The Pavlova Omnibus. Austin Mitchell

Britain. Every year 500 tons of fish are pulled out of Lake Taupo alone and 100,000 deer and several hunters are riddled with lead. Indeed, old-timers will tell you that you were safer on Vimy Ridge than in some of the New Zealand forests. Tramping tracks like the trail to Milford take a harder pounding than any parade ground. Pity any foe with the temerity to invade New Zealand. The whole population would simply take to the hills. Guerilla war would decimate the entire Red Chinese Army in days.

      The outdoors is normally reserved for holidays. You will recognise them because activity rises to ever more frenzied levels. In Britain holidays are an escape from reality, two hectic weeks on a package tour to a world which is slowly being plasticised, processed and sanitised for trippers. With the Kiwi, they are a concentration of reality, a period in which the people leave their houses and go to camping sites or motels, where life can go on as normal, the women cooking, the men tinkering. Holidays New Zealand style can also mean visiting relatives or friends and living off them. The country is a vast network of obligations and owed visits. Not even Petone is immune. When people with sleeping bags arrive at your door talking of a chance encounter in the Midland Hotel five years before, or a distant relationship with your wife’s mother’s first cousin, to turn them away is a breach of hospitality. So is taking seriously their offer to sleep on the floor. They want a bed, yours if necessary. No New Zealander away from home ever goes short of a bed, though as a Pom you may well be too squeamish to exploit a system which demands only thousands of relatives and brazen insensitivity.

      Perhaps all that I’ve described, the do it yourself world of industry, entertainment and holidays, seems a little crude and unsophisticated to you. You may miss excellence and expertise. Seriously, though, life is better. You’ll be doing things for yourself. After the initial blunders you’ll come to enjoy it. If you don’t you can always go back home and pay someone else to do everything for you. Even grumbling.

       EIGHTH LETTER

       THE KIWI SNIGGERS: A Brief Guide to New Zealand Humour

       NINTH LETTER

       THE MEDIUM is the TEDIUM

      MOST COUNTRIES have some pastor of souls tenderly watching, forgiving transgressions, shepherding the nation toward salvation. In Britain, the Church of England, in Egypt, Islam, in India, Hinduism. In New Zealand the media do the job, and even manage to declare a dividend on it.

      You think of the media as a dynamic force, criticising, stimulating, questioning. Such organs do not transplant. The happy medians are a priesthood. When we doubt, they reassure the people; they comfort their isolation, assuage their uncertainties, remind them that all is for the best in the best of possible countries. The media’s business is balm distribution, wholesale and retail. Overseas, the media criticise and question in a climate where all is not well. In New Zealand it is. The media can get on with their real job of reassurance.

      Let’s begin our survey of the varieties of religious experience with the established church, the three denominations née NZBC—to its intimates, ‘the corp’ (the se being silent). Where you come from a corporation is an independent organisation, like that centre of Black Power, the National Coal Board. Disabuse yourself. In New Zealand a corporation is a government department with freedom to choose its own letterheads. In 1960 the National Party was anxious to present itself as the party of constitutional rectitude. It was also aware that television was coming, and could be more embarrassing for a government department to handle than, say, hydatids dosing. Yet the corporations can be troublesomely independent, whereas they should be seen and not heard. So the NZBC was treated like the tamarillo (née tree tomato): the name was changed and the creature kept the same. Symbolically, Broadcasting House was built cowering beneath the Bowen State Building and hiding behind Parliament.

      The NZBC posed as much danger to the public peace as a Pekinese being taken out for walks on the end of a four inch steel cable. The corporation had to comply with any general or special directions given in writing by the minister, though since the minister responsible is usually the least literate, he prefers to pick up the telephone. Any telephone call reduced the NZBC to jelly.

      The National Government rewarded devoted servants of the National Party by appointing them to the corporation. Indeed if it had appointed any more, they would have been able to form their own party branch. The only real qualification for the job was to have no knowledge of television. The Labour Party, believing in the continuous creation of corporations, then divided the NZBC into three, like Caesar’s Gaul.

      The new corporations are a new dimension of administrative theory. The corporations do what is wanted without appearing to be told. If one does anything someone disapproves of, this can always be disavowed as a consequence of independence. If only show business had shown the same skill in developing the ventriloquist-less dummy.

      Mark you, the whole structure is unnecessary. No corporation has any desire for independence. Overseas they speak of the immense power of television. In New Zealand we know its immense timidity, like a steamroller whose driver lives in terror of virus infection from the crowds milling under his wheels. Real freedom could be too much to bear; witness the state of desolation the NZBC found itself in when the government did naughty things like allowing privately controlled radio. Like a hysterical wife suspecting the husband she’s been loyal to for forty years of adultery, the corporations alternate between hysterical plate throwing and even more hysterical self-abasement. Sometimes none of the poodle’s tricks please. Imagine the consternation when you cancel the Brian Edwards Show and a minister promptly condemns you for it.

      Yet don’t fear a divorce. Conjugal bliss will return after the sulks. After all the corporations fear everyone else more than the government. Pressure groups protest at programmes or demand time; viewers write to the papers, or even ring the studios; MPs complain to the ministers; puritans protest about the sexual significance of showing the Apollo docking manoeuvre. Each corporation has to protect itself against such a cruel world—by setting up Regional Advisory Committees. Now representatives of every conceivable pressure group can air their views in confidence and this has a pacifying effect.