A Jewish name for God is “I am.” When Neil Diamond, a Jew, sings “I am, I said”, he is actually singing out to God. A sagacious barman at the Heritage Hotel in Hamner Springs when Aaron Gilmore asked him: “Do you know who I am?” might well have responded: “yes, you are someone who thinks he’s God.”
This week’s Listener editorial said Gilmore’s sins read like a checklist of New Zealanders’ pet hates: immodesty, name-dropping, being over-bearing with service staff, failing to front up when you’ve made a mistake, blaming your mates, qualifying your apology.
Despite this, I was prepared to forgive him his trespasses. Many people say things they regret the next day after a few drinks and Gilmore is only human after all. Subsequent revelations about past indiscretions however were unforgivable and there would have been a huge sigh of relief at National Party headquarters when he finally fell on his sword
Democracy was supposed to be about electing people by a majority vote, but the list system produces a cacophony of humanity with few responsibilities and is I suspect peppered with people who have bludged their way on to the party register by fair means or foul.
Oh how I long for the good old days before the insidious MMP system of governing was instigated; when the two-party system was clear-cut and MP’s on both sides of the house were decent and dependable.
In 1972 Ben Couch was selected to contest the Wairarapa seat for National. I was a member of the local executive of the party at the time and it fell to me to take Ben Couch down to meet the Prime Minister.
Ben, ex All Black and Maori All Black, was a shearing contractor and lived at Pirinoa. He told me he would get a lift into Featherston where I could pick him up in the main street at around 2 p.m. so we could meet the Prime Minister at 3. The Prime Minister was John Marshall. He greeted us warmly and invited us to sit with him in comfortable lounge chairs around an ornate mahogany coffee table. Pleasantries were exchanged and tea was served.
I vividly remember Ben and me holding the exquisite Royal Doulton china teacups with our little fingers perched at right angles looking for all the world like this was a natural pose and one that we were used to daily. I was a shade disconcerted though when John Marshall kept referring to Ben as Mr. “Cooch” as in the grass, rather than “Couch” as in the sofa we were sitting on. I was wondering whether I should correct the Prime Minister over his grammatical failings when Ben came to the rescue and suggested that he could call him “Ben.” The PM responded and allowed that if we liked, we could call him “Jack.” We thanked him graciously for encouraging the informality of the gathering, but I noticed we both continued to call him “Sir.”
And this was some years before he was knighted.
After about half an hour of small talk our allotted time was up and the “Jack” wished Ben well in the upcoming elections and we were on our way back over the hill. I offered to drive Mr. “Cooch,” a name which from then on I took great delight in calling him, back to Pirinoa, but he insisted that I need only drop him off in Featherston at the Martinborough Road intersection and he would hitch-hike back home.
As I watched him walking off down the road I couldn’t help but think what a wonderfully egalitarian country we lived in. The greasy butcher and the Maori shearer had just had afternoon tea with the Prime Minister of the nation and to cap it off the shearer was now hitch-hiking back to the lanolin-scented shearing shed. A society where Jack is as good as his master, or in this case where the workers were as good as Jack.
Ben didn’t win his first election, but did so the one after, in 1975. By then Sir John Marshall had been dethroned as National’s leader, quite possibly because of his inability to correctly pronounce surnames and Rob Muldoon had assumed his mantle. Muldoon recognised Ben’s talents and soon had him in cabinet. In the interim the Beehive was built and Ben rang me from Wellington one day and said that I must come down and see his new office. Ben was Minister of Maori Affairs and when he invited me into the new abode I was spellbound by its magnificence. I have been into a number of minister’s headquarters since, but I think the decor of the Maori Affairs office surpassed them all. Native timbers and ornate Maori carvings interspersed with contemporary Maori art, all done with pronounced panache. As Ben proudly showed me around the suite I recalled the day we went to see the previous Prime Minister and I suggested to him that from the shearing shed at Pirinoa to this magnificent office in the Beehive was one giant leap for mankind. It would have sounded even more profound if Neil Armstrong hadn’t used a similar expression some ten years previously.
Ben and I were both teetotalers so we toasted the new office with a celebratory cup of tea, cocked small fingers and all.
The great aspect of Ben’s selection and then election was that he came from a reasonably conservative electorate populated predominantly with white Anglo-Saxon voters. And, as we now know, this was no aberration. Some twenty years later Georgina Beyer again showed that Maoris don’t need to have separate seats or the MMP-inspired Maori party to get into parliament. They just need the confidence of the electorate. Skin colour and hereditary characteristics have no bearing, and nor should they.
To a great extent the running of this country has now been taken out of the hands of ordinary New Zealanders. Many cabinet ministers are actually list MPs themselves and the Aaron Gilmore’s of this world sneak in to parliament thanks to a flawed system of government that should never have been introduced.
The shearers and the sausage makers, it could be argued, have lost their influence entirely.
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