Nickie Muir: Better times within our grasp

Nickie Muir.

I'm holding out great hopes for 2017. Seriously. Not nuclear meltdown between Trump and Putin or any other catastrophe.

This is the year that New Zealanders, all of us - not just a political elite or the paid trade unionists or the hacks and honchos of the business world - take an active interest in a democracy as something that belongs to us all.

Is it possible that instead of just throwing a giant spanner in the works of "the way things are" because we don't see ourselves as being part of the decision-making process anymore, we lean in for "the way things could be".

Where the British have opted for Brexit, possibly doing themselves out of the main source of income they've had for decades, the finance sector, and leaving it open for the truly European hard negotiators like Germany to pick up the rewards; New Zealand could look at what we actually want rather than rue the missing nose off our own spited face.

Where North Americans threw up against the establishment by choosing someone who has then chosen men of the machinery of the establishment to be his closest advisers, we could choose leaders who will serve our best interests.

How a Wall Street tycoon, a paranoid army general and an ex-CEO of one of the most corrupt corporations in history, can understand and help create a world where a whole generation of working poor can find meaningful work, is utterly mystifying.

Employing a man like Stephen Bannon, editor of Brietbart News, a site famous for such enlightened headings as "Would you Rather your Child had Feminism or Cancer?" as a senior adviser. Dark genius.

Like shaking the establishment out of its ennui by giving it back the status quo on steroids, except the poor will still lose. Passing pleasure in people power followed by lasting financial pain.

We should be taking out full-page ads in the Guardian and the New York Times inviting refugees from the lands of crazy to come and establish a working democracy that allows individual talent to flourish while still addressing gross inequity and the corruption that it invariably breeds.

We could discourage the climate deniers. Not because any of us can prove them wrong but because if they are, and we listen to them, it will be too late to achieve a working economy by the time we've worked it out.

But we won't ban them because we'd be the kind of democracy that always accepts debate and those who can think against the current.

It's not like I can't see the problems that any utopian wannabes have faced historically.

Hey I've read Lord of the Flies, it's just that watching the last election, I felt we were slowly turning into a banana republic floating in the Southern Ocean without the benefit of bananas, based around the cult of personality.

With Key gone we may be forced back on policy and that's got to be a good thing for democracy. 2017: Can't wait.