The main difference between the two audiences - apart from the obvious geographical distances - is that the first group will read the stories while also denouncing Auckland as everything that is wrong with the country, and moaning that the city gets too much attention from the national media, while the other is just grateful that they've got a heads-up that three lanes are out on the Southern past Greenlane.
It's all part of a general narrative from the rest of the country that Aucklanders are a bunch of feijoa-eating, latte-sipping arrogant pricks, demanding all the attention, with an overt focus on Auckland issues in the national press that comes at the expense of everyone else in the country.
To be fair, there are loads and loads of people south of the Bombays who have no problem with the big city, but there are definitely areas around the country (especially around Canterbury) that only look at Auckland with fear and loathing. For their part, when it comes to this divide, Aucklanders don't really give a shit, and are Don Draper in this Mad Men scene, too busy dealing with their own problems to worry what the rest of the country think about them:
This urban/rural divide has been part of NZ for a long time (and with much of the rest of the country also becoming more urbanised, has never really been limited to Auckland), and it's unlikely to go away soon, and still flares up quite often.
It was there the other week when the city of sails was battered by huge winds, followed by mass power outages across the city, with all suburbs suffering some kind of loss of electricity. It affected a huge amount of people and was comprehensively covered in our national media, as it bloody well should have been.
This was, of course, greeted with the usual sneering, with Wellingtonians pointing out that the winds weren't that strong compared to what they have to put up with; and people in rural areas saying that they lose power all the time, and the media was just making a big deal out of it because it was Auckland, and there were plenty of people only too willing to spit out the usual asinine comment about the affected people needing a spoonful of cement.
But this was a fucking big story, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, and the idea that the news media was making too much of a deal about it was asinine - it was their goddamn duty to get as much facts out there as possible, and follow up on long delays in restoring power. This is part of the fucking job.
Even proud Wellingtonian John Campbell took a break from his Checkpoint show to have a mild rant about the anti-Auckland sentiment he was getting in his feedback, and he seemed genuinely appalled that some peoples' first reaction to an extreme weather event was to start sneering at the victims.
It didn't stop many - including, of course, a couple of NZ Herald columnists - from saying that Aucklanders should get out and fix their own mess instead of going on the news and moaning about it. Which is a staggeringly stupid idea, with live and exceedingly dangerous power lines down all around the city, the last thing anybody needs is Joe Fuckwit firing up the chainsaw and getting in the way - no amount of number-eight wire mentality is going to fix the power gird for a city of 1.5 million people.
(One of those columnists later went on record as saying she was just joking about it. Which is fine then. Obviously, young families with hungry babies and old folk who can barely out the front door, who were still without power after a week, would have thought it was real fucking funny.)
Even years after the Christchurch earthquakes, only a proper arsehole would go on public record to tell Cantabrians they should stop whining and harden up about their EQC repairs, and many reporters are still checking in on places like Edgecumbe to see how they're doing after devastating floods a few months back. Nobody is ignoring this shit, and nobody is going to ignore it when it happens in the big city either.
People live in Auckland for different reasons - it might be where all their family and friends are; or they might have moved there for the social and employment opportunities. But they're just like everybody else in this country, and deserve to have their story told when things get a bit shit. Especially when there are so many of them, and especially when the city is such a huge driver of cultural and economic power in this small nation.
Still, Auckland can take it, the residents of that fine city have enough to worry about with traffic and infrastructure issues to listen to the sneers coming from down south. We just want to get home on time.
- Steve Lombard
Posts
