New Zealand tick?

Who cares what makes New Zealand tick?

Anyone with any doubts about the national characteristics of the New Zealanders can now read about them in The Passionless People. In it the author, Gordon McLauchlan, a fourth generation Kiwi himself, operating from some olympian height, sets about the psyche of his countrymen with a metaphorical machete and leaves it without a shred of virtue.

As such, what he says has certain elements of inverted superiority complex. Who are these monumen tal dullards that they warrant a 200odd page book about them? Who outside New Zealand cares what makes 3 1 / 2 million New Zealanders tick?

According to McLauchlan they aren’t, as they think, contented peo ple living in a green and sunlit land but a mob of “smiling Zombies”; unhappy, unsure of themselves culturally constipated, as it were, because migration has come entirely from the British Isles instead of (like Australia) from middle and southern Europe, Middle East and even Latin America. Furthermore, there were too many canny Scots amongst the early settlers and their horrible influence is still being felt, five generations on.

We are told that NZ society is materialistic and bemused by statistics. People are carried away by the thought that the New Zealander is, per capita, the world’s biggest meat eater, butter eater, sugar comsumer, milk drinker, beer drinker, etc. Their conception of God is said to be a “South Canter bury sheep farmer with a diploma of farm machinery from Lincoln Col lege, who plays senior in the Rugby scrum and gets pissed with the boys but never with strangers”.

A lot of Kiwis suffer, McLauchlan thinks, from sexual hangups (could it be because of a dearth of those Latin Americans and Southern Europeans?) but “ ... the divorce rate is still relatively low. It is believed that the New Zealand wife lasts such a long time as a sex partner because she has so few mov ing parts ...”

Other New Zealander faults in clude the facts that they drink too much, take too many pills, make good soldiers but are moral cowards, are ultra-conservative and probably racist. When in doubt about anything they set up a com mittee or call a general meeting; and they prostrate themselves in admira tion of the medical profession which sits firmly at the top of the social totem-pole.

“In New Zealand,” the author says, “the scapel is mightier than the pen, sword, orb and sceptre too ...

Here he is the subject of fawning social adulation. I think the most likely reason is that in NZ the doc tor is the perfect shining example of the things New Zealanders most ad mire superficial cleverness, con formity and money.”

The list of Kiwi shortcomings is endless; quotes from psychiatrists, social workers, poets, politicians, novelists, professors of this and that, even doctors, are given at length to reinforce the proposition that they are a despicable and hopeless lot.

Virtues, if any, are not mentioned.

The Passionless People may enrage a few Kiwis but nationally it is hardly likely to bring about a metamorphosis in the New Zealand way of life. Foreigners, if they aren’t

bored by it, will probably reflect that there also could go a Brit, a Pom, a Yank or an Aussie.

Uniquely for anyone living on the eastern side of the Tasman Sea, the author seems to see virtue in the way Australians do things. In this, by in ference, he even goes to the length of thinking that a new and virile culture is developing a fact denied by his Australian opposite numbers who exhort Aussies to forgot their beach-bumming, beer swilling, horse-racing preoccupa tions and get off their collective backsides, or else.

Gordon Maclauchlan has been a journalist for 25 years during which time he has had a multiplicity of jobs, including, at one time, being editor of the New Zealand Journal of Agriculture which can hardly be said to be anything but attached to the Establishment. Perhaps that’s what soured him.

He is best known now for his humorous column in the New Zea land Herald’s Saturday edition and no doubt he has sufficient fans to take the book in the spirit in which it maybe, was meant; Not too seriously. Judy Tudor.

(The Passionless People By Gordon

McLauchlan. Published by Cassell, New Zea land. 1NZ6.95.)