Because some bastard has to change the world...

I'm flattered to have regular readers of this blog and I must apologise for the lack of action. Just because I haven't posted for more than a month, it doesn't mean that I haven't been busy. I have accumulated a new volume of bile and cynicism in this time because I have put my hand up, paid my deposit and I'm running for office in local government.

Actually, it's rather fun. For an exercise in vanity there aren't many dodges quite like it. You get your name put on all sorts of paraphernalia and suddenly in your pursuit to become one of the great and the good you become important to community groups, journalists and other assorted ratbags. But for all that fun there are the inevitable chains that drag. I get loads of emails and they are of two kinds. The first starts with 'Dear Mr Bastard, As a council candidate we realise that your time is precious. Rather than coming to talk to our group about what half-baked idiocy you stand for, please answer these six questions with answers of no more than 200 words by X O'clock tomorrow. Yours etc...' I dread these emails because that's 1,200 words or around an hour and a half of writing and you do have to use the maximum allowance because the questions aren't easy ones like 'What is the name of your cat?' It's like being at university all over again only the deadlines are much tighter.

"For the cheap price of one arm and one leg we'll run you
an ad that can be seen by our wide circulation if they all have
a microscope and haven't voted for someone else already."

The other kind of email are very kind invitations by advertisers to spend your campaign funds with them. This is all well and good if you have campaign funds to spend, after all, candidates in my particular contest are allowed to spend up to $80,000. Believe it or not, some will spend the full allowance, but I won't be mainly because this is more than twenty five times my budget and once you take out printing costs, petrol and other assorted niceties such as vouchers for the volunteers who are helping pollute the letterboxes in my ward, I have just enough left for... actually, there's nothing left. So the advertising emails, while tempting, go unanswered especially when the cost of advertising is either expensive or horrifically expensive. But then, this is democracy for you. The cap was brought in to prevent candidates effectively buying their way in, but with the limit so high this problem persists unmitigated.
If you'd like to help by foolishly throwing a bit of cash my way, click here.

So for all this effort and outlay, what have I seen?
Well: Traditionally local elections get an extremely poor turnout by voters so candidates really have to work their freckles off to get their messages across. This particular election is important for my city as we rebuild and there is a considerable amount of money to be spent (carefully). What is bewildering is that the public really don't care. They don't care that the people they are electing administer an annual budget of $2.2b and that the incumbents that they elected to do this in my ward are a housewife and a former male stripper. People don't want to see leaflets in their mailboxes, billboards around town and have flyers given to them in the street because they see the whole election as a colossal annoyance. These are the people who have also been unified in their outrage at the saga surrounding the performance, pay and exit of the Chief Executive of the council; they are also uniformly irritated by the patchwork nature of the repairs to the streets of Christchurch; the are uniformly angry that the central government seems to be calling the shots in our city. Will they vote? I hope so. They have had their ballot papers mailed out to them, all they have to do is tick a few boxes and put it back in the post... a task beyond the ability or bother of many, believe me.

Why did I bother to put my hand up? Because some bastard had to and I genuinely believe that I have something to contribute to the council table: me with my shiny new LLB, my background in field engineering, my elegant suit and my finely tuned bullshit detector. 
The results are in on October 14.
Watch this space.