KEY POINTS:
You have to hand it to the Aussies. They just can't hack it when New Zealanders are successful.
Swanning around Sydney last week, where the Flight of the Conchords were about to be screened on television for the first time, I came across this cryptic little gem of
a preview in the Sydney Morning Herald: "This new series is said to be a hilarious sitcom and the two stars, Brett McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, the toast of the Big Apple - or was it the other way round?"
No doubt when the series finishes, and proves as big a hit in Oz as it is in New York, the Australians will claim McKenzie and Clement as their own. They pinched Phar Lap and Fred Dagg, why not our latest success duo?
In Sydney it was lead-up to Budget week, with speculation aplenty about tax cuts, means-testing for wealthy baby-boomers and - something New Zealand could pinch - grocery credits instead of welfare handouts for beneficiaries with a record of abusing and neglecting their children.
Somehow I can't see Ruth Dyson introducing a similar policy. If Judith Collins is Minister of Social Welfare after the election she might give it a go, but I fear the feisty Collins will be held in check by the National Party apparatchiks as Ruth Richardson was.
More's the pity. We all know of, or see, reckless beneficiaries sending their kids to school with no lunch or breakfast while the money goes on smokes and pokies.
This is a country that dare not speak the bleeding obvious. We tiptoe around the world, careful not to upset anyone, even the military regime in Burma - or Myanmar as our politicians and media insist on calling it. In Australia, it's Burma. Even the politically correct BBC calls this place of misery Burma, so why not us?
I phoned the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, somewhat under siege because Mary Anne Thompson, the former head of the Immigration Department and now the centre of an investigation into allegedly fake qualifications, once worked in Winston Peters' office.
"Quick question - why does New Zealand call Burma Myanmar? Does New Zealand recognise this tyrannical militarist regime?"
Apparently we don't "recognise" any regime, as evidenced in the recent Kosovo flare-up over independence. "If we recognise one state," Peters' spokesman explained, "we then come under pressure to de-recognise others. We prefer that our actions demonstrate our attitude."
Burma has been known officially as Myanmar for only 19 years. However, inhabitants who dare oppose the military-dominated Government, whose junta unilaterally decided to jettison the name Burma, refuse to legitimise the new name.
So shouldn't we call this country Burma? By acknowledging the change to Myanmar, aren't "our actions demonstrating" we tacitly sanction the manner in which this change came about and the leaders who effected it? This is most definitely not the stance struck by the United States, Canada and Australia, where media use Burma as the country's name.
The official reason I received from the ministry is New Zealand has "followed the United Nations' lead in using Myanmar instead of Burma, and has done since 1989. Interestingly, the two words [Burma and Myanmar] apparently mean the same thing - Burma is a corruption of Myanmar and both have been used by locals for a long time."
The UN does recognise Myanmar, and where the UN appeasers go, New Zealand follows.
Which leaves us between a rock and a hard place when confronted with the UN's "responsibility to protect" principle, signed by 150 states in 2005. We happily sign these feel-good protocols - Kyoto is a classic example - with nary a thought to consequences.
Which brings me back to Sydney, where Gareth Evans, former Australian Foreign Affairs Minister, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, challenged nations that signed this principle because they believed the need to protect vulnerable citizens within their own borders could sometimes override sovereignty. When the West could use the principle to save thousands of Burmese from death, it finds thousands of reasons for not interfering.
New Zealand, however, needs no excuse. Despite paying lip-service to the fatal future for another 40,000 Burmese, nearly 20 years ago we snubbed the ousted civilian government and winked our support to the military by calling the country Myanmar.
