An Interview with the Children of New Zealand
(Microphone on: 11.09am. General chatter: Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brothers.)
MS: Right. Thank you all for coming. We have a lot to cover so please answer your name when I call it. Quinn.
Quinn: Quinn.
MS: You can just say ‘Here’.
Quinn: Oh. Here!
MS: Liam?
Liam: (Heavy sigh) Here.
MS: You ok?
Liam: Yes.
MS: Ok. Alexis.
Alexis: Here.
MS: Skylah?
Skylah: Here.
MS: Right. Jordan?
Jordan: Here.
MS: And Zara.
Zara: Here.
MS: Good. So the magazine wanted me to come and talk to you about all the problems in the world.
Jordan: The recession …
MS: Exactly. There are a lot of pr …
Liam: Global warming.
MS: Global warming is definitely ...
Skylah: Petrol was a problem last year.
Alexis: Yeah, it went, like, peeeyoooong!
Liam: Oh, and the cost of money, everyone’s gonna go keeeooowwwahhh! [Flails arms] I need money this, I need money that. What’s with it?
Zara: [Softly] Landfills?
Liam: What’s with it?
MS: Yes. And Zara just had a good one, landfills.
Zara: We will not really have a place to put everything, and we’ll have to live in rubbish.
Jordan: And landfills never break down.
MS: No, they just keep going, like the Queen. What would be a solution? Anyone?
Skylah: At school, like in the junior syndicate, they have all these boxes, and they make all-new stuff. Like, they reuse lots of stuff.
MS: So recycling?
Liam: Can I have a word?
MS: Sure.
Liam: Even though 60% could be recycled and reused, it’s still only a matter of time before that’s used up again, and it goes to the sea, and, uh … the circle of rubbish—I forgot it’s name.
MS: Circle of rubbish is fine.
Liam: … will just get bigger and bigger until no fish, no food sources, no oil, no money, lack of resources. And that’s it. End of life! I don’t know what else to do.
MS: It’s ok. So what you’re saying is that the amount of rubbish we’re generating is moving us towards an extinction event?
Liam: Could cause extinction to all life as we know it.
MS: Wow. I think, Zara, you were going to say something?
Zara: In this school, some teachers, their pens don’t work and they throw them out, they could recycle them.
MS: You’ve seen teachers doing that?
Zara: They throw them out all the time.
MS: That is terrible. What about the recession?
Jordan: Yeah. Everyone’s running out of money, so all the prices of everything is going up.
MS: Yeah. Are you guys noticing the recession in your family?
Zara: Well, my Mum said we have to save our money for food, so she can’t buy stuff for us …
MS: So this brings up an important point. Quinn, maybe you can talk about this, what is the role of kids in helping with the recession? What can we do? And when I say we, I mean you.
Quinn: Well, my Nanna, when we go over there, we do gardening, and she gives us ten dollars, and I think that we should just work for five dollars an hour.
MS: And that would make it a lot easier on the Nanna economy?
Quinn: Yeah, because they just had a dog die.
MS: Oh no.
Quinn: And they’ve got a kiwifruit orchard to look after as well.
Liam: Ok. About that …
MS: Just hold on a second, Liam, because we have a backlog of people with their hands up. Skylah, you have a point to make about what Quinn was saying?
Skylah: Well, I think that grandmas know better than the adults do, because adults are too fancy in thinking that everything matters, but grandmas just have an old, small TV, and sometimes they don’t even have a TV, they just spend all day …
Jordan: … gardening
Skylah: … doing the dishes and gardening.
[Overlapping voices.]
MS: Ok a lot of nanna stories. So what about law and order?
Jordan: What’s law and order?
Skylah: There’s a law, and there’s an order, that’s what I think.
Jordan: And it’s a TV show.
MS: Well, we probably won’t talk about the TV show.
Jordan: The police aren’t always that good.
MS: No?
Alexis: Some policemen, they aren’t that good, but then there are other people that could be good policemen, but they’re not. They think they’re gonna be too scared.
MS: Right, so we need to find better people and make them into police?
Skylah: Well, on TV, some advertising is really good, but the police advertising is not that good.
Jordan: They should have happy ads, because some ads they have it’s all raining.
MS: What about crime? Is there too much crime, or do we need more?
Zara: There’s too much.
Alexis: The tagging’s absolutely horrible.
[Loud agreement.]
Quinn: On the first day of the holidays I went down to play some soccer with my Dad, and someone had spray-painted on the grass, ‘F-word’ and then ‘Off’.
MS: Oh dear.
Skylah: Well, that sort of attaches to the police issue, because they’re not really going out and looking in the places they should be looking.
MS: Looking in the wrong places.
Skylah: Yeah, because the taggers go to places where the police don’t go, and then in the morning the police show up and say, ‘Oh, look, someone’s tagged here.’
[General clamour.]
Quinn: Um, there’s this cool stuff you spray on walls, and when you tag on it, it washes all the tagging off.
MS: So we could just use planes to spray our whole country with that stuff. Solve the whole problem.
[General agreement]
Skylah: But it has to be something good for the trees.
Skylah: One thing, I think, is that they just shouldn’t sell spray cans, and that would solve the solution forever.
MS: Ok, I want to move on to family values.
Skylah: Oh, like the value of families, like, how much your family is worth.
MS: In a way, yes, but it’s more a term grownups use for the things they think are important in every family, and the things that a family should be.
Zara: [Softly] Like how good they are.
MS: Yeah.
Zara: Like if they do something naughty you don’t need to …
Jordan: … hit them.
Zara: … smack them, you can just say, you shouldn’t have done that, can you go to your room and I’ll come and get you.
MS: Yeah, that’s very sensible. Ok, Liam, you have something to say on the family?
Liam: Ok, um, [Reading from piece of paper] since it’s a lot of money flying in a plane that’s said to be safer than a car, well, I’ve heard that a plane disintegrated in mid-air ‘cos someone put an extra engine on.
[General silence.]
MS: Wow.
Alexis: Are we still on family values?
MS: We’re still … technically …
Skylah: Sometimes there are ads on during the day that shouldn’t be on until after 7.30, because …
Quinn: Like crash ads.
MS: Yeah, so they’re scary for kids?
Jordan: I don’t like that ad that goes, [Sings] ‘Do you love the muffin man?’
Zara: And there’s that ad where that guy spins that wheel. That gave me a nightmare the other night.
MS: I hate nightmares. So I asked you to form pairs and to brainstorm on particular subjects. Jordan and Skylah, you had children’s rights?
Skylah: We got that children need to explore. I think parents are too concerned, and … children need their personal space.
[Loud agreement.]
Zara: You just wanna say, “Can you stop bugging me, I just need some time by myself.”
[Loud agreement.]
Jordan: ‘Cos when you’re upset you just want to cry and they come in and pat you on the back and say, “Are you alright?” And you just wanna … well, can’t you just let me …
[Louder agreement.]
Skylah: What my Mum said is that you need to let boys cry because usually boys think it’s [in deep voice] unmanly to cry.
Liam: That’s …
Skylah: They need to cry or otherwise they’ll be all grumpy when they’re old, because they haven’t got all the sadness out.
MS: Ok, that’s very good. Liam?
Liam: [Sighs] Yeah, I was just getting offenced.
MS: Offenced? By what Skylah was saying?
Jordan: Why?
Liam: Well, you know, the boys crying thing [trailing off.]
MS: You don’t think that boys should cry?
Liam: Only on necessary … occasions.
Alexis: Like, don’t be a cry-baby, but cry every time it really, really hurts.
MS: What if you’re just really sad?
Quinn: Like if someone dies.
Liam: Well if someone dies in your family, that’s actually a very appropriate time to cry. If it’s someone you love, I’d say yeah, it’s ok.
Skylah : At my last school we had a disco, and this boy asked this girl and she said no, and he just cried and cried and cried. Like, you don’t really need to cry, because there’s a million girls in this school that you could ask.
MS: Yeah. Probably damaged his chances with all the crying, though.
Skylah: Probably.
MS: Now, Zara and Alexis, you had crime?
Zara: Well, first of all the first thing we wrote down is that we need more policemen. And put spy-cameras up to spy on bad people.
Alexis: Um. Have a school where police can get more training, like with guns and tasers and stuff.
Zara: They need to be brave. And they have to be calm when they’re doing everything.
MS: So maybe bravery training?
Alexis: They should train at night and have things behind bushes to see how brave they really are and what they do. If they shoot it, that’s probably not good.
Jordan: You could have fines for, like, small things.
Jordan: Or lines.
MS: So criminals could write lines?
Skylah: Well I think they should have a punishment, because they just get to stay in their cells, dancing around or whatever.
MS: Lots of dancing in prison.
Zara: They could hit rocks before they get out, so make them do jobs in jail.
MS: Jobs in jail. That’s very catchy.
Jordan: It’s not very good if you’re just smashing rocks, because it doesn’t really do much. They should do useful things.
Alexis: So then they have some good things to do when they go back home.
MS: Right.
Alexis: Yep. So when they get home they know how to scrub toilets so then the family members might be nicer to them.
Skylah: That’s sort of like on The Hulk, he gets really angry and he smashes stuff and it makes him feel good. But he needs to do something that makes him feel calm. Like writing something down … like sort of like lines, or writing down an apology, or …
MS: Alright. I think we better move onto the environment. Liam and Quinn
Liam: Ok, we have solar-panelled vehicles. Submarines to planes.
MS: … Explain that one?
Liam: Submarines that turn into planes or something. And there’s cars in Australia that have solar panels on them and they go at 40kph.
Jordan: What about, like, in winter?
Skylah: They should have a car that runs on the cold, and you can only use it in winter and autumn. But on sunny days you have to use a bicycle instead of being lazy.
[General agreement.]
Liam: Ok, let’s just say this: there’s two cars, one’s a cold-absorbing car, one’s a heat-absorbing car, and one’s a carbon dioxide absorbing car.
MS: Right, brilliant, what’s next? I can’t wait to see.
Liam: Make forests so we get a greener view from outer space, and more resources.
MS: But how do we get more resources, because that’s one of the prob …
Liam: No-no, what we’re saying is more forest means more animals and more resources, which means there’s more vegetables and berries to pick and sell. Which means we can have more longativity, ‘cos we’re … instead of doing things that shorten down our lifetimes, we can have longer lifetimes.
MS: Right, so you’re calling for a better quality of life.
Liam: Yes.
Jordan: I was gonna say that New Zealand should get rid of all possums. ‘Cos they’re eating all the kiwis.
Liam: So you’re saying no more un-native transfers?
MS: I think that’s what he was driving at. So what else do you have on your mind-map there?
Liam: Well, the other thing is stalactite bacteria hills.
[Silence.]
Skylah: Oh…kaayyyy.
MS: Stalactites are the ones that grow down?
Liam: Yeah, stalactites in Australia have bacteria unlike any other, not even like trees. What I’m saying is that scientists take bacteria, and over time we’ll put it on rocks and it’ll expand over everywhere.
MS: And what’s the benefit of this bacteria?
Liam: It turns carbon dioxide into oxygen.
MS: Gotcha.
Liam: So what I’m saying is put it all over the world and that’s it, no more carbon dioxide.
Jordan: But if we brought over these stalactites from Australia …
Liam: We wouldn’t be bringing over the stalactites, just the bacteria!
Jordan: Yeah, but what if when we bought the bacteria here it created some new disease?
MS: Interesting point, Liam, that’s one of those un-native transfers you were talking about earlier.
Liam: True.
MS: But don’t be discouraged, it’s still a great idea. So the last thing we need to do is to think up a name for our think tank. Because the other think-tanks that I looked up on the internet, they …
Skylah: … Don’t deal with real problems.
MS: Um. Yeah. And their names … I’ll just go through them and you let me know what you think. So, Centre for Strategic Studies.
[A pause, laughter.]
MS: What do you think?
Skylah: Lame.
Zara: Boring.
MS: Ok, what about The Institute for Policy Studies?
[Groans.]
MS: No good?
Zara: What about the Save The World Group?
MS: Excellent. Write that down. Another one I found on the net was Maxim Group.
Skylah: Guhh.
MS: Yeah, a lot of people say that.
Jordan: What is it, even?
MS: A lot of people say that, too.
Zara: I think Save The World New Zealand.
Quinn: What about Sporting Studies Group?
MS: Interesting.
[Thoughtful silence.]
Jordan: Ooohh. I know. The USG—United Solutions Group.
Skylah: Oh, that’s perfect!
MS: I like all those ideas. And we don’t have to decide now, we can think about it. Can I just say how amazing you all are.
Skylah: We know.
