Why I should be in wonderland with Ellis

IDEAL HUSBAND: Rosemary McLeod's dream man.

Relevant offers

Rosemary McLeod

Then and now - teens are still misunderstood Purge as Henry burns in fire of public odium We all have our dark sides, including Superman The symmetry of emotional and financial fraud Porn hoarder far worse than contrite Brooke A life less ordinary and much less pleasant At last, a reason to be merry this Christmas You can tell a lot just by looking at Paul Henry The confusing signals teens must decipher The pashes and bashes of boarding school

OPINION: I have discovered the man I should have married. It's been a long time coming, this epiphany, and is, alas, too late.

It's surely love. It's a definite realisation anyway. Rick Ellis, head of TVNZ, you should be mine.

It's not that I'm bewitched by your appearance. I would never be so superficial.

But I find I can look kindly on a chubby chap, even more so since I became somewhat chubby myself. We'd go together like two giant Mallowpuffs in one crinkly cellophane packet – as would John Morgan of Niwa and me, but his reported $130,00 pay rise turned out to be a mere $70,000. Pshaw to that.

I have only a newspaper photograph to go on now, Rick Ellis, though we met years ago, but it speaks eloquently to me, along with last week's report of your $110,000 a year pay rise.

That's just the pay rise, is the bit that gets me, your whole pay package being worth close to a mill per annum. I could love a man on nearly a mill per annum.

Easy. Maybe, too, it's the white shirts and the ties in the photographs of you rich bureaucrat guys, with all that they evoke of seriousness of purpose. You probably even have dinner suits.

I've never had a bloke with a dinner suit, let alone an actual suit, or with any need for one, for I am hoi polloi.

A government report last week may have claimed that people earning $30,000 a year or less are the happiest New Zealanders, but I jeer at it.

In my youth I admired pop stars and arty types, but where did that get me?

They're a flash in the pan thing; rich today, broke tomorrow, with any money they make shoved up their nostrils.

I should have focused on the stayers, not glamour; the boys doing useful degrees who never looked cool. Who wants to look cool when you can be rich?

Other women, wiser women, knew this instinctively. While I wasted my youth and my looks, they grabbed you guys and set up house.

They could see a dinner suit-wearer in the making. They could cook your dinner parties and stay awake over the talk of money and policy and strategy.

They knew that one day their reward would be redecorating their homes every year, playing tennis all day, and farming their teenagers out to boarding schools.

Instead of working to pay off mortgages and wrestling with adolescent angst, they'd develop a killer backhand.

Rick Ellis, John Morgan, no wonder you smile so broadly, for you are sleek and well fed, and your wives surely appreciate you. We would have lots to talk about, possibly, if I were one of them. I could listen, anyway. "During the Muldoon Think Big era," John Morgan has said, for example, "I was fascinated by the political debate about whether New Zealand's future was best served by encouraging business to focus on wealth creation or by having people pay higher taxes so governments could focus on wealth redistribution."

I nodded off there. Bit boring. But you wouldn't notice.

"I interpreted it", you continued, as "should we focus on making the pie bigger so everyone gets more in the end, or should we concentrate on dividing up the pie?"

I know what your answer to that question was. That's why guys like you and Rick Ellis are top earners in the state sector: you bake big pies, then eat them, and by the look of you both, they're delicious.

It took this country a while to abandon its egalitarian past and start a proper class system, with a few very rich people at the top, like you, and lots of poor people at the bottom who don't seem to smile as much or as wide as you guys. Maybe that's because you restructure things and cost them their jobs, but why sulk? They could always make pin money polishing your shoes, and if their wives had any gumption they'd clamour to clean your dunnies.

Strange, isn't it, how history goes? We've reinvented the class system, based on money, and I'm re-evaluating my rusty feminism.

We thought it was infra dig to be a corporate wife, that it was selling out to the patriarchy, that we should battle the blokes for the big jobs, shove shoulder pads in our jackets, and fight for equality. It seemed to make sense at the time. But that was then, and this is a good many years later.

Oh, the joys of being a lady who lunches, I now see, a woman married to a man – and this is John Morgan again – who modestly advises, "Chase success, not money, and eventually the rewards will catch up with you".

I guess it also helps to chase the right men, and not trip over your shoelaces.

- © Fairfax NZ News