Bruce Bisset: Close your eyes and make a wish

Seems to me there are times when the political world is upside-down for no good reason - and this is one.
There must be a blissfully happy throng of 30- and 40-somethings out there making ridiculous amounts of money and frankly not giving a toss about anyone or anything else.
How else to explain National's comfortable lead of 30-odd percentage points over Labour at the same time as the economy is going down the toilet?
It was the 25-45 age-bracket that swung to the right and put John Key's mob into power last time round, so one can only assume they're still backing blue and thus skewing the polls.
While most everyone else is just plain blue.
I can only conclude that demographic must be the fortunate few of today - old enough to be trained up and beyond the unemployment queues, too young to be hurting much from business closures and finance company collapses.
Lucky them. But that they can't get their noses out of their iPads or their Facebook chatrooms long enough to take notice of what's actually happening in the real world is symptomatic of these techno-narcissistic times.
On one level I shouldn't be surprised. That generation is part of the "natural swing" to the right, in rebellion against their parents' left-leaning majority views; the sociological pendulum that tick-tocks between collective interest and self interest every 25 years or so.
On another, I'm flabbergasted. Surely, you would presume, anyone intelligent enough to hold down a well-paid position in this mega-information age must be aware how precariously we are balanced over the abyss.
Apparently not.
However in the faint hope that some of them might still be reading this column, here's a few facts they can ponder over their lattes and bagels:
Inflation is running at a 21-year high of 5.3 per cent, with many basic foodstuffs (not to mention petrol and electricity) increasing by far greater percentages in the past year.
Roughly 30 per cent more families in Hawke's Bay have accessed food banks and budget support services this year than last, and double the level of four years ago.
Unemployment for the 18-25 age-group is at an historical high of more than 20 per cent.
In Hawke's Bay, the number of full-time jobs shrank by 3.2 per cent last year, and overall economic growth in the past five years was effectively zero.
The number of women seeking support from Women's Refuge has doubled in the past three years.
The relative worth of social welfare benefits continues to steadily decrease; a standard unemployment benefit today buys less than 50 per cent of what it did 30 years ago.
These (and many similar statistics) are all indicators of not merely an economic crisis, but a socio-economic crisis: the lower paid are getting paid relatively less, if they are paid at all, and their costs (and debt levels) are increasing out of proportion to their ability to make ends meet.
At the same time, the increased wealth of those at the top continues to outpace all other earnings measurements: this year's NBR rich listers were, on average, 20 per cent richer than a year before. That list includes John Key.
Clearly the gap between the haves and the have nots is a chasm yawning ever-wider.
Meanwhile a range of social programmes are being cut down or cut out altogether - just in case the poor haven't yet understood that they are of no importance.
Apparently neither are the middle classes, for short-sighted cuts - particularly in education funding for preschool and tertiary - will impact hard on them too.
But that fact seems to have escaped the "change for the sake of it" brigade.
The government's wishful solution for these inequities is to sell what remaining assets we the public might still claim to own while digging up our parks and dredging our seabed in a chancy search for minerals and oil - which when exploited will profit some large overseas companies far more than New Zealand.
Oh, and to make a bike trail and try to be big wheels in the finance markets. Ha!
Yet National still leads by a country mile four months out from election day.
Talk about the blind leading the blinded! Will they see the revolution coming, do you think?
On the evidence, unlikely.
That's the right of it.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.