Frank Greenall: Rose-tinted goggles to be the election MooTube

COMMENT

A nod is as good as a wink to a blind voter, but a VR headset is even better for spreading your own brand of manure.

Russian scientists have sussed how to squeeze more milk out of their moo crew. Moscow's Ministry of Agriculture and Food reckon they've developed customised virtual reality (VR) headsets for dairy cows, currently being trialled on a farm near — where else? — Moscow.

Why? Russian winters are tough. Just ask Napoleon or Adolf. Dairy cows are people too, and they get blimmin' chilly hanging out in draughty cow gulag barns freezing their teats off. Milk production chills out.

But now, courtesy of their VR goggles, each Daisy's personal daily panorama is not the gloomy, frigid interior of cow prison, but swaying meadows of hock-deep clover bathed in eternal summer sun. There may be a slight nagging disconnect in the cow brain between the hormone-saturated desiccated chaff it's actually chowing, and the lush meadows featured on its VR set, but, hey, if you can't believe what's in front of your eyes, what can you believe? What is this — Animal Farm?

The Red boffins reckon the herd is lapping up the MooTube experience, milk output is pumping, and everybody's creaming it.

Breakthroughs of this magnitude don't go unnoticed. The current Labour-led Government doesn't door-knock dairy farmers because they vote blue regardless, but it's alert to anything that can boost its re-election chances.

When Labour Party strategists got whiff of the ingenious cow VR headsets, they extracted special permission from the Ministry of Working Groups to set up another Working Group to see if headsets had re-election implications.

The Working Group for VR Headsets reported back that extensive sausage-roll-and-savoury-fuelled hui had concluded that milder local winters negated having to con cows into believing they were at Club Meadow. Nevertheless, they postulated VR headsets could still work wonders in the New Zealand context, particularly if made compulsory for citizens of voting age in the upcoming election.

A nod is as good as a wink to a blind voter, but a VR headset is even better for spreading your own brand of manure.

Accordingly, the contract has gone out for supplying VR headsets for compulsory use by all potential voters in the pre-election run-up. Tenders are also out for production of the video vignettes to be featured in the headset, although it's thought the imaginative leap required would stretch even Taika Waititi.

Essentially, via their VR goggles voters will see New Zealand the way it really is. Or at least the way it was promised last election.

Glance one way, and a vista will emerge of carefree Kiwi families frolicking in pristine pollution-free waterways, lakes and sea. Why, the waters are so pure you can take a drink while you swim, although the sea water's a tad briny.

Turn their head and they will see rapacious property speculators wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth as they suffer the Capital Gains Tax imposed by the valiant coalition government to deflate house prices. Swivel more, and the vista now is of whole suburbs of completed KiwiBuild houses, affordably built and positively bursting with happy families.
Their VR goggles will also depict the special exhibition currently at Te Papa, featuring several clapped-out vans and cars that whole families once called home in the bad old days prior to VR headsets.

A quick pan to the school gates, and fully shod kids packing healthy lunches abound, while tell-tale Marmite stains at the corners of mouths testify to hearty breakfasts.
Next, voters will see pedestrianised city streets, motorways reclaimed for rail and cycle trails, industrialised farming replaced by sustainable models, and classrooms of ex prison wardens no longer required because the incarceration rate has plummeted, and who are retraining to be vegan dieticians.

Oh, it's great to be a Kiwi after the Tooth Fairy has waved her wand over a once beleaguered land, and presided over the promised Year of Delivery.

Without those headsets, why, we'd still all be stuck with just ordinary old everyday reality.