An Aussie mate, realising that his three kids were about to leave home for tertiary study, organised the family trip of a lifetime and went for an extended holiday to Greece.
His family had a great time sunbathing, swimming and viewing Greece's stunning historic heritage, but he predicted pretty much what is now playing out this week.
On checking out from his hotel, he was advised there was a steep discount for a cash payment and that there was an ATM just down the road. He paid in cash and got the discount. He later realised the transaction left no audit trail with the hotel and that was the way the hotel avoided paying the local equivalent of GST.
He was impressed with the transport and tourism infrastructure, which included expensive motorways amid mountainous landscapes. The investment just didn't seem to justify the traffic he saw on those roads.
I was discussing the Greek dilemma with a friend over dinner in Hawke's Bay yesterday and discovered he'd written a piece about the crisis for his pupils. This is worth quoting in full. The situation Greece finds itself in has produced an interesting reaction, much of it self-righteousness or judgmental or simply ungenerous.
"The Greeks have brought this on themselves. They have been profligate, they have spent money they haven't earned, and they are all tax dodgers."
It's worth considering that there are two sides (at least) to this equation. You can't spend borrowed money unless someone lends it to you in the first place and, in this case, the countries that lent money imprudently at best are the ones who are most strident in denouncing Greece.
And having lent money, and overlooking the fact that very little of the multi-billion-euro bail-out payments actually go to Greece - most of it is churned around the European banks which presumably clip the ticket each time - they are now demanding the Greeks do penance. In this case, penance means austerity, which has driven unemployment to more than 25 per cent and youth unemployment to 50 per cent. No country can sustain that and, of course, the people suffering most are the ones least responsible. If you travel in Greece you can't avoid the sense of bitterness and hopelessness that has resulted. The country is undergoing a diaspora of its own as its young people leave.
I love Greece and its people. It has become a cheap tourist destination and is poised to become catastrophically cheaper.
I remember seeing overweight German tourists trooping off cruise ships, all desperate to suck up some Greek history, maybe because they don't have a history of their own, or at least not one they care to remember. But the Greeks do.
They have given the world democracy, geometry, the Hippocratic oath, extraordinary literature and sculpture and mythology, and building techniques still used today. They taught Europe to be civilised. So rather than sneering at the Greeks for the debt they owe avaricious European banks, we should consider the debt we all owe them.
The European Union is one of the most promising political developments since the death and devastation of World War II that left much of the continent in ruins. Countries that were at each other's throats 70 years ago are now groping towards unity.
The ten million Greeks amount to a tiny percentage of the five hundred million population of the EU. So let's hope a solution can still be found. Strangling a country because of the mistakes of duplicitous politicians in the past is no answer.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is a supporter of pro-amalgamation group A Better Hawke's Bay. He is chief executive of the NZ Howard League and a former president of the Labour Party. He is a political commentator and can be heard on Radio NZ's Nine to Noon programme at 11am Mondays, and Sean Plunket's RadioLive show 11am, Fridays. All opinions in this column are his and not those of the newspaper.
