Joanne McNeill: Better to take our chances

When the Minister visits the parched outer reaches of the shire to declare official drought, it might help some - with dry assistance packages perhaps - but it is just not good enough.

As soon as drought has been ritually declared, we really expect the heavens to open and glorious rain to bucket down until the water tank runneth over, soaking the earth and everything upon it, leaving said Minister looking damp and silly while we all celebrate wildly.

Rainmaking is the kind of wizardry required of tax-payer funded Wellington magicians, along with fixing the economy, joblessness, the environment, crime, health, education, family violence and house prices.

Clearly Nathan Guy is no rainmaker.

Now sterner measures must be contemplated. Buying water is another traditionally sure-fire cure for drought. Generally, as soon as the tank is full of horrible chlorinated town water, money has changed hands, and the tanker disappears in a cloud of dust, down pelts free water from the sky.

Meanwhile, we wait.

Senior locals, sinewy persons of fixed gaze and few wasted words are adamant. There will be no rain until April. Rain dancing will make no difference whatsoever.

Personally though, I'm still keen to try a public gathering - with formal attire and best tablecloths for picnicking (to tempt rain), voices and any other musical instruments of choice, for mass performances of every rain song anyone ever knew. Singing in the Rain, Here Comes the Rain Again there must be heaps of them. Please add suggestions to the list.

I've been practising Bob Dylan's long drawling mantra: "It's a hard, it's a hard, it's a haa-aa-aa-rrrd raaa-eeens a gonna fa-a-all" which although clearly not efficacious yet, is at least highly therapeutic.

It seems waiting - for rain, payday, deliverance, miracles - is the human condition, although in the case of Christchurch home-owners, waiting for over two years now in cracked, sloping, broken homes (and worse) for insurance companies to pay up, it's beginning to look more like sheer intransigence than the natural order.

Meanwhile hikes in premiums and earthquake strengthening regulations affect everyone - possibly more to preserve insurance company profits than lives or property.

Were I a Wellington wizard, my first magic trick would be to ban insurance outright. It's a protection racket, fed by fear, which requires us to bet on our own misfortune; a totally counter-productive activity if you subscribe to the sports psychology doctrine of positive visualisation.

Insurance is a pernicious form of usury (along with interest, which I'd ban too) which raises the cost everything. Philosophically, its premises are shaky; despite advertising to the contrary, nothing is actually replaceable and the idea that it is merely promotes recklessness and waste. If we all took our own chances, odds on, we'd more careful. And when it came to the likes of rebuilding after unavoidable disasters, we'd start immediately, recycling, pitching in together and making autonomous decisions instead of waiting powerlessly in limbo at the mercy of a bureaucratic nightmare which specialises in "steely abnegation of responsibility ... wrapped in the flannel of warm concern"; a peerless turn of phrase, well worth sharing, for which I am indebted to Rosemary Hill writing in the London Review of Books on a completely different matter.