Aussies criticise haka 'overkill'

The New Zealand swim team performs a haka for the women's 4x200m freestyle team. Picture / Brett Phibbs

MELBOURNE - Australians have been given a blunt message from New Zealand's Commonwealth Games team - if you don't like the haka, too bad.

The only way they would stop seeing it performed in Melbourne was to stop Kiwis winning any more medals, New Zealand chef de mission Dave Currie said yesterday in response to Aussie complaints of haka overkill.

"It's something that's uniquely New Zealand and I think that other countries envy us because we've got something of substance," Currie said.

"Aussie, Aussie. Aussie, oi, oi, oi doesn't quite cut it."

This is not the way the national newspaper the Australian sees it.

It was okay when the swimming team performed a haka after Moss Burmester's gold in the 200m butterfly. The newspaper even ran a picture and reported that it had spurred South Africa on to beat Australia in the 4x100m relay.

"To see the New Zealand team do the haka - it gave us all goosebumps," lead South African swimmer Roland Schoeman told the Australian.

Yesterday, after the series of haka after the rugby sevens gold and the New Zealand bronze in the women's 4x200m freestyle relay, the mood had changed.

"Far be it for an Australian to complain about the excesses of another nation at the Commonwealth Games," reporter Wayne Smith wrote, "but someone needs to tell the New Zealanders to start rationing the haka."

Smith confessed to being a fan of the haka, but he said it was being cheapened in Melbourne.

"When Moss Burmester won the 200m butterfly at the pool on the opening night of swimming, the haka performed in his honour was spine-tingling. But then the Kiwis were at it again after the women's 4x200m freestyle relay. Not to hail the new Commonwealth champions but the bronze medallists.

"What's more, it wasn't just the trim, toned, muscular swimmers performing it but some of the New Zealand support staff as well."

Smith wrote that the haka did not belong just to Kiwis because they had taken it to the world and the world had embraced it.

"And we do not want to see the New Zealand women's gymnastics team performing it.

"The haka is powerful medicine, a way of welcoming honoured guests and of intimidating foes. Don't devalue it."

Currie said New Zealand's Games athletes had a clear view about the haka.

"The first question is - too many for whom?" he said.

He said athletes saw the haka as a way of celebrating, recognising, honouring, welcoming and sending off their teammates, and an expression of the emotions they were feeling.

"The only thing that it's not is entertainment. We're not entertaining anyone. We don't do it for an audience.

"It's spontaneous. We don't have an issue with how many haka we do.

"If we win more medals, we'll do more haka."