The game for everyone has been hijacked, New Zealand rugby’s impossible task: Gregor Paul

Photos / 123rf. Illustration / Paul Slater

Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He’s won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.

OPINION

There was a story a few years back that provided a fascinating insight into the British psyche and what it takes for people to feel compelled to stop something they don’t think is right.

A young couple decided to have loud and reportedly uninhibited sex in the carriage of a busy commuter train. Their fellow passengers hid behind their newspapers or stared out the window pretending nothing was happening.

But when the couple then lit up a cigarette in what was a no-smoking carriage – there was uproar.

The guard was called, the couple were fined and kicked off the train because the British middle classes will stay silent through any excruciating event that stretches social boundaries for fear of offending anyone, but they can’t tolerate any kind of rule-breaking that upsets their sense of fair play.

This whole business comes to mind because it’s not apparent whether New Zealanders – organised political protests aside – have a trigger point, or if they do, what sort of event they would need to see play out for the masses to unite and call foul.

What no one seems to either be aware of, or simply not willing to call out, is that rugby – the game which still, despite the empire wobbling, is at the soul of the country – is being stolen by a small cohort of provincial union chairmen.

A game for everyone is being hijacked by a single stakeholder group who have managed to con the public into believing that they have bravely and progressively devised and voted for a new governance system that was identical to the proposal being backed by all the other stakeholders, bar one small difference.

We live in the age of the PR con job – where Britain can vote itself out of Europe on the back of lies about what migrants are costing the National Health Service and where weapons of mass destruction can be found wherever they need to be found to justify starting a war.

And so kudos to New Zealand’s provincial unions for tapping into the zeitgeist and convincing everyone that they are in the process of forming an independent NZR board that comes with one minor mandate to include a small but important dose of grassroots governance experience.

The advice to anyone who cares about rugby and its ability to survive in the face of what is now an existential crisis, is to read the explainer piece the Herald has published which details precisely what the unions are trying to piece together as a fit-for-purpose governance system that delivers the high-calibre people an organisation with complex financial instruments and high-performance ambitions needs.

Anyone can see, if they care to actually look, that what the unions have proposed differs enormously to what has been identified as the best practice governance model.

The proposal has created an ill-defined and yet strangely powerful entity called a Governance Advisory Panel that will be dominated by provincial union representatives and seemingly, given that it will have the ultimate authority to determine what skills and competencies directors need, will act as a board to the NZR board.

The all-critical appointments panel – the group that will interview and select board candidates – will be dominated by PU representatives, and so the single greatest flaw of the current system will be preserved.

That is, that good directors, the sort with the real-world commercial experience, business acumen and governance smarts that the game desperately needs, won’t apply for the simple reason they won’t trust the process.

And they won’t feel, even if they were miraculously appointed, that they would be sitting round the board table with the same sort of broad-minded, high-calibre people who considered themselves there to serve all the game and not just one little cohort that may have been instrumental in rigging the system to get them in there in the first place.

The provincial unions will grab power in every pocket of the new world they are creating and so that, of itself, renders this idea they support an independent process as entirely untrue.

And their insistence that the final composition of the board will look largely like it would had the alternative governance proposal been successful, is also wildly inaccurate.

The board that Proposal 2 will deliver must contain not just three people who have provincial experience, but one member who must have lived experience in relation to, and knowledge and understanding of, Te Ao Māori in a complex organisational context; and one member who must identify as Pasifika, and 40 per cent of the directors must be female.

The unions seem to think they will find individuals who meet multiple criteria – female-Pasifika-PU-experience - but this will be the veritable hunt for unicorns given that for decades, provincial union boards have been old boys’ clubs, and there are only about 50 or so women who currently or who have previously served on a provincial union board.

They are trying to put together an overly complex and almost impossible jigsaw, that even if they manage to complete it, will be a triumph for box-ticking only, and almost certainly not produce the best nine people the game needs.

The unions are building a representative rather than an independent board, and while that is a mistake, why not at least commit to it fully, and include a board seat for the Super Rugby clubs, the professional players and schools – all three of whom could make strong claims to be of equal importance to the overall health of the game as those entities who have been rewarded by the provinces.

That the unions continue to say their proposal differs in just one aspect to the alternative, is either a result of staggering ignorance and misunderstanding of what they are proposing, or it is a skilled and orchestrated PR campaign to grab almost total control of the sport, knowing that an apathetic New Zealand public will either buy their story or lack the motivation to do anything about it.

On the evidence presented so far, it does seem like the unions are operating on reduced intellectual horsepower rather than playing a clever trick.

After all, they spent nine months arguing they couldn’t tolerate the idea of a stakeholder council as was being proposed by the independent review into the governance structure, and insisted its name had to change.

When they put out a press release after the SGM vote, they said their first task would be to set up a stakeholder council.

And having rejected the findings of the independent review – a comprehensive piece of work conducted by recognised experts – to devise their own governance structure, they have now turned to AI to help them understand what they have created and to give them a job description for someone serving on a Governance Advisory Panel.

Metaphorically, the unions are getting away with both the sex and the smoking, and Kiwis have to ask whether they are willing to tolerate both, or whether they can muster the collective willpower to save their national game from what is effectively a hostile takeover.