Dear John, In a post-Easter spirit of new life and magnanimity, I have forgiven your failure to award me a New Year's gong. You can't hold a wannabe dame down though (not that I am suggesting you would do anything so untoward). I am brimming with innovation and I am thinking big.
Gone are my foolish notions about the need for a huge boost to apprenticeships to support the Christchurch rebuild and address the issue of our ageing tradesmen, or the idea of putting underemployed youth to work planting trees on dairy farms, or of a firewood programme where they could cut up discarded tree fellings dotted around the countryside and sell them.
I am thinking synergy, synchronicity and sex. I sense you are squirming already, John, but bear with me. Think of England, or even Bill English, for a minute or two.
As you may be aware, down here we have a white elephant cleverly disguised as a covered stadium built primarily for rugby. We also have a rugby union which is trying to find its way out of a financial crisis. We ratepayers know we will be paying for that large animal for a long time and we know, under the existing scenario, it will never pay its way.
Possibly you don't care too much about what happens in this backwater and feel miffed because too many of us vote for anything but National.
Support my clever plan and the votes will follow. Trust me.
Why not turn part of the stadium complex into a super-duper brothel with profits going to offset the costs for ratepayers and also to prop up the Otago Rugby Football Union? It wouldn't require much capital, apart from the human type, and there is plenty of that about.
If we catered for all genders, we might be able to persuade former Dunedin gal Pam Corkery to return home as brothel manager.
Should she turn down such an exciting opportunity, I would be prepared to fill the bill. I wouldn't do any of the "work" of course, but swan around elegantly in a swanky frock, keeping my hands clean with matching elbow-length gloves and carrying a cigarette holder. (I wouldn't be smoking anything of course, that would not be healthy.)
I sense you'll want to go all puritanical on me, John. It is easy to tut-tut about the tawdriness of such a business and its links to the seamier side of life, including drug abuse. (I have done the same about gambling, conveniently overlooking I once owned SkyCity shares.) Toughen up.
Is this the same John who does not seem to believe increasing the number of poker machines in SkyCity will result in a corresponding increase in gambling addicts? If you can hold that crazy line I am sure you can find a few "experts" or possibly "sexperts" who will tell you what a marvellous thing for the economy an internationally recognised brothel would be.
It should go hand in hand with an international convention centre shouldn't it? And, as you say, we need one of those. Heaven only knows how we have managed to survive thus far without one.
Only pesky greenies would dare to wonder why we would grovel to any company putting lots of dosh into building anything which must rely on people flying in on planet-destroying aeroplanes. "New Zealand is keen, not green" could be our marketing mantra.
Of course, we'll need a few law changes to sort this brothel thing out, but I am sure you can push something unpalatable to the masses through Parliament under urgency, drawing on your experience with The Hobbit and the proposed SkyCity accommodations.
Because I know most of you in government are only capable of understanding brief reports in bullet point form, I have prepared a few selling points:
* Charter schools can be used to train the sex workers needed. (Don't ask me how you do that, but anything is possible in a charter school.) Introduce some relevant NCEA standards at Level 2 to make national achievement rates look good. This will be particularly helpful for those pupils who have failed to make the grade with the primary school national standards.
* A public/private (don't lose the l there) partnership can be set up to get it off the ground.You can refuse to divulge the details on the grounds of commercial sensitivity.
* Celebrities can be paid big bucks to extol the brothel's virtues on Twitter and Facebook.
* The brothel's VIP clients will get special privacy protection. (ACC will be able to produce a manual for that.) To recognise me for my entrepreneurship, you could do more rule-changing to confer a special honour on me this Queen's Birthday weekend - Madam McLean sounds good to me.
Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
