KEY POINTS:
How auspicious! And propitious! Well, slightly auspicious. And sort of propitious.
Because it's 8/8/08 here first. It won't be 8/8/08 in Beijing, where it counts, until four hours after we started it. And by tomorrow, 9/8/08, which also reaches us first, all our auspicion and all our propition will have flown out the window, or gone down the drain.
Which rather tends to prove - as Bill English and (Dr) Lockwood Smith know only too well - that luck is very much a matter of time and place.
If you're unlucky enough to be caught shooting the breeze in the wrong place at the wrong time, then it's quids in you'll end up dog tucker, leak fodder, embarrassingly hoist on your own blow hard.
And it serves you right, to be fair. Those who blow hot air can't complain if they get singed. Nor grumble when they find themselves coughing up gobs of grovel in a smog of outrage.
Politics is like athletics, really. What goes round, comes round. And the political Olympics are always a marathon - a never-ending, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey relay where the baton of shame is passed from hand to hand as soon as someone stumbles.
So Winston fades and Bill takes the lead. Oh, look! There's Lockwood on his shoulder, heading for the tape. The commentators scream, the crowd goes wild. Who will win the Sold Medal? Frenzy fills the air. The fumes of fury thicken.
"See!" cough the indignant. "They do have a secret agenda!! They do want to sell Kiwibank!!! It's an outrage!!!"
Or, more precisely, it's this week's outrage. There'll be another outrage next week. There'll be other politicians in the starting blocks, halfway through the Olympics, ready to sprint towards exoneration, happy only that we'd rather watch the shot putters than put shots on them.
By then, Kiwibank will be but a memory. But while it's not - and with the enviable pageantry of the Beijing Festival of Steroids about to begin - let us pose a heretical question. Why not sell Kiwibank, for crying out loud? It's not like it's Auckland Airport or anything. It's just a bank! And if they did sell it they might have a closing-down sale first, with specials on money - 25 per cent off $100 bills; two $10s for the price of one, that sort of thing.
Come to think of it, why stop at Kiwibank? Let's sell the Post Office too. And the ACC. And the b****y Corrections Department. Yes, especially the b****y Corrections Department.
Couldn't run a cellphone network in a prison, that lot. So sell 'em!!! Sell 'em all!! Sell 'em to the Chinese. They've already got all the power poles and wires and substations and meter boxes in the whole of flaming Wellington!!!! And they didn't need a secret agenda to buy those!! Just a nice, friendly gummint ready to cut a deal.
So let's sell the entire bureaucracy to Mr Phing Ah Me Bob from Hong Kong. Then he'll be his own best customer.
And we'll have ginormous pots of money!!!!!
So much money we could stage our own Olympics and build our own Bird's Nest Stadium. No flowers, of course. Just native grasses. In fact, we could build our Bird's Nest stadium out of native grasses. Like the birds do.
What a unifying opportunity that would be. Plucky Kiwis from throughout Outer Roa making a patriotic pilgrimage to our Olympic nest, each bearing in a loyal hand their own special twig or straw.
And what an architectural wonder we could build with their gifts!!! Twenty storeys of twigs and straws soaring over Aotea Square like a giant apartment block for moas. (Except they're extinct - as are the buyers of apartments in apartment blocks, alas). No matter. You get the point. If we sold Kiwibank - and all the policy analysts at the Ministry of Garden Ornaments too - it would be us, not the Chinese, who had the dosh to stage a sporting spectacle and the world would be looking here, not there.
Better still, it would be able to see what it was looking at. The world would see our happy peasants removing their pyjamas - as instructed in the etiquette booklet issued by our Office of Capital Spiritual Civilisation Construction Commission - in a clean, green land neath a clear blue sky.
Come to Auckland - where the traffic never moves - and the world would see an opening ceremony, its crowd all sheathed in dark hose fine, feet properly apart in the recommended V, each shaking hands with visitors from abroad for no more than three seconds while scrupulously avoiding any questions about age, marital status, experience and personal beliefs.
And as we, the twig people, left our great stadium, trailing the world in our wake, we would turn to each other with joy unconfined and ask, as a nation euphoric, "Kiwibank? What Kiwibank?"
