Ask yourself - is America being great right now? Is New Zealand back on track?
Should’ve listened to me.
In fact, you know what? I’m sick of always being politically savvy to no good end. So much so that I’m thinking about standing in the Dunedin City Council by-election. The current council are mortifying.
I already have a track record of getting on with people I don’t agree with - I date across the divide. The Yorkshireman comes out with whack-a-doodle (to me) conspiracy theories all the time. In fact, I recently had to explain feminism to him because he thought it was something stabby. Thanks to a diverse employment history, I’m battled hardened to nutjobs talking bollocks. It can’t be that different, sitting across a council table from colleagues in need of correction.
On the campaign trail, I wouldn’t have any trouble explaining what I bring to the role, as I’d only have one policy: Don’t be a dick.
Because when it comes to the current arrangement, there are too many dicks on the dancefloor, to quote Flight of the Concords. It’s a bit of a sausage festival. A bunch of silly sausages, posing on the esplanade and going on about their groynes.
Actually, someone really did encourage me to stand for election to the Dunedin City Council once. I mentioned it to my then mother-in-law and she burst out laughing, but I was serious.
Back then I was a full-time writer, appearing in almost every publication in the country, even New Zealand Trucking Magazine, so I might have got in on name recognition alone. ‘‘Oh, that’s her, whasshername? You know, she did the thing. She’s funny.’’ People thought Trump was funny too, and he went all the way to dictator.
My sole policy, don’t be a dick (tator), would prevent that happening, were I to get elected.
You may think I don’t have the temperament required to make a useful elected official. It’s true that I have a short fuse and no poker face. When I was the comms manager at Waitaki District Council and they first started livestreaming, I was asked to move out of camera range because I kept rolling my eyes and mouthing ‘‘What the ****?’’.
I’m bound to get frustrated by time-wasting grandstanding, self-serving behaviour, stupidity or racism and do shouting and hand signals, which might lower the tone. Not at the moment, of course, where the tone is ridiculous, but you know, if there was a proper council going on.
But maybe I have the perfect temperament, though. As a post-menopausal woman, I won’t put up with anyone’s crap, can tear strips off a misogynist at 50 paces, and I’m great at financial management, having been poor for so long.
The biggest problem is that I’m probably a bit too honest.
To be a councillor, as far as I can tell from my extensive reading of the ODT, you need to be able to express faux outrage to a wattle-shaking degree: ‘‘Too many cyclists!!’’, ‘‘A one-way George St is the devil’s footpath!’’, and be slippery with the truth (or make promises in a way that won’t come back to bite you later).
I’m also too sensitive. The first time someone said something mean about me on Facebook, I’d cry.
Plus, I bore easily. If I had to read hundreds of pages of policy and planning documents and sit through a six-hour meeting that had no jokes in it, I’d sink into a coma.
Other than that, landslide victory.
