-felling results in mature kauri being chopped to make way for sun-decks; and that we need more offshore oil-fields to fuel the cars roaring along the new motorways we're busy building in defiance of climate change. On that subject we're told technology will save us, so we don't actually need to do anything except give lip-service to the COP21 agreement; we certainly don't need to reform our pastoral agriculture even though all advice is that we must.

We're learning our police and legal system are now fully politicised, with illegal warrants and searches of journalists' homes as simple as a phone call from a mate to arrange, while exposing a flaw in our firearms regulations will draw a similar search and a charge to boot; and that judges are, in their own words, inclined to "liberal interpretation" of extradition laws when deciding whether internet moguls should be thrown to Hollywood wolves.
Gosh, I haven't even got to the overseas section - Trump! Isis! Migrants! - and I'm out of space.

But suffice to say 2015 has nailed down that it's a crazy world out there, and getting crazier daily. So brace yourselves, because here comes another year of it.

#Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.