Nine Things You Can’t Say in New Zealand

New Zealand. Luminous jewel of the deep Pacific. our national song is Black Magic Woman, by Santana, and our God is a Maori warrior who by night turns into a hawk, or so is my understanding. But in New Zealand (as in any Zealand) there are certain subjects best avoided in polite company, and certain opinions best kept to yourself, if you value your friends, and your health. But I’m writing this from an undisclosed café in Vietnam, so I don’t have to worry about that. Through the miracle of mass communication, I can now say all the things I’ve longed to say, without fear of physical harm.

1. On the whole, we’d have been better off French.

Close your eyes and imagine: croissants, fine cuisine, wine for brekkie, an inflated sense of our own worth. We could be sitting right now beside a sunny café, on one of our 50 days of annual leave, enveloping moist treats with our perfect lips while discussing philosophy in an accent that would turn any foreign brain to gooey fromage. But no, Mother England had to step in, clasp us to her pallid bosom, and condemn us to two centuries of pies, wars, lager, and sexual diffidence. If we were French, we could have weazled out of history’s deadliest wars. Brittain is the reason so many of us are dead, and why those alive are fairly boring. But oh, what we could have been: a neo-Gallic paradise, a new-Noumea. Sure, we would have had to put up with an at times oppressive colonial master, gay-ass berets, and a country that glows in the dark, but that, mon ami, is a small price to pay to not be British subjects.

2. I hated Whale Rider.

A strange thing happens when a New Zealander hears the eerie whistle of a traditional Maori flute and the low ‘whoooooooooom’ of that instrument you swing around your head like a cat, (you might know it as the Once Were Warriors instrument.) The average Kiwi falls into a semi-hypnotic state where she believes that what she’s watching is something as deep and ageless as a river, something that will allow her to unravel one small corner of the cultural fabric of New Zealand. In this state, she’ll be oblivious to the fact that what she’s really watching is a pretty average film with a moronic, sub-film-school script, one dimensional characters, and a plotline lifted from the movie Footloose.

Whale Rider pretends to be deep and searching, but the fact is that Taika Waititi was able to paint a more realistic, more nuanced picture of life in a small Maori community in hist short Two Cars One Night than Caro could in an entire film. Meanwhile, a vastly superior film like In My Father’s Den goes relatively unheralded. Maybe it was too gritty, too complex. The world loves a simple film, and the world loved Dances With Whales.

[NOTE: The writer would like to particularly apologise to his Mum, who enjoyed the film very much, and who bought him the DVD for his birthday.]

[2.1. Peter Jackson is the worst thing that could ever have happened to New Zealand film.

It was our proudest moment since Ed Hillary snuck to the top of Everest while the other mountaineers were sleeping. LOTR: the monsters, the mayhem, the incomprehensible dialogue, the plots that dragged like a dog with an impacted anal-gland, the camera soaring over lavish tracts of our best scenery while famous actors chewed on it. Some people, though, might not think it was such a proud moment. They might point out that when a small nation becomes a new cog in the international film production machine, their home-grown industry becomes over-extended, prices rise, and it becomes harder for smaller, local productions to get made. The big players, meanwhile, have a field day with your lavish tax-breaks and other incentives. Some people might also point out an irony in the fact that Jackson would have found it difficult, perhaps impossible, to get his early films made under current conditions. Not me though, I think Jackson is awesome, and there was no better way to honour him than with a giant portrait at Wellington airport made entirely out of toast.]

3. Statistically speaking, of the roughly 1000 All Blacks that have served our country, roughly 100 have been gay.

I have no point to make here, I just wanted to see the look on your face. Priceless. In 1948, renowned sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey shocked the world when he claimed that a third of American males claimed to have had at least one same-sex orgasmic experience by age 45. Furthermore, approximately 10 percent of the males admitted to having been predominantly homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55, and four percent of white males described themselves as exclusively homosexual. The exact figures are still the subject of debate, so for argument’s sake lets assume a reasonably conservative measure of 10% of males with reasonably strong homosexual urges. That means that in a group of 1000 men you would expect there to be at least 100 men who fancied their mates. Who could they be? Mexted? Hayman? (he looks like a cuddler,) Smokin Joe? (A stage name? Seriously) The big question is: does being in a group with strong taboos against such behaviour enhance or diminish these tendencies. Common sense would tell us that strong taboos will make us focus on the things we’re not supposed to think about, (Don’t think of a pink of elephant.) This could explain why conservative politicians and religious leaders are so often caught in compromising positions. Likewise, anyone who’s spent time with rugby players, or watched an episode of Matthew and Marc’s Weirdly Homo-erotic Adventures, or whatever their show is called, will possibly find the number of gay jokes that fly around … intriguing.

This theory can also be applied to political parties, (parliament in general,) to religious groups, and to all other sports, except perhaps cricket, where out of 1000 players, roughly 100 would be straight.

4. Giving women the vote was probably a bad idea.

I want to be supportive, but man, we men had it good. A fresh country to call our own, women who baked and knew their place; now the place is theirs, they run the show: PM’s, Gov Gens, CEO’s. It’s like we said, “Won’t you share our dinner, M’lady,” and she said, “Yes. Now nob off to the kids’ table.” Great plan boys. Now look at us: subservient creatures, metrosexualised, mercilessly parodied in shows and TV ads. Most galling is the fact that our women’s rugby team seem to win World Cups with one powerful arm behind their back, while the All Blacks are repeatedly, embarrassingly, unable to. Bloody hell.

5. We need to increase immigration by at least 400%.

The consensus around the dinner tables of mainstream New Zealand seems to be that immigration is a bad thing. “We need to put a lid on it,” they say. “You walk down Queen Street and you’d think you were in bloody Shanghai,” they babble. Well, as someone who frequently returns from such dinners with bite marks on my tongue, I can now confess that not only do I disagree with that, I think that New Zealand should aim to double its population in the next 20 years. You heard me. 8 million kiwis. I like immigrants, I like their smiles and their interesting outfits. I like their stories. Most of all, I like their money. New Zealand is massively underpopulated and this puts a huge burden on the tax-payer. 8 million would still leave us plenty of room to paddle our boats, while also allowing us to adequately finance our schools, roads and hospitals. Finally, it would force us to become a truly multicultural society, instead of one that just pretends to be so.

6. If anything, we should work to increase the brain drain.

Incentives, tax-breaks, lollies, whatever it takes to get the kids out of home and learning and earning in exotic locales, (or Brittain, whichever’s easier.) We have a reputation for creating world-beaters, but Rutherford could not have cracked the atom here. Bill Pickering couldn’t have sent America into space if he’d stayed at Canterbury. But those are old examples, what about a modern case. In 1981 a man called John Key received his Bachelor of Commerce in accounting from Canterbury. After working as a foreign exchange dealer at Elders Finance in Wellington, he rose to the position of head foreign exchange trader before moving to Bankers Trust in 1988. In 1995 he joined Merrill Lynch in Singapore and was quickly promoted to Merrill's global head of foreign exchange, based in London, where he may have earned around US$2.25 million a year including bonuses, as well as the nickname "the smiling assassin" for maintaining his cheerfulness while sacking large numbers of his co-workers. Some say that if you see him you should stay very still, for he can only sense movement. In 2001 he returned to New Zealand to enter politics. We should all remember John’s story as the debate over the brain-drain becomes central this election.

7. Brian Tamaki would make a great PM.

And speaking of brain-drain, I think it’s time we gave Bishop Brian Tamaki, God’s answer to the Fonz, a bit more credit. Ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative governments are huge right now. We need a leader who’s as rigid and righteous as the sultans of China, Russia, and the U.S.. We need a black/white thinker, someone willing to switch off the rational part of his brain and to answer our most complex socio-political questions with a set of basic, pre-conceived principles lifted straight from an ancient book of Jewish folk stories. Adoption for same-sex couples? Just don’t do it. Sex education for teens? Just don’t have sex. See? Easy. We need to be lead by someone who knows best, and who’s willing to send black-shirted men into the streets, if necessary, to keep order. Most of all, we need someone to teach us that if we follow his principles, (and perhaps surrender a teensy percentage of our income,) we too could have a shiny motorbike in this life, and salvation in the next.

8. Wellington dub-music sucks:

Our mums have their finger on the pulse of what’s harmless and agreeable in the world of popular music, though they usually get the names wrong. “Those Trinity’s Drops are nice,” or “I quite like that Fat Freddy’s Roots.” Well, how could they resist the Welli-sound; the true apotheosis of wallpaper music. These are songs that lend a laid-back vibe to any occasion—beach, bbq, latte session with the girls— without being distracting or dividing. You could have your boss, your mates, and your Nanna at your BBQ and still be certain that none of them would be offended by your musical selection. And then there’s the lyrics:

I got nothing left to loose,
Like a bubble never had no shoes,
Walking these streets, deep and dark as night,
I wanna love I don't wanna fight.

It’s like something David Brent would sing. There’s some great bands in the Capital that don’t employ horn sections—So So Modern, Disasteradio, The Phoenix Foundation—but by all means keep your worn copy of Based On a True Story cranking. It would hardly be a lazy Sunday in Wellington without it:

Just short people look up high,
can't help but spy from my wandering eye,
something beginning with the capital cool,
capital you, if you could only check my view.

Nice.

9. This Sun-Smart business has gone to far.

What are we up to, SPF 90? 100? What are we expecting, exactly, a passing comet? And what’s with dressing your kid in more layers than a Siberian hobo. This kid here, for example, only wants to play with the ducks in the park, to feel the sun on her mottled cheek. Instead it looks as if a clothes-chest accidentally discharged in her face. She’s a kiwi kid, but her feet are sandled—“The bees! The bees!”—and her tiny face is caked in a layer of white goo that makes her look as if she’s been set upon by a roving gang of incontinent ducks. We’ve gone too far, we need a reality check, a little sun is a good thing, it’s where we get Vitamin D. We don’t need to go back to the 80’s, when we used to douse ourselves in a bucket of cooking oil then lie on the lawn until we passed through three stages on the ethnicity spectrum. Maybe we just need to restore a sense of balance.