Angry words down under

This year’s Auckland Writers & Readers Festival produces another heavyweight series of literary sessions that I imagine don’t impress Gordon McLauchlan one bit.

Gordon is a pithy user of words and has opinions to match. Much like Sir Robert Jones, the last person with whom I suspect Gordon would like to be compared.

In a series of interviews to promote his latest book, The Passionless People Revisited, Gordon sums up a lifetime’s contempt for politicians, business types and, despite his role as a writers’ advocate, his fellow authors.

Not personally, of course, as Gordon is about as affable as you can get. But he does worry about how ideas and facts are communicated, the state of the public debate and has a strong sense of history.

I wouldn’t like to oppose Gordon in a debate – he is too well read to be easily challenged – but I do agree with him in one area and that is whether we have the writers we deserve.

“New Zealand literature generally doesn’t relate to real life,” he told one interviewer. “Most of it is about middle-class angst. Once We Warriors touched on real problems but tell me a book that has done that since.”

He is right. I haven’t and have given up on all New Zealand fiction ever since, even that which is set overseas (as much of it is). Where are the novels about the dramatic social, business and cultural changes Gordon writes about?

Reading for passion
The writers’ festival, Words Down Under, perhaps gives a clue. There, you will be able see and hear fiction writers Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, Geoff Dyer and Jeffrey Eugenides; some crossover ones (from real-life experience to fiction) such as AD Miller and Stella Rimington; and non-fiction heavies such as Michael Hastings, Lawrence Kraus and Caroline Moorehead, to name the better known ones.

Miller’s superb Moscow-set business thriller Snow Drops, I might add, is one of the few works of fiction I’ve bothered with lately, though I am still struggling through hefty works by Franzen and Eco.

In a rare gesture, the festival has included, for the first time, a serious business writer, Chandran Nair. It is worth noting here that the literary and academic worlds, for reasons that can only be guessed at, never consider bringing out the Niall Fergusons, Malcolm Gladwells and Steven Pinkers, who alone must keep several bookshops in business.

The demise of the Business Roundtable has also meant we no longer get the likes of Mark Steyn, Tyler Cowen, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, PJ O’Rourke, Francis Fukuyama or James Delingpole.

And it’s not as though I only want to hear those. What about the writers who have focused on financial success and failure in both fiction and non-fiction: Michael Lewis, John Lanchester, Adam Haslett, Justin Cartwright and Sebastian Faulks, to name the more obvious.

You may not find many of these authors in large piles at Whitcoulls or Paper Plus but you will find plenty who are passionate about them and what they have to say. Even if they’re only about foreign countries.

But maybe that’s one of the pleasures of being in a remote backwater that no longer rates a mention in The Economist.

(Disclosure: I am chairing Chandran Nair’s Michael King Memorial Lecture on Saturday, May 16, about his book, Consumptionomics. I can only imagine my appearance is due to a mention of the book in this column back in February last year.)

Looking at a gift horse
The furore over the government’s deal with Sky City for a $350 million national convention centre ignores some basic reasons why people travel.

The convention business is mainly about going to exotic places on the boss’ money and doing what you can’t do at work or home.

If New Zealand is to be serious about getting a share of this action, which is substantial, it makes sense to let a casino company carry the risk, as happens in Macau, Singapore, Las Vegas and elsewhere.

Asians, and particularly Chinese, are keen on gambling but have limited outlets – so they head to the nearest casinos overseas. Japan doesn’t have casinos but it does have Pachinko – noisy halls of pokie machines that have to be seen (and heard) to be believed.

Put simply, Sky City wants to bring its casino operations up to world standard, make gambling more convenient with cards or coupons, introduce machines that play table-style games, spread its gambling over more buildings and floors rather than remain in a single cramped premises, and have more certainty of its investment by extending its licence well beyond 2021.

Despite media reports, Sky City has caused few problems with its business and has a high reputation in the industry for what it has achieved. Investors like it, too.

As someone once said, never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Milking the cow dry
A week seldom passes without some politicians making fools of themselves when dealing with business or economies. The current pinup for this is Argentina’s populist President Cristina Fernández, who is setting the pace for David Shearer and Bryan Gould.

On top of banning foreign books (“Tears for Argentina”) and iPads in favour of import-substitutes, she has now seized back control of the privatised YPF oil company by expropriating Repsol’s shareholding.

But, as John Gapper explains in the Financial Times, this is before the company has actually gone into production of a large shale gas discovery.

The government has run out of cash and wants to raid the oil company, which needs millions if not billions in capital to exploit the resource.

This has parallels with the mentality of anti-drilling mob here; although they actually oppose Petrobas and other oil companies from doing any exploration to find if there’s any oil or gas in the first place.

Like most state-owned companies, including some oil ones, YPF was a disaster until it was privatised in 1992.

As Gapper explains, you do not complain about foreigners buying energy companies (like our power stations) before they pay for it. You wait and when the time is right you seize it back. How Labour misunderstands this basic rule of socialism beats me.

Ironically, the shale gas find is called Vaca Muerta (dead cow in Spanish).