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Otago Daily Times
6 days ago
- General
- Otago Daily Times
Woolly thinking about tangled electoral reforms
Nestled in the bottom of the box there was a cheery note. It was from one of the Murchison-dwelling sisters, the Queen of Cookery, famous for her show-stopping baking, and dispensing advice which doesn't beat about the eggs. It ended with: "I have a feeling it might cause some angst. Hey ho, give it a go." The angst inducer was a wool winder, a thoughtful gift from the QC and the Auckland-dwelling sister to overcome what they called "future wool dramas". I can't remember now, but they must have observed me tied up in knots trying to unravel a skein of wool. It's a situation which always makes me fantasise about being Maniac Magee, the hero of Jerry Spinelli's book of the same name. No knot would ever stay unknotted once he began to untie it. If only. My patience always falters halfway through the process, scissors are employed, and wool is wasted. I have tried to erase the memory of what happened last time I used the wool winder, but I am confident there was angst, swearing and wool wastage. The gift of about a kilogram of orange wool from a friend given it after the closure of the Roslyn Woollen Mill made me think it was time to brave it again. She couldn't see herself using it and kindly remembered me mentioning a grandson who was keen on an orange jersey. Since I was dealing with the orange unknown, it was fitting the instructions for the wool winder appeared to have been written by someone impersonating Donald Trump. It was all in capitals — never a good sign — with random words beginning with bold lettering. (There was also mention of a swift, something I thought was a made-up word in this context a la Donald until Mr Google informed me it's an umbrella-like contraption to hold the skein while you wind. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but this mother was not capable of massacring an old brolly for the cause.) The accompanying illustrations to The Donald capitals were a confused blurry mess bearing little resemblance to the winder before me. Much like The Donald, I blundered on without really knowing what I was doing. The wool kept going rogue and clogging up the works under the spindle where it was supposed to be gathering. At one point the spindle, fed up with my incompetence, tried to escape, launching forth from its mooring like one of Elon Musk's failed rockets. A week on, half the wool is wound in a series of odd balls, the rest slumped accusingly on the back of a chair. Spookily, orange became the theme of the week, or maybe the theme of the weak. That other Orange Guy, the mascot of the Electoral Commission, was on my mind. He and his dog (called Pup even though he has been around long enough to be fully grown by now) will be busier than ever before the next general election, if planned law changes are passed. It would be wonderful if, during the select committee process, some sense could prevail, binning the proposal to shift the cut-off date for enrolment to 13 days before the election. We are expected to believe our democracy depends on a faster vote count, rather than having as many people vote as possible. There has been no proper consideration of ways to speed it up. Maybe not cynically trying to change laws to hopefully benefit your own vote tally but properly training and employing more vote counters might be the way to do it. Given the high level of unemployment, it is not as if there is likely to be a shortage of willing workers the electoral commission could nab before they head across the Ditch. If that costs a bit more, it's worth it if it means more people get to vote. The government has overplayed the impact of the numbers enrolling and voting on the day of the election, something which has only been available in the last two elections. It is not so keen to emphasise that before that, since the 1990s, people had been able to enrol up until the day before the election. The sky did not fall. Those in prison should also be able to vote, regardless of their sentence length. Prison is the punishment, not disenfranchisement. How could it be fair to have two people serving a similar-length sentence for a similar crime, one in prison, and one at home with an electronic bracelet, being treated two different ways under our electoral law? It's enough to drive me to the knitting needles. I'll be chanting "orange is the new black" like a mantra, hoping it will make my grandson cool in his new jersey and offer protection from despotic tendencies. • Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
Otago Daily Times
22-07-2025
- Health
- Otago Daily Times
Accepting viruses and our baking shortcomings
Realising I am not genetically superior was a let-down. In the end, I could only blame myself. I had started to believe my own mythmaking. Never a good idea. For the first few years of Covid-19 infections romping through the country, my vaccinated self managed to avoid it. There were some close calls, including the time I was part of a group which spent an enjoyable evening around a circular dining table opposite a man who tested positive for the virus the next day. He had been sneezing too, put down at the time to an allergy to the resident dog. While my two half-sisters had both contracted Covid, my two full siblings were Novids, despite exposure to it, hence my delusions of our genetic superiority. (The Auckland-dwelling sister's avoidance was particularly impressive since all of the time she has worked in a front-line health reception role.) Earlier this year, she was finally laid low with a hefty dose of it. I told myself she must have been already under the weather. I pushed away thoughts my Covid-free days might be numbered too. When I experienced symptoms a few weeks later, I convinced myself it was a cold, only deciding to check after someone told me of an annoying work acquaintance always insisting they didn't have Covid, but never bothering to test. When the lines showed up on the rapid antigen test, I didn't believe them. I wastefully repeated the test. The lines were there again. Damn. As it turned out, my symptoms were mild, and I was grateful I was well enough to continue with my writing work at home as usual. The experience made me ponder anew about our Covid-19 response and the bitterness still felt about it by some — in particular, the vitriol still hurled at former prime minister Jacinda Ardern because of her government's handling of this event. Its persistence baffles me. She has not claimed she got everything right in the pandemic response but points out "we don't get to see the counterfactual, the outcome of the decisions we didn't make. The lives that might have been lost". Did the frenzy of Jacindamania lead some people to believe she was a saint; some sort of omnipotent being who could do no wrong? Was her talk of kindness too much? (A wise character in Fredrik Backman's latest book My Friends , says "kind people were the worst, because at least with mean people you know what you're dealing with. There's no limit to how dangerous someone who seems kind can be.") Were they disappointed to find out she was flawed and fallible like anyone else? That, no Virginia, there is not a Santa Claus? To those critics who will no doubt accuse her of behaving as if she thought she was omnipotent, my suggestion would be to be open-minded enough to read her book. Some reviews have spent more time dwelling on what is not there, or what they wanted it to be, such as a blow-by-blow account of her time in the top job. Since it is a memoir, it was up to her to choose what she put in and what she left out. She has not itemised everything that happened in the Covid response, but vividly conveys the uncertainty, the enormity of the task facing the government, the relentlessness of the ever-changing scenarios, and even the impact it had on her ability to be present in play with her toddler daughter Neve when her head was full of Covid-related graphs. Many women will be able to relate to Dame Jacinda's struggles with morning sickness, breastfeeding, and being torn between their job and their role as a mother. These are issues which do not go away when you are a prime minister, even if you have a great support team, as she did. As someone who never ventured near the contents of the iconic Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book ( I knew my limits), I remember being irked by Dame Jacinda's postings about her birthday cake constructions for Neve. "You don't need to be super mum and the Prime Minister," I wanted to scream I feel kinder after reading about it, understanding it as an example of the sort of silly pressure mothers feel. She knew nobody expected her to bake a cake, but she saw it as part of a list of "Mum" things she needed to tick off. Maybe it is time to cut her some slack, in all areas of her life, and to acknowledge what she and her government got right and learn from what they got wrong. In the same way I have had to come to terms with not being genetically superior and therefore immune to Covid-19, we could accept she is not a demon or a god. • Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
