Ken Douglas: one of the last of the old school

Tributes are being paid to Ken Douglas, who died on Wednesday* aged 86.

I can’t claim to have known Douglas well, but I had a bit to do with him over the years.

I first encountered him when I was a young (19) and very green industrial reporter for The Dominion and Douglas was secretary of the Wellington Drivers’ Union. I was an occasional visitor to the union office on the second floor of the Trades Hall. Pat Kelly was then assistant secretary.

Douglas and Kelly were a bit of an odd couple. Douglas, himself a former truck driver, was a Moscow-aligned communist and a leading light in the Socialist Unity Party, whereas Kelly – father of the late Helen Kelly, who followed him into the union movement – was a Marxist who took his ideological cues from Beijing (or Peking, as we still called it then). But the relationship seemed to work.

Not all union officials were favourably disposed toward the Tory press, regarding the media as tools of the ruling class. Some were surly and hostile, but Douglas was always personable (as was Kelly).

It was only many years later that the two parted company – acrimoniously, in Kelly’s case. By that time (this was the late 1980s) Douglas was president of the newly formed Council of Trade Unions, which several key blue-collar unions refused to join. They were suspicious of the new umbrella organisation because it was dominated by white-collar, middle-class unions such as the Public Service Association.

Douglas tried to hold the movement together and eventually found himself bitterly at odds with bolshie former comrades who thought the CTU should organise strike action against the National government’s Employment Contracts Act, which aimed to strip the unions of their power (one thing David Lange's reformist Labour government had never attempted).

Douglas was in the unfamiliar position of urging moderation. Kelly, always more of a firebrand, was one of those who accused him of betraying the workers. It can’t have been an easy time.

The rancour lingered. I remember writing something about the union split for the Evening Post years later and phoning Kelly to get his view on Douglas’s role in the upheaval, thinking that by then the wounds might have healed. They hadn’t. “You wouldn’t want to print anything I’d say about Douglas,” was his response.

Douglas was a community stalwart in Titahi Bay, where I lived for several years. He was active in local sports clubs and served for several terms on the Porirua City Council and the Capital and Coast District Health Board.

He also sat on some high-powered corporate boards, including those of Air New Zealand, New Zealand Post and New Zealand Rugby. Some people wondered how he reconciled these well-paid gigs with his proletarian sympathies, but I guess he justified them because they involved publicly owned organisations, albeit operating in a capitalist environment.  

Douglas’s politics were anathema to me but I couldn’t help liking him. He had a bluff personality and a sharp intelligence that was uncontaminated by higher learning. 

TVNZ’s One News was drawing a long bow when it described him as “perhaps the most famous unionist in New Zealand history” (presumably the reporter had never heard of Fintan Patrick Walsh, or thinks history began sometime in the 1980s), but he was certainly one of the last of the old school.  

Footnote: I note that several media outlets are referring to Douglas as "Red Ken", but I don't recall ever hearing that nickname in his union days. The only "Red Ken" of that era was the socialist mayor of London, Ken Livingstone (or Ken Leninspart, as Private Eye magazine delighted in calling him).  

*The original version of this post incorrectly said Tuesday.

  

 

 

Ernie Abbott's death still cries out for justice

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, Stuff regional papers and Stuff.co.nz, July 24.)

It’s 35 years since a bomb killed Ernie Abbott, the caretaker of Wellington’s Trades Hall. That’s literally a lifetime ago – a point brought home by a recent reconstruction of the crime on TVNZ’s Cold Case.

One of the detectives investigating new evidence in the case was four years old when the bomb went off. This meant he had to acquaint himself with the political mood of the period, which was essential to an understanding of the killer’s likely motivation.

That wouldn’t have been easy, because judged from today’s standpoint, New Zealand in the mid-1980s seems almost an alien society.

It was a country in the last throes of Muldoonism.  Society had been violently polarised by the 1981 Springbok rugby tour and the economy was on its knees after years of compulsive tinkering by a bullying, authoritarian prime minister. 

New Zealand’s parlous economic state at the time could largely be blamed on Robert Muldoon’s dogged belief in the virtues of regulation and state interventionism, but trade union militancy was a potent aggravating factor.

Vital industries – freezing works, the waterfront, road and rail transport, shipping, construction, car assembly plants – were subject to constant bloody-minded disruption.

Trade union leaders – Jim Knox, Ken Douglas, Bill Andersen, Pat Kelly, Blue Kennedy, Con Devitt – were household names, although rarely mentioned in complimentary terms, other than by their members (and even then, not all of them). Many were avowed Marxists.

Strikes were rarely out of the news and public tolerance of union disruption was stretched to breaking point. It was a malaise that Muldoon, notwithstanding all his tough talk, never seemed willing or able to confront. All this added up to an ugly, sullen national mood of which Ernie Abbott became the hapless victim. 

On March 27, 1984, someone walked into the Trades Hall building on Wellington’s Vivian Street and placed a small suitcase on the floor in the foyer. Several unions had their offices in the building, so it was a natural focal point for anyone with a grudge against the movement. 

When Abbott picked up the unattended suitcase at 5.19pm, apparently with the intention of locking it away until someone claimed it, the bomb inside exploded. He was killed almost instantly.

It was inconceivable that the device was intended for him personally. Ken Douglas, then secretary of the Federation of Labour, suspects the real targets were the participants in a high-level strategy meeting that the bomber possibly thought was being held in the Trades Hall, but which actually took place at the FOL head office some distance away.

Abbott was a socialist and a committed unionist, but he was a very minor cog in the union machine. He held no significant office and was liked by the many who came and went from the Trades Hall – me included, since I often visited the building as a reporter in the early 1970s. I remember him as perky, chatty and good-humoured, although he was apparently not averse to an argument.

We can only assume that whoever murdered him didn’t really care who the bomb killed. It was a crime of blind rage and resentment against trade unionism as an institution. Regardless of what anyone thought about the unions, it was a despicable act of terrorism.

The prime suspect remains alive and has been publicly named. He fits the profile of the likely killer: a grudge-bearing loner with experience of explosives.

Cold Case revealed significant facts that had not previously been disclosed, but the evidence is circumstantial and the police remain hopeful that someone will come forward with information that will close the case.

The drab old Trades Hall still stands in Vivian St and I assume it still houses union offices, but pretty much everything else has changed since 1984. Even the nearby Panama Hotel, where unionists did their drinking and plotting, has long gone.

Several months after Abbott died, the voters tossed Muldoon out of office and the oppressive national mood that had characterised the latter part of his nine years in power was lifted. In its place, New Zealand found itself caught up in the Labour-initiated economic upheaval that became known as Rogernomics, after Finance Minister Roger Douglas.

Ironically, despite the election of a supposedly union-friendly Labour government, trade unions went into sharp decline. Weakened by rising unemployment and economic turmoil, the movement was torn apart by a bitter internal battle between hard-core militants, who believed the key to survival lay in even greater militancy, and a more pragmatic faction led by Douglas.

In the end, neither side won. Jim Bolger’s National government had the last say in the 1990s, abolishing compulsory union membership and ending many of the rights and privileges previously enjoyed by unions. Today only 17 per cent of New Zealand workers belong to a union, the character of the movement has changed radically and strong-arm militancy is a distant memory.

But one thing hasn't changed. Ernie Abbott's killer has never been charged, and his death still cries out for justice.

The kiwi is a bird. I am a New Zealander.

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz., December 13.)

Call me the paper’s resident Grinch. While other people make lists of cards to send and presents to buy, I’ve been compiling an inventory of things that get on my nerves. Here are a few:

• I am not a kiwi. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a freakish-looking bird with nostrils at the end of its beak. I do not scurry around in leaf litter at night probing the soil for grubs and worms.  I am of the species homo sapiens, not apteryx australis.

Accordingly, I cringe at the fashion across all the media for referring to New Zealanders as “Kiwis”. It’s patronising, cloyingly sentimental and just plain wrong. It promotes a comforting nationalistic myth that we are all the same, with common characteristics, opinions and aspirations, rather than representative of what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the crooked timber of humanity, in all its glorious complexity.

In any case, we managed perfectly well with “New Zealanders” until someone decided to infantilise us. It may be four syllables rather than two, but I think we can still get our tongues around it.

• That Air New Zealand engineers’ strike threatened for the week before Christmas. Déjà vu, anyone?

People over 50 will recall the Cook Strait ferry strikes that just happened to coincide with school holidays, or the walkouts by freezing workers that left yards full of sheep at the height of the killing season – anything to maximise the pressure on the employers to cave in.

A generation has grown up with no memory of the enormous economic harm done by industrial disruption during the 1970s. Some would say the subsequent labour law reforms which stripped unions of much of their power went too far. But by cynically and heartlessly calling a strike at the busiest time of the year for domestic air travel, the Aviation and Marine Engineers’ Association has obligingly reminded of us how things used to be.

The sense of nostalgia was sharpened by hearing the engineers’ spokesman interviewed on Morning Report. He spoke with an English accent, recalling an era when New Zealand unions were infected by British class warfare.

• What has Jacinda Ardern got against the letter T? On the TV news the other night she referred to hospidalidy and modorists. I’ve previously heard her speak of credibilidy, creadividy and inequalidy. And because the prime minister is an influencer and role model, other people are already imitating her pronunciation.

Nothing is more susceptible to the whims of fashion than pronunciation and language. The letter L seems well on its way to extinction in some usages – note how often you hear “vunnerable” and “howth” in place of “vulnerable” and “health” – while other words have inexplicably gained an extra syllable, so that we now have “befor-wah” and “unknowen”.

Now the inoffensive letter T, which never harmed a soul, is being usurped by a rampant, invasive D. Someone should mount a campaign to prodect the integridy of spoken English.

• Someone from Otago University watched 24 James Bond movies and read all the Bond books, carefully noting every occasion on which he drank alcohol and the high-risk activities that he engaged in afterwards. I’m not sure what the purpose of this exercise was, but I’m assuming the taxpayer paid for it.

Perhaps we’re supposed to assume it was a bit of a jape, but that wasn’t obvious from the interviews given by the professor (an academic title that once commanded respect) who led the project. He po-facedly pronounced that Bond drank a potentially fatal quantity of alcohol on one occasion and was a consistently heavy drinker over six decades.

But for heaven’s sake, Bond is a fantasy character. So what did this exercise achieve? Are the Otago researchers trying to persuade us that we shouldn’t try to emulate Bond’s drinking?

That would be consistent with their obsessive taxpayer-funded wowserism. But New Zealanders are no more likely to mimic Bond’s drinking patterns than they are to tussle with komodo dragons or indulge in any of the other absurd escapades that occur in his movies. What the research project really reveals is that the Otago academics don’t trust us to distinguish real life from Hollywood escapism – just as they don’t think we can be trusted to drink responsibly. 

• On a cheerful note more appropriate to the festive season, it was a joy to hear the prickly Chris Finlayson, former Minister of Treaty Negotiations, frankly unburden himself on radio of his feelings about the iwi leaders who for years have frustrated attempts to achieve a Treaty settlement in the Far North.

Finlayson, of course, is stepping down at the next election, so could afford to be blunt. But what a shame that politicians should have to wait for their impending retirement to tell us what they really think.

Following in the footsteps of Walsh, Skinner and Knox

(First published in The Dominion Post, October 30.)

By now Richard Wagstaff should be settling into his new job as president of the Council of Trade Unions.

He’ll be very conscious of the legacy he’s inherited. His predecessors include Fintan Patrick Walsh, Sir Tom Skinner, Jim Knox and Ken Douglas.

Walsh was the closest New Zealand has come to an American-style labour boss, feared and hated in equal measure.

Skinner was a moderate and a shrewd pragmatist, regarded with suspicion by some of his union brethren for doing deals with National cabinet ministers late at night over a bottle of Scotch.

Knox was a gruff but likeable old-style blue-collar battler, a veteran of the 1951 waterfront confrontation who took over what was then the Federation of Labour at a turbulent time when the ground was rapidly shifting under his feet – sometimes too rapidly for him to keep up.

Douglas, who remains active in public life as a Porirua city councillor, was an avowed Marxist who had the misfortune to preside over a movement that was fracturing under the strain of change, and who was accused – unfairly, I believe – of selling out in his efforts to hold things together.

Each was a household name in his day, and a power in the land. Wagstaff is neither, and has little chance of becoming one unless things change radically.

He takes over the leadership of a union movement greatly weakened by economic upheaval and labour law reform, but in many ways also greatly improved.

In the days of compulsory union membership, which ended under Jim Bolger’s National government in 1991, New Zealand was one of the most highly unionised economies in the world.

But while the law guaranteed massive membership, it meant that unions were under no pressure to prove their worth. The result was a plethora of small, weak unions with lazy officials who collected members’ fees but didn’t do much else.

Paradoxical though it may seem, compulsory unionism wasn’t viewed favourably by hard-core, militant unions such as the seamen’s, freezing workers’ and watersiders’ unions. They saw the movement as being weakened by all those thousands of shop and office workers with no commitment to working-class solidarity and no interest in fighting the class war.

It’s a very different picture now. Unions represent only about 17 per cent of the labour force, but give the impression of being far more responsive to their members’ needs. They have to be, or they won’t survive.

The odd little craft unions that once occupied every dusty nook and cranny of the Wellington Trades Hall vanished long ago as industries were restructured – or in some cases wiped out – and unions merged.

Simultaneously, union power has shifted from traditional blue-collar industries to the white-collar sector. Deregulation, economic reform and technological upheaval have destroyed the power bases of once-formidable unions in industries such as freezing works and car assembly plants.

These days it’s public sector unions such as the teachers’ and nurses’ organisations, mostly dominated by women, that have the big numbers. It’s enough to make grizzled old wharfies and boilermakers weep.

One thing hasn’t changed, though, and that’s the need for well-organised, effective unions. If anything, they have become more important since the reforms of the 90s tilted the industrial balance of power back in favour of employers.

Workers can’t rely on the state to protect their interests. That was demonstrated at Pike River and in the forestry industry, where the CTU successfully prosecuted employers over workplace deaths after Workplace New Zealand declined to take action. Taking bad employers to court isn’t high on the government’s priority list. 

Zero-hours contracts are another example of vulnerable workers needing someone to stand up for them.

The big problem for the unions is that people have long memories. Many of us vividly remember the 1970s and early 80s, when the economy was constantly sabotaged by bloody-minded industrial disruption. That ensured there was precious little public sympathy for the unions when National stripped them of their power.

But back to Wagstaff. He seems personable, approachable and articulate, like his immediate predecessors Helen Kelly and Ross Wilson.

That’s a good start. The union leaders of earlier generations were often furtive and hostile toward the media, whom they regarded as the tools of the ruling class.

It’s different now. Public relations is an essential part of the tool kit of the modern trade unionist as the movement struggles to win back public respect.

It’s a work in progress, as they say.

Con Devitt and the decline of union militancy

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, July 30.)

 

Cornelius Devitt died in Wellington a couple of weeks ago. That name would mean nothing to younger New Zealanders, but to those of a certain age, Con Devitt was once a household name. In fact you could almost say he was public enemy number one.

Devitt was a trade union official. To be precise, he was secretary of the Boilermakers’ Union.

That may not sound significant, but the Boilermakers’ Union included the workers who did the welding on construction jobs involving structural steel.

It was a small union, but it wielded power far beyond its size because it effectively controlled some of the country’s biggest construction jobs. And in the 1970s, under Devitt’s leadership, the Boilermakers’ Union was synonymous with militancy and disruption.

Most notoriously, the union was blamed for endless delays in the building of Wellington’s showpiece BNZ Centre. Begun in 1973 and intended for completion in 1977, the 31-storey building wasn’t finished until 1984. The final cost was four times greater than the original estimate.

The BNZ site wasn’t the only one where the boilermakers made their presence felt. They were also involved in long-running disputes at Mangere Bridge, Marsden Point oil refinery and the Kawerau pulp and paper mill.

But the BNZ job caused the greatest outrage. It was in the heart of Wellington and thus smack-bang in the public eye. And because the BNZ in those days was still state-owned, the taxpayer had a direct stake in it. One consequence of the BNZ fiasco was that New Zealand architects stopped designing buildings that depended on structural steelwork.

I interviewed Devitt in 1995 and he insisted the union was made a scapegoat for other problems on the BNZ job. I’m sure there was an element of truth in that, but there was no doubt that the boilermakers were a bloody-minded lot who seized any excuse they could for downing tools. On one memorable occasion they went on strike because a union delegate didn’t like his company-issue boots.

Rob Muldoon was prime minister then, and he was in the habit of referring to “Clydeside militants” – a shorthand term for left-wing unionists from Britain who attained positions of influence in New Zealand unions. That was a direct reference to Devitt, whose early days were spent in Glasgow’s Clydeside area, then a hive of heavy industry. Devitt proudly told me it was known as “Red Clydeside” on account of its tradition of union militancy.

Devitt, who was 86 when he died, was one of the last of a generation of union leaders whose faces were very familiar to New Zealanders in the 1970s and early 80s. They included Bill Andersen (Drivers’ Union), Pat Kelly (Cleaners and Caretakers), Blue Kennedy and Frank McNulty (Meat Workers), Don Goodfellow (Railwaymen) and Jim Knox (Federation of Labour president).

Some were Marxists, though not always openly so. Factionalism ran deep within the union movement, not only between militants and conservatives (of whom the Irish Catholic Tony Neary, of the Electrical Workers’ Union, was the figurehead) but also within the left – most notably between Moscow-aligned communists and those who took their ideological cue from Beijing.

It was a time when militant unions wreaked economic havoc in key industries. Freezing works, the wharves, car assembly plants, transport (especially the Cook Strait ferries, which were seen as especially vulnerable) and the pulp and paper industry were often targeted.

It was ironic that Muldoon, despite his much-vaunted tough-guy image, never got on top of the union problem. Unions went on strike with almost complete impunity throughout his nine years in power, and no doubt contributed to the woefully sick economy that Labour inherited in 1984.

Only a handful of union survivors from that era remain. They include Ken Douglas, who went on to head the Council of Trade Unions, and former Seafarers’ Union president Dave Morgan, though neither remains active in union affairs. Douglas tried to hold the movement together when it began to break apart in the late 1980s and was savagely attacked for supposedly betraying the workers – another irony, given his socialist and militant credentials.

It all seems a lifetime ago, which I suppose it was. Yet that period of strong-arm unionism left an enduring legacy.

Many New Zealanders retain sharp memories of the damage done by industrial turmoil. That goes a long way toward explaining why the union movement today is a shadow of what it once was.

Economic upheaval, deregulation and globalisation wiped out the old centres of union power, such as the big freezing works and car assembly plants. Politicians did the rest, passing new employment laws that tipped the scales in favour of employers.

The abolition of compulsory trade union membership in 1991 was a turning point. Some militant blue-collar unions never wanted it in the first place, believing the movement was weakened by numerically large unions, such as those covering retail and clerical workers, whose members were not strongly committed to union principles and were reluctant to take industrial action.

Today, less than 17 percent of the labour force is unionised and some once-formidable unions no longer exist. Others have shrunk or have been absorbed by others. Power has shifted to white-collar unions, such as the teachers’ and nurses’ organisations.

There’s a new generation of union leaders – typically much better-educated than their predecessors, more media-savvy and less locked into old, class-warfare mindsets. And because unionism is no longer compulsory, unions have to work a lot harder to attract and retain members, which they do.

I believe that in some ways, the balance of power in industrial relations has swung too far in favour of employers. Workers need strong, effective representation to protect themselves against abuse and exploitation.

But if today’s union leaders want to understand why politicians have nobbled them, they need only look back at the rampant abuse of power by militant unions in the era of Con Devitt.

No one would ever wonder which side Kelly's on

(First published in The Dominion Post, October 19.)

IT’S A LONG TIME since the New Zealand trade union movement had a leader as forceful and articulate as Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly.

Like her late father Pat, a fiery Irish Marxist from Liverpool, she’s a fighter who gives the impression of never taking a backward step. She would have been brought up to regard compromise as the dirtiest word in the English lexicon.

It may not always be the wisest approach politically, but no one would ever die wondering which side she’s on – which is not something that could be said of all her predecessors.

Fintan Patrick Walsh, the power behind the Federation of Labour in the 1950s and 60s, was a bully and a tyrant who didn’t hesitate to crush fellow unionists if they got in his way or dared to defy him.

The wily Sir Tom Skinner was viewed with distrust by many of his union brethren, who suspected him of making secret late-night trips to Parliament to do deals with the Tory enemy over a bottle of whisky.  

Jim Knox was well-liked and well-meaning but out of his depth. A man of limited education, he had a simplistic view of industrial relations that was inadequate for the turbulent times.

Ken Douglas, a Soviet-aligned communist, inherited a union movement in upheaval following the economic reforms of the 1980s. For his attempts to hold a splintering movement together, he was branded a traitor to the working class – a label that dogs him to this day among some old-school unionists.

Ross Wilson was the first CTU president of a new breed: university-educated, quietly spoken and almost bookish. He did a conscientious job, but it was hard to imagine him storming the barricades.

Kelly combines the best attributes of some of her predecessors. Like Wilson she has a law degree, but she doesn’t hesitate to wade into a brawl, as was evident during the 2010 dispute over The Hobbit.

But she will almost certainly never see unions regain the strength they enjoyed (and abused) in the 1970s, the era she recently said she would most like to go back to.

* * *

IT MAY be happening largely out of the public gaze, but that doesn’t mean the review of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements isn’t being closely watched.

Critics of the constitutional review accuse it of working towards a predetermined outcome that will see the Treaty of Waitangi entrenched as supreme law and judges given powers to strike down any law deemed to be in breach of Treaty “principles”.

The National Party agreed to the review as part of its deal with the Maori Party after the last election. As New Zealand First Party leader Winston Peters pointed out, there was no public demand for it; it arose out of opportunistic political horse-trading. Such are the flaws of the MMP system.

Critics are also suspicious of the review panel’s composition. Although it’s co-chaired by respected law academic John Burrows, it appears disproportionately weighted toward Maori. Sir Tipene O’Regan is the other co-chair and Dr Ranginui Walker is one of the four other Maori members.

Mr Peters is not alone in expressing misgivings. In fact alarm bells are being rung right across the political spectrum.

Former Act MP Muriel Newman is campaigning against the review and left-wing political commentator Chris Trotter wrote a scathing column in this paper pointing out that the supremacy of parliament – a central tenet of our constitutional arrangements – was under threat.

The fact that the review panel has so far operated largely out of the public view has done little to allay the critics’ suspicions, but the panel’s website now lists a range of organisations that it has been having “conversations” with. Openness is surely the best approach if it wants to reassure people there’s nothing to be afraid of.

* * *

MAORI PARTY co-leader Tariana Turia wishes the media would stop harping on about Nia Glassie, the Kahui twins, James Whakaruru, Delcelia Witika and other Maori children who have died as the result of violence. Ms Turia says they deserve to be left in peace.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. An alternative view is that we should never be allowed to forget them; that it would, in fact, dishonour their memory if we allowed ourselves to push their hideous deaths out of our collective conscience.

I have no doubt Ms Turia is sincerely committed to ending violence toward Maori kids, but you have to wonder whether her commitment is shared by everyone in Maoridom.

Many Maori leaders are quick to demand redress for supposed Pakeha wickedness but are strangely mute when it comes to denouncing appalling behaviour by their own people. If it discomforts them to be confronted constantly with evidence of the outrages perpetrated on Maori children, surely that’s no bad thing.

Small wonder that people get cynical about welfare

(First published, in a slightly abbreviated form, in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, February 15.)

PETER FREEDOM, who boasted last week of travelling the world on his unemployment benefit, isn’t the only person to make a mockery of the benefits system.

Buried in a recent newspaper report about Ronald Terrence Brown, a career criminal jailed for drug offences, was the revelation that he had been on unemployment and sickness benefits for about 20 years.

Brown, 65, was part-owner of a bar in Auckland’s Karangahape Rd and owned six vehicles, including BMWs and a Porsche. He was involved in a ring that dealt in drugs worth millions, and all the while he was bludging off the taxpayer – just like former Christchurch gang leader Darryl Harris, who infamously claimed the sickness benefit for 26 years and even got a special-needs grant to buy tyres for his 2007 Chrysler 300C (a classic “gangsta” car – I bet it was painted black).

Small wonder that honest people get cynical about welfare when they see criminals and other freeloaders abusing the system. The effect on public morale and social cohesion – on confidence in the fairness of the system – is corrosive.

Despite what welfare lobbyists say, New Zealand has an unsustainable welfare problem. More than 350,000 people are on some form of welfare benefit, and if you add those receiving Working for Families and superannuation, the number jumps to 1.3 million. As Sir Roger Douglas has pointed out, “That’s 1.3 million New Zealanders receiving support from the 2.2 million New Zealanders working to pay for it.”

The fact that it’s Douglas saying it gives people an excuse to tune out. There goes the old right-wing dinosaur again, they’ll say. But the unpalatable fact is that he’s right.

Defenders of the welfare system will cry “unfair” at the mention of abusers like Freedom (former name Petrus Van Druten), Brown and Harris. Not typical, they will say; no one condones such brazen ripping-off of the system. And up to a point, they are right. But only up to a point.

The culture of entitlement – the notion that it’s okay to rip off your fellow citizens if you can get away with it – is endemic. Freedom, Brown and Harris simply represent it at its most audacious extreme. Decades of welfarism (exacerbated by accident compensation, the abuses of which are legion) have implanted the belief that living off the taxpayer is a legitimate lifestyle choice.

And the most worrying aspect is that the culture of entitlement appears to be tacitly condoned by the bureaucracy that administers the welfare apparatus. How else can anyone explain the fact that Brown and Harris, whose criminal careers were a matter of public knowledge, could get away with abusing the system for so long?

Clearly, no one noticed the 2007 Chrysler Harris was driving when he arrived at the welfare office pleading poverty. Or if they saw it, no one bothered to ask why someone who could afford to buy and run such a car needed the taxpayer’s help to put food on the table.

We are left to conclude that the public servants who dispense benefits look the other way because they are as dependent on the system as the beneficiaries themselves. After all, their jobs depend on it continuing.

When the media publicised the taxpayer’s generosity to Harris, provoking public outrage, the reaction from the Ministry of Social Development was quick and fearless. Chief executive Peter Hughes said Harris had been told his sickness benefit would stop from January 10 because “he no longer meets standard eligibility requirements”.

Two questions. Would Harris’s benefit have been curtailed if the media hadn’t created a furore? And does anyone really believe his benefit was curtailed because Harris suddenly ceased to be eligible? Far more likely that the department was embarrassed at being caught out and had to act.

And here’s a third question that doesn’t bear thinking about: how many other Freedoms, Browns and Harrises are out there?


* * *

LAST WEEK’S announcement that the minimum wage was to rise by 25 cents to $13 an hour was greeted with scorn and derision in union circles. “Pathetic” and “laughable” were a couple of the epithets I heard on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report.

The rise amounts to $10 for a 40-hour week, which I would have thought was better than useless, but the unions want the minimum hourly rate raised to $15.

There’s some seriously muddled thinking going on here. Only a week before the increase in the minimum wage was announced, we learned that unemployment was up from 6.4 to 6.8 percent.

Everyone else knows the economy is struggling for traction, but this fact seems to have escaped the unions. They think industry can afford to pay the same minimum wage as economically buoyant Australia.

In the distant, make-believe galaxy the unions inhabit, employers are presumably sitting on vast reserves of cash, but it’s a different story in the real world. You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-winning economist to figure out that if employers are forced to pay higher wages, they will simply hire fewer people and unemployment will go up again.

The unions’ stance tends to support the cynical theory that unions don’t really care about the unemployed, since people with no jobs don’t pay union fees. Personally, I don’t buy this. I think the union attitude toward the unemployed isn’t one of indifference but of ideological blindness. They can’t, or won’t, see that paying more to people who are in work, particularly when the economy is teetering on the brink of recession, reduces the prospect of jobs for those who are unemployed.

The same muddled thinking applies to youth pay. The Left thought it was a triumph in 2008 when Parliament passed Green MP Sue Bradford’s Bill abolishing youth pay rates, thus requiring employers to pay workers aged 16 and 17 the full adult rate. But as a result, youth unemployment has skyrocketed.

Economist Eric Crampton from the University of Canterbury calculates that 12,000 more young New Zealanders would be in work today had the Bradford Bill not been passed.

This wasn’t even a case of unforeseen consequences, because the consequences were entirely predictable. Simple logic dictates that an employer is less likely to take a punt on an unskilled school leaver if that person has to be paid the same wage as an adult with a solid work record.

I could go on. In 2003, Labour introduced extra entitlements for people working on public holidays. The impact on operating costs was such that many cafes, bars and restaurants no longer open on statutory holidays, meaning their employees earn nothing – a pyrrhic victory, surely, for the workers.

Cause and effect. It’s not hard to join the dots, unless you’re ideologically blinkered.

* * *

THOUGHT for the day: If New Zealanders applied a fraction of the energy and ingenuity to their work that they devote to dressing up for the IRB Sevens, would New Zealand soon be back in the top half of the OECD prosperity rankings?

It's time to call the teachers' bluff

History tells us that when a government takes on a trade union, there can be only one outcome. In 1912, William Massey’s government famously crushed a strike by Waihi gold miners. The following year, the same administration recruited special mounted constables from rural areas – dubbed “Massey’s Cossacks” because of their riding skills – to subdue striking waterfront workers.

In 1951 Sid Holland’s National Party government broke the power of the watersiders and their allied left-wing unions in a dispute that lasted 151 days and left a legacy of bitterness that lingered for decades. Twenty years later, another National government deregistered the Seamen’s Union, thereby ending years of damaging guerrilla-style industrial action promoted by a militant union faction known as the Red Guard. (I remember it well, because as a young industrial reporter I was with the union president, the late Bill “Pincher” Martin, when the news came through that his union no longer legally existed.)

Perhaps the most striking instance of a government challenging union power, at least in modern times, was Margaret Thatcher’s epic confrontation with British coal miners in the mid-1980s. Thatcher’s victory over the miners effectively broke the back of militant unionism in Britain after decades of economically ruinous strikes.

In all the above cases, government action came only after years of union provocation and misguided appeasement by timid politicians, which union militants invariably (and correctly) interpreted as weakness. The short-term results, when the politicians finally acted, were not always pretty, but the public generally regarded the inevitable unpleasantness as an acceptable price to pay for the curbing of union power.

It’s tempting to romanticise the vanquished trade unionists as working-class heroes, but in reality many (like the British miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and the charismatic Jock Barnes, who led the New Zealand wharfies in 1951) were hotheads and egotists, driven by a potent combination of power, vanity and ideology, blind to any considerations other than the interests of their own organisations, and ultimately prepared to see even their own followers destroyed rather than surrender.

From a 2010 perspective, these clashes between governments and unions seem little more than historical curiosities. But are they? The days when powerful blue-collar unions – miners, watersiders, seamen, freezing workers – could bring the economy to a standstill are long gone, reflecting the economic transformation of the past three decades. In some cases the unions were complicit in their own fate, hastening the demise of their industries either by bloody-minded militancy (as in the case of the Boilermakers’ Union, whose industrial blackmail techniques ensured an end to construction projects that depended on them) or by their stubborn refusal to abandon old ways.

But all that has happened is that the centre of union power has shifted. The unions with the greatest strength now – and the ones most prepared to use it – are those representing white-collar occupations and professions, mostly employed by the state.

All of which brings us to the two teachers’ unions, the NZEI and the PPTA, both of which just happen to be locked in disputes with the government right now: the NZEI over national standards and the PPTA over salary and conditions claims.

There is something depressingly familiar about all this. As the power of the old blue-collar unions has faded, so the militancy of the teacher unions has increased. It has become almost a cliché to describe them as the boilermakers and freezing workers of the new millennium. In fact I see from my files that as long ago as 1995, I wrote an editorial about the PPTA headlined Militants of the nineties.

In that Evening Post editorial I wrote: “As employees of the system, teachers have every right to be consulted on changes. They are entitled within reason to oppose moves which they believe are not in the best interests of pupils, and when all else fails they have the same legal right as any other group of employees to take industrial action. But they misuse their strength – and test the country’s patience – when they consistently use their organisational muscle to frustrate, defy and stonewall the legitimate policies of an elected government.”

I also wrote that teachers had misled themselves into believing that they were the sole guardians and arbiters of all that was correct in education. “They have deluded themselves into thinking, in effect, that they have proprietorial rights over the education system when in fact they are merely its servants.”

I know what you’re thinking. That was 15 years ago, and nothing has changed – except that the teachers seem more convinced than ever that they control education and that it’s the government’s function to comply with their agenda, rather than vice-versa.

You can hardly blame them for being bolshie, because clearly it works. The teachers generally get what they want. They have learned that if they dig their toes in, governments will back down – as we saw when PPTA members, by the simple expedient of bullying and intimidating school boards of trustees, thwarted the Bolger government’s attempts to experiment with bulk funding (which was what that 1995 editorial was about).

Right now the secondary teachers are threatening to strike if they don’t get the 4 percent salary increase they’re demanding (on top of the 4 percent they got last year, and the 4 percent the year before that – surely you don’t expect teachers to accept the restraints that other public servants have to live with?). And it seems, judging by a TV3 News report this week, that some PPTA members are not above misusing their influence and authority in the classroom by getting pupils to write letters to the Ministry of Education supporting their claims. TV3 reported that the letters were on PPTA-branded stationery and all appeared to have been written from the same template. The suspicion was that it had been done in class time. Disgraceful? Yes. Unprofessional? Yes. Par for the course? Afraid so.

Meanwhile, at the NZEI’s annual conference, primary teachers subjected Education Minister Anne Tolley to a protest that even their pupils would have considered embarrassingly puerile. Tolley’s speech was heard in stony silence – not even a token round of perfunctory applause when she finished – and every time she mentioned “national standards”, the mute delegates all held up protest placards. Outside afterwards, Tolley was heckled and harassed. Discourteous? Yes. Disrespectful? Yes. Childish? Yes. An appalling example? Yes. Par for the course? Most assuredly.

The question is, how much longer will New Zealanders have to tolerate these antics? How many more ministers of education – representatives of a government that the people of New Zealand elected – will be subjected to this sort of humiliating treatment? When will a New Zealand government decide it has had enough petulance, disruption and wilful defiance from the teachers and take them on, just as Thatcher did with the miners?

It’s not enough for the minister to protest lamely that unionised teachers are behaving unprofessionally or inappropriately. She’s supposed to be in charge. Problem is, she looks isolated; there’s very little evidence of support from other senior figures in the government.

On national standards, it’s time for the government to start getting more assertive. It’s not for teachers to decide whether national standards work. That’s a decision to be made at future elections by the people of New Zealand, who pay the teachers’ salaries and expect them to respect the democratic process. This means accepting the government's right to introduce new and perhaps distasteful policies, just as all other public servants do.

The NZEI has made its objections clear and that should be an end to it. But as long as National appears less than resolute, the NZEI will use every opportunity to sabotage national standards. The teachers will have been greatly encouraged by the fact that Tolley appears to have been left to fight the battle alone, creating the impression (perhaps falsely) that the government has little stomach for a fight. If John Key and his senior ministers are seriously committed to education reform, they should show it.

As for the PPTA, there has been talk this week of lockouts. This talk came from the PPTA rather than the government and looked like a calculated ratcheting-up of the tension – almost a dare. Well, National should call the union’s bluff. Governments have pussy-footed around on education for too long and the teacher unions just keep getting more cocky and obstructive. The government, having been given a mandate to govern (and still enjoying strong support in the polls), would have moral authority on its side.

It would be interesting to see how tough the teachers are when the other side goes on the offensive. A full-on confrontation would be messy but there is no doubt who would win, provided the government had the balls to see it through. And if previous government-union showdowns are any guide, a resounding defeat for the PPTA would leave the union weakened and demoralised, clearing the decks for a slew of potentially beneficial education reforms that have previously been put in the too-hard basket for fear of teacher resistance.

A few that come to mind are education vouchers, which would enable parents to “buy” their children’s education at the school of their choice; performance-based pay, which would reward and incentivise good teachers and strip away the protection enjoyed by non-performers; bulk funding, which would shift power from the central bureaucracy to school boards; and an end to the perverse Labour-imposed system of zoning, which locks the poor into mediocre schools and creates exclusive zones of privilege (as reflected in stratospheric real estate prices) around sought-after ones.

None of these proposals are radical. They seem that way only because the teacher unions have opposed them so vehemently, knowing that the national union structure – the source of their power and control – would probably start to unravel if they were adopted.

Is this an anti-teacher rant? No. I have known many teachers – both my own and those of my four children – for whom I had great respect and admiration. Good, hard-working teachers deserve far more honour and recognition than they get under the present structure, which supports and protects poor performers under the guise of “collegiality”.

Is it an anti-union rant, then? No. I believe strongly in unions and have held office in one myself. What I object to is the abuse of union power. The teacher unions exert far more control over the education system than is healthy or democratic. They do it only because they have been able to bully successive governments into letting them. But the time has come for the education of our children (and grandchildren, in my case) to be liberated from their grasp.

God protect us from pretend prophets

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, April 13).

WHEN we think of conceit and arrogance, we normally associate it with overt displays of superiority: the swaggering walk, the braying voice, the overweening air of self-assurance.

Yet there is another type of conceit and arrogance that dresses down, cladding itself in the garb of modesty and humility. It can appear self-effacing and even holy, but it is no less vain.

It was this sort of disguised hubris that we saw on display in the trial of the so-called Waihopai Three. Anyone observing the defendants’ scruffy clothing, their unworldly manner and their air of righteous sincerity could have concluded these were humble men of Christ, driven by the purest of motives. The jury obviously did.

I don’t dispute the sincerity of the three men who vandalised the Waihopai satellite dish, but I do question the popular perception that they are simple men of faith, untainted by pride or vanity.

On the contrary, I believe they exhibit a deeply unattractive type of conceit: namely, the unshakeable moral conviction of zealots.

Their beliefs trump anyone else’s. If their fellow New Zealanders objected strongly enough to the Waihopai satellite dish, it would be a political issue. They don’t, and it isn’t. Yet the Waihopai Three decided their moral convictions entitled them to act on our behalf, and to hell with the repair bill that the taxpayer will now have to pick up.

Even Helen Clark, hardly a right-wing warmonger, condemned the attack on Waihopai in 2008 as a senseless act of criminal vandalism.

The inflated self-regard of the Waihopai Three emerged in full view last week when Solicitor General David Collins QC suggested the Crown might sue them for damages. One of the three, Adrian Leason, scoffed at the government for being “sore losers or cry babies” and virtually taunted it to have a go.

A damages case would only promote their cause, he said; and besides, the three had only $1000 between them (a statement now open to doubt after revelations that Leason and co-defendant Sam Land have property assets valued at half a million dollars).

The third Waihopai vandal, Dominican friar Peter Murnane, seemed serenely confident that public opinion would force the government to back off. We shall see.

Murnane, incidentally, was one of the priests who gave sanctuary to the oily queue-jumper Ahmed Zaoui. He represents a highly politicised branch of the Catholic clergy that rarely hesitates to let reason get in the way of emotional fervour.

The motivation of the Waihopai vandals is as much political as religious. Their rhetoric is that of the neo-Marxist left which pursues its agenda under the banner of peace and justice.

They claim to have acted on behalf of the women and children killed by the US war machine in Iraq, but theirs is a highly selective morality. They condemn the killing of innocent Iraqis by American forces, most of which is unintentional, but they say nothing about the rampant and wholly deliberate murder of innocent people – mostly of their own kind – by Islamic fanatics seeking to extinguish democracy and impose their own repressive dogma.

If it ever occurred to the Waihopai Three that the eavesdropping network operated by the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand might be preventing more wholesale slaughter by these murderous fundamentalists, they probably pushed the thought from their minds. It doesn’t fit their warped worldview.

Muslim terrorists probably regard these woolly-headed, pretend prophets in much the same way as Lenin viewed the “useful idiots” in the West who supported the murderous Soviet state.

* * *

AM I ALONE in objecting to the melodramatic use of the word “survivors” to describe anyone who has been sexually abused or spent time in a psychiatric institution?

“Survivors” are people who have lived through truly life-threatening experiences. I wouldn’t make light of the awful experiences many victims of sexual and psychiatric abuse have suffered, but the integrity of the language is worth protecting.

Their lives were generally not at risk. To describe them as survivors devalues the word and detracts from the ordeals of true survivors – those who lived through Nazi concentration camps, for example, or were plucked from the sea after the Wahine sank.

You can see, though, why lobbyists for people seeking compensation for abuse have adopted the word. “Survivors” is an emotive term that makes their claims sound more pressing.

* * *

THE LEFT keeps moaning that wages in New Zealand are too low, which is perfectly correct. They complain that the government hasn’t delivered the promised higher-wage economy – again, all true.

But just let anyone suggest that something meaningful be done to free up the economy, increase productivity and stimulate income growth – such as reducing taxes and government spending – and who’s the first to howl in protest? Why, it’s the Left.

Unionist Matt McCarten recently grizzled that an increase in ACC levies would negate the 25 cents an hour rise in the minimum wage. Yet if anyone proposes dismantling the ACC behemoth, the unions are the first to rise up on their hind legs.

Until the Left can reconcile these contradictions, it’s stuck with a credibility problem.

Home and Away: thoughts on the British-Kiwi relationship

In the course of a rare cleanup of my Microsoft Word files this week, I came across the following. It’s a talk that I was invited to give to staff at the British High Commission in Wellington two years ago about the British-NZ relationship, and how New Zealanders regarded the mother country. I was about to delete it when I thought, “Hang on – I’ve got a blog now. I can bore other people with this, besides the Poms.” So here it is.

The High Commission staff member who asked me to give the talk, a New Zealander, urged me not to hold back. I sensed that he was disappointed afterwards that I wasn’t more brutal, but on re-reading it I think my comments were reasonably frank without being gratuitously insulting.

It’s a long read, so if you're going to attempt it, pack some muesli bars and warm clothing.

* * *

MY brief, as I understand it, is to give you a New Zealander’s perception of Britain today, of the relationship between our two countries, and how it has changed.

I can’t pretend to speak for all New Zealanders. Each of us has our own individual perspective. But I would say that in many respects my views are probably fairly typical. They are also, of course, partly shaped by my observations and experiences during nearly 40 years as a journalist.

I would like to start by talking in general terms about how pervasively British culture has penetrated our own.

As far as I’m aware, I don’t have so much as a millilitre of British blood. I come from Irish Catholic stock on my mother’s side and a mixture of Danish and French Protestant on my father’s. Yet the first time I travelled to Britain, in the mid 1980s, I felt instantly at home.

The sights, the accents and the institutions I encountered wandering around London seemed intimately familiar. This agreeable sensation was magnified by the fact that I had stopped off for a few days in San Francisco on my way to Britain and found America almost intimidatingly alien.

Why should a New Zealander with a name like du Fresne feel completely at ease on arriving in Britain for the first time? Simply because I grew up in a society in which our cultural influences were overwhelmingly – in fact almost exclusively – British.

New Zealanders of my children’s generation, who have grown up watching American TV shows, wearing American designer labels and using American speech idioms, can’t begin to imagine how all-pervasive these influences were.

Let me give you just one small example. On Sunday nights in the pre-television era my family would gather around the radio. The programmes we listened to were all British – Take It From Here, Hancock’s Half Hour and the Paul Temple mystery serials by Francis Durbridge were staples.

On occasions my mother would drive us the 30 miles to Hastings to see comedies from the Ealing or Boulting Brothers film studios. Her favourite stars – and they became mine too – were people like Alistair Sim, Cecil Parker, Alec Guinness and Joyce Grenfell.

It’s almost surreal that a child growing up in a small country town in New Zealand should have been so deeply influenced by a country 12,000 miles away, with which he had no familial or hereditary connection. But many of my weekly rituals as a child were British in origin.

Every week I looked forward to picking up our regular order from the local newsagent, which included the comics Film Fun, Radio Fun and Tiger – all British. I didn’t have the slightest interest in soccer, and still haven’t, yet I always read Roy of the Rovers. On Friday nights we would buy fish and chips – another British tradition. And our parents always drank tea, coffee being regarded as almost subversively avant-garde.

By contrast, we were exposed to relatively few American influences. There were American cars on the road – more then than now, oddly enough – and of course American films, and American music. But the hamburger, that universal symbol of coca-colonisation, didn’t arrive in New Zealand until the 1960s, and we were well into the 1970s before the first McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried outlets opened.

Let me more talk a bit more about music, specifically. Conventional wisdom has it that the rock and roll revolution happened in the mid 1950s with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley and Fats Domino. But I would argue that in New Zealand there were two rock and roll revolutions.

There was an American-inspired cultural earthquake of sorts in the mid-fifties, but it was a relatively minor tremor compared with what was to come, and the social effects were largely peripheral. The rebellious bodgies and milk bar cowboys of the 1950s who wore tight jeans and rode motorbikes (invariably British Triumphs, Nortons and BSAs, oddly enough) were generally viewed as being an anti-social minority on the fringes of respectable society.

The really major seismic upheaval, in terms of mainstream music and culture, didn’t happen until the British beat boom of the 1960s, which brought us the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Animals.

It was almost as if we’d been waiting for Britain to validate the new youth culture before we embraced it. And while we were dutifully waiting for a signal from the Mother Country, we passed the time listening to Cliff Richard and the Shadows, who were as popular in New Zealand as Elvis ever was. Incidentally, if you ask any New Zealand pop guitarist of the early 1960s who his big influence was, it wasn’t Scotty Moore or James Burton or any of the hot-shot Americans – it was Hank Marvin of the Shadows.

You’ll note that I used the term “Mother Country” to refer to Britain. If this expression is used at all today, it’s normally in a gently sardonic fashion. Yet there was a time when it was used with the utmost reverence.

I’ve recently been working on a project which involved looking at newspaper files from the early 20th century, when the term “Mother Country” was not only in common usage by the New Zealand press, but was accorded capital letters.

Similarly, it was common in the press to refer to Britain simply as Home, with a capital H. The personal columns, for example, might record that Mr and Mrs So-in-So of Wellington had recently left on a ship for a voyage “Home”. It was an accepted synonym for Britain and remained in common usage until the 1960s.

I mention all this by way of a scene-setter, to try and give some idea of how totally New Zealand was in thrall to Britain. I could easily go on. I could talk, for example, about the rapturous public response to royal visits. I was a young reporter on The Dominion when the Queen toured in 1970, and for several weeks the entire staff of the paper was mobilised with one aim in mind – to ensure the Queen was covered every step of the way. It doesn’t happen now.

I would like to turn now to a personal assessment of the good and bad aspects of that British heritage.

First, the good. I’ve always thought it was a blessing that New Zealand was colonised by Britain rather than one of the other European imperial powers, such as France or Portugal or the Belgians. In many ways the British were enlightened and liberal colonisers. It’s easy to find fault from a 21st century standpoint, but from James Cook onwards they generally treated the Maori with a degree of respect that stands out against the shabby treatment of native races by colonial powers elsewhere.

Then of course there’s the great legacy of Westminster parliamentary democracy and all that went with it – political freedom, respect for individual rights, freedom of the press and free speech, a robust judicial system and a tradition of tolerance and liberalism. These principles weren’t always applied consistently but they did provide a sound platform on which New Zealand could develop, and I don’t think we should ever understate the enduring value of those traditions.

I’ve often thought that if I were to find myself in prison on trumped-up charges anywhere in the world, I would want it to be Britain. You may have had your lapses – the Guildford Four and the Derek Bentley case of the 1950s come to mind - but I think I’d stand a better chance of getting a fair hearing in Britain than in most other countries, including America, where justice sometimes seems precarious.

Britain also gave us wonderful music – I’ve already mentioned the Beatles – and it gave us wonderful television.

We have Britain to thank, too, for a fantastically rich heritage of humour. Many New Zealanders of a certain age still lapse into Goon Show language at the slightest excuse, and can describe individual episodes of Steptoe and Son that were made more than 40 years ago; the pickled onion in the bath scene comes to mind. Fawlty Towers, Open All Hours, Dad’s Army and Monty Python have embedded themselves deep in the national consciousness, to the extent that people commonly recite familiar lines from them – “Don’t mention the war” being just one example.

As popular as some American TV comedies have been, such as Seinfeld and M*A*S*H, they simply don’t command that sort of enduring attachment.

These are all things for which we owe Britain a debt of gratitude. And of course you gave us rugby, more of which later.

But then there are the downsides of our British heritage. Where do I start?

Oh, what the heck – let’s get the unhappiest aspect out of the way first. British food.

It was New Zealand’s singular misfortune to derive its culinary traditions from a country with possibly the dullest cuisine of any culture in the world, save perhaps for Eskimos and Laplanders. It’s a cuisine that finds its highest expression in roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and despite all the hype surrounding Gordon Ramsay, Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver, it’s my observation that much British food is as dull and stodgy as ever. Fortunately in New Zealand the past thirty years has seen a gastronomic revolution that has largely coincided with a more adventurous immigration policy.

I also blame the British for our tradition of bourgeois conformity, which I believe can be attributed to the fact that New Zealand was predominantly settled by members of the British middle class.

It seems to me that one of the privileges conferred by membership of the upper class is that you’re pretty much free to behave as outrageously as you like, and if you’re working class you can take risks because you don’t have much to lose. But the middle class is obsessed with doing the right thing, toeing the line, obeying the rules, not making a fuss or giving offence, not standing out in the crowd and in general not being seen to do anything that might jeopardise one’s social standing.

It was precisely this sort of person that New Zealand immigration policy sought to attract. We were suspicious of anyone who wasn’t British, and when we couldn’t get enough British migrants in the 1950s we turned to Holland, because the Dutch were deemed to be the next-best thing – hard-working but eager to assimilate and become good Kiwis, and not given to volatile displays of emotion like some other European nationalities.

This unadventurous legacy produced a rather joyless, grey society, as is evident from any old newspaper photograph of a New Zealand crowd scene. We were a very grim and oppressed-looking lot. Our timid immigration policy dulled New Zealand society to the extent that the journalist Gordon McLauchlan, in the 1970s, wrote a best-selling book about New Zealanders called The Passionless People. Meanwhile Australia had opened its doors to people from southern Europe and the Levant and got a much more colourful and vibrant society as a result.

Now I’d like to turn to the subject of British cars. The New Zealand of my childhood got around in Humbers, Vauxhalls, Ford Zephyrs and Vanguards, and generally we were pretty satisfied with them. Perhaps we were just conditioned to believe that if they were British, they must be good. At any rate we didn’t have a great deal of choice, because British cars enjoyed preferential tariffs that gave them a huge advantage in the marketplace. Those tariff arrangements were part of a quid pro quo in which Britain took our meat, butter and wool and we in turn demonstrated our loyalty by buying your cars, trucks, tractors, aircraft and ships.

It’s hard to pinpoint the precise time at which the disenchantment with British cars started to set in, but it was probably sometime during the 1960s – I would guess between the Mark 3 and the Mark 4 Zephyrs. Suddenly British cars were no longer the benchmark.

This could have been due to two factors. One was that Japanese cars were starting to creep onto the New Zealand market, giving us a point of comparison. And it was obvious to anyone that pound for pound, the Japanese cars offered far greater reliability and a much higher level of specification. Heck, they came with heaters, radios and carpets.

But the other factor, I suspect, is that British industry was in decline – partly because of a rise in militant trade unionism. A sullen, resentful work force seemed bent on sabotaging British industry, and weak management seemed powerless to arrest the process. And so you got what became known as the British disease.

Whether it was some sort of ripple effect I don’t know, but British design also suffered. The result was that New Zealand motorists found themselves lumbered with appalling clunkers like the Austin Maxi, the Morris Marina and the Vauxhall Viva – ugly duckling cars that would have been second-rate even if they had been able to do what they were claimed to do, which they couldn’t.

By the 1970s, the British cars that had once ruled the roads were more likely to be seen broken down beside them. We lost faith in British engineering and the Japanese were only too happy to fill the vacuum. The trickle of Japanese cars soon became a flood.

This may seem a trivial point, but I believe it was strangely symbolic of the way the traditional relationship with Britain was itself starting to break down.

It just happened that the British motor industry lost its way about the same time as Britain joined the EEC. And despite New Zealand politicians extracting concessions that guaranteed continued limited access to Britain for our agricultural products, there was a perception that Britain was abandoning us. So that was another, deeper factor straining the traditional ties.

Mention of militant trade unionism brings me to another unwelcome British import. New Zealand from the 1960s to the 1980s suffered an epidemic of bloody-minded industrial disruption, much of it generated by cloth-cap unionists who had emigrated from Britain and brought the class war with them. I won’t pretend that New Zealand didn’t have its own stroppy militants, but there was no doubt that British unionists were disproportionately represented in the unions that caused mayhem during the Muldoon era, and there was considerable public resentment toward them.

The classic example was a union leader named Con Devitt, who’d come out of Clydeside and ended up in control of our Boilermakers Union, which represented welders. It was Devitt’s union that added seven years to the construction time for what was supposed to be Wellington's flagship building, the BNZ head office in central Wellington. In the process several engineering firms were driven out of business and New Zealand architects resolved never again to make the mistake of designing buildings in structural steel, because it would require the employment of Devitt’s members.

It was perhaps no coincidence that around this time, overt hostility began to emerge against British migrants as a group. An oafish talkback host named Tim Bickerstaff launched a campaign urging his listeners to Punch a Pom a Day, and we began to hear anti-English jokes like the one that went: “How do you know when a planeload of Pommy migrants has arrived? Because the whining continues long after the engines have been turned off.” Thus was created the stereotype of the Pommy whinger, who finds fault with so many things that everyone wonders why he doesn’t just go back home.

It’s a stereotype that persists to this day, and like most stereotypes it has a core of truth. You only need to listen to talkback radio, and note the disproportionate number of querulous British voices, to realise that.

What caused this hostility toward the British? I would guess several things. It was partly a backlash against Pommy whingers and union troublemakers, which in turn may have stemmed from a growing sense that British migrants were exerting too much influence and taking New Zealand in a direction, culturally and socially, where we didn’t want to go. A feeling, perhaps, that we were losing control of our own country.

But the point at which the relationship between the two countries really began to change irrevocably was when Britain threw in its lot with Europe in 1973.

In hindsight, it was probably a good thing for both of us. From a New Zealander’s point of view, we’d been trapped in an unhealthy dependency relationship, and with that went an element of sycophancy. Though we’d been nominally independent since 1907, we were still in the habit of seeking British approval for virtually everything we did. I remember, for example, that Sir Robert Muldoon insisted on Air New Zealand fitting its Boeings with Rolls-Royce engines rather than those made by General Electric, just to keep in Britain’s good books.

When Britain deserted us for the EU, New Zealand felt a bit like a teenager who’d been kicked out of home and forced to fend for himself. At first we felt hurt and a bit lost; but after a few years we realised we could not only manage on our own, but have fun doing it. What at the time seemed traumatic turned out to be liberating.

I should mention however that older New Zealanders in particular felt betrayed, and many probably still do. They couldn’t understand why citizens of a country that had unquestioningly sent troops to fight for Britain in two world wars, and incurred some of the highest casualty rates of any Allied forces, now had to stand in the aliens’ queue at Heathrow while German passport-holders were fast-tracked. But younger New Zealanders have grown up without any such sense of grievance; for them the war is an abstract of history. The umbilical cord connecting New Zealand with Britain has long been severed.

So where we are now? Well, New Zealand has moved on, to use a favourite phrase of our prime minister. The relationship with Britain is no longer a subservient one. We don’t look to Britain, as we once did, for all our cultural inspiration or for leadership in matters of international policy. Our most important relationship, as the Dominion Post reminded us yesterday, is with Australia. Britain is simply one of a number of other countries with which we maintain important relationships; but it is no longer the pre-eminent relationship.

We have developed a new identity, one that’s more firmly rooted in the South Pacific. New Zealand today draws more cultural inspiration from its Maori and Pacific elements than from Britain. And a generation has grown up which knows little of the old sentimental bonds with the Mother Country.

In many ways the relationship between our two countries is still in the process of being redefined, and inevitably there is some tension as we adjust to our changed roles.

I would suggest there’s still a residual tendency on the part of some British people to adopt a rather patronising – benign, perhaps, but still patronising – approach toward New Zealanders, much as one might address a slightly backward child. I remember my hackles rising at a dinner in Oxford University 20 years ago when a former British diplomat began lecturing me in a condescending manner on the folly of New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance.

The nuclear issue of course was a touchstone of New Zealand’s new-found independence and it was pretty clear that the British government strongly disapproved. This was made obvious by Britain’s refusal to condemn the Rainbow Warrior bombing, which many New Zealanders interpreted as tacit condoning of the French action. Another betrayal.

For our part, while we no longer instinctively defer to bigger countries, I think we have to be very careful that we don’t make the mistake of pumping ourselves up too much. I remarked in a recent column that an element of braggadocio has crept into the national character, which I find deeply unattractive and unbecoming. Legitimate pride in our achievements – and I’m referring here to things like the America’s Cup and the Lord of the Rings – all too easily mutates into boastfulness.

It’s one thing to throw off the cultural cringe that has led us in the past to defer to everyone else, but it’s quite another to go to the other extreme. To pump ourselves up constantly, as we seem to be doing, just seems to me to be another symptom of national insecurity, and just as unattractive.

I mentioned that Britain and New Zealand are still in the process of redefining their relationship, and I suggest that’s much harder for you than it is for us, because we’re not encumbered to the same extent with historical baggage.

Britain has had to come to terms with the loss of empire and great power status, and I don’t believe that’s been easy. In fact I think a lot of British people still haven’t quite faced up to it. I remember an English friend of mine remarking wistfully that Britain should never have given up its colonies. I imagine there are a lot of people living in those former colonies who also wish Britain had never given them up, because they were probably far better off under British colonial rule than they are now; but of course it’s idle to indulge in nostalgic pining for an era when much of the world map was coloured in British imperial pink.

And it’s not just the former colonies that Britain has lost. It’s had to cope with the loss of some potent symbols of economic and cultural sovereignty too.

Harrods, that definitive British retail institution in Knightsbridge, is owned by an Arab family. MG Rover, the last surviving volume producer from Britain’s once mighty car industry, collapsed ignominiously in 2005 and was bought in a firesale by the Chinese. Jaguar is owned by the Americans while Bentley and Rolls-Royce, probably the two proudest names in British automotive history, are in German hands. How humiliating is that?

And I want to make special mention of Rupert Murdoch. I’ve long been intrigued by the intense ill feeling shown toward Murdoch by the British intelligentsia, in particular, and I can only conclude there is deep resentment that a great British institution, The Times of London, was taken over a colonial upstart from Australia.

The mere mention of Murdoch’s name is enough to induce apoplexy among journalists from left-leaning papers like The Guardian, but they need to be reminded that it was Murdoch who did what British newspaper owners seemed incapable of doing, which was to take on the powerful Fleet St printing unions and drag the newspaper industry kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

Now let me turn to sport. I suspect that Britain still hasn’t come to terms with the fact that, having created the game of rugby, it promptly ceded superiority in the sport to some of its remote colonies. This suspicion is borne out by the fact that when the British magazine Rugby World published its list of the all-time top 100 players a few years ago, six of the top 10 were from the British Isles.

I don’t think any objective commentator would dispute that the two pre-eminent rugby teams for most of the 20th century were South Africa and New Zealand. Yet only one All Black and one Springbok made the British magazine’s all-time top 10 players. Sean Fitzpatrick, the most successful All Black captain ever, scraped in at 98 on the list.

The same stubborn denial characterises the obsessive – one might say unhinged – rantings of the British rugby writer Stephen Jones, who just can’t accept that rugby supremacy resides in the southern hemisphere. While Jones keeps on disparaging the New Zealand style of play, the All Blacks keep on winning. You’d think he might have figured this out by now and pulled his head in, but no.

Much British sporting journalism seems to be characterised by desperate optimism. Whether it’s the English football team or Tim Henman or the Lions, the British media repeatedly make the same error of talking up British chances and raising unrealistic hopes on the part of the fans. We saw this with the grossly hyped visit by Clive Woodward’s Lions in 2005, when of course they suffered a three-nil whitewash. And as for poor old Henman, I used to feel desperately sorry for him every time Wimbledon rolled around, when he would have to carry the burden of the unrealistic hopes of the British media.

I personally experienced something of this yearning for British sporting glory at Le Mans in 1985. There was a huge contingent of British fans there and their hopes were pinned on a clean sweep by the Jaguar team, but one by one, to the bitter disappointment of the Brits, the Jags fell out of the race (mostly mechanical failure, as I recall; fancy that). In the end it was Porsches that filled the first five places. On the trip back to London our charter bus stopped for a meal break in the beautiful city of Rouen and the British fans took out their frustration by behaving like absolute yobbos, abusing the locals and urinating all over the historic square where Joan of Arc died at the stake. It was not the most endearing side of the British character.

At times like this I wonder whether sport has become a substitute for military conquest and a means by which some British people – and I must in fairness emphasise “some” – try to recapture something of the pride of Britain’s great military past. Certainly British football hooliganism, which fortunately seems to have abated in recent years, is an outlet for jingoism of the ugliest type.

I can afford to be holier than thou here, because I come from a country with very little history to speak of, certainly not by comparison with Britain. We have no past glories to recapture and no former colonies to be patronising toward (although some Pacific Island leaders might dispute that). Metaphorically speaking, our historic baggage would fit into an overnight bag while yours would fill an entire cargo hold. So the adjustments as the relationship changes are easier for us.

I would like to finish with a specific reference to some British journalists.

I am a great defender of freedom of the press, for which – as I said earlier – we can thank our British heritage. And freedom of the press includes the right to express extreme and offensive views. But one aspect of being a small country is that we tend to be over-sensitive to criticism; and I have to confess that from a personal point of view, nothing winds me up more than a sneering piece by a British journalist about what a small, tedious and godforsaken country New Zealand is.

I have read many such pieces. One of the more recent was by the British writer Douglas Davis, and it appeared in The Spectator – incidentally, a great magazine that I subscribe to despite its occasional lapses.

Davis devoted almost an entire Diary column to what seemed a totally gratuitous attack on New Zealand. Let me read bits of it to you.

[Blog readers: At this point in my talk I recited excerpts from Davis’s column, but I threw the offending article out ages ago and haven’t been able to find it on the Net. Suffice to say he dismissed Enzed as a dull, bleak and mediocre country and even mocked the Kiwi accent. Now, back to my talk …]

I have to say here that while I sometimes cringe at the New Zealand accent myself, it’s pretty damned rich for anyone from Britain to mock the way other nationalities speak. A few years ago I shared a carriage on a French train with a group of teenagers and found myself idly wondering what country they came from. It was several minutes before I twigged that they were actually English and were speaking, at least nominally, the same language as me.

Reading stuff like Davis’s column, I instinctively want to counter-punch. I want to point out that opinion surveys frequently reveal the British to be some of Europe’s most unhappy and demoralised people. I feel like asking Davis why it is, when you turn on the Living Channel on Sky TV, you see endless programmes about British people traipsing around real estate offices all over Europe because they’re desperate to get away from the place. I could talk about the reality TV shows from Britain that portray British people as overweight, unhealthy, useless and dysfunctional. I could ask why, if New Zealand is so deeply unattractive, so many British still choose to migrate here. And I could point out that if I wanted to form perceptions about Britain on the basis of Heathrow, as Davis seems to have done at Auckland Airport, I could paint an extremely unflattering picture.

But of course this would not only be petty, but would present a very distorted picture of Britain.

I can’t help but wonder what impelled Davis to present such a jaundiced, negative picture of New Zealand – one that I know isn’t shared by many of his countrymen. Is it possible that he feels resentful about Britain’s declining place in the world and tries to make up for it by striking out at soft targets like boring, sleepy New Zealand? Is it the old story of making yourself feel better by putting someone else down? That’s the question I’d like to leave you with, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention.