Dialogue: No great hurry, but we should be a republic

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Lloyd George, I understand, was the first Prime Minister in modern times to admit that the right amount of money put in the right place could buy you a peerage, and it was no secret that for many years discreet dollops of dosh dropped in the right place could win you an eminent position on an honours list here, too.

But the whole sad system hit its nadir during the 20-odd years before the beginning of the 1990s when New Zealand politicians decided knighthoods were too valuable to hand out too freely among the plebs and began handing them to one another.

Fortunately, it stopped with Jim Bolger, who, as a republican of Irish extraction, would have looked even more ridiculous tarted up with a "Sir" than the atavists who accepted.

Happily, those days have gone, at least for the time being. I don't know anyone not impressed by this Government's revision of the honours system.

First, it rejected those "orders" and "members" of an empire that hadn't existed for decades, and this week brought out the best list I can ever remember.

I read it and read it and couldn't find anyone there because they were rich and famous and no one who had transparently bought their way on to it with either money or obeisance. Wouldn't quibble with one of them. Fantastic!

The next move is to establish New Zealand as a republic, although in a practical sense I guess there's no great hurry. The Queen is irrelevant in a fundamental way and has no say in what happens here. It's just that she - nice enough housefrau though she seems to be - represents a tradition based on heredity and privilege that most Scots and even a large number of English regard as outmoded and a bit absurd.

If lineage matters at all, we should declare a tuatara head of state - as a pure-bred line, they've been around longer than anyone else. I'm astonished to find there's still a pro-monarchy group in New Zealand. Of all the causes one could espouse I can't think of another quite as boring and ridiculous.

I can understand some older people having qualms about severing ties with Britain, brought up as most of us were through an education system that glorified the Empire by distorting history.

(I recall being taught of the barbarity of Indians who locked British troops in the Black Hole of Calcutta, but not a word was I told of the atrocities committed by the British in India and elsewhere.)

Of course, at school we also ingested Shakespeare, Dickens and many other profound and wonderful cultural influences we will carry for as many generations as I can foresee.

Just how far some people will go for British honours was demonstrated a while ago by the Canadian-born newspaper magnate Conrad Black, a brilliant businessman with high conservative opinions, whose greatest personal ambition was to be appointed to the House of Lords. As one would expect, his abiding sin is, by most accounts, pomposity.

As the owner of London's Daily Telegraph and the right-wing magazine the Spectator, he had no trouble gaining dual Canadian-British citizenship, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had listed him for an imminent peerage when the Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, got to hear of it.

He told Blair that Canada had got rid of the British honours system and he didn't want Canadians getting in through a back door. Blair obliged Chretien, Black denounced his Canadian citizenship, became a member of the House of Lords, and earned the contempt of most Canadians in the process.

Given their long history of mutual dislike, Chretien's action against Black was hardly free of political pettiness, but he did say a Canadian sitting in the House of Lords would not be "compatible with the ideals of democracy as they have developed in Canada".

I read something of this in a recent edition of the New Yorker. The story included some background on Canada that navel-gazing New Zealanders may be interested to note: "There are those who say that the uneasiness Canadians have with titles reflects something approaching hostility toward anyone who rises too far above the crowd."

Robert Fulford, a Canadian essayist and journalist, notes that this trait has been described as a national characteristic of any number of other countries, including England and Sweden.

"Australia actually has a phrase for it: the tall-poppy syndrome."

Which suggests the tall-poppy syndrome reveals nothing more than the healthy egalitarian impulse of a true democracy.

Oh, and Canadians make an abiding political issue of their brain drain, too, wasting a lot of hand-wringing on that unstoppable phenomenon, just as we do.