Our haven in world of chaos

Chris Northover PHOTO/FILE

We have a son in Adelaide, along with three grandchildren, so we often speak on the phone or Skype. For a while there my favourite joke was to say something like "It's really hot here. We are expecting a heat wave - the temperature is likely to get to 25 degrees." To enjoy this joke it was important to have watched the weather report - not our one, but the prediction for Adelaide, which TV One conveniently provides.

It is not uncommon for the temperature in South Australia to reach the low40s and rising, lately, to the mid-40s. So high, in fact that is no longer a joking matter - or a point that needs to be made. Air too thick to breathe does that pretty well.

Many local parents will recognise this gambit for the cheap ploy that it is. It is really just a subtle way of pointing out how uncomfortable the place where the offspring have settled is, and wouldn't it be better to return home to the third most temperate climate in the world?

But while the climate and beauty of this area compare very favourably with Australia and the cost of living is matchless, we all scratch to find any other way of attracting the kids to come back.

Most young people I talk to want to get out of Wanganui. Marton, Taihape and Ohakune kids are even more motivated to leave, and the last one out of Hunterville please turn off the Playstation; which is tragic because they are all nice places to be, when you're a bit older at least. The only things missing are the jobs, and the other, "cooler", young people.

But just as the temperature in Adelaide is no longer a joke, it has been predicted that there will be grave water shortages in East Coast Australia over the next decade or so which could make it uninhabitable. And Australia's problems will be a walk in the park compared to the rest of the world - the European Union countries are struggling to survive their debt problems and some are descending into Third World conditions.

The US must surely soon find out that it cannot keep printing money (the inventively named "quantitative easing") to pay off its impossible debt burden, and join Europe's economic death spiral.

The deal which the United Nations Security Council and Germany last month naively agreed with Shi'ite Iran, which was supposed to limit their ability to make a nuclear bomb, has in reality left these madmen reportedly only weeks away from achieving nuclear capability.

So much so that Sunni Saudi Arabia is now hurrying towards nuclear capability itself.

The Shia/Sunni Muslim aggression in the Middle East is teetering on the brink of a genocidal jamboree, whereas Africa is becoming a seething cauldron of hatred and greed.

In comparison, our problems - Wanganui's poorly designed sewage treatment station, cars parked on a footpath, some creep killing kids' chooks and the mystery of "is he or isn't he leaving town?" - pale into insignificance.

In fact the headlines, "Nothing happened in Wanganui today", begin to look pretty attractive to me, and hopefully, one day, to all of our furthest and dearest.