Jim Hopkins: Grateful to our chilled southern bones

The offices of South Canterbury Finance in Timaru. Photo / Sarah Ivey

Dear Bill, Don't you listen to those northern roosters, sir. We are grateful, all of us. South Canterbury, North Canterbury, Mid Canterbury, West Canterbury, East Canterbury - they're all grateful. The whole South Island is grateful.

Everyone south of the Strait and north of the Pole is grateful, sir. We are an island of gratitude in an ocean of insolence.

Our gratitude runneth over, sir. It truly doth. We are irrigated with gratitude.

We bathe in gratitude. We milk gratitude. We churn it into cheesy grins. We pour gratitude on our plates when we eat our humble pie.

A rising tide of gratitude has lifted all our tractors. Every morning, in lonely schools at the end of dusty roads, barefoot kiddies in threadbare hand-me-downs tug their little forelocks till their foreheads bleed.

Even the magpies are singing "Kwardle-oodle-ardle-thank you-doodle" in the wind-bent branches of the trees at the edge of the domain. So ignore those carping carpsters who claim we are indulged and ungrateful. They're wrong, sir, wrong. They couldn't be more wrong - unless they were young Mohammad Amir no balling on cue.

But such is not our way, sir. We play with a straight bat here - as you will know, having lived in Dipton while dwelling in Wellington.

There's no overstepping in the south. We never cross the line. We know our place, sir. We do the exports, Auckland gets the roads. And we're grateful it is thus.

We're grateful for the chance to pay taxes and we're grateful to you for spending them. We're grateful for the ETS and the RMA. We're grateful for gambolling lambs and girls who smile mysteriously and we're grateful you let spring arrive on time, sir. We're grateful for any random acts of kindness, even if yours was a day early.

In short, sir, we're grateful for everything. We're grateful our politicians have enacted laws so wise and good and well-informed that 12-year-olds who torture dogs will face no charges and feel no shame.

We're grateful there are so many lawyers in the north for parents to hire in times of teenage travail.

We're grateful to have paid our part in the construction of that splendid new Supreme Court in Wellington.

We're grateful those shysters in the finance world who lined their own pockets while investors were ruined have received the kind of sentences Bernie Madoff got. We're grateful every tainted cent they squirrelled away has been refunded.

We're grateful for all the money spent on those diligent government watchdogs who have, in recent times, so rigorously policed the activities of those not on dialysis.

We're grateful Mr Petricevic from Bridgecorp can still play golf - even on days when he's due in court - and we're grateful Mr Hotchin from Hanover can travel abroad and Mr Watson had such a nice birthday party in London.

We're grateful Mr Bryers from Blue Chip only got 75 hours' community service. There are people in Timaru who've been doing that most of their lives, sir.

Captains of industry, in some cases, builders of dams, and, yes, it's true their ship has surely gone off course of late. But at least it appears they kept bailing till the end, plugging leaks with their own money, all to no avail.

Now it seems they will go down with their ship, sir, because they didn't secrete other people's savings to build themselves a lifeboat more opulent than the vessel they commanded.

But we do feel grateful, sir, as you say we should. It is good that the Government has done what it said it would do.

Such consistency is rare and welcome. And we hope others feel grateful too. We hope you've been showered with appreciative messages from Aucklanders grateful that taxpayers are funding a $1.2 billion road through Mt Albert, complete with lovely tunnels.

That $1.2 billion, sir, is 75 per cent of an SCF bailout and, unless we're much mistaken, those tunnels are actually going to let people go under rather than stop them.

So we hope you're feeling the love, sir, for the tunnels and the nice new viaduct in Newmarket and that flash bit on the western motorway that will see the removal of 14 sets of traffic lights.

You could always send them down here, sir, to augment the great forest of their kin already cluttering SH1 in Christchurch, Ashburton, Timaru, Oamaru, Dunedin and Invercargill.

We love feeling like second-class citizens, sir. Some extra traffic lights could be just the ticket. Unless you want to move a road or two, sir, like that old hotel near Victoria Park. $2.1 million it's costing (is anyone grateful?) for a week's worth of shunting.

Seven days, sir, which is roughly the length of time SH1's been closed down here so far this year, sir, thanks to bad design, bad maintenance, blocked drains and underfunding.

So, if you want more gratitude, sir, some random acts of construction would be the perfect sequel to your random act of kindness, for which we thank you once again and remain your humble servants.