Jim Hopkins: $250m a week...the real bane of our lives

With a possible double-dip recession looming, New Zealand has bigger issues than Robin Bain. Photo / Richard Robinson

Robin Bain is innocent. No, he's not. Yes, he is. He's not! He is! Not! Is! Not, not, not! Is, is, is!

Oh, dear; once more into the breech, dear friends, full of sound and jury, signifying nothing.

Certainly in the sense that nothing's changed. Because nothing has. The people who were murdered are still dead. The verdict still stands. We are where we were.

Except now we have a story, a big story, less a cause celebre and more a cause macabre. One man who wasn't in court has defended another who couldn't be there.

That man will never be able to defend himself, which may explain why hear-say evidence has been so deftly used to represent him as the classic post-feminist villain.

At least now he has a posthumous champion. But that will not alter the official outcome one iota. Our courts don't acquit dead people - especially those who have never been charged.

Needless to say, there have been predictable responses to the programme. Detective Inspector Karam has called it flimsy, insubstantial, full of unreliable evidence. Some will say, he should know. Others will say, "Good on ya, Joe!"

The lawyer paid by legal aid to defend David Bain wants a right of reply. Fair enough, sir. Go for it. Use some of your considerable fee to pay for another programme, or some ads putting forward your side of the story - again.

Maybe, in order to fairly and finally determine David Bain's claim for compensation, Simon Power could bring Paul the Psychic Octopus here.

Paul would solve the case. He's got all the World Cup games right. Give him a couple of tanks with a photo on each and turn him loose. Case closed. Everyone back to their own beds. Fat chance, you'd have to say. It's not going to happen.

We'll just twitter on for a while, mad starlings in the scandal tree, until some other outrage distracts us. As it surely will.

But, increasingly of late, the disquieting thought has occurred that there is really only one story in Outer Roa. It's a thought reinforced this week by news that we may be sliding down Part 2 of a double-dip recession.

Whatever we are preoccupied by, wharves or sheds or refugees, farms or forensics, there is only one issue about which we should be exercised. Every day we debate some matter or other, always with great intent and intensity, the meter's running. There's an elephant in the room, folks, so big the room is now in the elephant.

We're borrowing $250 million just to stay afloat in our leaky boat. That's the elephant. By some mysterious happenstance, Bill English has got hold of Shane Jones' credit card and is putting everything on it.

Heaven alone knows where this dosh is coming from. Probably China; they've got $2.4 trillion in foreign reserves, enough to buy every Crafar farm in the entire universe. So, in all likelihood, this week's $250 million came from China, just like last week's and the week before.

Perhaps there's a secret factory in Dr Russel Normal's favourite place, Tibet, where used yuans are sent to be pulped and pounded, mushed and mashed, before re-emerging as crisp New Zealand dollars, all shiney and new and heading our way to prevent food riots and nationwide outbreaks of Greekness. We don't want to be the Athens of the antipodes, gracious, no!

Which should, in theory, moderate our considerable angst about the possible sale of the Crafar farms to a Chinese consortium. Impoverished we may be, squatting on the world's footpath with a beggar's bowl in front of us and a note saying, "poor country needs $250 million a week just to stay alive" but we still don't like foreigners buying our dirt.

Well, we don't like some foreigners buying it. Apparently the Germans own a couple of whopping Southland farms and a Harvard University pension fund owns another biggie in Otago. And we haven't got our teats in a tangle about either of those acquisitions.

Perhaps because the Germans and the Americans aren't, umm, errr, how can we put this, you know, Chinese. If so, perhaps we should bite the pullet and accept our livestock's on the block - along with almost everything else.

'Cos if they don't get the farms, the Chinese will just buy LandCorp instead, oh, and the Overseas Investment Office and Dargaville and Queens Wharf and the ARC (yes, please!) and anything else they fancy.

Because we're broke and they're not. They're lending us $250 million a week, not the other way round. We're the ones with the sinking funds.

We've been living on borrowed crime and that's diverting. But next time you hear somebody binding in the marshes about this, that or t'other, ask yourself one simple question.

"Is this as important as $250 million a week?" And if your answer's "no" then don't waste your breath. Leave the jabbering to others. Because that's all it is.