The hunt for suitable products led to late-night phone calls to British companies as he sought to gain the right to represent companies he had found by, well, I don’t really know how in those pre-internet days.

One successful operation involved the sale of moisture meters, a few suitable for timber measurement but the greater number used to determine the moisture content of wheat and, thus, the correct time to harvest. It seemed there were very many farmers growing wheat on the flat plains beyond the city limits, if the stream of ruddy-faced chaps at our doorstep seeking repair and recalibration of their machines as harvest time approached was any guide. But not enough to satisfy the machines’ manufacturers on the far side of the world and, on occasion, the early-morning calm of the house would be broken by Max’s remonstrations shouted down the phone that the slowing of sales of new machines was because he had pretty well saturated the local market.

On one occasion, this was apparently insufficient to assuage the concerns of the supplier on the phone and, in barely stifled fury, Max enquired how many of the meters the voice on the other end had sold in Bristol. Though his comparison of the population of Aotearoa and Bristol was a bit awry, the point was made to my dozy adolescent brain, if not the early-morning caller: that our farming community was pretty small fry when compared to the fleets of combine harvesters I imagined cutting a swathe through the wheat fields on the far side of the world.

This remained a dominant motif in my thinking about our little country tucked away in the South Pacific for many years. It is a notion reinforced by those optimistic aphorisms that we are ‘punching above our weight’ and are capable of exerting a political influence in the world beyond that due our small population. What residual truth remains in these shibboleths is challenged by the increasingly complex pluralistic society in which we now live; we are inexorably part of the wider world with all its difficulties, and opportunities.

The frailty of our cities’ finances, the failure of infrastructure and the susceptibility to the effects of natural cataclysms are not ours alone. Many cities around the world face extremely difficult challenges meeting the basic expectations of food, water and housing in increasingly urbanised populations, without the added impost of a fiery and flooded future as a result of our profligate use of hydrocarbons. I am sorry to say we should add to this list the awful depredations resulting from those resorting to brute force to resolve seemingly intractable political issues.

Though we are, thankfully, at some distance from significant violence, we have no shortage of complicated matters riven by differences arising from income, ethnicity, gender and political view, any of which can frustrate resolution of the simplest of matters. The zoning of city land in our cities is an interesting example of the way in which the seemingly rational analysis of land use, soil quality, access to water, waste, social infrastructure and transport, is skewed by self-interest and, perhaps, at times, a too-small gene pool to call upon to mediate the conflicting expectations of the polity.

Is there a project in the public realm that has not been through the mill of party politics, received the opprobrium of one or another special-interest group, had a few special reports by worthy bods, endured a royal commission or two or survived a review by a coterie of planning commissioners? It’s easy to shrug, lambast NIMBYs and the forces of the woke, and dream of the halcyon days of Prime Minister Muldoon’s ‘think big’ era when hills and seabeds were gone by lunchtime. We are the richer for the careful consideration of planned projects, and especially so when concerned citizens are able to comment through local authority consultation or the parliamentary select committee process. Though we tamper with this at our peril, the fast track consenting to be offered by Ministers Brown, Jones and Bishop suggests nothing has been learned.

In Wellington, the planning commissioners’ review of the city’s proposed district plan changes to density and height controls, dubbed the ‘war for Wellington’ by The Spinoff’s Joel MacManus, led to a vociferous response from public, press and professional, and a near-complete rout of the commissioners’ recommendations. The recommendations rejected much of the evidence on which the proposed plan changes were based and ignored evidence of those not appearing before them in person. The resultant plan change, passed without alteration by Council, has been hailed as a major game-changer for the city. It facilitates a greater density of development within suburbs close enough to walk to work, and those within the catchment of established public transport routes. The Council’s rejection of the commissioners’ reports, the second of which was described by MacManus as “just as shitty as the first”, and the Council’s affirmation of the proposed changes, have been trumpeted as “leapfrogging Auckland’s Unitary Plan”.

Up here, we await the government picking up the cudgels of the National Policy Statement – Urban Design and its more unruly sidekick, the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, that witless bit of legislation that champions an increase in housing numbers while offering impediments to achieving better quality. The hiatus in Wellington’s meddling, while the new government lays waste the mechanisms of a caring, equitable society in favour of discredited trickle-down economics, allows a bit of spare time to push back on the mayor’s latest fund-raising scheme.

Under budgetary duress from the combined effects of aging infrastructure, storm damage and central government’s control of its ability to raise revenue by anything other than rates or disposing of assets, the mayor has proposed leasing out the port for 35 years. Aside from being a remarkable turnaround from his electioneering rhetoric that had port activities heading out of town, the proposal carries a risk of alienating the city’s Waitematā foreshore for generations to come. And so, the various urban interest groups coalesce to make representations to the city’s long-term funding plan and dust off the megaphones and placards yet again.

There is an uncomfortable unasked question that underlies opposition to the mayor’s plan: if not ‘leasing the family silver’, then what? How is he to constrain rates while maintaining the services, and resilience, we should rightly expect from the city? Though we must, in the short term, take to the barricades to protect the Waitematā, I suspect the answer to the city’s long-term funding is not to be found in tinkering with those few mechanisms free of Wellington’s dead hand but, perhaps, in a bolder strategy.

A few years ago, Bob Harvey wrote an article for Metro magazine calling for the realisation of Owen McShane’s proposal for Auckland to secede from the rest of the country and become a city state. McShane was an architect, planner and commentator who had developed a comprehensive proposal for an independent Auckland, which he named Ākarana. It extended only so far as to include the water supply in the Hunuas and the waters of the Hauraki Gulf. The argument for secession drew on the precedent of Singapore, a city whose only natural resource was, in McShane’s words, that which “sat between the ears of its inhabitants”, the fields, factories, mines and forests making the inhabitants “too comfortable” and, presumably, hobbling innovation and productivity.

Enough with lobbying and importuning those in the Beehive! I love the call to direct action, though Harvey’s reliance on the Chinese ‘One belt and one road’ funding to provide the necessary infrastructure of the city state might be revisited in the light of the loss of sovereignty that has attended some of that programme’s loans. Were we to seize this initiative and haul up a flag of independence, it would at the very least assist Max’s midnight phone calls should they be repeated. His sales to New Zealand farmers would look spectacular on a per-capita basis, if the country’s population were reduced by that of the newly independent Ākarana.