Austin Mitchell - The Pavlova Omnibus

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.’