Dialogue: A nation devoted to trivial pursuits

I paid my first visit at the weekend to the (relatively) new Westgate shopping centre at the top of the North-western Motorway. I shan't be going back.

Considering all the environmental and resource management laws we have on our books, it sure beats me how a monstrosity like that could have been parked on our landscape.

Whoever allowed the planning consents to go through ought to be sacked. If it was the Waitakere City Council, the place, perhaps, should be called Harveygate.

This is urban blight writ large - a series of bleak, unattractive, barnlike structures (including, of course, the big red one) scattered over at least half a square kilometre and surrounded by hectares of barren black carparks. The complex is redolent of a heavy industrial area but, if anything, even less attractive.

The visual horror of the vast yellow and black chequered box that is the multiplex cinema makes The Warehouse look positively benign.

If this is the western gate to Waitakere City, it is doubtful that anyone would seek to venture any further.

The place has only one redeeming feature - it is the site of a fascinating craft shop. I am not one to mall-crawl or browse in shops, unless it is a bookstore. If I go shopping, it is to buy something I need or want and I'm in and out as fast as I can find it and pay for it.

But this shop, not all that big, held my attention for over an hour as I meandered among the scores of little booths offering every sort of craftwork you can imagine, from hand-painted handbasins to intricate little ornaments, leatherwork, woodwork, knitting, jewellery, pottery and glassware - you name it, it's there.

At the weekend, too, I read that someone is proposing to build not one but two shopping centres in Newmarket containing between them some 500 new shops. Now I would have thought that Auckland needs 500 more shops like it needs 500 more cars.

My observation of retailing - gleaned from friends in the game and from the tenor of the vast amount of advertising in the Herald - is that Auckland retailers are already doing it hard.

It's no wonder Auckland is called the City of Sales for it seems that unless most retailers are constantly having sales they're doing a starve. Indeed, in some of those at Westgate on Sunday you could have fired a shotgun down any of the aisles and hit nothing but unsold stock.

I know that the favourite pastime of New Zealanders these days, God help us, is shopping, but there is only a certain amount of disposable income to be disposed of and it would appear that already it isn't enough to keep Auckland's existing retailers - particularly the small, independent operators - in profit.

It seems that the only businesses making money out of retailing these days are the mall owners and other landlords, a breed who make bankers, oil companies, chemists, car dealers and real estate agencies look veritably philanthropic.

But even they must be hurting a bit, for there are few malls in Auckland today which don't have a number of empty shops sticking out like gaps in a set of unkempt teeth.

But what puzzles me is why we, blessed as we are with one of the most naturally beautiful and bountiful countries on Earth, have become so trivially minded as to spend so much of our time in an artificial environment buying things we don't need with money we don't have (our credit card debt a head is, apparently, among the highest in the world).

That petty-mindedness, of course, is not confined to those who spend most of their leisure hours crawling in malls or browsing in boutiques. It has infected our whole society, from Parliament through local government, health and welfare agencies, the education system and community groups, and has spawned a gaggle of quangos and single-issue pressure groups whose "we know best" bleatings are enough to make even an indifferent man sick.

Nothing more perfectly illustrates this than the story on the front page on Tuesday about the kerfuffle overr two kids and six adults becaming ill after eating saveloys given as a time-honoured treat by a Christchurch butcher.

This practice has been going on since I was a child - and that wasn't yesterday - yet the moment something like this happens petty bureaucrats are screaming for it to be stopped. How small-minded can you get?

My reaction was one of astonishment - not at the blubberings of the bureaucrats, but that there was still a butcher in New Zealand who gave savs to kids as a treat.

Now there's a guy who still has the big picture.

* garthgeorge@herald.co.nz