AND ANOTHER THING
Why Tony Blair should visit the Arcadia of the South Pacific
PAUL JOHNSON
Where is the best place in the world to be a child? Last week, a New Zealand cabi- net minister, Mr John Banks, and his wife returned home with three red-haired Rus- sian children they had adopted: Natalia, eight, Sergei, five and Alexander, two. Banks had been brought up in a children's home himself; his marriage has been child- less and he and his wife went to Russia to collect Natalia from her orphanage. They discovered she had two little brothers and decided on the spot that they must not be separated. It is a touching tale, and Mr Banks says the most moving sight of all was seeing the dozens of sad faces pressed to the windows of the grim orphanage as the Banks left with their much blessed trinity.
Blessed is the word. Russia is a harsh society. The two boys would almost certain- ly have ended up long-service conscripts; Natalia would very likely have become a prostitute. In New Zealand they will find perhaps the last Arcadia made for healthy, energetic kids. It is rich — and becoming richer — beautiful and still virtually unspoilt. There is no pollution: the air is so clear that colours are as vivid as on the Riv- iera before it was poisoned. I noticed this at the Auckland flower-show a fortnight ago — never have I seen such brilliant roses and I noticed too that the scent of the flow- ers was as pungent as once in Grasse. New Zealand has perhaps the world's best pub- lic health service, a passable system of edu- cation, no traffic jams, masses of space (3.4 million in a country the size of Britain), very little disease (2,000 kilometres from its nearest neighbour, it is the world's most isolated country), and a variety of enthusi- astic religions — rugby, tennis, cricket, mountaineering, white-water rafting and sailing being just some of them. Children wear neat school uniforms, manners are exemplary, and no one will accept tips. All this sounds too good to be true and indeed would have been untrue had not New Zealand's politicians, led by a Labour minister of genius, Mr Roger Douglas, had a fundamental change of heart ten years ago. At that time, New Zealand, with one of the most cumbrous and inefficient wel- fare states on earth and a system of regula- tions, import controls, licences and what- not — much of it a wartime legacy later compounded by collectivist governments right and left, giving it a distinct communist satellite flavour — was heading straight for bankruptcy. Mr Douglas carried through a libertarian revolution which, sustained and enlarged by his successors, has transformed the country's economy and indeed its physi- cal appearance. New Zealand is now an exemplary free-market country: its unions are crushed; its dynamism is exhilarating; it is developing clean, hi-tech industries to add to its agricultural excellence; invest- ment is flowing in and its currency is hard- ening. I was told, 'You get your friend Tony Blair to come out here and see how we did it.' Labour shadow ministers — the country is currently run by a cunning opportunist called Mr Jim Bolger — told me they would be delighted to see Mr Blair, learn from him and teach him in turn.
There are flies in this ointment. Even the clear air has its drawbacks. New Zealand has the world's highest rate for one form of skin cancer. The country's leading land- scape painter, Mr Tim Wilson, presents the blinding sparkle of the highland scenery so faithfully that I found his palette far too high for my taste. The most successful artists, Alfred Sharp (1836-1908) and, more recently, Charles Blomfield and John Gibb, avoided pure sunlight or, like Sharp, got inside the vast primaeval forests, with their exotic or enormous trees unknown any- where else on earth, which are among New Zealand's glories. On the other hand, natu- ral conditions are so good that film-makers flock there for location sequences. The variety of scenery is such that it can be made to look like anything: the Congo, Sherwood Forest, the Jurassic era or Mans- field Park. Local crews are cheap and nice to work with. One Hollywood director, who makes 60-minute television yarns called Hercules and Xena, told me there was no difficulty in getting the South Island to look like Greece 2,000 BC: the problem was to get New Zealand actors to speak the Amer- ican English which, Hollywood decrees, was the demotic of the Golden Age: 'They will keep calling him 'Ercules. Another problem is the Maoris. The Queen, on her recent visit, did not like hav- ing to wear an itchy feathered rug and apol- ogise to the natives for civilising them, and she was quite right. More nonsense is writ- ten about the Maoris than about even the Aboriginals or the 'Native Americans', as Red Indians are now absurdly called by the Politically Correct. That disease flourishes in New Zealand as elsewhere, especially on the campus and in broadcasting. In an Anglican cathedral, I heard a predictable sermon on 'Maori land rights', and the churches are encouraging the Maoris to demand 'sovereignty', make their own pass- ports and have their kids taught all subjects in Maori, which was not even a written lan- guage before western philologists got hold of it.
In fact, the British very likely saved the race from extinction. Maoris settled in strength in a hitherto uninhabited New Zealand only in late mediaeval times, as a famous 1898 painting by Charles Frederick Goldie (based on Gdricault's 'Raft of the Medusa') reminds us. They set about clob- bering and eating the giant birds which had hitherto lorded it there, using murderous clubs of very hard wood, wahaikas, of which I was given a beautifully carved replica. They had already got through most of the stock and were turning to cannibalism when the whites arrived and introduced the food-producing methods which have since made New Zealand the greatest agricultur- al success story in history.
They ought to be grateful to the British, and except for their 'leaders' — primed by the white liberals of the race relations industry — most of them are. But the story is familiar; you can write the script yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with New Zealand provided the ideologues are not allowed to spoil it, as the collectivists once came close to doing. Any patriotic Briton who wants to see what our own country was like before sheer numbers, heavy industry, slums, council estates, drugs, crime and immigration destroyed it, should go to this delectable country and take deep lungfuls of its pure oxygen.
Owing to errors in transmission for which the author was not responsible, in Paul John- son's column last week about heirs to the throne, Henry III appeared as Henry II and, in the final paragraph, Henry V appeared as Henry VI.
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