No news like snow news

First snow has a magic that doesn’t ever melt.

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The only topic of conversation in Wellington this week has been the snow. As soon as my daughter and her friends were told their school was closing for the day on Monday, they were en route as fast as possible to the home of the girl among them who lived at the highest altitude, where they could have a snowball fight. Such elevation temporarily took on a new status, rather like how far your apartment is up the peak in Hong Kong, although any similarity ends there. That same day I heard screams of delight from the primary school across the road from my house as some of the kids saw snow falling for the first time in their lives. I remember my own experience of that very well. As a child, I lived for a time in a forestry village on the Napier-Taupo road while my parents did their “country service” as teachers. Not until I grew up and had long left did I appreciate how utterly bereft our village was of any single redeeming aesthetic feature.

Regardless of that, it was for some years the place I called home. For that reason I had mixed feelings when it literally disappeared after the reforms of the 1980s and the site was planted over with Pinus radiata as though the village’s existence was a dirty secret best obliterated. Actually, that view had some validity, too, but I digress. We moved there when I was six and one very wintry night my parents had lit the fire in the living room, the coal range was going in the kitchen and the curtains had been pulled hours earlier against the dark and cold evening. There was a knock at the front door, then my mother called out, “Look! Come and look!” Our little village of just16 houses, with pumice on the ground, some horrible pig dogs and only a gravel ring road to hold back the thousands of acres of surrounding dark forest, had in the course of the evening been silently transformed into a magical winter wonderland of white. I thought it was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. The memory of seeing, that very first time, the light from our porch illuminate the falling snow, then running outside to have the flakes land on my hands, and melt away, will be with me always.

Good on Kevin Milne for talking about under-the-table tax dodgers, particularly tradespeople. I can never go to our local fruit and vege markets, where many of the stallholders collect their income in plastic ice cream containers, without wondering how much, if any, of the day’s takings end up in the public purse. Minimising your tax obligation is one thing, but simply dodging it altogether as Milne pointed out is not only illegal but unfair. The cost of running a country is a shared burden. Or at least, it should be.

The idea of televising Radio New Zealand is apparently being investigated. The first question likely to occur to listeners is “why?” When is radio not radio? When it is on television, presumably. Legend has it Sean Plunket used to eat a meat pie or two during Morning Report, but if you started work at 5.00am, who’d blame you? But do we want to see it?

And if the more popular shows are televised, won’t RNZ simply become radio with lipstick, in which presenters have to bear in mind camera angles and will in future no longer be chosen only for their interviewing abilities but also for their looks? In other words, it would be a TV channel.

If RNZ is already skint, how will it be affordable on TV, with the extra studio and staff costs that would involve? Presumably it would aim to attract sponsorship, which will certainly get the luvvies out with their placards. The role of public broadcasting is an interesting debate, and an independent radio news and current affairs service is easy enough to support. It is more difficult to see why taxpayers should fund a classical music radio station. Radio NZ Concert should be subsidised by all those dentists who have it on during work hours, presumably to soothe the patients before they are given their bill.