Brian Rudman: It's time to checkmate the knighthoods

Newly elevated Dame Jenny Gibbs summed up the honours farce accurately enough when she described the whole circus as a "a bit of a giggle, I feel as though I'm in a pantomime". With the restoration of the archaic title system, she is.

In Britain, the birthplace of this silliness, they've been debating replacing it with something more befitting the modern world. Only down here, in this insecure little corner of the world, has a country seen fit to undertake the Restoration of this antiquated practice.

In 2004, the British House of Commons public administration committee called for a "decrease in awards of knighthoods and damehoods, with the objective of phasing out the awards of knighthoods within five years".

The year before, the Sunday Times had revealed a list of celebrities who had snubbed the Government by refusing knighthoods and other top honours.

They included comedian John Cleese, rock star David Bowie, actors Kenneth Branagh and Vanessa Redgrave and authors Graham Greene and John Le Carre.

By then, New Zealand had already dispatched the quaint practice. But the new National Government had other ideas, and now it's out with the swords and velvet cushions and forward to the past.

As an Aucklander, the only positive I can see in the latest list is that at long last this end of the country seems to be getting a fairer proportion of the top gongs. Of the 27 top honours - knights, dames and companions - Auckland scored 12, including two of the three actual titles, compared to Wellington's seven.

Given its population, Wellington still gets a disproportionate number, but the numbers are much better than when I first started checking on this.

In the 2007 New Year's honours, for example, Wellington got 11 of the 20 top honours compared to Auckland's miserable three. The following New Year, Auckland and Wellington got six apiece of the 18 top awards, leaving the rest of the country to scrap over the rest.

It's not that there's anything wrong with saying thanks, as a community, to generous rich folk like Dame Jenny and John Todd.

Nor is there anything wrong with saying well done to Sir John Walker, though why it's taken until this week to mark a hero of a quarter of a century past is a mystery. At least Sir Edmund Hillary was summonsed straight from the battlefield, as it were, to the palace to receive his imperial award.

But why do we saddle those honoured with a title from our imperial past? We all know what a knight was. A fellow who rode around on a horse in heavy armour, waving a sword and shouting for king and glory while he slashed foreign heads off.

I had to look up "Dame". Seems that up to the 17th century, she was the wife of a knight, then they decided it was silly, and went with Lady instead.

It was from the Latin word for lord or master. It entered popular parlance, as it were, in 1917, when King George V, casting his eye nervously around Europe where empires were crumbling, invented a class of royal honours suitable for common folk, the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

It was, and is, as De Bretts points out, the lowest class of honours. The British still hang on to this name, though the empire is long gone, but we eventually New Zealandised it, calling it the NZ Order of Merit.

But we kept the hierarchical class structure, continuing to rank awardees downwards as either companions, officers, members or, lowest of the low, Queen's Service Medal holders.

No doubt back at the palace or Government House, or wherever, there is some gartered bureaucrat rationing out the number of awards at various levels. But it's never been explained to me satisfactorily how the grading takes place.

How is it that the voluntary community worker, who slaves away for 30 years, is worth a mere medal, while rich moneybags like Michael Fay and Bob Jones get the knighthoods? Not to forget the Wellington anaesthetist Dr Graham Sharpe, who laid a complaint to police after it was revealed that former Prime Minister Helen Clark signed a picture she hadn't painted and is now an Officer of the NZ Order of Merit.

If we want to move on from this pantomime, the first step would be to abolish the class basis of the awards and drop all the fancy titles. We could also decouple the award process from the political process.

Let local communities decide who they want to honour locally. Then all we need do is abolish the monarchy and turn the public holiday, formerly known as Queen's Birthday, into a sort of Mother's Day, a time to celebrate and thank those who make New Zealand a better place.