Efficiency

Our Saturday Columnist

My favourite section of our Saturday paper is the column written by our friend, Matt Rilkoff, the paper's News Director. Matt was a student of Margaret's when he was at High School.

This morning he writes about the problem of lunch: to buy or to make and carry from home. Among his interesting facts is that the price of a Moro Bar in terms of wages earned to pay for it has doubled in his working lifetime.

It fascinates me that these discrepancies appear. Why has the cost of housing risen by 250% over my lifetime, while the cost of everyday food, petrol, and so on has stayed more or less stable? And at the same time, the cost of air travel has fallen by something like 80%, again in relation to wages.

Do these figures mean that the aircraft industry has been wonderfully, almost unbelievably efficient, and that competition between companies has been a positive factor? Do they mean that the building industry has become noticeably less efficient, and that there is no comparable competition there?

Matt sings the praises of his favourite sandwich taken from home: peanut butter and sultana. I can agree with him that these would make a welcome snack at midday in a busy work programme. But if the stories from my grandchildren's primary school are valid, Matt would be a persona non grata in some places if he dared to carry peanut butter sandwiches with him.

People seem to accept that taking peanut butter to school is a threat to the safety of others. By the same token, it is a threat to others to refuse to accept vaccination, or to oppose fluoridation of water. I cannot see a difference in principle between these three examples. Many public health issues depend on everyone being involved. Like insurance, the more of us get involved the cheaper it becomes for everyone.

So as he suggests, this issue raises questions from both nutritional and economic points of view, it even raises fundamental ethical matters. What is your take?

Biography versus fantasy

Often when we are driving with the grandchildren we turn on the sound system for music. They love the nursery rhymes, or the lively action songs they have learned at Mainly Music or at Jump Jam. 

The older ones have taken to listening to stories, especially the collection of stories written by Roald Dahl. So they, and we, are familiar with "The Enormous Crocodile" , "James and the Giant Prach", and the rest.

Dahl is a superb fantasist, and like all good children's authors, has a lot of wry comment about human behaviour for the adults as well.

So I was interested to discover his autobiographical books, on a completely different tack. "Going Solo" is the account of his first days of actual combat as a fighter pilot during the Second World War. He had been working in East Africa, enlisted in the RAF, like me was trained on Tiger Moths, and then posted to Egypt, and then Greece as the allies pulled out.

His accounts of real life are as readable and gripping as his fantasy; I can't recommend them too highly. The book is not long, you could read it in a holiday weekend easily!

Now our youngest has progressed to the movie of "The Gruffalo's Child", which I think is a perfect example of ideal children's literature. I still enjoy it every time, anyway. Perhaps this is what they mean by "second childhood"!

Showing off!

Today our U3A sketching group was asked to put on a display of our work at the occasional "Lifestyle" meeting. Like all our general meetings, this was held at the Underwater Clubrooms at the harbour, quite a congenial venue. Here is the MC of the meeting recording the event.

And a close-up of the selected work of some of the half-dozen of us who participated. We attracted 

some positive comments from an enthusiastic crowd.

These watercolour and pen sketches are by two of our more experienced sketchers, who recently returned from a visit to India; you can probably see some of their souvenir sketches.

Plenty of attention and positive comments on the "white on black" efforts.....

And the variety of media and subjects represented.

We may even gain some new members for our group in the future!

Family History Supplement

New Information

I have just put together two pieces of information on the Gaze family history. One is a letter I received from a distant relative a few years ago, who had come across an old document in the home of a mutual connection who had just died.

The second is a letter from a correspondent in Australia who was researching his Gaze ancestors, which showed similar Christian names, a similar geographical place of origin in London, and similar occupations to our family.

The other day I came upon the two letters at the same time and some pennies dropped. So I re-read the details and found the connections: dates and places and names and occupations exactly co-inciding!

My great-grandfather Charles Gaze, saddler, born 1832 and arrived Auckland in March of 1859, had an uncle, also Charles. He was the youngest brother of our Charles' father John, born 1807 (ie, immediately after the family moved to London from Bristol), also a saddler,etc.

In 1830 Uncle Charles married Jane Kingdom, and in 1832 they sailed for Sydney, arriving aboard the Governor Halkett on 10 September. Charles died 1845 and Jane in 1851. He had worked as collar-maker, harness-maker and publican, as well as saddler.

Their children were:

Charles John , 1833; Olive, 1835, married Allen Hancock 1855; Robert, 1837; Jane, 1840, married Andrew Smith 1861; James 1843.

I wonder how this family survived, because when Charles, their father, died, the eldest was only 12, and their mother died when he was 18, so he had siblings of 16, 14, 12, 9, and 6 to support.

An Anniversary

I have been looking at old records and discovered that today is the twentieth anniversary of my by-pass operation in Waikato Hospital.

I have great admiration for the staff there, who did their job so well that I have survived till today!

And I am very grateful for the health service which provides all sorts of life-saving interventions from our taxes, the system which was introduced by the first Labour Government in 1938.  

My first memory of the personal value of the health system goes back to my first visit to the Dental Nurse, which must have been around 1940. In those days not every school had a clinic and we had to travel to a neighbouring school. But by the following year the clinic at our school had been built and it was a much easier trip. Not that I enjoyed any ot it because in those days I had lots of fillings-- no fluoride then.

But just think how much work went in to the job of setting up the Dental Nursing scheme.

So a vote of thanks to founders and past and current staff of our health services!

Florence Foster Johnson

We saw the film this morning with our Cinebuzz friends.

It is one you shouldn't miss, not for the singing,but for everything else. Acting, music, scenes, costumes, story -- all good quality.

And interesting because true.

Make sure you see it!

1946

This is the title of the latest book I have been reading. It is the work of Victor Sebestyen.

The main idea of the book is that events in 1946 set the direction for the rest of the Twentieth Century. And there are plenty of examples.

The wartime leaders of Britain and the US were no longer in charge. Whereas in the UK Clement Atlee had been a key minister in Churchill's war cabinet, Truman in the US had not had similar experience of top leadership.

Russia was taking control of most of Eastern Europe after years of domination by Nazi Germany. The first hints of the Cold War and the iron curtain were detected.

General Douglas Macarthur was beginning the task of rebuilding Japan along democratic lines, a 180 degree change from the previous autocratic tradition.

Britain was preparing to leave India, while other European nations were trying to re-establish their empires in regions the Japanese had taken over during the war.

Germany was suffering the after-effects of the war: massive destruction by bombing raids and fighting across its territory. A hunt for Nazi war criminals was begun, and new systems of government, again along more democratic principles than Hitler had encouraged, were being launched.

The financial and trade systems had to be re-established, and in particular the huge task of feeding the starving millions in the worst affected areas had to be undertaken. In practice this meant the citizens of the UK had to endure more stringent rationing than they had during the war so as to feed Germany.

And the fledgling United Nations was taking its first faltering footsteps.

Overall the thesis that 1946 was a pivotal year is certainly argued well.

And I have started to think about my memories of that year and how our life here in New Zealand related to the accounts in the book.

1946 was the year I started secondary school, in what we called 'Third Form'at Auckland Grammar School. The Labour Government's Education Act had just been passed in 1944 introducing School Certificate, so we were in the second cohort of students who sat that exam. Everyone had to study Social Studies in the first two years. The teachers were just struggling to get to grips with this new way of dealing with History and Geography and Civics. I remember a local survey being touched on, but in hindsight it could have been much more interesting and inspiring to us.

I can't blame the teachers; several of them had just returned from flying Lancasters or Mosquitoes over Europe or the Pacific, or manning artillery in France or fighting through the jungles of South-East Asia. And the others were very elderly and worn out trying to hold the fort when the younger men were all away. But it certainly was the start of a new era.

We still had rationing, like the Brits, and lots of families were still sending food parcels to friends and relatives in UK or in other wrecked parts of Europe.

But in many ways the hints of the future had not reached us yet. I still travelled to town each morning by steam train. Diesel engines were yet to be introduced to our part of the world. And the streets I used to get to school from the railway station still had trams filled with workers on their way too. The petrol ration allowed us only fifty kilometres of travel each month, while new tyres were virtually unobtainable.

I think we saw bananas again after having none during the war, and products like peanut butter, which we had never heard of, started to appear.

Because building materials had been short during the war years, no new school rooms had been built, so classes were large: I remember classes of between forty and fifty in my last years at primary school, This took a while to rectify.

We were seeing the last of our American friends, who had built camps and hospitals near us, like Middlemore and Puhinui. So there were no crowds of US servicemen at church on Sundays any longer, nor being entertained for lunch by my parents.

The more things change, the more they stay the same!

A century-old letter

In June 1919 the Taranaki Herald published a 'Letter to the Editor', sent in by Walter Nash, who was at that time working in New Plymouth and helping with the development of the infant local branch of the Labour Party.

It was quite a long, detailed letter responding to an Editorial about ecnomic affairs that the paper had printed a few days earlier.

The main point of Nash's commentary was that workers made up two-thirds of the workforce, but only enjoyed 40% of the income, whereas capitalists, who were a very small proportion, enjoyed a much larger share.

Nash wanted to know why workers should be expected to work harder without the extra financial incentive that the owners of wealth received to allow their capital to be used.

It was an argument for more equality of incomes, for a living wage, and by implication a fairer tax regime.

Sound familiar?

This is basically the same point that politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders have been making, and their academic supporters like Robert Reich and Bryan Gould have been arguing for, during the debate that has raged around this issue over the last few months.

Since Nash's day the width of the inequality gap has been reduced until its low point in the seventies and eighties, but since then it has increased again to its present size, which is very much what it was a century ago.

Perhaps we need a mechanism which will not only right the imbalance, but will also self-correct regularly so that things will not get out of kilter again.

What do you think?