Penn Raine: New Zealand! What are you like?

On the face of it this British idiom invites self-description. That’s not quite it, but more of that later.

So, what are we like, we En Zedders, Kiwis, Aotearo-ians, and is the view we have of ourselves the same as others have?

For all our claims of nationhood, at least until the middle of last century we were like the kid put to bed early, creeping out to get glimpses of the partying adults down the hall. At a remove from Europe and Britain where everything happened that was intellectual, sophisticated, cool, we were South Pacific  copyists, saving up for the cheap airfare or boat journey to somewhere else, for the irritatingly named ‘OE’, when our real lives would begin.

Bill Pearson in his very much quoted 1952 essay, Fretful Sleepers, claims of us that ‘there is no one more docile in the face of authority’, that ‘the New Zealander generally…does what he is told partly because everyone else is doing it, partly because he wants to be sociable and cooperate…’

It’s hardly a flattering description but accurate enough in describing the deferential citizenry of that time, keen to fit in, to not make waves or to be tall poppies. Of course, even an underdog has feelings  and, in a world where even our ex-convict cousins across the way sniggered at us for our backward habits and attachment to sheep it was inevitable that we would seek some gloss, a boasting point, and tra-la, what better highlight than that moment in 1893 when we gave women the vote before anyone else.

I cannot count how many times I have heard this as proof that the globe awaits our next move. Also much mentioned is Hillary’s co-ascent of Everest in 1953 which may have added optimism to Pearson’s essay of the previous year but somehow, I doubt it, nor I suspect would he have seen the AB’s occasional glory as evidence of world-leading nationhood. 

To add extra weight to our perceived status, student essayists and debaters have obsessively shoe-horned in the phrase ‘clean and green’ when asserting how we were the envy of other nations. Superficially I suppose this is a reason for pride except if you think about how we are roughly the size of Great Britain but with 62 million fewer people, who, when I last looked, seemed to consider littering a national pastime. How cleanly green would we look if there were 67 million of us dropping plastic bags of dog poo on pavements and flinging empty Macca’s boxes from car windows?

I think it was in the mid-eighties when the first symptoms of conceit appeared, around the Wine Box era when some hyped-up money man high on Wall Street cosplay - David Richwhite perhaps - insisted that we forget agricultural pre-eminence and market ourselves as the ‘Switzerland of the South Pacific’. By this he did not mean that we could persuasively elbow out the Swiss in snow-tourism nor host the Davos WEF but that we could become significant global financiers.

LOL.

Perhaps this triggered a new national zeitgeist because after that the boastful New Zealander popped up all over the place. According to many new migrants we commonly ask them to affirm our friendly, happy land and to agree that, yes, they are so pleased to be here and not in some other awful place.  While this may be true in terms of freedom from actual bombing, starvation, and egregious punishment for expressing anti-government views, these immigrants have lost their culture, homeland and perhaps families, and however much we may wish it, they are not getting paradise in exchange.

Perhaps if we asked them what they missed most, or what were the negative surprises they experienced we might hear something different. Like our flimsy, poorly built, expensive housing stock, our ineffectual transport infrastructure, the surprisingly high crime rate, and despite an advisory I once saw at London’s NZ house for migrants to ditch heavy overcoats, the fact that we do have a winter, contrary to the ‘sub-tropical’ claim of  a mendacious MFAT web author.

This parochialism on the ground is one thing but is so much more embarrassing when it opens its mouth overseas. Whenever The Engineer and I go to other places we have become used to overhearing our fellow citizens lecturing other travellers on how well we do things. Our climate, actual and social it seems, has produced a utopia of contented, fair-minded summer-dwellers. We once arrived to stay with old friends who ran a fine B and B in their old French farmhouse just after they had hosted two Kiwis. Their guests, who had themselves run a small hospitality business in New Plymouth, offered our friends several helpful tips and pointers for success. That our friends’ accommodation had a sought-after listing in Alistair Sawday’s Special Places to Stay did not suggest that their advice might be, well, arrogant.

We were apologetic, but it didn’t seem enough.

And then came 2017, when so many of us took the sugar-rush of Jacindamania intravenously. That international journos inhaled the cheap click-bait intel was perhaps a disappointment for those of us who hoped that media elsewhere could hold to standards of neutral investigating and reporting, but there we were, at last, provably the envy of the world.

I still have conversations with people who believe that a great miracle was wrought in the last six years despite the government’s hostility towards democratic principles: MIQ, vaccine mandates, Three etc Waters, Hate Speech legislation, revisionist Treatyism and the big fiscal hole of the swelling bureaucracy and vanity projects. If you ask for details they will usually claim that we were ‘saved’ from mass death. Other successes are not forthcoming.

Pearson, who was a Labour man would be taken aback to see how his words could now be applied to the distortion of a social model he revered.

” Fascism has long been a danger potential in New Zealand. Of course, fascism doesn’t just occur: it is a deliberate strategy used by money-makers threatened with social discontent. But in countries nominally democratic, fascists have first to prepare the ground. In New Zealand the ground is already prepared, in these conditions: a docile sleepy electorate, … willingness to persecute those who don’t conform, gullibility in the face of headlines and radio peptalks.” 

New Zealand, what are you like? is not an invitation to self-express, but a jokey way of being amazed at how someone has messed up. Messed up we have, and we did it to ourselves. Our national confidence has been flayed during the last two Parliamentary terms and although the government has changed  that hollow sound from Wellington is not just another shift in the fault line but the noise of the empty Treasury vault doors flapping in the wind.

Perhaps there was a sweet spot between our nation’s cringing lack of self- esteem and the hubris of the last few decades when we were decent people who valued a fair go and honest day’s work. The thing is, we need to save ourselves now, because the government is cash-strapped, although they might not say so and it’s time to show some of that traditional grit and fortitude. The only mention of us in foreign press that I have seen recently  was not adulatory and pointed out how rabidly our media behaved when Kelly Jay Keen visited last year.  

It’s time for us to stop searching for global relevance and pretending that we can lead the world for climate change. It’s time to forget about being offended, promoting division, shouting slogans we don’t know the meaning of, and get back to work. Or even just get to work.

The party’s well and truly over, NZ, it’s time for a reality check.

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.