SINCE moving into the caravan a month ago, we have moved from Gonville to our piece of land up the river, then to outer Brunswick for a 21st, back to the land, vacated to the eco-village for the tail-end of Cyclone Debbie, back to the land where we hardly had time to dry out before heading for Hastings just as ex-Cyclone Cook bore down on the east coast of the North Island ...
Life is certainly not boring in a caravan.
The thing about living in a small space is that you have to take along only what you use.
The LPG cooker, radio and LED lights run off a battery came in handy when the power was cut to Hastings during the storm.
It's hard to have a landline in a caravan, but with chargers for a couple of smartphones and a laptop running Linux and wifi, it means I can stay in touch and write and send a column anywhere in New Zealand.
I interviewed Auckland Green Party candidate Chloe Swarbrick when she visited Whanganui last week.
The fact that she had just been placed at 13 on the Greens' party list piqued my interest - I had been Green Party foundation member No13, and I'd held that number until I declined to renew my membership when the Greens left the Alliance.
I call myself an anarcho-green capitalist these days. Politically, it means staying as far away from the state as possible while living lightly on the Earth and managing capital.
One was as a member of the Green Party and the Alliance Whanganui candidate in 1993. Another path was through academia, starting with environmental planning before changing to straight geography, and studying what people do in their environment rather than what they should do. I combined this with work and travel.
Come in, No 13: Chloe Swarbrick, a Green Party candidate in Auckland, speaks at a meeting in Whanganui this month.
Chloe Swarbrick had come in a creditable third in the 2016 Auckland mayoralty race. A qualified lawyer and a businesswoman, she had first caught my attention by questioning the mandatory bicycle helmet regulations while putting forward policies aimed at promoting the greater use of bikes as part of Auckland's transport system.
After the mandatory cycle helmet regulations came in under Labour, the number of cyclists halved and the number of traffic incidents involving cyclists doubled, Chloe claimed. She pointed out that only Australia and New Zealand have made helmets compulsory.
Chloe had questioned the health implications (head-lice) of helmet sharing as part of bike-sharing schemes. This had produced a "moral panic", she said. "Chloe wants to ban helmets and kill our children" was a reaction she faced.
I had long held the belief that the mandatory helmet law was more to do with the compulsory consumption of polystyrene, much of which ends up in the sea, than with public safety.
I put it to Chloe that the mandatory helmet law was originally used by Michael Cullen to achieve economic growth for Helen Clark's Labour government, but she skilfully batted the question away.
Earlier I watched her answer a question on cannabis law reform. "The Greens stand for legalisation, not decriminalisation, but you should contact our cannabis spokesperson, Julie-Anne Genter," she answered, putting forward policy I had helped develop in the 1990s.
I quizzed her on one of my hobby-horses, tobacco taxation.
"What right does the state have to manipulate an individual's behaviour when it is at no cost to the state?" I asked.
"The answer to that is contextual," she replied and told me how distressed she had been seeing her father smoke.
She's smart -- that's why the main political parties courted her after the mayoralty election.
Chloe will be 23 during the coming election. With all "five foot two" radiating energy and honesty, she will do well for the Greens in Auckland.
The Green Party gets its vote from the centre of the big cities -- it is an urban phenomenon. In the countryside most voters still see the Greens as eco-fascists.
When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller. In his spare time he is co-chairman of the Whanganui Musicians' Club.
