everybody get together

Collectivism is not a word you hear all that often any more and when you do, it is usually in disparaging tones. Reverse PC I guess - collectivism as a symbol of all that was wrong with the old Soviet Union, communism more generally and then, broader again, anything that's not fully market driven.

So it's possibly a bit surprising that I've run across it twice this week.

On Wednesday night I was at one of those annual 'gala' dinner thingoes, this time for a medical research institute here in Brisbane. In his summing up address the Executive Director said "I am an unashamed collectivist." Quite a bold statement and certainly drew my attention away from the steak and mash.

What he was talking about wasn't that he ran a communist enclave or that he drew on a lot of public funding, but that he encouraged all his researchers to seek collaborations wherever they could. And also to collaborate with each other, gently reminding the audience (to general polite laughter) that individual units often don't practise this.

So in fact not quite so extreme as his statement may have been interpreted, but he used the phrase quite determinedly - it did gain attention and it underscored very graphically what he was on about.

Then today I was traipsing around a suburban shopping centre in search of stuff when I came across an art exhibition, put on by the Brisbane Artists Collective. Probably much closer to the standard definition, but also I imagine a more sensible way for them to handle their finances.

Which got me thinking about cooperatives, which seemed to be a much more common way of organising joint/mutual economic activity - maybe within a limited geographic area? - in the past. I guess most coops have been wound up now or turned into limited liability companies to "unlock the value."

Crikey I hate that term. Financial finagling - it unlocks the value all right and then distributes it upwards.

Have a piece of jaundiced ideology, courtesy of Chateau VVB.

In other news, today I saw one of these.

And decided yet again that I'd like one. I am on-again-off-again about grey imports and here's why.

When the Federal Government was introducing its Registered Automotive Workshop Scheme (RAWS), I was contacted in my then work capacity by a number of local traders who thought that the new restrictions it introduced on importing used cars - particularly the "grey market" from Japan that it was aimed at - would shut them down. There was actually quite a community of these traders in sunny Queensland.

And regardless of other rights and wrongs, it was yet another policy aimed at protecting local manufacturing. Unlimited imports were allowed into NZ in the 1990s and closed down all local assemply.

I spoke to a few traders and visited a couple, including one that sticks in the memory - a most unlikely trader. She organised a bang-up, typical industrial area, sandwich platter and bent my ear like crazy. I listened politely, took notes and it all seemed pretty cogent.

When I checked back with the licensing authorities, it turned out that she was well known to them and wasn't quite as squeaky clean as it appeared.

RAWS seems to have been introduced successfully, has probably cleaned up the market a bit but you can still get what you want.

I must say an R34 V-spec is still quite enticing if you could get one with verifiable history. The one I saw today was very dark blue with dark alloys: with those massive pumped guards it looked the duck's guts.

Almost as much as one of these. Want one of them too.