Garth George: It's time to grow up and put away childish resentments

COMMENT


A few weeks ago a senior police officer in Northland was nabbed for rather seriously exceeding the speed limit, ticketed and had to pay a hefty fine.

His name was bandied abroad and the petty-minded among us - whose numbers seem to be legion and growing - self-righteously told themselves and each other that justice had once again been done.

It hadn't - in fact grave injustice was done. Thousands of New Zealanders every day are ticketed for exceeding the speed limit, pay their fines and get on with their lives, a bit lighter in the pocket but otherwise unaffected. No one knows who they are except those whom they choose to tell. Not so with the police officer.

Because his name was made public and he was forced to adopt a mea culpa attitude, not only has he had to suffer unwarranted public humiliation but I suspect his career prospects have been fatally compromised.

Yet even that pales into insignificance alongside the fact that the officer was ticketed at all. He should simply have been politely told that speeding these days was not a good look, that in future he should keep a better eye on the speedo - and allowed to go on his way.

To be dobbed in by one of his own must be for the officer the unkindest cut of all. Back in my days as a police roundsman for various newspapers that would not have happened. There was an esprit de corps among police which ensured they looked after each other, and to pot a colleague for a minor misdemeanour would never have occurred even to the most zealous of them.

Which is the way it should be but isn't any more and the whole affair says more about the sad and sorry state of morale in the police force than it does about the officer concerned.

And now it looks as if it's going to be the Army's turn thanks to the knee-jerk reaction of our puppet Minister of Defence to an internet item mounted by some bloke who defected to Australia and who is still obviously burning with resentment over treatment he allegedly received as an Army cadet more than 30 years ago.

Misery loves company and there are none so miserable in the world as those who harbour resentments, so it is not surprising that other former cadets of the 1970s have crawled out of the woodwork to try to get their own back for the way they were treated in an environment to which they were obviously unsuited.

Army records show that the internet complainer, one Ian Fraser, was one of 154 cadets who went through the class of 1971. About 1200 cadets went through the cadet school in the 1970s and some 5000 between 1948 and 1991.

Quoth Mark Burton: "The issues that Mr Fraser has outlined are serious and they deserve to be looked into seriously."

With the exception of the death of 17-year-old Grant Bain, who was shot at the Waiouru cadet school in 1981, that is absolute nonsense.

What people like Mr Burton don't seem to understand is that the alleged physical, psychological and sexual abuse took place in an Army, a society and a culture far different from today's, and any attempt to judge the behaviour of a group of testosterone-charged young men in an Army camp of the 1970s by the PC mores and expectations of today is not just stupid but downright dishonest and unjust.

I have no doubt that much of what these whingers allege about the hazing and harassment is true. But so what? Even if 500 of the 5000 complained, it would still be only 10 per cent, which would seem to be a pretty light failure rate for a hard school such as the Army.

But I suspect that those who couldn't cope number but a handful and that the rest (in their thousands) took it on the chin, learned to stand up for themselves - and came out the other end as soldiers.

Hear Mr Fraser: "They are compensating prisoners for the hard time they had in prison. We were serving our country at the time and this is what they did to us."

What absolute rot. What Mr Fraser and all the others were doing in the Waiouru cadet school was leaning a trade, the ancient and honourable trade of soldiering, with an eye, perhaps, towards making it a career. But some of them found that there was more to being a warrior than they had bargained for.

And note the mention of the word "compensation". Ring a bell?

Because the question has to be asked: why has it taken three decades for these people to make their complaints? And how come they have managed to nurse their grudges for so long, apparently without making any attempt to deal with and outgrow them?

Is it, perhaps, because the retrospective guilt and compensation culture, triggered by the Treaty of Waitangi claims, has become such an epidemic that every Tom, Dick and Harriet with a resentment and a sob story to tell can hold out their hands and expect the Government to cough up?

I am reminded of a popular saying among servicemen in World War II, recited when the going got tough or things went wrong: "If you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined."


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