Australia has never looked more appealing

It came as no surprise to read that the number of New Zealanders leaving the country approached record levels in the year to August 31.

There was a net migration loss of 42,600 New Zealand citizens, not far short of the record loss of 44,400 in 2012. More than half of those leavers were bound for Australia.

Overall, migration figures show an unprecedented population increase. Annual migrant arrivals reached an all-time high of 225,400. Most of the new arrivals came from India, China, the Philippines, Fiji and South Africa.

New Zealand must seem an attractive destination to people from countries suffering from overcrowding, poverty, political repression, pollution, violence and corruption. But the migration figures also tell another, less encouraging story.

New Zealand is looking less and less hospitable to people who have grown up here. They remember what the country of their birth used to be like and they know what it’s capable of being. They have watched with dismay as a prosperous, settled, liberal democracy has been destabilised and transformed into a squabbling, sullen and ill-tempered society that they no longer recognise.

They have not only seen economic prospects – historically a key driver of emigration – diminished by an incompetent, profligate government; they have also watched with mounting disquiet as social cohesion has been undermined by extreme, officially sanctioned ideological agendas that have prevailed unchallenged since 2020.

Even more depressingly, many see little prospect of improvement post-election. Small wonder, then, that so many New Zealanders find Australia appealing. I suspect that many of those who have already left shut the door behind them, albeit regretfully, and have no intention of returning. Those of us who remain are diminished by their loss.

As is often the pattern with external migration, many of those who have gone will have been skilled, highly educated and ambitious for social and economic advancement. As Kiwibank economist Jarrod Kerr observed, “We lose trained, smart individuals. That is something that worries us.”

The leavers will no doubt have been encouraged by an Australian law change last year that eased the pathway to Australian citizenship. This was naively greeted by the media – and celebrated by the New Zealand government – as a breakthrough after years of Australian intransigence.

In fact the Australians would have been motivated less by a sudden, uncharacteristic rush of goodwill toward their neighbours across the Ditch than by the realisation that opening the doors to talented and well-trained New Zealanders made perfect sense, especially when a recovering post-Covid Australian economy was desperate for skilled, hard-working (and English-speaking) people.

In other words, what was played up by New Zealand politicians as a gain was in fact Australia cleverly taking advantage of mounting social, political and economic unease under a floundering Labour government here. To put it bluntly, we were screwed. And it worked: the Guardian reported in August that New Zealanders were applying for Australian citizenship at the rate of 375 a day.

The latest migration figures particularly resonated with me because my wife and I have just spent two weeks in Queensland. While there, I couldn’t help but be struck by the vibrant, dynamic, prosperous vibe and the general mood of positivity. It stood in striking contrast to the sulky, bitchy mood at home.

We stayed with my brother-in-law and his wife in Brisbane and our son and his family in Noosa. They enjoy a very good life, a high standard of living and didn’t give me the impression of pining for home.

I drove up to Hervey Bay to visit a cousin, I spent an enjoyable day with a former colleague from my Nelson Evening Mail days and we had a long lunch with an old friend of our son who moved to Brisbane many years ago. Our friend's parents and siblings had made the move too.

They are among the estimated 670,000-plus New Zealanders living in Australia. Two nephews and a niece have also settled there, along with several old school friends and an almost uncountable number of ex-workmates. Most are still proud to call themselves Kiwis but they are better off there.

We spent several years in Australia in the early 1970s – our first child was born there – but I had never thought about returning there to live. This time I did. The appeal of Australia historically ebbs and flows, but right now it’s running very high.

It’s not just the lure of the climate and the beaches, enticing though they are. It’s something much more elemental than that. It’s the feeling that New Zealand has become a broken, demoralised society – a perception accentuated when I made the mistake of visiting NZ news websites while in Queensland and read mostly about violent crime and failing infrastructure.

As a former news editor I have to remind myself that a lot of news is, by definition, bad. Still, stories about a massive sinkhole opening up in the centre of Auckland and the unexplained damage to the iconic Ranfurly Shield (not to mention the implication that illegal drugs were involved in the latter incident) seemed somehow symbolic of a country in decline.

This negative perception was magnified on the bus trip into Wellington from the airport on our return. The once proud capital (remember the “Absolutely Positively Wellington” campaign?) looked like Dublin in the 1980s, which is not a flattering comparison. The first people we saw on the streets were a trio of high-as-a-kite derelicts falling about in a Kilbirnie bus shelter. Vape shops and tattoo parlours lined the route and the city generally looked unkempt and unloved. It couldn't have made a more striking contrast with the shining, humming Brisbane we had left behind.

Of course Australia has its issues too. Tomorrow’s referendum on whether Aborigines should have a constitutionally enshrined “voice” in Parliament was the dominant story while we were there, and it’s an issue as divisive as co-governance (with which it has obvious parallels) here.

Australia, like New Zealand and virtually every other English-speaking democracy, is also mired in the culture wars initiated by neo-Marxists in the universities. But from the perspective of a New Zealander, these problems, as long as they occur in Australia, have the great virtue of being someone else’s. I don’t feel I have any emotional stake in them, nor any right to pronounce an opinion. Here is different; this is my country.

All of which brings us to the election. And for the first time, after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to exercise a passive protest by not casting a party vote. I will be among the hundreds of thousands of abstainers who threaten to make this the lowest turnout in New Zealand election history. 

It’s not just that I find the options too thoroughly depressing. Rather, I see no good whatsoever coming from this election and don’t want to feel responsible in any way for the outcome – which, however the voting plays out, will almost inevitably perpetuate the paralysing malaise gripping the country and condemn us to further decline. 

In the end, the decision came down to a relatively simple calculus. Do I desperately want to get rid of the Labour government and its Green hangers-on? Yes. But even to the extent of giving my vote to parties that I can't in conscience support? No.

I won’t join the exodus to Australia, because we have deep family attachments here. But New Zealand feels buggered, not to put too fine a point on it, and I have no confidence that whatever wretched, compromised hybrid government rises from the post-election swamp after tomorrow will have the will, the ability or the moral fibre to fix it.

Rowan Dean and that Sixty Sixty poster

I was vaguely aware last week that someone in Australia had caused a stir over a poster for the New Zealand band Six60; something to do with the band’s use of the Maori language. I didn’t bother to acquaint myself with the details, concluding that it was just another tedious skirmish in the culture wars. There are so many it can be exhausting trying to keep up with them.

I took a closer interest, however, when I found out a couple of days ago that the ruckus was triggered by Rowan Dean, a man with whom I have had dealings in his capacity as editor of the Spectator Australia, to which I occasionally contribute. 

Dean presents a show on Sky News called The World According to Rowan Dean, and it was on this programme, while talking to Jonathan Ayling of the New Zealand Free Speech Union, that he drew attention to the Six60 poster.

Noting New Zealand’s “push for inclusivity” and promotion of the Maori language, Dean brought the Six60 concert poster up on screen and pointed out that it was entirely in Maori; “not a word in English”. Maori appeared to be supplanting English, Dean said, and he wanted to know how New Zealanders who don’t speak Maori felt about it. 

The subject arose in the context of a rather confused interview in which Dean and Ayling sometimes appeared to be talking at cross-purposes. The recently passed Plain Language Act, the recently revived proposal for hate speech laws and the use of te reo all got tangled up together when they are separate and largely unrelated issues, the only unifying factor being Labour’s hell-bent drive to leave an indelible stamp on New Zealand before it gets jettisoned from office.

The confusion wasn’t helped by hyperbolic and not entirely accurate captions running across the bottom of the screen, such as: “NZ government hiring language officers”, “NZ passes Orwellian plain language bill”, “One step closer to the thought police” and “Concert poster excludes half of New Zealand”.

I felt sorry for any Australian viewer trying to make sense of it – but then, Australians have never been well served by news media purporting to explain what’s going on in New Zealand, which Australian commentators routinely portray as a slightly more remote, quaint and incomprehensible version of Tasmania.

All this happened two weeks ago, but it wasn’t until last week that controversy erupted on this side of the Ditch, and then only because of the Six60 poster which took up a relatively small portion of the interview. Predictably there was fury that a conservative Australian talk-show host was making what appeared to be disparaging remarks about the increasing usage of te reo in New Zealand. Dean’s offence was compounded in the eyes of his hyper-sensitive New Zealand critics by his failure to name the band correctly, as if by dismissively calling them “Sixty Sixty or whatever” he was delivering a further gratuitous slight against the nation.

In fact Dean appeared as much bemused by New Zealand’s adoption of te reo as critical of it. In common with many Australians, he fails to grasp the place of Maori in New Zealand culture.

His incomprehension highlights a crucial distinction between the two countries. In Australia, Aboriginal culture has historically been marginalised, despite belated attempts to give it greater recognition. In New Zealand, by contrast, Maori influence runs wide and deep.  It’s accepted – in fact valued – as an essential element of mainstream society. No one watching the Black Ferns play England last Saturday could have been in any doubt about that.

If I wanted to appear learned and profound, which I’m not, I would speculate that this difference between the two countries arises at least in part from a striking contrast between Maori and Aboriginal cultures and their relationships with the European colonisers. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that whereas the Aboriginal reaction to the arrival of Europeans was to melt into the bush, Maori confronted the colonisers head-on. They weren’t over-awed or intimidated; they demanded to be engaged with on equal terms.

And so it has continued. Pakeha New Zealand has absorbed Maori culture in a way that many Australians just don’t get. Maori are an ineradicable and invaluable part of our national character. They help make New Zealand the unique place that it is.

That was brought home to me last weekend at a friend’s funeral. Neither she nor her late husband were Maori, but they had adopted a Maori daughter and in doing so had become part of her whanau and had gladly embraced tikanga Maori (or perhaps I should say it had embraced them, because it works both ways). The funeral, which our friend had planned down to the last detail, seamlessly fused Maori and European influences – the former represented by a spirited, moving and beautifully sung waiata, the latter by Alison Krauss singing the gospel song I’ll Fly Away. Oh, and a piper as the coffin was carried out. It couldn’t have happened anywhere but New Zealand.

Dean’s difficulty with the use of te reo in New Zealand came as no surprise to me. In 2020 I wrote an article for the Spectator Australia about the relentless promotion of biculturalism in New Zealand, with particular reference to the increased official use of Maori. I also referred to the unlawful roadblocks set up by Maori activists, ostensibly for the purpose of preventing Covid-19 from being spread to remote and vulnerable communities.   

Dean subsequently invited me to take part in another Australian Sky News talk show he’s involved with, called Outsiders. I initially agreed, but on learning more about the likely tone of the show I backed away. Outsiders presents a conservative perspective and the subject was to be Maori influence in New Zealand life and politics. I was concerned that the other participants in the show, who were Australian, would be dissing an aspect of New Zealand society that they didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to be a party to it. 

At this point readers of this blog might wonder whether I’m going all woke here and indulging in a bout of virtue-signalling. Not a bit. It’s possible to value and take pride in the enormous Maori contribution to our national character while simultaneously being deeply concerned about the promotion of divisive, race-based policies that threaten to drive a wedge between Maori and Pakeha. In fact I’d like to think that in this regard, I’m not far out of line with mainstream thinking.

In any case, I’m allowed to criticise New Zealand because it’s my country. But I become defensive when it’s attacked by Australians (or Poms, for that matter).

Anyway, back to The World According to Rowan Dean. I thought Six60 reacted to Dean’s remarks exactly as they should have, with characteristic New Zealand good humour. Resisting any temptation to ramp up an already overheated war over wokery, they offered Dean free tickets to one of their shows and issued a new promotional T-shirt bearing the slogan “Sixty60 or whatever”. Perfect.

For his part, Ayling quietly pointed out to Dean that te reo is officially a New Zealand language and people should be free to use it. That’s a free speech issue. Use of te reo becomes problematical only when people feel compelled to use it or discriminated against for not doing so. That’s a free speech issue too.

 

The Canberra elite's visceral loathing for Pauline Hanson

(First published in Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz, October 31.)

I first wrote about Pauline Hanson in 1997. She was then a newly elected Australian MP whom the liberal media – indeed most of the Australian political establishment – openly despised.

Hanson had been selected as a Liberal Party candidate in the 1996 elections but was dis-endorsed because the party was embarrassed by her opposition to special government assistance for Aborigines. She won the Queensland seat of Oxley anyway, despite it being an Australian Labor Party stronghold, and went on to form the One Nation Party.

Journalists and commentators made much of the fact that she had previously owned a fish and chip shop. She was seen as bigoted and uneducated and therefore not worthy of a seat in the Australian parliament. It didn’t seem to occur to her detractors that the bigoted and ignorant, in a democracy, are as entitled to representation as anyone.

Hanson wasn’t helped by the fact that she came from a state that many liberal Australians considered racist and socially backward.  All this made her the target for a lot of mockery and thinly disguised intellectual snobbery. When a TV interviewer asked her whether she was xenophobic, it was clear Hanson didn’t know what the word meant. The howls of derision could be heard from Brunswick to Balmain.

Her conservative stance on Asian immigration and Aboriginal rights made her even more of a pariah. At One Nation meetings, she and her supporters were abused and pelted with missiles. Ironically they were branded as Nazis, a label that could more accurately have been applied to the people trying to silence her.

I pointed out in my 1997 column that while the media and the political establishment were busy pouring scorn on Hanson, she was steadily building voter support. In the 1998 Queensland state elections, One Nation won 23 per cent of the vote.

Notwithstanding all the derision heaped on her, Hanson shrewdly exploited her “outsider” status. There remained a significant body of old, conservative Australia – some would say redneck Australia – that liked what she was saying.

More than 20 years on, a lot has changed. A flawed human being who arouses intense feelings from friends and foes alike, Hanson has been through some turbulent times.

A gang-up by the major parties ensured she lost her parliamentary seat in 1998, despite winning the biggest share of the vote. She was later expelled from the party she founded and was imprisoned for electoral fraud, although her conviction was quashed on appeal.

Subsequent attempts to revive her political career were dogged by conflict and controversy, but in 2013 she was reconciled with One Nation and by 2016 she was back in Canberra as a senator for her home state. 

One thing that hasn’t changed in all that time is the Australian media’s visceral loathing for her. While Hanson remained in the political wilderness she could be treated with lofty disdain. But with her return to the corridors of power, elements of the media seem to be back in “Get Hanson” mode.

Evidence of this is a recent book called Hoodwinked: How Pauline Hanson Fooled a Nation, by Canberra press gallery doyenne Kerry-Anne Walsh.

If that name rings a bell with some readers, it’s probably because Walsh is a regular Friday morning commentator on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report. But judging by reviews of her new book, Walsh – who previously wrote an overwrought and highly partisan account of how former Australian Labor prime minister Julia Gillard was supposedly shafted – has done nothing to erase doubts about her ability to comment impartially on Australian politics. 

One review on a left-wing website carrying the imprimatur of the Catholic Jesuit order applauds Walsh for “dismembering” Hanson. The same review, incidentally, continues the relentless disparagement of Hanson’s background as a fish and chip shop proprietor, as if that negates any right she might otherwise have to be taken seriously.

A less admiring review in the Spectator Australia by maverick former ALP leader Mark Latham, who is something of an outsider himself, describes Walsh’s book as 300 pages of non-stop abuse.

Latham says Walsh’s first sentence sets the tone, describing Hanson as looking like “she’d been slapped with something wet and smelly from the old days, when she ran a fish and chippery”.

Ah, there it is again: the fish and chip shop. The Canberra commentariat won’t let anyone forget it. It’s a striking example of how contemptuous some of the media elite have become toward ordinary people.

From what I’ve read of her, I don’t think I like Hanson, but I like media gang-ups even less.

A tough but dispassionate journalistic assessment of Hanson would be entirely legitimate, but Walsh’s book sounds more like a toxic rant. One otherwise sympathetic reviewer described it as “depthless, open loathing”. Not much has changed in 21 years, then.

The truth about accents

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, April 18.)

A recent edition of my favourite magazine, Britain’s The Spectator, included a travel article in which the writer had made a brief stopover at Auckland.

She described New Zealand as “utterly draconian” about what people are allowed to bring into the country. “I disembarked to dire warnings of crippling fines for smuggling in food, seeds, plants or pets. It’s a brave traveller who wanders in with a forgotten banana skin in their bag.”

She went on: “To my horror, I was pounced on immediately.  A guard grabbed my handbag, dragging it off my shoulder. ‘D’you hev food of eny kind in your beg?’ she demanded. ‘Boris [her bouncy beagle] thinks you hev’.

“My bag was wrenched from my grasp, emptied out on to a table, and given a thorough snuffle by Boris.”

I suspect a bit of journalistic exaggeration here. Granted, our border protection people sometimes lack a bit of finesse. This is a hazard of their occupation internationally. Customs and immigration people everywhere have a way of making innocent travellers feel guilty, or at the very least under suspicion.

But what particularly struck me was the writer’s mocking of the New Zealand accent.

Before I go any further,  a disclosure. I cringe at the way many of my fellow New Zealanders speak.

The New Zealand accent is changing, and not in a pleasing way. I reckon the time will come when people of my generation will struggle to understand what millennials are saying.

Younger staff in cafes and shops are often incomprehensible. They speak a dialect recogniseable only by their contemporaries.

On a recent Air New Zealand flight I winced at the strangled pronunciation and grotesque, sing-songy vocal cadence of the 30-something woman making the in-flight announcements. Our national airline leaves no stone unturned in its efforts to recruit cabin crew who speak atrociously.

But here’s the thing. As a New Zealander, it’s my right – a right of citizenship, you might say - to comment critically on the way we speak. But when people of other nationalities make disparaging remarks about the New Zealand accent, that’s a different story. I always feel my hackles rise.

Why? Because it’s the sneerer’s way of asserting cultural superiority.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the way other nationalities speak, but it reveals more about the mocker than the mocked.

The Brits still carry a lot of imperial baggage, and some can’t help revealing their disdain for cultures that they once governed, and which they still consider a bit primitive – like us, for example.

The United States-based TV host John Oliver is another Pom who enjoys making fun of the New Zealand accent.  The irony that has escaped both Oliver and the Spectator writer is that their own country is home to a wondrous assortment of bizarre regional accents and dialects, some of them almost incomprehensible to outsiders. 

This illustrates two truths about accents. The first is that most human beings can’t help the way they speak, any more than Oliver can help looking and sounding like a dork. Accents are markers of regional origin, social class and education. They are part of a lifelong cultural conditioning that starts at birth and over which most people have little control.

The other truth is that most national and regional accents sound funny to outsiders and are therefore ripe for mockery. This is just as true of a farmhand from the English West Country – or, for that matter, a Welshman or an Old Etonian with marbles in his mouth – as it is of a biosecurity officer at Auckland Airport.

The British are not the only nationality who derive amusement from the way New Zealanders speak. Australians do it too.

A recent example was when the now-disgraced former Australian deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce was revealed as having dual citizenship of Australia and New Zealand. This was the cue for much gleeful satirical comment on Australian TV shows in which Joyce mysteriously acquired what was presumably meant to sound like a New Zealand accent.

Sigh. Australian jokes about the Kiwi accent are as tedious, predictable and infantile as the tired old ones about sheep. But who’s to say that our accent sounds any more ridiculous to an outsider than the Australian one?

Done without malice, mimicry of other accents can be funny. The late Peter Sellers made a career out of imitating Hindus and Frenchmen – something he would never get away with today. But the way the New Zealand accent was described in the Spectator article had nothing to do with humour.  

It was a sneering putdown of a crude colonial – one, moreover, who had the impertinence to subject the English journalist to the inconvenience and humiliation of a bag check.  How dare she!

It’s a sign of insecurity when one nationality tries to build itself up by putting others down. The sooner people realise this, the sooner the disparaging jokes about national accents will dry up.

Any Australian's preferable to a Kiwi - even Kevin Rudd

(First published in The Spectator Australia, August 6.)

Anyone who has observed the relationship between Australia and New Zealand over many years is forced to an inescapable conclusion. Some Australians don’t like the idea that New Zealanders can do anything very well, and positively recoil from the thought that they can do anything better than Australia can. This was the only plausible explanation for the extraordinary contortions over whether the Australian government should back Kevin Rudd in his belated bid for the job of United Nations Secretary-General ahead of New Zealand’s Helen Clark.

For all the hollow sentimental rhetoric spouted every Anzac Day about the closeness of the trans-Tasman bond, the truth is that at the political level, New Zealand is generally regarded as an irritating smaller sibling whose interests are considered only when it suits Canberra to do so. It’s hard to escape the feeling that in the eyes of some high-powered Australian political players, any Australian – even the discredited Mr Rudd – would be preferable to a Kiwi.

Mr Rudd’s now-aborted candidacy had all the hallmarks of a spoiler action that was likely to obliterate whatever chance Miss Clark might have had of securing the big job. It was a desperate play by a bored, under-engaged man anxious to amount to something again.

The irony is that the appointment was unlikely to go to anyone from the Anglo world anyway, since it’s the UN custom to rotate the job on a geographical basis, and it’s generally considered the turn of Eastern Europe. Besides, conventional wisdom holds that the big powers which control the UN Security Council prefer to appoint someone malleable, which Clark is not.

In a recent straw poll, the former Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand  ranked only sixth of the 12 contenders. Toss in an Australian candidate to muddy the waters, and she wouldn’t have a bolter’s chance.

That Mr Rudd threw his hat into the ring in the first place was perhaps no surprise. After all, a man with an Olympian intellect – to say nothing of an ego the size of the Simpson Desert – needs a suitably formidable challenge. What was surprising was the breadth of political support for his bid, from senior figures in the coalition government as well as former colleagues from the party which found him intolerable as its leader.

It didn’t seem to matter that Mr Rudd had been an abject failure as Australian prime minister, once jettisoned by his own MPs and later emphatically rejected by Australian voters fed up with his toxic and dysfunctional government.

Neither did it seem to matter that even people on Mr Rudd’s own side (notionally, at least) ridiculed his conceit in thinking he was competent to take over one of the most powerful jobs in international politics. Kristina Keneally, former Labor Premier of New South Wales, called him a psychopathic narcissist and said her labrador dog would do a better job as Secretary-General – a putdown even more stinging than Queensland Senator James McGrath’s remark that he wouldn’t trust Mr Rudd to operate a toaster.

In the end, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made what was described as a captain’s call in announcing the government would not support Mr Rudd’s nomination.  Mr Turnbull was as blunt as the laws of political propriety permit in explaining why he had made the decision, simply saying that Mr Rudd was not suitable for the job.

Given Mr Rudd’s erratic history of rudeness, bad temper and general megalomaniacal behaviour, it’s possible that as many Labour voters as coalition supporters agreed. Certainly Mr Rudd’s petulant response to Mr Turnbull’s decision confirms that the Prime Minister made the right call. But what remains unexplained is why so many high-profile figures – including Liberal Party deputy leader Julia Bishop, ambassador to the US Joe Hockey, former Labor Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans and former Liberal leader Brendan Nelson – argued in Mr Rudd’s favour.

Judging by the public comments of Mr Rudd’s supporters, the main consideration seemed not so much his competence for the job as the belief that Australia should be seen as supporting an Australian candidate. This view was articulated by, among others, Richard Woolcott, a former Australian ambassador to the UN. “If an Australian decides to stand I think the Australian government should support that Australian,” Woolcott was quoted as saying. 

It didn't seem to matter that there was already a nominee from this part of the world, and one who has the necessary credentials. Miss Clark is respected even by her former political opponents in New Zealand as a woman of formidable ability and proven competence in international affairs. She was a three-term Prime Minister and since 2009 has held the third-highest job in the UN – that of administrator of the UN Development Programme. But she happens to be a New Zealander, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that it would be seen as a blow to Australian pride if a prestigious international job went to a Kiwi when there was an Australian available.

The relationship between the two countries is complex. There’s a lot of genuine affection, but also an undeniable rivalry. New Zealanders are more keenly aware of this than Australians, because Australia is able to ignore New Zealand in a way that isn’t possible in reverse.

This is partly determined by geographical location. New Zealand is an insignificant presence somewhere over Australia’s shoulder, like a more remote Tasmania. But when New Zealand looks out to the world, the first thing it sees is Australia.

Yet for all its size and pretensions to global importance, Australia doesn’t like being upstaged by its smaller bro’. Perhaps that’s why Australian politicians who once regarded Mr Rudd as their bitter enemy, and who rightly highlighted his personal failings, suddenly began singing his praises.

Mr Rudd hadn’t magically metamorphosed into a reincarnation of Nelson Mandela or John F Kennedy, so what had changed? The answer could only be that if someone from Down Under was going to take over the top post in the UN, then it should be an Australian rather than a Kiwi.

Perhaps the most telling fact was that ordinary Australians recognised Mr Rudd’s unsuitability even if the political elites didn’t. An April poll showed that Miss Clark’s candidacy was supported by more than twice as many Australians as Mr Rudd’s, and even Labor voters preferred Clark by a narrow margin. Perhaps that’s what people mean when they talk about the wisdom of crowds.

When supposed liberals turn out to be anything but

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, July 27.)

It’s been an extraordinarily turbulent few weeks in international politics.

Two patterns have emerged. The first, which has been much commented on, is that alienated voters are rebelling against the political elites which, for the past couple of decades, have been calling the shots.

People are looking for something new from politicians. For want of a better word, they seem to be looking for some type of authenticity – a sense that politicians actually stand for something, even if it’s not very well articulated.

In the US, this is obvious from the extraordinary groundswell of support for Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign has been based on simplistic slogans rather than clearly defined policies, but they strike a chord with American voters who feel they have been neglected for too long.

Over on the left we saw a similar phenomenon in the unexpected surge of support for the Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders.

In ordinary circumstances the tag “socialist” is the kiss of death to any American politician, but these are not ordinary times. The socialist Sanders was able to mobilise enough of a following to give his rival Hillary Clinton a hell of a fright on her way to the Democratic nomination.

In Britain, the political establishment got a bloodied nose when voters decided, by a margin of 52 to 48, that they wanted out of the European Union. This was another triumph for the “outsiders” in the form of the United Kingdom Independence Party, or Ukip.

Ukip capitalised on a mounting feeling, outside the prosperous bubble that is London, that Britons wanted to regain control of their own country.

Brexiteers were characterised by their opponents as racists who were concerned only about immigration, but there was much more to it than that. The Britons who voted to leave the EU resented being governed from Europe by bureaucrats over whom they had no control.    

The EU originated as an idealistic plan to avoid the risk of another European war, but it has grown to the point where it’s hopelessly out of touch with the people whose interests it supposedly represents. It’s also seen as undermining the autonomy of member countries and restricting their ability to act in their own best interests. 

Speaking of Britain, Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party is further evidence of disenchantment with the political status quo. Corbyn’s a cloth-cap leftie who is not liked by his own MPs, but has the backing of the party grassroots.

He may be unelectable, but people know what he stands for. That counts for something.

Closer to home, Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull – a bland, middle-of-the-road pragmatist in the same mould as John Key and David Cameron – called an election in the expectation that he would be returned with a thumping majority and be rid of obstructive individuals who had been making life difficult for him in the Senate.

As it turned out, his coalition government barely squeaked back into power after a cliff-hanger election which saw the opposition Labor Party restored as a political force.

What’s more, Turnbull will have even more contrary mavericks to contend with in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Turnbull ousted his predecessor Tony Abbott in an opportunist coup (many called it treacherous) last year, but ran a lacklustre campaign and must now be casting anxious glances over his shoulder.

Many commentators have been saying that for all Abbott’s failings, the former PM would have run a far more stirring campaign – one that would have connected with voters in the conservative heartland.

Abbott, like Sanders, Corbyn and Ukip’s Nigel Farage, is a conviction politician rather than one guided by focus groups and highly paid professional strategists. Trump has convinced Americans he’s a conviction politician too, though it’s hard to say.

Another is Pauline Hanson, one of the mavericks elected to the Australian Senate. Hanson is a conservative Queensland politician whose career has been built on her outsider status.

That brings us to the second pattern to emerge from the recent upheavals. It seems that in the eyes of some people, democracy is fine only as long as it delivers the results they want.

Both the EU referendum result and Hanson’s election in Australia triggered ugly, hysterical backlashes, mostly from people who probably think of themselves as liberal.

In Britain, four million bad losers signed a petition demanding that the referendum be held again. This is like the All Blacks losing a test match 48-52 and demanding a replay.

In New Zealand, a loudmouth radio host wrote a newspaper column arguing that people over 65 shouldn’t be entitled to vote (this, because older Brits voted to leave the EU while younger people, many of whom were too lazy to vote, wanted to stay in).

Similarly, the vicious media attacks on Hanson suggest the liberal elites would prefer it if the people who support politicians like Hanson were disenfranchised, presumably because they’re too thick and too redneck to be allowed anywhere near a polling both.

But Hanson’s supporters are as entitled as anyone to vote for whoever they think will best represent them. It’s called democracy.

The parlous state of our Defence Force

(First published in The Spectator Australia, May 14.)

In the same week that Australia announced it was spending $50 billion on a fleet of new submarines, the New Zealand army admitted it couldn’t muster enough soldiers to fire the traditional rifle salute at an Anzac Day service in the country’s third-largest city, Christchurch. Two weeks before that, it was revealed that two modern patrol ships from the New Zealand navy’s modest fleet hadn’t been to sea for years because of crew shortages.

It’s hard to imagine a more vivid demonstration of the parlous state of New Zealand’s military forces, or of the growing defence capability gap between New Zealand and Australia. But was anyone embarrassed by these disclosures? Not that you’d notice.

In complacent New Zealand, defence ranks so low in the order of political priorities that it’s virtually off the radar. Endangered native parrots get more attention. Politicians take their cue from opinion polls which show that while New Zealanders support their Defence Force, they don’t want to spend any more money on it.

Two generations of Kiwis have grown up with the notion that the military exists mainly to contribute to feel-good operations such as international peacekeeping and relief efforts. Defence policy seems predicated on the hope that in the event of a major conflict, New Zealand will escape the attention of the combatants. Failing that, Australia and the United States will ensure its protection.

The principal function of the navy and air force is to patrol New Zealand’s massive exclusive economic zone, the fourth largest in the world. The air force tries to accomplish this using 1960s-era Orion aircraft - planes that predate the Holden Kingswood and which have been miraculously kept flying as a result of endless engine and electronics upgrades. The RNZAF’s Hercules transport planes are of a similar vintage.

No one pretends New Zealand is capable of mounting a credible defence effort if the country came under attack. In 2001, Helen Clark’s Labour government decided to mothball the air force’s only combat aircraft, a squadron of ageing Skyhawks.

Clark famously justified that decision by pronouncing that we lived in “an incredibly benign strategic environment”. Only months later jihadists destroyed the Twin Towers, and suddenly the world looked very different. But Labour doggedly stuck to its defence-lite credo, cancelling a deal under which New Zealand would have cheaply acquired 28 F-16s to replace the Skyhawks.

By common consent, the strategic environment now is highly unstable –not just in the familiar flash points of the Middle East, but in New Zealand’s own area of strategic interest. North Korea is ruled by a belligerent madman and an ascendant China is flexing its military muscles with provocative displays of military power in the oil-rich South China Sea, where any conflict would threaten vital trade routes.

If that happened, defence commentators say, New Zealand would be under pressure to help keep sea lanes open. But with just two frigates (one of which has been in port since the end of 2014, undergoing an upgrade), it would struggle to make even a token contribution to a multinational task force.

Even when the navy sticks to its core role of protecting the country’s fisheries, there are doubts about its effectiveness. In January last year, in what seemed a striking demonstration of the navy’s impotence, HMNZS Wellington proved powerless to stop three Equatorial Guinea-flagged ships caught poaching valuable Antarctic toothfish.

All this must cause Australians to wonder whether New Zealand is pulling its weight in the defence partnership. Admittedly the two countries have different strategic priorities, partly due to Australia’s size and closer proximity to Asia.

New Zealand stayed out of the Iraq War, for example, while Australia assumed the role of America’s “deputy sheriff” in the Pacific.

New Zealand remains excluded from the Anzus Treaty as a result of its anti-nuclear stance, which was initiated by Labour and continued by the centre-right National Party. But as commentators point out, the relationship with Australia remains a cornerstone of New Zealand defence policy – and the widening capability gap between the two countries has been noted.

In a scathing speech at a symposium in Wellington last year, Kiwi defence analyst Chris Salt – an amateur, but a well-informed one – said New Zealand’s defence plan hinged on buying enough time to run to Australia and America for help. He described it as a policy “devoid of honour and integrity”.

So what happened to the notion that defence of national sovereignty is a core role of government? The answer, in New Zealand at least, is that it has been the victim of a profound generational change.

Until the 1970s, the country was led by politicians with painful memories of the Second World War. The defence portfolio was invariably assigned to a senior cabinet minister and the Returned Services Association was arguably the country’s most powerful lobby group.  RSA members had personally experienced the consequences of being thrust into war ill-prepared and warned constantly about the danger of running down New Zealand’s defence capability. The baby-boomer generation mocked them as crusty old warmongers.

As the old soldiers died and memories of the war grew dimmer, defence slipped down the priority list. The election in 1984 of a Labour government led by pacifists and idealists who had cut their political teeth in the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s and 70s, and who remained gripped by a mindset that regarded any sort of offensive military capacity as bad, was a turning point.

But it’s hardly fair to pin all the blame on Labour. The National Party, which has governed for much of the post-Anzus era, shows no greater commitment to defence than its left-leaning opponents.  

And while New Zealand defence personnel continue to serve with distinction on the ground (they’re helping train Iraqi troops right now), their political and bureaucratic masters in Wellington often give the impression of being incompetent and dysfunctional, with a long record of catastrophically ill-advised equipment purchases, bitter inter-service rivalry and disruptive shifts in policy with every change of government.  

Given the sustained neglect of defence in New Zealand, it’s a strange paradox that attendance at Anzac Day services has never been greater. The inescapable conclusion is that New Zealanders in the 21^st century are more comfortable commemorating past wars than dwelling on the possibility of future ones.

Footnote: Please excuse the annoying changes in the typeface. I have no idea what causes this and have given up trying to fixing it. 

We don't know how lucky we are

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 18.)

I spent much of the weekend mowing lawns and raking up leaves and other garden debris that had accumulated while my wife and I were on holiday in the United States. The only thing disturbing the peace – that is, once I’d turned the mower off – was the barking of a neighbour’s dog.

Meanwhile, a world away, the residents of Paris were locked indoors, reluctant to venture outside for fear of another terrorist attack. There could hardly have been a more striking reminder of how blessed we are, living in this remote and serene corner of the globe.

We can only hope that people who migrate to New Zealand value and respect the fact that ours is a liberal, humane, inclusive and relatively safe society, and that they commit themselves to helping keep it that way. After all, it’s presumably a key reason why they come here.

Not that we can afford to be smug. We are part of a connected, global society and it’s impossible not to share the anguish and anxiety that the people of France are going through right now. Neither can we disconnect ourselves from international efforts to confront and conquer the menace that is Islamist terrorism.

The Islamic State is a uniquely challenging adversary, especially given that its followers appear to have no fear of death – in fact, embrace the prospect of martyrdom. But the fight against them is our fight too.

The Islamist assault on liberal democratic values – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, women’s equality, the rights of minorities generally – is a threat to us all. We can’t pretend it’s not our concern simply because it hasn’t (yet) directly affected us.

Recent events have sharpened my awareness of other things besides our comfortable isolation in the southwest Pacific. Four weeks in the US reminded me once again how insignificant we are in world affairs.

I heard New Zealand mentioned once in the news media. That was when I was listening to National Public Radio late at night and heard a BBC news bulletin that referred briefly to the pending Rugby World Cup final between the All Blacks and Australia.

Small reminders of home intruded on us in unexpected, random ways. In Boston’s North Side, my wife spied a delivery man wheeling a trolley laden with Yealands Estate wine from Marlborough.

In the same city, I heard Weather With You by Crowded House being played as the background to a radio weather forecast. And twice in public places we heard Lorde’s hit song Royals – once in a Subway outlet in the small town of Tejon, in California’s Central Valley, and again in the same state when we were eating halibut and chips on the deck of a seaside café at Morro Bay (a charming spot, by the way).

People have asked me whether the RWC got any coverage in the US media. Fat chance. Rugby may be the fastest-growing sport in America (albeit off a very low base), but the media were interested only in American football, basketball and baseball.

Even universal sports such as golf and tennis rated barely a mention amid the swathes of coverage devoted to domestic sport, including college (i.e. university) football, which has a huge following. In most of the bars we drank in, massive TV screens were permanently tuned to sports channels showing the three popular codes.

(I love American bars all the same. I like the way people sit at the bar and strike up conversations with their neighbours. And American beer is superb. Thanks to the craft beer revolution, the days when the only options were ghastly mass-produced beers such as Miller and Budweiser – the beers they serve in Hell – are now but a grim memory.)

Americans are equally parochial when it comes to general news. Only the most sensational international events, such as the explosion that brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, elbowed their way into news bulletins. Mostly it was wall-to-wall coverage of the race for the presidency, with endless commentary and analysis of the main contenders.

I was reminded of a comment I heard years ago from a New Zealand educationist who had lived for several years in the US. Many Americans had no interest in the outside world, he said, because America was their world. 

This view is supported by passport statistics. As recently as 1989, only 3 per cent of Americans held passports, although the number has increased greatly over the past 20 years (it’s now closer to 40 per cent, compared to roughly 75 per cent for New Zealanders).

New Zealanders are certainly far more aware than Americans of the outside world. We have to be, because we’re at its mercy in a way bigger, more powerful countries are not.

Our isolation makes us compulsive travellers, hungry for experience of other places. Yet our concerns are often just as parochial as those of the Americans.

After four weeks away, my wife and I returned to a country that was still agonising over the same issue that dominated political debate when we left: the incarceration of people who are technically New Zealand citizens (although they regard themselves as Australians, in many cases having been brought up there) in what Peter Dunne rightly labelled concentration camps.

Australia’s treatment of New Zealand detainees is a disgrace, to be sure, and provides further proof that the supposed Anzac bond is a fallacy. It also demonstrates that by comparison with ours, Australia's penal and judicial processes are harsh and vindictive. They learned well from their former colonial masters.

But to put things in perspective, on a scale of one to 10 Australia's treatment of detainees is a two, or at most a three, compared with what the French were subjected to last weekend.

A light-bulb moment in Arkaroola

(First published in The Dominion Post, October 16.)

Years ago, I watched a rugby league test on TV in a remote tourist spot in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

The match was between the Kiwis and the Wallabies and I suspect I was the only New Zealander among the 20 or so people in the TV lounge.

When the Kiwis scored, I couldn’t help letting out a triumphant whoop. It was probably not a smart thing to do.

Feeling a roomful of eyes boring into me, I explained, almost apologetically, that there was an enemy in their midst. Whereupon a fat, red-faced Aussie male in a rugby league shirt snarled: “You Kiwis are like bloody poofters. There’s always one of you in the room.”

It was said without a trace of humour. I was so taken aback that I couldn’t think of a suitable riposte, although a few occurred to me later. (Isn’t that always the way?)

That he felt no constraint about using a term such as “bloody poofters”, thereby confirming himself as a social Neanderthal, was telling in itself. An uncouth Aussie is infinitely more uncouth than the most uncouth New Zealander. It’s possibly the only sphere in which they consistently out-perform us. 

Long before that night, I had realised that Australians and New Zealanders were fundamentally different in their culture and outlook. Working in Melbourne in the early 1970s I often wondered, when I drank with my workmates in the pub, whether we even spoke the same language. 

My colleagues were friendly enough – the women a lot more so than the men – but there was always a sense of distance between us. I was left in no doubt that I was an outsider.

I got better on better with the Poms in the Melbourne Herald newsroom, probably because they were outsiders too. What’s more, they seemed more civilised.

But that night in the Arkaroola Resort and Wilderness Sanctuary (a beautiful place, by the way) was what you might call a light-bulb moment. It was only then that it dawned on me that a lot of Australians actually don’t like us.

This isn’t true of all Australians, of course. Many regard us with genuine affection.

But if you examine the history of the relationship between the two countries, you can’t help but be extremely sceptical about the mythology that surrounds it.

The attitude of most Australian politicians toward New Zealand isn’t far removed from that of the slob in the TV lounge. They tolerate us as long as they have to, and they make friendly noises when it suits them. They’re always ready to invoke the sentimental Anzac bond.

But if New Zealand gets in their way, they don’t hesitate to squash us. At best, they’re indifferent to us; at worst, they treat us with contempt.

This has been demonstrated once again by the controversy over New Zealanders awaiting deportation in Australian detention centres. Our mates in Canberra couldn’t have sent a clearer signal about the value they place on the trans-Tasman relationship.

Predictably, there was the usual nauseating Australian hypocrisy. Interviewed on Morning Report, a Queensland senator who championed the hard line on deportation said: “We love our cousins across the ditch, but …”

With Australia, there’s always a big “but”.  

We shouldn’t be surprised, because we’ve seen this time and time again. Remember Laurie Brereton, the minister in Paul Keating’s government who unilaterally cancelled an aviation agreement with New Zealand and imperiously advised his counterpart in Wellington by fax? Par for the course.

More recently, John Howard gave Helen Clark what one political reporter called the Mafia option – in other words, made her an offer she couldn’t refuse – when the Australians changed the rules relating to New Zealanders living there.  

Clark is no pushover, but her negotiating strength was zero. Howard knew that and took full advantage of it, as is the Australian way. They’re the biggest boys in the playground and they know it.

Don’t expect anything to change because of new Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s professed admiration for John Key. The Key government’s meekly submissive posture on the deportation issue has signalled to Canberra that it will be business as usual.

One thing has changed, however, and quite strikingly. The angry public and media reaction to the detention camp outrage suggests New Zealanders have belatedly woken up to the fact that for decades, Australia has been playing us for suckers.

This message may not yet have got through to our politicians, who continue to defer to the bullies in Canberra out of sheer habit. But it will. 

Sledging: just one of the things that makes us different from Australia

(First published in The Dominion Post, July 10).

I wonder if the time has come to abandon the myth that New Zealanders and Australians are kindred spirits, joined at the hip.

The clincher for me was the behaviour of the Australian cricketers during the final match of the Cricket World Cup.

New Zealand was comprehensively outplayed; there’s no getting around that. But the Australians weren’t content with merely winning.

They couldn’t resist snarling like rabid Tasmanian devils, goading and taunting the beaten New Zealand batsmen even as they were heading back to the pavilion.

For what purpose? The Australians didn’t have the excuse that they needed to intimidate or unnerve their opponents. They’d already got them out, for heaven’s sake.

It was something rarely seen: sledging not as a tactic to win (questionable enough at the best of times, but expected from the Australians), but for the pure pleasure of it.

Brad Haddin was the principal offender. He’s the embodiment of the Ugly Australian – a boorish, braying, gloating, charmless braggart, incapable of even winning graciously.

He later tried to explain his actions by saying the Kiwis deserved everything they got. They were just too damned nice. He couldn’t bear it.

This suggests that Haddin suffers from a serious personality disorder, but he can always argue that he was merely taking his cue from his skipper. In 2013, Michael Clarke was heard telling the English batsman Jimmy Anderson: “Get ready for a broken f***ing arm.”

Australians invented sledging and have made it an art form. As long ago as the mid-1970s, Rod Marsh and skipper Ian Chappell (brother of Greg, who instigated another noble example of Australian sportsmanship, the infamous underarm bowling incident of 1981) were said to vie with each other in profanity.

Some people – the sort of people who regard winning as everything – admire this untrammelled aggression, but Australia is the only cricketing country that routinely indulges in it. They’re proud of it; it’s their point of difference.

Far from feeling contrite about his behaviour in the CWC final, Haddin has promised more of the same during Australia’s current tour of England. The Black Caps may have won universal acclaim in England for the way they played and behaved on their recent tour (“majestic in every way”, Roger Alton wrote in the Spectator), but Haddin advised the English media not to expect the same from Australia. That’s not how they do things.

All of which makes you wonder whether there’s a dark flaw in the Australian character.

We joke about Australians being descended from convicts, but perhaps it truly has tainted them. That would help explain not only their uncouth demeanour on the cricket pitch but a few other things besides: their tolerance of corruption, the preponderance of organised crime and their feral politics.

The comforting cliché is that Australians and New Zealanders are blood brothers whose bonds were forged in war, but we spring from different historical roots and have evolved into two quite distinct cultures.

I sometimes suspect we don’t really like each other much. We resent their swaggering braggadocio and loud nationalism. They regard us with indifference most of the time, dismissing us as too small and insignificant to amount to anything.

But they hate it when we do things better than they can, they don’t like competing with us on a level playing field (remember how hard they fought to keep our apples out?), and they never hesitate to claim our successes as their own. It came as news to an Australian-based friend of mine, for example, that the singer Keith Urban – routinely promoted in Australia as the boy from Caboolture, Queensland – is a New Zealander.

Our prime ministers have often disliked each other – famously in the case of Lange and Hawke – and according to recent reports, the Australians have even tried to erase New Zealand from the Anzac narrative. So much for trans-Tasman mateship.

Yes, we still have more in common with Australia than with any other country, and there are lots of things about Australia that I like.

I go there often and enjoy it for its energy, its colour and its larrikin humour. Only an Australian could come up with the expression “as lonely as a bastard on Father’s Day”.

Besides, not all Australians are yobbos. I’m sure many cringed with shame at Haddin’s antics.

But dare I say it, I think we have a more civilised society on our side of the ditch, and I think we should at least thank Haddin for demonstrating it.

A nation succumbs to emotional incontinence

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 12.)

I think it was the British psychiatrist and writer Theodore Dalrymple who coined the term “emotional incontinence” to describe mass displays of extravagant grief.

Dalrymple wasn’t referring to the neurological disorder of that name, but a sociological phenomenon that was first noted in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death.

On that occasion the traditionally stoical British public indulged in an uncharacteristic outpouring of mawkish sentimentality, gathering in the streets to weep on each other’s shoulders at impromptu shrines decorated with teddy bears. (Why teddy bears? You tell me.)  

Until recently, that public grief-fest stood as the high-water mark of emotional incontinence. But astonishingly, Australians may have outdone the Brits with their reaction to the death of the cricketer Phillip Hughes.

I say “astonishingly” because Australia likes to think of itself as tough and resilient; a larrikin society where hard men in the tradition of Ned Kelly, Jimmy Spithill, Steve Irwin, Dennis Lillee and the fictional Crocodile Dundee spit in the eye of adversity.

But now the secret is out. Australia’s soft emotional underbelly has been exposed.

Hughes’ death not only triggered an overblown media frenzy that continues almost unabated after two weeks, but seemed to reduce some of his fellow players to gibbering wrecks. Who would have thought Australian cricketers were so emotionally fragile?

Counsellors were working with Australian teams, we were told. Some players might never pad up again.

So traumatised were the Australian players that on the day before this week’s postponed test match against India began, there was still doubt as to whether some would be fit to take the field.

Most memorably, we saw the Australian captain, Michael Clarke breaking down like an overwrought teenager.

“We must dig in and get through to tea,” a quivering Clarke told mourners at Hughes’ funeral, in what sounded suspiciously like a line composed by a PR hack to wring maximum sentiment from the occasion.

We hear a lot these days about PDAs – public displays of affection, usually involving celebrity couples, that are criticised as exercises in attention-seeking. I wonder if intemperate public displays of grief should be similarly discouraged.

Certainly, it’s hard to escape the feeling that such displays are often less about the dead than the living.

Deaths happen in sport – most notably in motor racing, where fellow drivers do their grieving in private and move on.

Strangely enough, I don’t recall Australia’s jockeys being so psychologically damaged by the deaths of two female colleagues in separate accidents in October, only weeks before the Hughes incident, that they cancelled all riding engagements. Jockeys, like racing drivers, must be made of sterner stuff than cricketers.

The grieving for Hughes wasn't just excessive to the point of self-indulgence; it was hypocritical too. As sports columnist Mark Reason pointed out in this paper, it was Michael Clarke who told an English batsman last year, “Face up – get ready for a broken f***ing arm”.

The Australian captain clearly loves to indulge in macho sledging, enjoys pumping up the intimidation, but goes to pieces when a teammate dies as a direct result of gladiatorial aggression on the field. Can he join the dots, or does his ego get in the way?

Of course social media had to get in on the act too, with a mass exercise in dribbling self-pity called Put Out Your Bats, the originator of which – a man so psychologically frail that he burst into tears when he heard of Hughes’ death – was lauded in the Australian media as a hero and a celebrity in his own right.

The Put Out Your Bats campaign captured perfectly the spirit of the social media era. It required little of its participants and achieved nothing beyond making them feel good for having engaged in what they no doubt thought was some sort of profound communal act of catharsis.

To be sure, Hughes’ death was a tragedy – not so much because it robbed Australia of a great cricketing talent, but because every life taken prematurely is a tragedy.

More than anyone, his family would have been grieving, but significantly we heard virtually nothing about them. It was all about the game and its cosseted, self-absorbed stars.

In the same week that Hughes died, my wife lost a much-loved sister. She nursed her in her final days and was with her when she breathed her last.

Bereavement didn’t leave my wife in a state of abject helplessness. The day after we held a farewell ceremony for her sister, she was back at work. That’s what people do in the real world. They just get on with things.

"Deetch" or "dutch"? Both are capable of being made to sound absurd

(First published in The Dominion Post, October 17.)

 

YEARS AGO, while on a government-sponsored visit to Germany,  I noticed my official guide smirking as he eavesdropped on the conversation of some of our fellow passengers on a train trip between Karlsruhe and Berlin.

He later explained that the group’s accent identified them as coming from a provincial region in the north of Germany. A resident of sophisticated Bonn himself, he clearly regarded them as yokels. His contempt couldn’t have been more obvious.

It lodged in my memory not just as extraordinarily unprofessional, coming from someone employed to promote a newly-unified Germany, but as a striking lesson in how human beings put others down purely because of the way they speak.

Mocking other people’s accents is an age-old way of asserting cultural and social superiority. 

It’s also one of the easiest ways in which to poke fun at other nationalities - a fact cleverly exploited by the scriptwriters of TV comedies such as Hogan’s Heroes and ’Allo ’Allo!, in which the Germans and French were mercilessly caricatured on the basis of their accents.

Fifty years ago, Peter Sellers sold lots of records with his wickedly clever impersonation of Indians. Would he get away with it today? Probably not. Cultural sensitivity would rule it out. Yet some accents are still considered fair game - including our own.

On the American talk show Last Week Tonight, British comedian John Oliver had great fun recently with a New Zealand television news clip about the fuss over the National Party’s alleged plagiarising of a track by rapper Eminem in its election advertising.

Two aspects appealed to Oliver. The first was National campaign manager Steven Joyce’s reaction when journalists asked him whether National had obtained copyright clearance to use the Eminem song.

Joyce’s reply - "We think it’s, um, pretty legal”  - amused Oliver, who suggested the politician would make an entertaining defence lawyer.

But what also attracted Oliver’s attention, perhaps inevitably, was the accent of the New Zealand television reporter featured in the clip. Her pronunciation of “Eminem”, in particular, so amused him that he attempted his own imitation – not once but twice, to the great mirth of his audience.

Fair enough; I cringe too at the pronunciation of television journalists. Some give the impression they’re on a mission to destroy every trace of euphony in the English language.

This particular reporter’s pinched pronunciation of the vowels in “Eminem” was enough to make even me wince, and I’m a New Zealander.

But then, with accents, who’s to say that one is worse than another? All accents are capable of being made to sound ridiculous.

Several years ago, simple-minded Australians (no jokes about tautology, please) hooted with delight at the famous “Beached Az, Bro” video – an Australian-made cartoon in which a beached whale with a Kiwi accent declined an offer of a potato chup because he could only eat plinkton.

It wasn’t terribly clever, but it played to the widespread perception among Australians that New Zealand is a slightly more backward version of Tasmania.

Even an intelligent magazine like the Spectator Australia can’t resist having a dig. In an editorial devoted to National’s election victory a couple of weeks ago, it referred to events across the “dutch”.

But really, can anyone say the New Zealand accent is intrinsically more absurd than one that pronounces chips as cheeps, kiwi as koy-woy, pool as pewel and today as to die? Or, for that matter, ditch as deetch?

I suppose we just have to accept that New Zealand English can sound odd to other ears. What apparently doesn’t occur to most Australians, with their nationalistic braggadocio, is that their accent can sound pretty tortured too.

And what about the Brits? Once, travelling on a train in France, I spent several minutes trying to figure out the nationality of the young men who were sharing my compartment. It eventually dawned on me that they were from England and that the language they were speaking was nominally the same as mine.

No one from a country with Britain’s quaint assortment of impenetrable regional accents is in a position to poke fun at the way other people speak. At least a New Zealander from Kaitaia can understand one from Invercargill, which is not something that can be said for the British.

So perhaps people like Oliver should lay off the jokes about other cultures’ accents. It’s a cheap way of point-scoring, and it often says a lot more about the mocker than the mocked.

We're ahead of the Aussies on this one

Australians are perplexed – and I suspect slightly miffed – that New Zealand is likely to beat them to a new flag.

Stone the crows, cobber, they complain. Aren’t they supposed to be the rebellious ones?

Australia, after all, is the country that gave us Ned Kelly, who embodied the spirit of anti-authoritarianism, and the Eureka Stockade rebellion of 1854, in which Victorian gold miners rose up against the British colonial government.  

New Zealanders, a much more genteel lot, have never displayed the same eagerness to cast off the shackles of British colonialism. Until relatively recently we were seen as a distant mirror image of the Mother Country, stolidly loyal to the Crown, whereas Australia from the very beginning was determined to forge its own identity. 

This can partly be attributed to the high proportion of Irish in Australia, a group not noted for their affection toward Britain. Former prime minister Bob Hawke reckoned Australia was the most Irish country in the world outside Ireland itself.

In the latter part of the 19^th century, roughly one-third of the white Australian population was Irish. Peter Lalor, who led the Eureka rebels, was an Irishman, while Kelly was the son of an Irish convict who had been transported to Tasmania.

Perhaps due to the Irish influence, republicanism has always been a stronger political force in Australia than here, although Australians voted against becoming a republic by a comfortable margin (55-45) in a 1999 referendum.

Republicanism seems to be off the agenda there now – not surprisingly, since Liberal Party prime minister Tony Abbott is a former executive director of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, which played a key role in the “no republic” campaign in 1999.

That aside, Australians still think of themselves as more overtly nationalistic than New Zealanders. Hence their bewilderment at the fact that we’re seriously considering dropping the Union Jack from our national flag – a proposal considered too radical for Australian politicians to contemplate, even those on the left.

Their puzzlement is compounded by the fact that the idea is being pushed here by an ostensibly centre-right prime minister, John Key.

In the Australian view of the world, this doesn’t make sense. As a conservative, Tony Abbott would no sooner drop the Union Jack from the Australian flag than pass a law allowing same-sex marriage. The same could have been said of his Liberal Party predecessor, the long-serving John Howard.

But right there you have a clue to the difference between the two countries, which many Australians fail to understand. Mr Key did pass a law allowing same-sex marriage – and in doing so, continued a tradition of supposedly conservative New Zealand governments refusing to conform to standard conservative dogma. His promotion of a new flag is entirely in line with that tradition.

Even someone as knowledgeable as the high-profile Canberra political commentator Michelle Grattan doesn’t grasp that we do things differently over here.  Grattan wrote a column on the proposed flag referendum in which she was plainly surprised that a centre-right New Zealand government would do something no centre-right Australian government would contemplate.

But it’s nothing new. New Zealand governments march to a drumbeat which is often out of synch with conservative agendas elsewhere.

In the 1960s, National prime minister Keith Holyoake resisted American pressure to commit more New Zealand troops to the Vietnam War. New Zealand made only a modest contribution to the war effort; enough to show that we supported the Americans in principle, but no more.

Australia, in contrast, succumbed to American browbeating, even sending conscripts to fight. Prime Minister Harold Holt became famous for his craven commitment to go “all the way with LBJ” (American president Lyndon Baines Johnson).

The Australian commitment in Vietnam continued a pattern of close co-operation with America that dated back to World War Two. New Zealand, on the other hand, has increasingly shown a tendency to chart its own course, under National governments as well as Labour, and particularly since Britain abandoned us for Europe in 1973.

In the 1990s, National under Jim Bolger signed up to the former Labour government’s nuclear-free policy, although it had caused a deep rift with both Australia and the United States and continued to be an irritant in our relationships with Canberra and Washington.

Bolger also tried, without success, to promote republicanism – another initiative that must have confounded Australian observers who associated republicanism with the left. I suspect his republican sentiments had something to do with the fact that he was the son of Irish immigrants.

It was under Bolger, too, that National initiated a programme of Treaty settlements, which may have been another manifestation of his Irish sympathy for the victims of colonialism. Again, it was a policy that ran counter to expectations from a supposedly conservative government.

What it all adds up to is that centre-right governments in New Zealand don’t always conform to conservative norms. They are essentially pragmatic; they know they must capture the centre ground to stay in power and are prepared to compromise conservative principles (and even jettison them altogether, as in the case of same-sex marriage) if that’s what it takes.

It might not conform to other people’s expectations of us, but that’s the way we are.

For me, there is a sense of satisfaction in getting the jump on the Australians over the flag issue.

Our neighbours have an unfortunate habit of treating us condescendingly. As far as most Australians are concerned, New Zealand might as well not exist, other than as an object of disparaging jokes about sheep and fush ’n’ chups. So it startles them when we do something that many of them probably envy us for.

But the government’s proposal to push ahead with the flag referendum is consistent with the way we conduct our affairs in other spheres, where we often demonstrate a more independent spirit than they do (for example, by refusing to go to war in Iraq, and by limiting our contribution to the Afghanistan war – an echo of Vietnam).

Let me make a prediction, though. If we decide to adopt a new flag, whatever the design, the snorts of derision from Australia will be long and loud. But underneath the bluster, they’ll probably be wishing they’d done it first.