The difference between nails and bolts

For a lot of years I was pretty shy: often, I still am.

I was especially shy in my first year at Otago University, begun at age 17.

It was 1994. I studied music, despite being only modestly skilled and almost entirely indifferent, simply because it was a subject I'd heard of at school. I would walk from my North East Valley flat, sunless and mouldy, to my music lectures, hunched shoulders in my green woolly jersey, trudging in Doc Martens.

That walk took me through the Botanic Gardens and down Castle Street, with its slumped couches on the porches of flats, and Cranberries CDs played through sash windows into weak afternoon sun.

One day, this young guy - although a little older than I was - caught up with me, midway down Castle Street, somewhere before it met the bank of red brick flats on Dundas Street. I knew him a little because he was a music classmate; also the flatmate of a friend.

He was an extrovert. I shrank a little from him as he chatted in that way extroverts do, about stuff I can't now remember. But I couldn't dislike him. In his good nature, his sincerity, his sheer warmth for other human beings, he was the type who defied even the defensiveness of a curmudgeon.

He made me smile.

A few years later I left Dunedin, but I did my PhD through Otago. Like everyone did back then, especially the wearers of jerseys and Doc Martens, I focused my study on neoliberalism.

Halfway through that thesis on neoliberalism - angsting over important people's ideas and shitty instant coffee, like post-grads do - I realised I hated that term. I saw it described as an 'academic swear word' - used, often inconsistently, by folks who never defined it, to describe anything they didn't like.

Still, I was stuck with the term - there was no ready alternative - so I had to engage my independent brain, and figure out what it might boil down to.

That guy who caught up with me on Castle Street, I never spoke to him again after that day in 1994. The Cave Creek disaster happened the following year. Tonight the TV news marked its twenty-fifth anniversary.

The factors in that tragedy were many, but this time, they could be boiled down. All involved corners cut and pennies pinched; a failure altogether of regulation - because regulation, as we were told, was the nanny state scolding the freedom right out of us.

Someone had decided the laws of the market were stronger than those of physics. Some other post-grad with far greater confidence and bolder theories, and a new suit for his first job.

The Cave Creek viewing platform was constructed with nails, not bolts. The bolts would have cost an extra twenty dollars: less than a dollar and fifty cents for each person who died.

I have had all the intervening years to wonder what kind of a willful dogmatic delusion makes a person think nails are better than bolts, although he has not handled either; who tries to redesign an economy and society on that belief.

The guy who caught up with me on Castle Street that day, he did not have those years. His voice stopped, forty metres below where the platform was built, as horrified others ran for help. In a chasm, surrounded only by the sounds of the birds and the bush.