ADVANTAGE NEW ZEALAND

I’m now resident back in New Zealand after 6 years in Europe. People ask me what’s changed the most since I’ve been away. People now call me ‘Mr. Moore’ not ‘Mike’. Don’t know what that means. When you are talking to Kiwis abroad and ask what they miss the most and what’s the best thing about living abroad, inevitably they say, “seafood, people, the natural environment, birds in the morning’. What’s best about a morning in Geneva, London or New York? The newspapers. The joy of reading The Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal or The Guardian and the pure scholarship of columnists who write splendid analyses of the great issues. The aggressive vulgarity of personality-driven reporting in New Zealand is striking. The F word is used on radio often, that didn’t happen a while ago.

The crude abuse levelled by state television when sacking and cutting the pay of leading personalities was undignified, unnecessary, brutal, and cruel. Why do they do this? I serve as a member of several commercial Boards so it was a world-first when the CEO of TVNZ said he had lost confidence in this Board. Pardon? That’s a bit like me saying after I lost an election that I had no confidence in the voting public. Whatever happened to the ‘stiff upper lip’, the stoic Kiwi who took it on the chin? And, what’s this about the new ‘stress’ industry where well-paid public service executives need paid time off because they have a tough job? Hey, that’s why they get the big bucks. Get another job if you are not up to it. Note - it’s normally highly paid people in the public service not the low paid who do several jobs trying to hold things together who need paid stress leave.

What’s also very different in New Zealand, compared to TV on other countries is the number of taxpayer-funded advertisements telling us to be better people. All good and worthy causes. Don’t smoke, cover up food in hot weather, drive better, watch kids in pools, don’t drive into rivers without checking, safe sex, exercise - hardly an advertising spot on radio or TV goes by without those messages.

But does it work, or is it about showing the Government cares about us? The Government must be the biggest purchaser of advertising on TV and radio, not so in other democratic countries.

People ask me how long will National’s 63-year old leader, Dr. Brash, survive, will Labour’s Helen Clark, now in her third term, get bored and move on? President Johnson once said he seldom thinks of politics for more than 18 hours a day - same goes for Helen. Brash can survive if it still burns in his guts and if he has the energy levels. Brash can turn his age into an advantage, using humour as did Ronald Reagan, who claimed he was fit, even prepared to work into the wee hours of the afternoon, and that he had instructed his staff to wake him if there was a crisis if he was asleep, even if it was at a Cabinet meeting. But that takes style, class and grace which is not an admired political asset.

Re-elected, Labour now has a stronger Cabinet with the promotion of southern Speights-drinking males, Parker, Cosgrove, and O’Connor. Hopefully they will fight some of the out-of-control bureaucrats who know best and want to social engineer us to be more like them. And what’s this about cutting down non-indigenous trees in Auckland and banning palm trees? I was told how Department Of Conservation complained when a coastal farmer planted hundreds of Pohutukawa because they were the wrong type? Can this be true? Perhaps we should remind these bureaucrats that clover, radiata pine, sheep, cows, even Rugby, are not indigenous - let’s hope these politically-correct officials don’t look at our libraries or art galleries.

Labour has a lot of cards to play and will play them. Why not an Asian immigrant as the next Governor General? The present Canadian Governor General is a Caribbean woman, their previous Governor General was a female Hong Kong Chinese refugee. One in 25 Kiwis were not born in New Zealand.

There’s a real buzz in our major cities, and stunning rebirth in provincial towns. Isn’t it good that the last two Governments have not changed the fundamental reforms of the ‘80’s. But why are 500 New Zealanders a week leaving to live in Australia? Mugs.