A German economist writing satire about New Zealand sounds like the opening line of a bad joke.
The joke gets longer when you learn the plot: two Martian auditors land in the Wairarapa expecting humanity at its best, are promptly fined for parking without consent, and proceed on a reluctant tiki tour of the country in the company of a Wellington bureaucrat named Ben, who has quietly decided his career is over and he may as well help them.
What follows is a short excerpt, abridged, from my new novella The Martian Audit. The Martians are hovering above Auckland in their spacecraft.
The ship’s navigation computer screamed. Invisible cones were piercing the sky above the city, extending from the volcanic summits to the sea.
“What is this?” Xylos demanded. “My sensors cannot identify their purpose.”
The cones were legally defined but physically empty. No structures. No signals. No aircraft. Just geometry.
“Those aren’t temples,” Ben said. “They’re viewshafts. We legally protect the ability to see certain volcanic cones from certain points in the city. If you build anything that interrupts the sightline, you get prosecuted.”
Xylos processed this. “So the cones are protecting a view?”
“Yes.”
“Of a grass hill?”
“Yes.”
“From a specific observation point?”
“Yes. Usually a spot on a motorway.”
“And can citizens stop at this observation point to appreciate the protected view?”
“No. Stopping is illegal. It’s a motorway.”
Xylos was silent for a long moment. His visor flickered through several colours before settling on a pale, confused blue.
“Ben. You have legally protected the ability to see a grass hill from a location where looking at it is prohibited. And the cone itself is empty. There is nothing inside it. You are not protecting a structure. You are protecting absence.”
“We call it amenity value.”
Martians meet modern New Zealand
But the Martians are just getting started. Elsewhere they meet a doctor flying to Brisbane, an engineer in a caravan with a tarpaulin for a roof and a senior official whose talent is to absorb ideas and turn them into workshops.
At the end they conclude that invasion is more trouble than it is worth and recommend invading Australia instead. Never mind their coffee is worse.
Satire meets policy frustration
Think tanks do not normally publish novels. German economists rarely write satire. Something had to give.
Download your free copy of The Martian Audit from the New Zealand Initiative website in PDF or EPUB format for your e-book reader.
Source: New Zealand Initiative / Dr Oliver Hartwich
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Oliver is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative. Before joining the Initiative, he was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, the Chief Economist at the Policy Exchange in London, and an advisor in the UK House of Lords.
Oliver holds a master's degree in economics and business administration and a PhD in Law from Bochum University in Germany.
Oliver is available to comment on all of the Initiative’s research areas.