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Me And You And A Dog Named Who? |
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Written by Seuamuli Des Bentin
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Monday, 19 November 2007 |
Has anyone else seen the glaring solution to the controversial government decision to switch to Right Hand Drive vehicles driven on the left hand side of the road? So the Prime Minister has said that it is a done deal coming into effect as early as July next year, but what if he too was overwhelmed by the simplicity and practical brilliance of my friend Spindle’s suggested alternative? Or is he really not listening to any suggestions or anyone anymore?
The whole idea behind the decision to switch to RHD vehicles is so that the “overwhelming majority” who are dying to get stuck into the land, but need a pickup truck or two to be able to do that properly, can ask their relatives in Australia or New Zealand to send one over for them.
In years gone by, one worked the land to look for a new car the old folks said could be found there. Some found not just one car but a few as well as a “fale papalagi” and a big “pa povi”! Most of these successful ones had a kick start of some sort such as an existing family business, a loan, huge tracts of fertile land and a lot of family members or even just had a horse!
A mile from the faleo’o to the plantation has not changed in length in the intervening years up to now but it was 27 degrees in the shade back then compared to the energy sapping 32 degrees we now endure. But the most important ingredient in the success of those who worked the land and dared to venture beyond subsistence agriculture was the fact that they were not afraid of hard work. There is a sneaking suspicion that those raised on a junk food diet of remittances and foreign aid would lack the iron needed to work the land and be successful farmers. A car arriving from the rellies overseas would not give the would-be farmer the same feeling of pride as one found in the dirt under the trees of the forest with your sweat etched into every horse power out of its engine as you cruise the tar sealed plantation access roads made especially for it.
But these are all baseless assumptions. A Holden ute built for the Australian outback from Uncle Misiluki i Melepoge may just be the kick start young Jacko at kua needs to go cover the family land in kalo palagi and bananas so that the guys making those yummy banana and taro chips never run out and may even feel their supplier is secure enough to start exporting. So you’re right that it’s another assumption on my part, but where would we be if we are just going to sit here and shoot each other down? As the title of this column suggests, I would like to think that I am on the side of the “overwhelming majority” who are not lazy or suffer from aid dependency and who would see a leg up as the answer to their prayers. In a village where no one owns a horse anymore, a pickup truck might just be all that is needed to unlock the wealth that the old folks said was in them there hills!
Did you see how there was no mention at all of which side of the pickup truck the steering wheel was attached to, or which side of the road said pickup truck was driven on? Because both are not of the slightest importance in the overall picture or what this is about.
When Spindle called me a couple of days ago, he wanted my advice on his latest venture which was to build a retirement village called “The Mysterious Beyond” for old punk rockers. I thought that was quite funny because I thought all punk rockers self destructed in their thirties, if they survived that long, until Spindle said that there were a few of us who had seen the futility of it all and became “old skool”! He had become quite the entrepreneur in his ripped jeans and Mohawk! Which I thought made him the ideal ‘outsider’ to ask for his opinion on what is threatening to tear the most politically stable country in the South Pacific apart right now. Apart from land grievances of course!
But are you ready for this? Spindle’s answer, which he reckoned was based on the KISS Principle, was to keep everything as it is now and allow right hand drive vehicles – pickup trucks only – back into the country. A special “Farm Vehicle License” which you apply for, just as you would for a gun license, should be set up for people who would like to import a pickup truck from New Zealand or Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, for farming purposes. Any other right hand drive vehicle which is not a pickup truck would be as useful as a blunt bush knife on a plantation and should not be allowed in. If after two or five years the place was crawling with right hand drive pickup trucks and there was still no sign of agriculture becoming the backbone of the economy, then the experiment has failed and we would just put a stop to that nonsense and go back to being waiters and dancers for foreign tourists. And we would have saved ourselves a considerable amount of money. If however by that time agriculture had surpassed remittances and tourism as the main source of income and employing more people than all of the rental car companies put together, then I am sure that we, the “overwhelming majority” could ask for a complete change over to driving on “the other side” without a single voice of protest being heard! We after all are seen by the big business people and everyone else as the unproductive sector of the community, good for very little other than being willingly manipulated by ruling political parties to vote them back in come election time!
Don’t change the side of the road you drive on or sell your fleet of LHD rental cars until we have been given a chance to prove to you, but more importantly, to ourselves, that a jump start or a leg up is all we need to unearth the wealth to be found in our fertile land and spread some of it to kua. Have a nice one folks!
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Me and some mates (who were not part of this overwhelming majority initially) are going into the steering wheel converter business to help the other poor farmers who worked on their own to get their own pickups to 'cheaply' flip the wheel to the other side... all this talk of helping the poo-not well off has got me going for some taro chips from outside Lynns.