a post office or a new school for the short burst, big ones like protection or subsidies for a really sustained effort. The current grumbling league table puts doctors first in both volume and prizes, farmers second. University staffs are now moving up fast, having quickly mastered the art. Geographically it is only fair that Auckland should grow fastest. Its inhabitants have the loudest mouths for grumbling.
The second consequence is that private enterprise is more private than enterprising. It is inefficient. It carries on production in 9,000 small factories where a few big ones producing economically might be more sensible. Industry is expensive; television sets cost twice as much as Japanese imports, though bigger screens may be needed for larger people.
Yet the role of business isn’t to produce cheaply, or efficiently, but to wangle concessions from the government. The most enterprising entrepreneur is he who gets the most support: grants, import licences, or protection. These are the key to profit, not production. Nevertheless the country does export some manufactured goods; in 1969 it even sent $17 worth of musical instruments to Cambodia.
Most of the manufactured exports are potential not real. Entrepreneur and ex-car salesman Ken Slabb wants to exploit the local market for left-handed corkscrews. The market is limited and small-scale production and an inordinate rate of profit will make his product eighty-four times more expensive than imports. The solution is to claim that his main aim is to export millions of left-handed corkscrews every year. With supporting evidence from Ken’s great-uncle and an ex-girlfriend in Australia, poetic submissions are then heard by the Tariff, Development and Upholstery Council, where, despite opposition from the Glove, Mitten and Boottee Trade Association, the council agrees to exclude all left-handed corkscrews to give him a chance to establish himself. Within ten years the price of left-handed corkscrews has gone up 184 times, though sales have trebled because most of those used break on impact with a cork. Ken Slabb has made a fortune and retired to an island in the Bay of Islands, selling out to a British firm of corkscrew manufacturers who used to supply the market before he intervened. The exports have failed to materialise because of unfair trade practices on the part of the Australians and the unexpectedly heavy wage demands of the New Zealand worker. The alternative ending to this story is that prices increase only 180 times and the manufacturer goes bankrupt.
This may horrify you. Visiting IMF teams have been so numbed by it that they have been unable to say anything for months but the name ‘Bill Sutch’ repeated interminably. In fact, of course, New Zealand can live comfortably only by standing orthodox economics on its head. To understand the economic system you have to abandon what you’ve been brought up to regard as sense. Agricultural exports provide enough for all to live on. Kiwis could spend their time blowing bubbles or reading back numbers of Playboy were it not for some deep-seated puritan instinct which conditions them to want to work. So jobs have to be provided. Industry exists not to make things but to make work. The most efficient industry is the one which uses its labour most inefficiently; wharfies make their greatest contribution when seagulling; smokos do more for the economy than shift working. All the jokes about wharfies, like the one who complained to his foreman that a tortoise had been following him round all day, or the aerial photo of Wellington wharves which was ruined because a wharfie moved—all these miss the point. Work is like muck, no good unless its well spread.
Being practical men, New Zealanders are concerned not with hypothetical questions such as would Adam Smith, or even Robert McNamara, approve of our economy, but does it work? It does. The people have jobs, a good standard of living, a car and a lovely home each. Who could ask for more. They are not even concerned with the problem of whether the system could work better. Good enough is better than hypothetical perfection. Anyway the system works so well and has made the inhabitants so contented that they are the world’s most stable, and probably most conservative society.
Seriously, New Zealand is the best place in the world to live. It is called God’s Own Country. Modern theologians may argue whether God is dead. The rest of the world must pose him a lot of problems. Yet if the strain does get too much then he’ll not die. He’ll retire here.
*. See Fishopanhauser and Smith, ‘Conflict Theory and Beer Prices in a Southland Town’. A Ph.D. thesis assessing the relevance of Action Theory to empirical political analysis, including an attempt to establish a basis for determining the relationship between individual behaviour and system attributes. Based on in-depth interviews with 250 drunks.
**. See H. Sheisenhauser and Les Cumberland, ‘Status Attribution, Self Assigned Social Grouping, Inverse Social Mobility with Cognitive Dissidence and the Incidence of Plaster Ducks on Walls’. An exploratory survey based on 2.8 million random interviews with a stratified sample of New Zealanders. Condensed five-volume summary of results shortly available.
STUPENDOUS, FANTASTIC, BEAUTIFUL NEW ZEALAND
(In Black and White)
DON’T THINK of New Zealand as a nation. It is an accidental collection of places whose inhabitants happen to live in much the same fashion and talk the same language; not so much a nation as more a way of life. How tenuous the connections are I realised on decimalisation day. A woman in a Christchurch shop announced that she wasn’t going to bother with this decimalisation rubbish. They were moving to Invercargill next week. Dunedinites think of Auckland as another country. Aucklanders advise South-bound trippers to take enough overcoats and hot-water bottles for the South Pole. Interisland ferry sailings generate as much emotion as a world cruise. It’s as though an umbilical was being severed. At both ends.
New Zealand is a collection of communities, not the metropolitan country you know. In France, Paris sets the tone and controls a centralised machinery of administration. In Japan, Tokyo dominates business and houses a substantial part of the population. In Britain, London dominates; television and newspapers originate there, the social whirl centres there and career ladders end there. New Zealand is different. There is not one main centre but four, and even together they contain only about a third of the population. They are also far apart and very jealous of each other. Even if they could develop collective pretensions they are all jealously watched by a league of little sisters. Oamaru and Invercargill won’t stand for much from Dunedin except bad television programmes; Palmerston North keeps a close eye on Wellington. In any case the eighteen biggest urban areas contain just over half the population. All the other places have claims of their own, too.
In Britain everywhere outside London carries the stigma of being provincial. New Zealanders work on the assumption that all places are equal, though the growth of Auckland may have opened up the possibility that some are more equal than others. Life has a local focus. Different places view different television programmes, look at different newspapers and listen to different radio programmes. To be a Timaruvian means as much as to be a New Zealander. The only reason that travellers identify themselves overseas as New Zealanders is because no one seems to have heard of Waipukurau or Totaranui. Of course they draw together as a nation for the occasional catharsis—an All Black victory, a royal tour. Then they fall back into competing localities. This competition is all the more vigorous because it is one of the few notes of diversity in a uniform community.
Farmers live in the same kind of boxes as the rest; the boxes just happen to be in the middle of fields. Social habits are the same everywhere, though some have a longer drive to the pub. Nearly everybody looks out on the same jungle of tottering telegraph poles and tangled wires; there could be sewerage pipes to look at, too, if governments had been able to devise a safe method of stringing them among all the other dangling paraphernalia. New Zealanders are all campers on a lovely landscape and the main element of difference in their lives is the accident of which camp site they happen to have picked. Wherever it is, you must remember one basic rule: the