Get set

Am I the only one to get a little moist-eyed at the announcement today that the referee's scrum routine for the upcoming provincial rugby championship is being changed to 'Crouch, touch, set'? This appears to signify that the immortal phrase 'Crouch, touch, pause, engage'—first used, I believe, in a Tennyson ode, and later popularized by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra—is on the way out? A whole generation has grown up with these incantatory words ringing in its ears. I am not sure, in fact, that New Zealand would have won the Rugby World Cup without them. Right up to the final the ABs probably had little recording devices under their pillows, like the ones for the children in the nurseries of Brave New World, whispering this lyrical litany into their sleeping brains, imprinting it on the hard drive, ensuring that when the day came and the scrum went down they would crouch, touch, pause and engage. In that order. Unquestioningly. Tell me I have a dirty mind (please) but I always had the feeling there was something sexual, well, sensual anyway, about these intensely physical instructions; and maybe that's why they have sunk so deep in the nation's psyche. Touching and engaging, after all, is what keeps the human race going, with or without the pausing. As was memorably said by E M Forster, who played first-five for Cambridge University, 'Only connect.' Farewell, then, familiar words; at the going down of the scrum, we will remember them. 'Crouch, touch, set' doesn't have quite the same ring but no doubt we'll get used to it in time.

A dying party

I am inclined to agree with Paul Little that we are, in his words, witnessing the long, slow and inevitable death of the Labour Party. There is nothing inherently tragic about this. Parties are formed, rise up, win power, lose it, fade away all the time. Exactly 100 years ago it might have seemed to New Zealand voters that the Liberal and Reform parties were the only games in town, so dominant were they; yet within 25 years both were history. The same fate would have befallen Labour sooner or later, whatever it did; but it seems to be happening sooner for one overwhelming reason: the party has never truly recovered from what it did to itself in the 1980s - a time of political betrayal, I'd suggest, pretty much unequalled among Western democracies. Something broke in Labour then, and although it kept going out of sheer historical momentum, even winning power again under the wily Helen Clark, it feels more and more, with every passing month, as though it's running on empty now. No matter how it flossies itself up and piles on the pancake make-up, it can't conceal that, essentially, it no longer has a clear core of political philosophy. In the immediacy of the daily grind of politics that might not seem to matter much but in the long run it begins to tell with voters. A party has to stand for something distinctive and different; and Labour these days is at best National-lite. Even so, it could have gone on for quite a while yet as 'one of the two main parties,' so long as a credible alternative didn't arise. That, as Little says, has now happened with the emergence of the Greens as a real political force. Whatever you think of the Greens, it can't be denied that they have a clear core of political philosophy - and one much more in tune with the times than Labour's blurry jumble. Everything points to the Greens gradually supplanting Labour as National's major rival, either by subsuming it, merging with it or simply overtaking it poll by poll in voters' affections. It could even happen relatively suddenly, if there were another global or national crisis, or Labour did something seriously stupid. The Greens won't last forever either; probably in time their name will come to seem as much of an anachronism as Labour's is now. But for the moment, and for the first half of this century anyway, they have a following wind; and Labour has run out of puff.

Fire in Rome

I don't know who Justin Pemberton is, or what work he has done before, but his docudrama The Golden Hour, screened on TV1 last night, is blisteringly good. The film—which Pemberton both wrote and directed—tells the story of how, thanks to Arthur Lydiard's training, Peter Snell and Murray Halberg won gold for New Zealand within an hour of each other on the athletics track at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Interviews with Snell, Halberg and others are interwoven with historical footage and dramatized scenes with actors playing the athletes. This kind of thing needs to be done very well to work; many directors overcook the dramatizations at the expense of the documentary footage. Pemberton doesn't; he uses the dramatized scenes only to enhance and enrich the real stuff; the actors in them never even speak, which is wise, given that the (older) Snell and Halberg speak so eloquently about their experience. Halberg is in fact mesmerizing, though the most thrilling line (for me anyway, for some reason) is Snell's on what happened as the 800-metres field came round the final bend and he was boxed in behind the front-runners, seemingly unable to get through. It was then, he says, that 'I had the distinct feeling the others were slowing down.' Brilliant. And Halberg, as soon as he'd won and fallen, exhausted, on his back beside the track: 'The fire was gone'—the fire that had burned in him for four years after he came last in the 1500 metres at the 1956 Olympics and resolved to come back and win gold. Above all, Pemberton shows wonderful control of his material, never lapsing into patronizing hindsight or anachronism, not pushing nostalgic emotion down our throats, letting people and events speak for themselves. Brilliant. Did I say that before? If you missed it, I urge you to catch it on replay.

We the people

Call me picky, but when John Key says 'We would utterly dispute that Maori own water,' I get an uneasy feeling. Not just because of the opinion expressed (that's another story) but because of the plural pronoun. Sure, we all talk about Maori and Pakeha, and the water-rights case before the Waitangi Tribunal is being brought by the Maori Council, but when the prime minister speaks he speaks for the government of the nation; he speaks for us all. Who exactly does he mean when he says 'we'? As prime minister he ought to mean all of us—Maori, Pakeha, whoever's a New Zealander. Yet the way he uses it suggests he's speaking for Pakeha as opposed to Maori. It is possible I am being insanely pedantic here. But something about that 'we' troubles me. Karl du Fresne says the big question raised by the claim is 'Are we one people, or are we not?' and although I'm not sure he means it in the sense I mean it, if we truly are one people, represented by one elected government, then the nation's leader must speak as if it is so. He must find a better way of expressing these things. Tricky call. Over to you, John.

Beyond doubtful reason

For specious reasoning it would be hard to beat this New Zealand Herald editorial on partial asset sales earlier this week. In particular, my jaw dropped when I read that 'the reason economists in the Treasury urge privatization of the power companies is that better investment decisions can be expected of private shareholders. People who put their own money into something take more care of it. The public will receive the benefit of private investors' monitoring of the power companies.' Um...what? Where to begin exposing the gaping holes in this reasoning? Did the people who put their own money into Hanover/Bridgecorp/Nathans/Lombard (you name it) take more care of their money? I don't think so. And in exactly what fashion do private investors monitor the companies they invest in? Only the big corporates have any influence; individual private investors can 'monitor' all they like but the company they've invested in will go its own sweet way regardless. The Herald then goes on to further justify the sales by saying: 'Public ownership is probably necessary for a natural monopoly such as the national grid. But the generating of electricity and its sale to consumers were put on a competitive footing in the 1990s.' Which makes it all right? Well, sure, if you say so. But many would say electricity generation is one of the most natural monopolies you can get, and two wrongs (partial privatization in the 90s and partial sales now) don't make a right. In any case, by its own admission the Herald says Mighty River Power, Meridian, Genesis and Solid Energy 'will provide the stockmarket with much-needed gilt,' which rather suggests they've been doing perfectly fine under public ownership. At this point in the editorial I was hoping to get my jaw off the floor, but then came the kicker. 'If most shares are soon owned overseas,' trills the Herald, 'so be it. We live on international trade and investment. Resources are owned by those who can generate their best value. That is how a successful economy works.' So be it? Resources are owned by those who can generate their best value? Look, go ahead and sell off the whole country while you're at it. You'll have to change your masthead name, though: 'New Zealand' clearly has no place in it.

Slow and behold

Sure, Los Angeles is dense with traffic, gridded with freeways and long, long boulevards on which cars are king and lane-changing is a full-time occupation. But in quieter suburban streets a different ethic seems to prevail. Our jaws dropped the first time a driver slowed to allow us to cross the street in front of him, even though no pedestrian crossing was in sight. Before long we were experiencing many examples of driver courtesy to pedestrians—unlike New Zealand, where you daren't step off the pavement without making sure the road is clear a long way on either side, and drivers automatically assume the right of way, often quite aggressively. In LA, away from main roads, drivers frequently if not invariably slow and/or stop for walkers. They drive more slowly too. I wondered if this was just a phenomenon confined to Venice Beach, where we have been staying, but have just read this in Ian McEwan's novel Solar: 'The country [the United States] had lived en masse with the automobile longer than any other. People had wearied of the car as a racing device or penis or missile substitute. They stopped at suburban crossroads and politely negotiated with glances who should go first. They even obeyed the fifteeen-mile-an-hour limit around schools.' Who knew? Inexplicably, Hollywood action movies have given no hint of this automotive amiability.

Califeducation

So where does the government now find the other $114 million in 'savings' it wants to make in the education system? Be afraid, be very afraid. Anything is possible (anything, that is, so long as it drives a wedge, as Giovanni Tiso memorably says, 'between the aspirations of the middle class and the realities faced by the working class'). Here in Los Angeles, where I am at the moment, the LA Times has just led with the news that, rather than sharply increase class sizes or eliminate adult education programs—both, apparently, politically unacceptable—the city's education authorities are reducing the teaching time. It looks as though up to five 'instructional days' will be cut from the 2012-13 school year; that would bring to 18 the number of school days cut over the past four years. It's a way of paying teachers less, of course: five fewer days of teaching could be equivalent to as much as a 5% salary cut, according to the Times. But the main teacher union apparently feels it has no choice but to accept it: the alternative would be mass layoffs. The mind baulks at the thought of 18 days being lopped off the New Zealand school year, but you have been warned. When the bean-counters fix their gaze on public education, they don't see students or teachers, they don't actually see people: they see beans. And guess what else in LA? At the same time as all the above, the Times reports, the education authorities are 'under pressure to boost test scores, and use them as part of teacher evaluations.' I might just as well be back home.