Читать книгу The Pavlova Omnibus - Austin Mitchell - Страница 9

IF THE KIWI has one fault it’s modesty. He never blows his own trumpet. It will take a couple of minutes and at least half a dozen beers before you get him to admit that New Zealand is the most honest, decent, intelligent and cleanest of nations. Almost too good for this world, which may be why New Zealanders live so far away from it. Like Clark Kent they efface themselves until wrongs are to be righted. Then with the magic cry of ‘Conscription’ they change into the khaki insignia of Super Kiwi, set the world to rights and come back to their island fastness. An unsuspecting world is left thinking Monty won North Africa and Lieutenant Calley made Vietnam safe for democracy. The Kiwi owns up only to Crete and Gallipoli, to save others from embarrassment.

New Zealanders are not perfect, theirs is a young country. The Ancient Greeks had a head start but the gap is being narrowed every day. If Kiwis stop to wonder why Divine Providence which treated the rest of the world so ill did so well by them, they would probably put it down to national eugenics, breeding from a good stock carefully shielded from any base or coloured genes, even blue ones. Truth is more prosaic. New Zealand is what it is because it has been conditioned by isolation, by the need to make the best of what it has not got, and by smallness. And the greatest of these is smallness.

The population is maintained at a rough balance of one man equivalent to twenty-three ewe equivalents, or people to sheep—but then what’s in a name, as Engelbert Humperdinck would say. This balance makes the humans better off, with the average bloke earning $2,235 at the 1966 census, the average sheep only $6. Unfortunately it upsets a combined chorus of politicians and sex maniacs who want the people to catch up on the sheep by populating or perishing, conveniently forgetting that the strain of reaching the first ten million could produce both eventualities. Yet a population of only three million, scattered over 104,000 square miles, is responsible for most of the national characteristics. God who made them tiny, make them tinier yet.

Small population means an intimate society. You’ll soon begin to think that all New Zealanders know each other or even that they are all interrelated, thanks to some mysterious process of national incest. No one can arrive in a town where he doesn’t have a relative, a friend, or at worst a common acquaintance of his maiden aunt’s. As soon as the weather is out of the way conversations have limitless, or rather three million, prospects for mutual name swapping. The only way you can join in is by memorising a phone book.

A small country is unspecialised. Skills only become complex and compartmentalised in larger countries. British workmen arriving there are baffled to find that they can’t just exercise their traditional skill of screwing on the doorbell—they have to help build the house as well. A uniquely irrelevant British education system trained me to know everything about one British political party from 1815 to 1830, and nothing about anything else. I arrived in New Zealand to find myself lecturing on the whole rich tableau of history from mastodons to Muldoon. Even mastering this wasn’t enough to make the Kiwi grade. Unlike my academic colleagues, I wasn’t able to mend cars, build houses and play rugby—I still had nothing to talk about in the staff commonroom.

Unfortunately because specialists are so thin on the ground New Zealanders become suspicious of them. The all-rounder is preferred. Every year the country’s part-owners pop in from the international pawnbrokers at the IMF to inspect their pledge. Their dire warnings are always disregarded. After all, not one of them has handled a tool, even a screwdriver. In 1967 I did a television documentary attempting to analyse the Kiwi character. The audience was so shocked by my inability to put putty on a window that the brilliance of the argument was completely lost. Lack of practical skills is a form of personal inadequacy: as a perceptive correspondent in the Woman’s Weekly once pointed out, ‘protesters don’t knit socks’. This adoration of the practical even influences the government hierarchy. In America the State Department carries the prestige, in Britain the Treasury. New Zealand esteems only the Ministry of Works whose minister can proclaim, ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!’ to quote P. B. Allen, the Departmental Demosthenes pleading for a change of name to the Ministry of Good Works.

New Zealand owes much of its national character to the smallness of the population. A mass society is hierarchical and fragmented; a small one is uniform. Mass societies generalise into categories and classes; New Zealand deals in individuals, being small enough to particularise. Mass societies are preoccupied by abstractions and ideas: freedom, class, tyrannny, oppression. The Kiwi personalised society looks at people and their motives. If someone was declaiming about freedom and private enterprise an Englishman would listen. A New Zealander would quickly reduce it all to ‘He’s saying that because his father drank’ or, if acquaintance is more distant, ‘What’s in it for him?’ Continental workers strike against Gaullism, British against trade union legislation. The Kiwis’ nearest approach to a political strike is against increased beer prices.^[*] Instead of discussing ideas or grouping people into abstractions such as classes they prefer to gossip about individuals. Their national literature, like their conversation and women’s magazines, is dominated by the ‘funny thing that happened to me’ approach. A Briton would define someone by reference to some category, usually exact social position. The Kiwi does so by reference to his personal characteristics, usually his precise degree of ‘good or bad blokiness’.

The same smallness also makes New Zealand a uniform, egalitarian society. Of course other factors help. There’s no natural diversity. There are twenty-two breeds of sheep here but the humans mostly come from the same stock, are nearly all the same colour, have no deep social divisions and all go to the same schools. Minorities are too small to stand out. There is a small Chinese population but you’ll have to hunt them out in the yellow pages, under G or L. Even the nine per cent who happen to be Maori don’t break the uniformity. They usually segregate themselves in the countryside, in the plastic pas of Rotorua, or in the poorer areas of the cities where no one sees them, though all claim to hear. Only a few young militants have shown any great desire to be exclusive or militant. Most are brown New Zealanders with larger families and different family customs. Their traditional leaders make Uncle Tom look like Eldridge Cleaver.

In any case New Zealand needs the Maori. He is the national fig leaf. The academics can study him, the artists pinch his motifs, and the liberals sympathise with him, even if he doesn’t appear to understand what they are talking about. More important, as long as he’s there a stretch of white suburbia whose attitudes are evocative of a Rhodesia without Africans can pose as multi-racial, racially tolerant and other nice things. The whole process is quite painless. The Maoris are just a large enough proportion to make the rest feel virtuous and not large enough to inconvenience them, unless they happen to live next door which none of those who talk about the Maoris ever do. The concession of equality is nicely self-interested. As long as the Maori has only equal rights and equal treatment, poverty and lack of education will make him incapable of competing effectively. No Maoris, no poor.

Even differences of wealth aren’t really a source of diversity.^[**] New Zealanders don’t mind having the doctor in his castle, the patient at his gate, for financial equality is not enshrined in the Kiwi Pantheon. Because doctors are better unionised than wharfies they naturally deserve more: $7,000 a year more on average. Raising sheep is clearly more important than raising children so it’s better paid. Producing beer is more praiseworthy than guzzling it, an act which demands only a reckless courage and a dulled sensitivity. Property also makes perfect. With rocketing values since the war farmers have clearly done well, even if things have got so tough now that some have been compelled to drive Jaguars over four years old. The owners of scrubby gullies near Auckland do even better. The most profitable crop to plant is still septic tanks.

The difference of wealth doesn’t make a class system, because the country is so small. Concentration makes classes. In mass societies the like gather together, developing their own life styles, uniforms, newspapers and magazines, languages. Here Remuera and Fendalton look like a scruffy social hodgepodge compared with uni-class areas in London. The social groups are too scattered to congeal into classes. The British upper class has Fortnum and Masons to themselves. New Zealanders must forage in the Four Square. A New Zealand Tatler and Bystander could survive only by descending to photos of ‘a happy family group exchanging blows at No. 34 State House Road, Grey Lynn’. Think of Vogue, New Zealand. After three thin years it had done features on the upper class (all four of them). Loath to turn to features on fashion among Wattie’s cannery workers, it closed down. No one noticed.

This scatter factor prevents any like group gathering together for mutual encouragement and support. The only real Kiwi subculture is the seasonal subculture of students, which is why no one can stand them. In a North Island city a lone Trotskyite deviationist would like to test-drive a revolution with friends and bring his kids up in a commune. Instead the kids go to the local primary, his wife absorbs the Weltanschauung of the local newspaper and he has no one to talk to. In mass societies you know a few people deeply. Friends are picked on the basis of like backgrounds and attitudes. The Kiwi acquaintance is wide, not deep. They are all thrown together and they’ve got to get on together, so their skill is at keeping acquaintance as pleasant as it is shallow. To go deeper might tap well-springs of irreconcilable differences. Talk to the neighbour about the rose bed or the wife and you needn’t worry whether he’s a Maoist revolutionary, an ex-member of the Hungarian Iron Guard or one of the children from the Hutt Valley scandal of 1954, now grown prematurely old and doddery.

In this way the people manage to conceal what little diversity there is. They do so so well that they become positively anxious about diversity, if it ever crops up. A small society is an intimate one. Big Neighbour is always watching you. Keep him happy. Conform. Socially it is not advisable to get out of line or demonstrate any pretension, even were this possible in a society where money buys only a bigger car and a swimming pool, not a different accent, a uniform or an indefinable thing called ‘style’. Pretension is, in any case, difficult where everyone knows you; ‘he may be Director of the Reserve Bank, but I remember him picking his nose on the way to school’. For the same reason it is impossible for them to have any folk heroes. Americans may revere Washington and Britons venerate Churchill. New Zealanders would be too obsessed by the fact that the one fiddled his expenses and the other drank too much to respect their achievement. So the Monarch has to live overseas. Kiwis have tried to establish local substitutes; people in Timaru used to defer to a man they believed to be an illegitimate son of Edward VII; people in Stewart Island to an alleged granddaughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Both places soon restored their allegiance to the House of Windsor. If they in turn ever implemented the threat of more frequent royal visits, the Kiwis would transfer again—to Emperor Hirohito.

In a small country everyone knows if feet of clay exist. If they don’t New Zealanders will invent them. Kiwis have a deep egalitarian drive, summed up in the law ‘Thou shalt not get up thyself’. This is a difficult feat anatomically but one we see going on all the time, and anyone suspected of it faces severe retribution. In Britain the mail of people exposed on television consists of pleas for help, sexual advances and requests to be cured of the King’s Evil. Mine in New Zealand was small and more likely to consist of anonymous vituperation, accusations of communist or fascist leanings (depending on what day of the week it was), and suggestions to return to Britain. Baron Charles Philip Hippolytus de Thierry, self-styled ‘Sovereign Chief of New Zealand’, ended his sovereignty giving piano lessons in Auckland. Rumour has it that one of New Zealand’s baronets used to serve behind a bar, where patrons were invited to ‘Drink Bellamy’s Beer, Served by a Peer’.

Kirk’s Law of Social Gravity states that the higher you go the more they will try to pull you down. If you are in an élite position you must disguise the fact in two ways. The first is to look as vacuous, illiterate and normal as the rest of the populace. A startled British High Commissioner once observed Sir Keith Holyoake ‘declaring with pride that he was no intellectual, he was not well educated, he had left school when he was fourteen and had never been near a university’. The High Commissioner, of course, failed to realise that all this made Sir Keith peculiarly well fitted to be Prime Minister, just as a familiar array of qualifications admirably fits Mr Kirk for the same job. No New Zealand Prime Minister this century (with two exceptions) has been near a university, unless to slip in by the back door to collect an honorary degree under plain cover. Few politicians have verged on the literary. There is no tradition of political alibiography; few even dare to leave letters for a historian to do his job of transferring bones from one graveyard to another. The second disguise is to eschew the prerogatives of office. Ministers’ rooms must be open to every passing lunatic. Even the Prime Minister can’t afford to ignore the Tapanui Women’s Division. Peter Fraser used to show that running the war effort wasn’t making him big-headed by popping out to inspect leaky roofs on state houses. Keith Holyoake was ever ready to find suitcases lost by indignant railway travellers. When I told this story to a French television crew they incredulously tested it by ringing the Prime Minister from their hotel room, film and tapes rolling. Anticlimax. A maid answered. Mr Holyoake was out. Could he ring them back? Our élite must behave in this fashion, not because they want to, but because otherwise they are certain to be accused of ‘Uphimselfism’.

With socialists, equality is a matter of political principle, until they reach power, when it’s a question of amnesia. In New Zealand it is a simple fact of group conformity. It is negative not positive. Its basis is a widespread feeling that if we can’t all have something, no one should. Exceptions are made only for no-remittance cars and leprosy.

This is the country of ‘the right thing’. When interviewers confront citizens in the street with microphones they are so anxious to say it that they all say the same thing. Give them a norm and they’ll conform to it, unless its next name is Kirk. The process implies no belief in the norm, simply a considerate desire to avoid embarrassing others or discomforting themselves. Kiwis are virtuous; surveys of church attendances indicate that about a third go regularly, half once a month or more. They are also better ministered, at one per 500 adherents, than they are doctored. Yet all this is not through any yearning for salvation—they’ve got that already. It’s a necessary indication of respectability. Kiwis are honest and law abiding not because they are moral; their approach to the Ten Commandments is like a student to his exam paper—only four to be attempted. Rather they don’t want to step out of line. ‘Thou shalt not be seen to’ is more important than the actual ‘Thou shalt not’.

Big Neighbour is always watching but his ability to enforce his whim comes from the others’ guilt feelings, not his power. The cold-blooded and insensitive can do anything, simply by wearing a suit, attending the Jaycees and carting a prayer book round on Sunday, provided their orgies, drug parties and Red Book readings are kept behind closed doors.

Big Neighbour has positive sanctions only when two conditions are fulfilled. The act must be known. It must make people feel threatened. Then rumours will circulate, accusations will be launched in Truth, the telephone will make odd noises, ministers will announce in Parliament that you attended a meeting of the USSR Friendship Society eighteen years ago. Friends and acquaintances will sidle up to assure you they ‘don’t believe a word of it’ before dashing off to sudden, urgent appointments. The Great New Zealand Clobbering Machine will have trundled into action.

More normally there is a tolerant intolerance simply because of the intimacy. You can hardly be rude to someone you see every day, however many anonymous letters you might write to the press about him. And if intimacy is intolerant, it is also warm and friendly. This is the friendliest country in the world, a characteristic it is not advisable to question if you value your teeth. Everyone knows the story of General Freyberg driving through the New Zealand lines in the desert with a British general. ‘Not much saluting is there,’ says the highly pipped Pom. ‘Ah yes, but if you wave they’ll wave back.’

To make life even more pleasant New Zealand has one of the highest standards of living in the world: second in the car ownership league, fourth in telephones, third in washing machines, second in beer consumption at twenty-five gallons per fuddled capita, and first in tons of soap and number of showers per person. Many of the cars should be in motor museums, the phones don’t have subscriber trunk dialling, the washing machines are prediluvian tubs, the beer is tasteless, and the soap is carbolic. It hardly matters. Wellbeing is more evenly shared here than anywhere else.

This has been achieved with unpromising raw materials. New Zealanders don’t work like Germans, organise like Japanese, or compete like Americans. All they have is a practical flair. The country is too far from anywhere to be natural suppliers and too small to provide a worthwhile market for anyone else. It is too tiny to forge its own destinies and is subject to fluctuations beyond its control with massive internal political repercussions. But for this vulnerability the Continuous Ministry would still be in power (if this isn’t in fact the case). The land has few minerals, just a certain amount of natural beauty waiting to be built on or flooded, and an ability to grow grass. The standard of living depends on the animals unimaginative enough to eat grass and on the world’s willingness to eat them, though if the scientists have anything to do with it, they’ll eat the wool, too, eventually. These are the only valuable exports, although in the past few years the nation has begun to develop a new line which can be expanded in emergency—the export of the limited range of fine quality, locally produced people. Well made New Zealand. And how pleasant the manufacturing process.

Casual observers, after that two-day stay which qualifies them as experts, often assume that the scale of New Zealand’s achievement in the face of the inherent difficulties is the result of a deliberate pursuit of socialism. They call New Zealand the Land of the Long Pink Cloud, or Shroud depending on viewpoint. In fact it’s all been done by accident. People settled there not to build a perfect society, but just to improve their lot. Since they came mainly from working and lower middleclass backgrounds their concept of what they wanted to achieve was the life-style of the groups immediately above them in Britain, the middle class. The goals were modest. (They have continued to think small.) And the methods were practical and workmanlike. There was no ideological plan—they just tinkered as they went along, reducing this little universe to order by organising and regulating it. Then they set out to cut it off from the rest of the world as far as possible. Both methods helped shape the national character.

One of the greatest Kiwi skills is organising bureaucracies. Give them a problem and they’ll set up a committee, or an organisation. They provide welfare through voluntary organisations, with mums forming play-group committees, parents forming PTAs, Bads organising Rotaryisseries or Lion Packs (each desperately occupied in the despairing task of finding any poor and underprivileged to be charitable to). This is the welfare society. Above it hovers the greatest voluntary organisation of all, the State, which is seen as the community in action, rather than the remote abstraction it is elsewhere. The community wants a high and uniform standard of living. The State will provide it with two clever tricks. Full employment eliminates both poverty and the fear of being out of work and endows the people with their casual independence. Family allowances, state housing and welfare benefits also help to provide a level below which it is difficult to fall, a much simpler approach to welfare than President Nixon’s policy of making it illegal to be poor, or the proposal by other American right-wingers to use nuclear weapons in the war on poverty.

Bureaucracy and regulation aren’t enough. The New Zealander also has to live. If economic forces were free to operate, New Zealand would be three farms manned by a skeleton staff. The rest of the people would have to evacuate and leave the country to its rightful owners, Federated Farmers, with just enough others to service their Jaguars. Since there are three million New Zealanders, not just the 100,000 which economic logic would dictate, they have taken the protective measure of building a fence of tariffs and licences round the economy so that a pampered industry can develop.

This careful insulation has annoying consequences. Rabid sectional jealousies develop. Farmers exhibit acute pastoral paranoia when they see the rest of the populace lounging round demanding high wages at the expense of the only productive section (the sheep and the cows). Similarly, employers are bitter at workers who don’t put in longer hours churning out items the market is too small to take. And farmers, employers, workers all combine into a chorus of grumbling about the welfare state, regulations, controls, restrictions and the result of the 3.30.

So vociferous is the chorus you might assume the country is on the brink of civil war or armed uprising. Indeed, large numbers of French arms salesmen went out there after the Biafra war, thinking to find their next potential customer. Also grumbling is a major political sport. Prizes are allocated for it; small ones like a post office or a new school for the short burst, big ones like protection or subsidies for a really sustained effort. The current grumbling league table puts doctors first in both volume and prizes, farmers second. University staffs are now moving up fast, having quickly mastered the art. Geographically it is only fair that Auckland should grow fastest. Its inhabitants have the loudest mouths for grumbling.

The second consequence is that private enterprise is more private than enterprising. It is inefficient. It carries on production in 9,000 small factories where a few big ones producing economically might be more sensible. Industry is expensive; television sets cost twice as much as Japanese imports, though bigger screens may be needed for larger people.

Yet the role of business isn’t to produce cheaply, or efficiently, but to wangle concessions from the government. The most enterprising entrepreneur is he who gets the most support: grants, import licences, or protection. These are the key to profit, not production. Nevertheless the country does export some manufactured goods; in 1969 it even sent $17 worth of musical instruments to Cambodia.

Most of the manufactured exports are potential not real. Entrepreneur and ex-car salesman Ken Slabb wants to exploit the local market for left-handed corkscrews. The market is limited and small-scale production and an inordinate rate of profit will make his product eighty-four times more expensive than imports. The solution is to claim that his main aim is to export millions of left-handed corkscrews every year. With supporting evidence from Ken’s great-uncle and an ex-girlfriend in Australia, poetic submissions are then heard by the Tariff, Development and Upholstery Council, where, despite opposition from the Glove, Mitten and Boottee Trade Association, the council agrees to exclude all left-handed corkscrews to give him a chance to establish himself. Within ten years the price of left-handed corkscrews has gone up 184 times, though sales have trebled because most of those used break on impact with a cork. Ken Slabb has made a fortune and retired to an island in the Bay of Islands, selling out to a British firm of corkscrew manufacturers who used to supply the market before he intervened. The exports have failed to materialise because of unfair trade practices on the part of the Australians and the unexpectedly heavy wage demands of the New Zealand worker. The alternative ending to this story is that prices increase only 180 times and the manufacturer goes bankrupt.

This may horrify you. Visiting IMF teams have been so numbed by it that they have been unable to say anything for months but the name ‘Bill Sutch’ repeated interminably. In fact, of course, New Zealand can live comfortably only by standing orthodox economics on its head. To understand the economic system you have to abandon what you’ve been brought up to regard as sense. Agricultural exports provide enough for all to live on. Kiwis could spend their time blowing bubbles or reading back numbers of Playboy were it not for some deep-seated puritan instinct which conditions them to want to work. So jobs have to be provided. Industry exists not to make things but to make work. The most efficient industry is the one which uses its labour most inefficiently; wharfies make their greatest contribution when seagulling; smokos do more for the economy than shift working. All the jokes about wharfies, like the one who complained to his foreman that a tortoise had been following him round all day, or the aerial photo of Wellington wharves which was ruined because a wharfie moved—all these miss the point. Work is like muck, no good unless its well spread.

Being practical men, New Zealanders are concerned not with hypothetical questions such as would Adam Smith, or even Robert McNamara, approve of our economy, but does it work? It does. The people have jobs, a good standard of living, a car and a lovely home each. Who could ask for more. They are not even concerned with the problem of whether the system could work better. Good enough is better than hypothetical perfection. Anyway the system works so well and has made the inhabitants so contented that they are the world’s most stable, and probably most conservative society.

Seriously, New Zealand is the best place in the world to live. It is called God’s Own Country. Modern theologians may argue whether God is dead. The rest of the world must pose him a lot of problems. Yet if the strain does get too much then he’ll not die. He’ll retire here.

*. See Fishopanhauser and Smith, ‘Conflict Theory and Beer Prices in a Southland Town’. A Ph.D. thesis assessing the relevance of Action Theory to empirical political analysis, including an attempt to establish a basis for determining the relationship between individual behaviour and system attributes. Based on in-depth interviews with 250 drunks.

**. See H. Sheisenhauser and Les Cumberland, ‘Status Attribution, Self Assigned Social Grouping, Inverse Social Mobility with Cognitive Dissidence and the Incidence of Plaster Ducks on Walls’. An exploratory survey based on 2.8 million random interviews with a stratified sample of New Zealanders. Condensed five-volume summary of results shortly available.