Jim Hopkins: News filled with the stock characters of melodrama

We are an extraordinarily lucky lot, us 21st-century types. We enjoy longer lives, better health, a safer world, greater freedom and a wider range of wondrous gadgets than our luckless predecessors would've dared to contemplate. As a result, millions of us are profoundly miserable.

We consult therapists whose professions didn't exist 50 years ago or swallow medications that didn't exist 30 years ago in the hope such actions will help us cope with the ghastliness of it all.

One possible explanation for this strange predicament could be 'reality'. Or the amount of it to which we are exposed.

The 21st-century citizen gets an awful lot of 'reality'. And a lot of it is awful. Our 17th, 18th and 19th-century counterparts didn't have to deal with an incessantly bleak blizzard of information. The closest they came was the Town Crier breaking the news that the world wasn't flat. Which would've come as a shock, admittedly, but still pales into insignificance compared with the horrors we assimilate every day.

Should this surfeit of 'reality' be plunging you into a slough of despond, then here is a comforting thought.

Most 'reality' is fiction. It isn't true. Certainly not when presented as news. News is theatre by committee. It's a morality play, a daily drama of good and bad.

Its authors may offer us 'real' people but they're still characters. Their role is to play hero or villain; moustache-twirling landlord and helpless damsel lashed to the track.

"Globalism" is a villain, "indigenous peoples" are damsels. "Global warming" is a villain; "Kyoto" a damsel.

The UN is good. The US is bad. And George Bush is the most villainous villain extant. Therefore, despite the fact that the maintenance of New Orleans' protective levees is almost certainly a city or state responsibility, the suffering caused by their breach merely confirms his dastardly incompetence.

The same applies locally. For example, had those leaked emails come from Tourism Dargaville they would've been of no consequence. Only the fact that they came from the Round Table made them dramatic.

Because the Round Table is a villain. Its members are sinister fellows with dark designs upon the hapless State - definitely a damsel.

And that may be so. But if it is, then it is their arguments that should terrify us, not their name. Encouraging the audience to boo and hiss at the mere mention of a character is fine for fruity melodrama but not much else.

We desperately need a 'reality' that doesn't demonise, particularly since several intractable problems will remain regardless of the "miracle cure" we swallow on Saturday.

The most important is that New Zealand - as we know it - will not remain long in the First World. There is a wall and we will hit it. The only question is when.

Certain real facts make the collision inevitable. The first is the continuing transformation of wants into needs. The second is the exponential rise in the cost of providing those 'needs' for the public. And the third is that New Zealand is a city trapped in a country's body.

If nations 20 times our size are struggling with the rising cost of everything, then inevitably, sooner or later, there simply won't be enough taxpayers here to foot the ballooning bill for the burgeoning range of expensive services we assume we have a right to expect. Because there is no such right. Not in the real 'real' world. If we want those services, we'll have to invent new ways to provide them. It's that stark.

We'll need solutions that goes far beyond the present wearisome contest between public and private, with one being "good" and the other "bad".

Perpetuating that sort of distinction will merely make our fall from grace faster. And there are a few politicians saying as much.

But give our dramatists the choice of reporting them (without prejudice) or focusing on the unusual investments of a bungling candidate and I'd bet my left testicle (assuming I had one) that they'd opt for the latter.

Mercifully, there are signs the audience is getting restless. Don Brash is clearly not popular with our dramatists. His failings attract much sterner condemnation than do those of his rivals. Clearly, he's a villain - if only because he gets emails from the Round Table.

Yet, if the polls have any credence, he's more than doubled support for a party that won only 21 per cent of the vote three years ago. That is a fact. It is also an achievement which, in other spheres, would likely be celebrated.

But not in politics. Which may tell us a lot about the Leader of the opposition. Or it may tell us a lot about the people who tell us about the Leader of the Opposition. In 48 hours, we will know.

Tomorrow, we vote. Three years ago, only 77 per cent of us did, down from 85 per cent in 1999 and 88 per cent in 1996. Three years ago, 39 per cent of us split our vote. The total number of voters this year, and the number who split their vote, will have a major influence on the result.

Yet whatever that result is, an unintended consequence could be that our 'dramatists' ask themselves why they seem to be out of step with their audience - and whether it mightn't be time to consider producing a new kind of 'play'.