Jon dispenses with aroha to explore John Key's retrograde plan to restore knighthoods
There is plenty about our new government to analyse, not least the fragility of its two wings. We have a Maori Party claiming a mandate that far exceeds the fractiously stark reality of just how few Maori bothered to vote at the election and the party’s own inability to win all seven Maori seats. Tariana and Pita have opportunity, of that there is no doubt, but they are walking a precarious tightrope.
Then there is the bizarrely absurd document that binds National and ACT. One of my bright young things likened the agreement to a legal brief written in preparation for the law suit that will inevitably follow. I’m more sanguine so think, rather, that it was crafted by someone influenced by Salvador Dali. ACT’s collection of MPs appears more akin to a powder keg than a caucus, and the crazed idea by Key to agree to fund ACT’s ideological mates and their research efforts has the potential to boomerang badly upon the prime minister.
But what has really caught my attention was Key uttering once more his intention to restore knighthoods. The airwaves were full of it.
You see, I have talkback radio on in my car so that twice a day I can get to enjoy an array of debate otherwise absent in my life. A few days ago a talkback host was gushing on about restoring knighthoods. Callers trumpeted Key’s good taste in reclaiming our former glory. One old dear, impervious to the heavy group think going down, got stuck into Sir Michael Fay. She called him a degenerate crook, alongside several others of his vintage, but she soon found herself facing hostile interrogation from the show’s host, a reactionary whom I thought possessed neither any short nor long-term memory.
The cringeful fawning and mewing about restoring the old aristocratic form of Knighthoods and Dames reminded me of a phenomenon the French traveller André Siegfried once observed about New Zealanders, a little over a century ago. Siegfried, in a chapter entitled ‘Snobbishness in New Zealand Society,’ noted in relation to our attitudes towards titles that:
Indigeneity, not old Empire form, should surely underpin our award system and if there is too much confusion and too much blandness around the labels of the current pecking order then let’s put our minds to that first. Surely it is not beyond our collective imaginations to construct a hierarchy attached to our indigenous fauna or other cherished symbols of our land.
I’d love to better understand his rationale and his motivations for this policy. Perhaps he might share them with us.
Who knows whether this clamour for recognition is based upon notions of meritocracy or an unconscious attraction towards oligarchy? Is it that these people need to be rewarded for how special they are, or for how special everyone else isn’t?
Otherwise, I will wonder just who, on the subject of restoring titular titles, is being emotive and who, given the trajectory of our recent history, is being pragmatic.