Deborah Coddington: Losing the plot won't solve this country's problems

Quartermaster Sergeant Coddington was 23 when he left for war. Photo / Supplied

At dawn tomorrow we pause and remember with enormous gratitude the Anzacs.

Many of my generation's parents are still marching, though dwindling in numbers. If not, we honour them by wearing their medals, not over our hearts but on the other side of our chests, as is the protocol.

Sorting through Dad's papers recently, I came across a carefully folded telegram, sent to Trentham Army Camp on January 4, 1940, immediately before the First Echelon of the New Zealand Army departed for the Middle East.

Addressed to Quartermaster Sergeant Coddington, Hawke's Bay Rifles, it simply read: "God Speed Safe Return + Mum Dad +." The paucity of emotion brings a lump to my throat, more than if this were a flowery, over-emotional farewell.

My father did not come home for another 3 1/2 years, after driving a tank all over the desert, and with him came a fierce determination to succeed against all odds, a take-no-prisoners attitude and a fiery temper he never controlled. That war must have been truly horrible and the participants, from a young age, saw things that changed them forever.

How could it not? Dad was 23 when he went away. He and Mum were married on final leave. She was 18 and, when he left, she joined the Air Force and became qualified to repair instruments for planes. By today's standards, they were children.

That generation had such a tough start and, after the war, it wasn't any easier, so they raised their own children - we so-called baby-boomers - in a manner that could only be described as "spare the rod and spoil the child".

But we had freedom. The Anzacs had fought for it and our generation grew up running wild. Sure, we had some terrible accidents but we learned to take responsibility for our mistakes.

I learned from my father, who spoke his mind (and how), that having an opinion won't make you popular, but it made you an individualist, and you had to take responsibility for the judgment of your own mind. In other words, don't worry what others think of you.

Given cigarettes to calm nerves during the war, he could never kick the habit and died of lung cancer at 69.

His was an anti-greed generation, in that you had no automatic right to that which you had not earned. This value has gone out the window as we see corporate welfare wreak havoc upon the country and crony-phoney capitalism coupled with middle-class welfare bloat the borrow-and-hope classes in leafy suburbia.

But, in some ways, it was a bad generation. Incest, paedophilia and domestic violence were seldom dealt with by the courts. We averted our eyes whereas now the perpetrators are convicted. Homophobia was commonplace.

So was the diggers' fight worth it?

Last Saturday, Business Roundtable boss Roger Kerr told 3News we're one crisis away from becoming the next Portugal; we've "seriously lost the plot". Poppycock. If you search the Roundtable website, they've said we've lost the plot 15 times since 1996.

I prefer the comfort and optimism of Ronald Reagan's inauguration words: "The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away ... In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.

"From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"

Reagan was talking about America, "the last bastion of freedom", but New Zealand, too, is a liberated country and no matter how difficult, we must never surrender to hopelessness. Fighting talk, not losing plots, is what's needed when the chips are down. Think Winston Churchill.

Life, for all the tragedies it throws at us, is still wonderful and worth living to the utmost. Yes, the diggers' battle certainly was worth it.

So thank you, Anzacs, and thank you, Dad.