Deborah Hill Cone: Out on a limb and living dangerously

We like to think we are a daredevil kinda country; what with inventing the bungy, binge drinking, Marc Ellis and tinkering up Mt Everest. But we might like to revisit this point.

I arrived at Auckland International Airport this week and was decanting my luggage into a cab when I was accosted by a gender-indeterminate individual who resembled Brown Owl from Brownies. (I never got a single Brownies badge.)

Brown Owl's new job was to make sure no one put suitcases on the back seat of a cab. "It is dangerous," she growled. So that's how we get our national productivity up, eh; suitcase police. Welcome to New Risk-Averse-Land.

So I get in the taxi, with suitcases safely in the boot, and get home without getting decapitated.

Inside, I hear a very loud buzzing noise. Jetlag is grisly, but surely not this loud?

Look out the window and find council contractors are in the process of decapitating a 100-year-old oak tree at the church next door to my house.

The tree has a not insubstantial sign on it saying "protected tree" but that doesn't seem to mean anything to the North Shore City Council who deemed it to be unsafe the day before, a surly arborist who looks about 12 informs me.

And now they are chopping it down, without even a how's your father to the local residents. God's not so keen on trees apparently - the church said to go right ahead.

In my jetlagged lunacy I decide to become a tree hugger and clamber over decapitated limbs to perch underneath the tree in an attempt to inhibit proceedings, Arthur Dent-style.

I am not in my dressing gown but I could certainly have put together a much more appropriate We Shall Overcome outfit - a bit Joan Baez, a bit S&M with a padlock to chain myself to the oak, for example.

The teenage arborists calls the police. A baby copper tells me - I am quoting verbatim here as I thought he might have a future in the tabloids - "The council kept it secret because they didn't want mass protests."

This is catnip to a journalist; nonetheless, I find it difficult to continue my one-woman sit-in due to information asymmetry - arborists know about what makes trees unsafe and I don't.

Also, if they arrest me they can just carry on chopping the tree down anyway.

So then I talk to Gavin Donaldson, the council arborist who ordered the tree's execution. Gavin seems like a pretty good egg; I wouldn't be surprised if he wears walk socks.

He says he examined the tree the day before and noticed the cracking on its trunk and so it had to be chopped down. Questioned whether this might have been a little hasty, Gavin concedes it might look that way but it could not be helped because the tree was "unsafe".

You might think there is nothing wrong with this attitude. "Better safe than sorry" and so on. It sounds coolly reasonable. But in the bigger picture it makes for a very odd, and bossy, society.

And this fear of danger is certainly not very helpful in a financial sense.

If the economy is going to recover we all need to start taking risks again. Not completely mad-arse ones like we did at the height of the property boom, but just putting some skin in the game.

"While it makes complete micro-economic sense for families and individual businesses, the spending freeze and collective shunning of nonguaranteed investments is macro-economically troubling.

"For the economy to recover and thrive, hoarders must open their wallets and become consumers, business must once again be willing to roll the dice," as Slate columnist Daniel Gross put it.

He didn't explain how we do that when on a day-to-day level we are too busy fighting rogue suitcases and trees.

deborah@coneandco.com