The 36 Questions Project is a new series in which Meg Williams takes a politician on a date and asks them the 36 Questions, a series of conversation-starters designed to make two people fall in love. In this inaugural installment, Young Greens co-convenor Williams dates Act leader David Seymour. Will opposites attract?

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared in Craccum, the University of Auckland student magazine. It is republished with permission.

In 2015, the New York Times’ Modern Love column published a piece by Mandy Len Catron about the 36 questions that can supposedly make any two strangers fall in love. The 36 questions are divided into three sections, each more personal than the last. To finish, the pair are instructed to stare into each other’s eyes for four whole minutes. Catron discovered these questions in a study by Arthur Aron called ‘The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings’, which resulted in two of the research subjects falling in love and getting married.

The idea behind the questions is that being in a vulnerable position with another person fosters closeness, and so naturally the questions really force you to dig deep and to feel awkward and embarrassed (the questions themselves are listed below).

Catron’s article makes its way back onto my Facebook newsfeed every now and then, and when I saw it pop up again recently I had a wild idea: what if I, co-convener of the Young Greens, did the 36 questions with David Seymour, leader of the Act Party? I’m a girl with some gumption, eager for a good story, so I went ahead and sent him a Facebook message with my pitch. David is well-known for being a good sport, so of course he said he was keen. He did have his initial concerns, however.

“What if it worked?” he wrote. “Then we would end up as star-crossed Romeo and Juliet with Jeanette Fitzsimons and Richard Prebble as Montague and Capulet.” He agreed to go ahead with it, but only do the first third of the questions, and definitely not do the staring into each other’s eyes for four minutes thing. I wasn’t too keen on staring into his eyes for a whole four minutes either, to be clear.

My friends were not without their own concerns. “Meg,” they’d say. “What if it does work?!”

“Well,” I’d reply, “I guess I’d just have to carry out a secret love affair with David Seymour.” There are probably worse things, right?

We arranged to have dinner at Spacca, a little Italian place on Remuera Road David recommended because of the chef’s comical enthusiasm (as well as the delicious food).

I arrived late because I was stuck on a bus in horrendous traffic. When I did finally arrive, I had to stop myself from channeling my inner Julie Anne Genter and begin our date with a seminar on the state of public transport in Auckland.

I sat down and got stuck into the pinot noir David had ordered for me. Gaetano, the enthusiastic chef who David reckons is straight out of the mafia (“Just look at his tattoos,” David said), came over and spoke at a million miles an hour. “Yes,” I said, not really knowing what I was agreeing to. Moments later the table disappeared underneath an abundance of beautiful Italian food. I was instantly impressed – I’m terribly fussy about Italian restaurants because their food can never quite match the Italian food I make at home (I make a damn good seafood marinara), and I don’t mean to turn this into a restaurant review, but shit this food was good.

More drinking with David: Toby Manhire has a 7.30am beer with David Seymour

To avoid small talk and to get the conversation flowing, I suggested we jump straight into the questions. It wasn’t long before one of the questions led David to opine that the worst teacher in New Zealand shouldn’t be paid the same as the best teacher in New Zealand. Of course, what he was referring to were collective agreements won by teachers’ unions which guarantee fair pay for all teachers. The socialist in me found these comments to be a bit of a boner-killer, so I set a rule: no talking about policy. “We can save that for the 36 questions to make two people fall out of love,” I said.

We pushed on. The whole process is only supposed to take about 45 minutes, but after two hours we had only reached question 14. Each question would spark a new conversation; one got me talking about my mother’s breast cancer diagnosis a few years ago, the genetics of breast cancer, Nikki Kaye’s recent recovery; another got David talking about his sports car he built himself in high school. We talked about religion and my religious background and found common ground on our respect for the Anglicans. One question prompted me to explain John Rawls to David, attempting to get him to admit that under the Veil of Ignorance he would believe that all resources should be distributed equally like a communist paradise. We slipped back into talking about policy; David mentioned charter schools, so I snapped us back to the questions.

After we’d gotten through a decent chunk of them (yes, we had gone further than David was initially willing to go with the questions, probably because I’m so darn charming after a few wines), we thought we should probably leave Spacca, having been in there for two hours. We went over the road to a pub to finish the questions, and to continue getting sufficiently sozzled. While we were there, a fan of David’s came over to get a photo with him, which was a little bizarre. We had a couple more beers, meaning we were up to drink number four or five.

We didn’t do all of the questions. Some of them were just a little too personal – I don’t think either of us were prepared to share our most terrible memories with each other, and the question about the roles of love and affection in our lives seemed a little inappropriate. There had to be, after all, at least some level of politician-journalist professionalism. Though I definitely wouldn’t say the relationship that developed between us was as dry as most politician-journalist relationships.

There was one point in the night where I really was taken aback by David’s genuineness. One of the last questions was, “Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be?” I set a rule that we weren’t allowed to choose our iPhones, since iPhones are just an extension of our limbs. I said that I would save my teddy bear, which my dad bought for me the day I was born, and has slept in my bed with me every night since.

David’s answer was, to be quite honest, pretty gorgeous. He said that before his mother passed away a few years ago, she recorded a video, put it onto a DVD, and addressed it to David’s future partner. David said that this is what he would save.

“And you’ve never watched it?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Not yet.” You have to admit that that is fairly adorable.

The end of the night came around and we realised we had taken approximately three and a half hours to not even finish the questions, and we decided to call it a night. Tipsy David decided it’d be unwise to drive home, so we got into an Uber and shook hands goodnight as he was dropped off at his Remuera flat.

I really didn’t know what I was expecting to get out of this bizarre experience. What I did end up getting out of it was actually a nice night with someone who was easy enough to get along with. Did the co-convenor of the Young Greens and the Leader of the ACT Party fall in love? I don’t think so, but (I don’t know about David) it definitely made me realise how possible it is to make a connection with someone, even if that someone is anti-unions, pro-charter schools, and once compared Marama Davidson (the Beyoncé of politics and my dear friend) to Trump… eek.

He did pay for my food, drinks, and Uber home though.

*

The 36 Questions

David and I only discussed some of them – and sorry, I’m not going to share his replies this time. But stay tuned for future installments in which we’ll dig deep into politicians’ answers.

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

2. What is your most treasured memory?

3. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

4. Before making a phone call, do you ever rehearse what you’re going to say? Why?

5. What would constitute a perfect day for you?

6. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

7. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you choose?

8. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

9. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

10. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

11. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

12. Take four minutes and tell you partner your life story in as much detail as possible.

13. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained one quality or ability, what would it be?

14. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?

15. Is there something that you’ve dreamt of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?

16. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

17. What do you value most in a friendship?

18. What is your most terrible memory?

19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

20. What does friendship mean to you?

21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?

22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.

23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?

24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “we are both in this room feeling…”

26. Complete this sentence “I wish I had someone with whom I could share…”

27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.

28. Tell your partner what you like about them: be honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.

29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.

30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.

32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?

36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

This content is brought to you by LifeDirect by Trade Me, where you’ll find all the top NZ insurers so you can compare deals and buy insurance then and there. You’ll also get 20% cashback when you take a life insurance policy out, so you can spend more time enjoying life and less time worrying about the things that can get in the way.

This election year, support The Spinoff Politics by using LifeDirect for your insurance. See lifedirect.co.nz/life-insurance

The author of the acclaimed book Things That Matter talks to Gareth Shute about health policy in the lead-up to the election – about the obesity crisis, the social investment approach and the kind of place New Zealand wants to be.

Dr David Galler has worked at the intensive care unit of Middlemore Hospital for 25 years. In that time he’s experienced firsthand the effects of changes in government health policy. His book, Things That Matter, largely concerns itself with personal stories from his life as a doctor and is threaded through with heart-rending experiences of dealing with patients who come close to death or families who’ve had to let a loved one go. Yet the book also makes a passionate plea for New Zealand to improve our approach to healthcare, especially when it comes to those who are most vulnerable.

As a starting point, it seemed worth asking Galler what policies he believes would have the biggest impact if they were enacted after the next election. However, Galler resisted this way of looking at it – he believes this type of piecemeal approach is exactly what is wrong with the current approach to healthcare. If healthcare is not tied to a larger vision, he said, then policies in other areas can counteract what we are trying to achieve. For example: if our housing policy leads to household overcrowding then there will be more people with infectious diseases turning up in hospitals; or if we don’t target our food regulations to encourage healthy eating, then diseases connected to obesity will rise and place a new burden on our healthcare system (as has happened over the last couple of decades).

The Spinoff: When you think about government policy for the next election, what do you think are the most important areas?

Dr David Galler: Oh, I think the really big thing is having a sense of purpose – what is it that we’re trying to create? That’s the thing that’s been missing in the debate. You can look at policies individually – their upsides and their downsides – but what we want is cohesion across our policy and implementation regime. You want them to be supporting each other for a purpose that is clearly defined. Instead what we currently have is a chaos of social policies because they cancel each other out or create problems that require new policies to clean up the consequences. We end up going around in circles and we wonder why we aren’t making progress over the big issues.

What would you suggest instead?

I was recently speaking at a conference in Vancouver together with a First Nations group that represents three disparate Native American communities that live throughout the province of British Columbia. They have a definition of health and wellness that’s quite different from Western definition, though similar to Māori, who view health and wellness in a holistic sense. Physical, spiritual, mental and family wellbeing are a package deal. What’s interesting about the First Nation’s approach is that they relate that definition of health and wellbeing to a vision that all the people of the First Nations should all be able to reach their potential. Health contributes to that, but so do a whole lot of different things. The danger when you don’t have a vision is that you have a clash of policies and implementations, so you take two steps forward with one policy and two steps back with another.

Look at child poverty. The government in 2013 was delivered a plan by Jonathan Boston’s expert advisory group commissioned by the children’s commissioner to tackle child poverty. The group actually defined the level of poverty in New Zealand according to an internationally recognised definition. They set a goal that they reduce that level of poverty by 30-40% below the current rate and they outlined the evidence-based interventions that need to be sustained over time in order to do that. A thing like child poverty is one of those wicked issues – there’s no single solution to it. You need to look at the evidence for how it’s going to work and focus your interventions over a long period. You also need some good measures to tell you that you’re making progress against it. One of their recommendations was a universal child benefit and on the basis of that, the government dismissed the whole thing.

What the government tends to do is implement some of the weaker recommendations because they don’t clash with their ideology and they’re less politically sensitive. The most effective health-related interventions – a tax on sugary drinks for example – carry with them a challenge to the existing ideology and they also carry with them some political risk. What we tend to get is less effective recommendations and they occur without the package of the other ones. The government will point to them with a big smile on their face and say – “look what we’re doing about such-and-such” – but the reality is that they’re just piddling around at the margins.

In the latest budget, $3.4 billion is added to the healthcare sector (1.8 billion will go to the DHBs, while another 1.4 billion is to cover the increase in pay for aged-care workers). Looking at the healthcare section of the National Party’s website, they start by saying that over their time in office they’ve increased the number of elective surgeries by nearly 50,000 per year and have added 6100 doctors and nurses. They’re all about finding efficiencies and removing unneeded back office staff.

Much of that output stuff can be challenged, but they’re probably not even the measures that you want anyway. When it comes to the obesity epidemic, the demand for key care services in the hospital are largely driven by what are to-some-extent reversible and to-some-extent preventable problems. Demand is going through the roof. This place [Middlemore Hospital] has never been busier. Constantly full – the whole place bulges. That demand is outside of health to fix. We’ve got 200,000 people living at deprivation levels 9 and 10 in Counties Manukau and 40,000 of those are children.

The Greens’ child health policy does talk about taking a holistic approach and they have comprehensive plans for increasing heart health among New Zealanders and combating the diabetes epidemic. But each of these involves a dozen new sub-policies, which would be hugely expensive to implement. With a growing number of retirement aged people over the coming decades, how could we ever afford to put all those policies in place?

The counterfactual is that what we’re currently doing is totally unaffordable. Our DHBs are currently running at a deficit. They might say we’ve got a rock star economy, but when you look at our GDP per capita, it’s actually well below the OECD average, because we’ve just relied on immigration to bump up the numbers.

Do you think the system would work better financially if we take earlier intervention?

We have to.

It doesn’t seem to be a popular approach politically.

I think they don’t know how to do it actually. I think if politicians were a bit more confident about what to do and how, then they would be more inclined to do it. I think if government was willing to show the kind of leadership that is necessary, things would head in a different direction. They don’t want to make the hard decisions – they don’t want to do it.

Boyd Swinburn along with other academics went to the Minister of Health, Jonathan Coleman, with a plan to fight obesity and he immediately showed them the door. So he’s rejecting evidence-based policies on the basis of his own politics and his view of the world. This is the part of the problem that we have woodwork teachers like Gerry Brownlie and free marketers like Coleman who are making non-evidence based decisions.

Do you think doctors are a group like teachers, where they’re all seen as all being left-wing so it’s assumed they’ll always be asking for more money for schools and hospitals? Do you think that causes a communication gap?

Well, there is a demand for services so that demand does need to be met. At the same time, we do need to reorient our attention to primary and secondary prevention. Primary prevention is really around the way we live our life, the food that we eat, our environment and so on. Secondary prevention is the active management of existing disease to keep people well and out of hospital. But we also need to treat people who are sick.

There are all sorts of issues in all those baskets. Certainly in the emergency care unit of the hospital what we want is really good, high quality services. Yet value is a complicated thing because while you can look at it in financial terms, but you really need to look at it in terms of the triple bottom line – which is social and environmental outcomes as well. You have to look at all those costs.

To be fair to the National government, if you asked most people about the new health policies that have been put out by Labour and the Greens so far then you’d probably find that they could only name single policy items without much sense of a holistic framework (Labour has yet to finish updating their 2014 policy for the current election). One of the recent Labour proposals is “a clear time-frame for industry to reduce sugar content in all processed food”. The Greens have long proposed a sugar tax and labelling foods with a traffic light system, so you can see whether a particular food items is healthy or not. On the surface, these sound just as one-off as the National policies.

But are they one-off? What you need to do is look at the entirety of the policy. The problem is that politicians release policies one by one and they tend to be reactive. But what we want to do is actually look at the basket of policies and how they contribute to the outcome that we want. When it comes to food regulation, there is an enormous amount of opportunity to improve the standards of food that are available to people and the government are simply blocking that. The government strategy is just the free market and individual choice. My question is: is that what New Zealand wants? Because the free choice of individuals and the free market has got us to where we are today and where is that likely to lead us? We are the third fattest nation in the OECD and we have the third highest rate of childhood obesity.

Is part of the problem just being able to talk about obesity in a political context? The counterargument is always that obesity is a self-control issue. It’s difficult for politicians to bring up the fact that some populations in New Zealand are genetically predisposed to obesity, especially given that it has a connection to race.

Well, Gareth, I’ll tell you, there was no obesity epidemic before the 1980s, so I say – there may be all sorts of genetic predispositions to all sorts of things, but that is not the issue here! The issue here is the cheap, ready access to very high sugar and high fat foods to a population that has very little money, while the cost of decent food is much greater. And it’s against an advertising regime that just pushes this down their throats left, right and centre. This is not personal choice. This is David versus Goliath when it comes to personal choice – it’s not an even playing field. Far from it. Why do you think all the pokies are in South Auckland? Why are there so many liquor stores and shitty fast food outlets where the poor people are? Is that personal choice? This personal choice argument is crap actually. It’s complete bollocks.

One thing we haven’t covered so far that you discuss in your book as being tied to health is housing policy and the inequities there. What would you say about that?

We can learn from the past. We discovered in the early 90s that when the housing benefit was removed, we reached the tipping point for the meningococcal epidemic. The number of adults in a house increased because the benefit was removed and a child’s chance of getting meningococcal disease has been clearly linked to the number of adults living in a house. That’s proven scientific fact.

We also know that when Counties Manukau in the early 2000s put a lot of its money into Housing New Zealand to clad damp houses in South Auckland, the numbers of children being admitted in winter with paediatric respiratory disease dramatically decreased. There are very clear links between things like housing and wellness. So we need to recognise those and actually set a goal for what we’re trying to achieve and a strategic plan to deliver on that goal, along with measures to tell us if we’re progressing towards it.

Instead, we don’t have a strategic approach at all. I look at it and I just see gross mismanagement really. I just see a bunch of silo-based decisions being made that have a whole series of unintended consequences and tend to counteract other policies and directions being taken in other areas. It’s social chaos – that’s what we’re seeing. We shouldn’t be surprised with what we’ve got.

One thing that the National government has done is make the B4 school checks free for children and they’ve also added a diabetes checklist to this so that “95% of children identified as obese in our free B4 School health checks will be referred to a health professional for support to improve their family’s lifestyle through better nutrition and more physical activity”.

But what’s a health professional going to do? Tell them not to spend their five dollars they’ve got that day for food at KFC? It’s complete bullshit. It’s so disingenuous. It’s just one of the things that politicians do where they’ll have a policy that is virtually meaningless and very ineffective, then they’ll say that’s their solution to a big problem. It’s more complicated than that.

Bill English’s social investment approach is quite interesting. I actually think it’s a good idea, in the sense that he’s starting to look at vulnerable families and how can we actually customise the resources available to these families and deliver them in a way that is meaningful to those families, with our approach changing as their circumstances change. It’s a transformative model of service delivery. But they’re talking about it and it not doing it.

I think the best example of transformative service delivery is the alcohol and drug treatment courts. It actually looks at recidivist criminal offenders whose offending is driven by alcohol and drugs. That is a truly transformative model of service delivery and Bill English’s social investment could be really good at dealing with vulnerable families if it took a similar approach.

But the other side of this is – what are the drivers of vulnerability and what are you doing about those? They’re not looking at that, so it’s just classic government policy. They have a whole lot of policies that have consequences, like creating vulnerability to health issues. And then they’ll introduce some intervention to deal with the vulnerable. You see what I mean? They haven’t got an overarching strategy about reducing vulnerability – their policies aren’t linked up in any way. Instead, they just piss around at the margins and it will ultimately be really ineffective in dealing with the big issues.

What I’m saying is – we deserve better. We are a proud country. We’re lucky as hell to be who we are and where we are. What we have is incredibly precious, in terms of our geography, our relatively small population, our natural resources that are available to us. What worries me is that we are eroding those at an incredible rate and we are allowing that to happen. The argument is – at least we’re not as bad as “x” – but why can’t we be the best? And we should be.

You’re talking about a holistic agenda, but the whole way politics is run now via short articles in our daily newspapers and two-minutes pieces on the evening news, so you can’t blame politicians for trying to get an easy-to-understand talking point. Plus our community is more gentrified than it used to be and I’m not sure people believe in the social safety net in the same way that they used to…

I’m not so sure about that. I have more faith in the people in our community to tell you the truth. I truly believe that there is an enormous amount of goodwill towards others in this country. It’s a question of re-discovering that and not driving people into their political camps. The discussion needs to be on the issues and values that we want, rather than the National Party has got this policy and the Labour party has this policy and the Greens have got this policy. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily helpful, it just hardens people’s positions.

I think New Zealanders are very kind people – they’re very equitable and fair, generally speaking. I don’t think we marshal that power in the way we probably should. We’ve left it to the media to report the way that they do. We leave it to the politicians. As soon as you start getting political, you drive people into their entrenched political camps. My sense is that we need to talk about the issues and not the politics. We need to have a frank discussion about how we want New Zealand to be.

This content is brought to you by LifeDirect by Trade Me, where you’ll find all the top NZ insurers so you can compare deals and buy insurance then and there. You’ll also get 20% cashback when you take a life insurance policy out, so you can spend more time enjoying life and less time worrying about the things that can get in the way.

This election year, support The Spinoff Politics by using LifeDirect for your insurance. See lifedirect.co.nz/life-insurance