Tinkering

by John Clarke

  ‘I’m the prime minister,’ he explained.

  ‘Is that right?’ said the spuds. ‘Take a number.’

  ‘We’d rather you didn’t go to South Africa,’ said Norman. ‘It will look like an endorsement of the white supremacist policies of the South African government, to which we are opposed.’

  ‘So what?’ said the spuds. (I’m summarising a bit here, obviously.)

  ‘So it’s not going to happen,’ explained Norman.

  The spuds were furious. They saw this action by the government as a direct threat to the way the country was run and, after a smaller prime minister had been elected in 1975, the tour went ahead. As a result of New Zealand’s endorsement of the white supremacist South African regime, the Montreal Olympics in 1976 were boycotted by twenty-six African nations.

  ‘So what?’ said the spuds and the smaller prime minister.

  And so it was that the return Springbok tour of New Zealand in 1981 was a famous disaster, for the spuds and the government did not have the support of the people and the nation was divided and brother spoke not to brother, nor sister to sister, nor yet generation to generation, each of its kind. And there was a gnashing of teeth and the scribes were thrown into a great confusion and there came a heavy sadness upon the people and upon the land, and upon the face of the deep.

  The economic crisis of the 1970s occurred over the issue of debt. Was the New Zealand economy borrowing too much overseas? While this question was being considered by economists, a Debt for Equity Swap was organised by a group called ‘I Just Drove the Getaway Vehicle’. At the time government policy had not yet been outsourced; we still owned the infrastructure, the power, the gas, the water, the phones, the post office and the national airline. The Bank of New Zealand was still a New Zealand bank and one or two of the newspapers were still owned in the country. During the early 1980s, however, the New Zealand economy was put in the hands of finance ministers due to a filing error, and authorities are still looking for the black box. A social democracy with only one previous owner was asset-stripped and replaced by a series of franchises. Even rugby sides stopped being called Canterbury, Wellington, Otago and Auckland and were instead given the names of animals, colours and weather conditions. The next thing anyone knew they’d appointed a currency dealer as Prime Minister and the equities market became a place of worship.

  New Zealanders don’t have much trouble working out what they think. It’s the next bit that might need some work. In 1969 I was standing in a pub in a country town in Otago. They’d run out of Speights and we were drinking a beverage produced in the north. The man next to me was deeply unimpressed and made a number of uncharitable statements about the quality of what was on offer.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t,’ confirmed the man. ‘It’s bloody terrible,’ he said. He then thought for a moment and resolved the matter in his mind. ‘This is the worst beer I’ve ever tasted,’ he said. ‘I’ll be glad when I’ve had enough.’

  This probably wasn’t the answer. Complaining about what’s wrong but not taking action has the same effect as not noticing what’s wrong.

  Incidentally, New Zealand remains the most beautiful country in the world. There’s no question about this. You can go to any part of it with confidence, at any time of year, with the possible exception of Hawera at Christmas, Otautau in August and Taihape in a stiff westerly.

  Hands Across the Tasman

  My first contact with Australians was in London, where I was living during the early 1970s for tax purposes. At one stage, seeking a career in retailing, I wrapped mail orders at the back of the book department of Harrods. Each volume was placed on a piece of corrugated cardboard and the cardboard was then manipulated until the book was no longer visible. A skill I have never lost.

  Across the bench from me was an Australian who called everyone Bruce. He pointed out a friend of his in the sports department. ‘See him Bruce?’ he said. ‘He’s a professional tennis player.’

  ‘What’s he doing working in the sports department of Harrods if he’s a professional tennis player?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s no good,’ said the Australian.

  I lasted three days at Harrods, but my Australian friend lacked my persistence and was impeached on the second afternoon for putting a famous sign on the main stairs. It was made out of corrugated cardboard and said: harrods, no farting.

  It was at this point that I recognised the shared perspective of Australia and New Zealand on matters of international significance. The question is whether or not this communion of subversives can be converted into export dollars.

  Closer Economic Relations will do much for the exchange of ideas among business people of course, although it should be remembered that there is really only one idea among business people and exchanging it is an achievement of only modest dimensions. It must surely be possible to develop something more worthwhile than the intercourse of moustachioed primates in Flag Inns all over both countries.

  A new nation should obviously be forged, combining the two in such a way as to maximise the contribution of each. Australia would grow fine wools, beef and trees for Rupert’s newspapers. New Zealand can provide dairy products, coarse wools and trees for Rupert’s other newspapers. Bob Hawke should head a government, possibly in Brisbane where there hasn’t been one for a while and where it will have novelty value.

  Roger Douglas is an automatic selection as minister for finance. Someone would have to explain the job to him, but once he understood it he’d be hard to hold. He is dedicated to excellence in all things and is apparently a delightful person. His appointment would also eliminate the need for the portfolios of health, education, social welfare, housing, agriculture and the arts.

  Paul Keating is the best treasurer in the world and could run an expanded banana republic with his eyes closed. Indeed that might be where he’s going wrong at the moment. New Zealanders will have to get used to the idea that the stock market crash was ‘a correction’ and that it confirmed the brilliance of Paul’s mid- to long-term thrust, but this shouldn’t be a problem. The correction was almost terminal in Wellington and drove at least one correctee to camp in a Sydney living room with twenty-seven journalists and a change of tennis socks.

  David Lange would be Speaker. He has been trying to curb this tendency lately but there seems little point and a man who only shaves because it provides him with an audience has much to offer an emerging nation. If the post of governor-general is available I would suggest almost anyone except Alan Jones or Kylie Minogue and I submit the following changes to the governmental structure of all states in the new federation.

  The bicameral system obliges the government of the day to deal with vestiges of the last government but three. The same thing happens when cousins marry and quite clearly there should be one house, as is the case in New Zealand, with the proviso that the power should be retained by the states, as is the case in Australia. This will allow for spirited debate and important pronouncements which have nothing to do with the running of the country and will accommodate both the New Zealand yearning for regional independence and the Australian desire for a perpetual Constitutional crisis.

  The new Parliament House in Canberra can then be turned into an all-weather sporting complex, thereby satisfying the only genuine interest of the entire population of both countries.

  Spot the Deliberate Mistake

  In response to questions from confused members of the Australian public, many of whom are known to me personally, I’ve embarked on a programme of national education.

  Too little is written about the ignorance of the Australian people. There is, by way of contrast, too much written about their intelligence. Their resourcefulness, initiative and fearless traditions have been set to music in order to sell a wide range of foreign products; the Anzac spirit is evoked by no one more beautifully than American fast food chains, and the chairman of Australian Steel has been made a Sacred Treasure by the government of Japa
n.

  The problem of educating the Australian population is clearly urgent and must be addressed on a scale never before contemplated. We’ve started at a very rudimentary level with a massive television campaign designed to teach people what a Post Office is. We’ve tried to do several things at once, which is a sophisticated concept, but one we like. We’re explaining:

  (a) What a Post Office is.

  (b) Who those people are, in Post Office uniforms, who deliver your mail.

  (c) What those things are, that are put in your letterbox (through a slot in many cases) by the uniformed artisans mentioned in (b).

  (d) What those boxes are. (The ones in which articles are placed by the liveried representatives of the essential service industry alluded to in (a).)

  (e) That when it’s raining, the mail is delivered in the rain.

  (f) That during periods of intense sunshine, the mail is not delivered in the rain.

  (g) That in order to effect delivery, some postal employees use bicycles, although on very steep hills, particularly when the mail is not being delivered in the rain, the bicycle may choose not to be ridden but to be pushed.

  We’ve referred to the Post Office throughout as ‘Australia Post’, a catchy name meaning Post Office. In fact, we’ve been even cleverer than this would imply. We’ve decided to improve our logo. Initially, I wasn’t sure this was possible. The old logo has ben extremely successful and, despite claims that it was unnecessary and meaningless, research has demonstrated that many people realised eventually that the logo had something to do with Australia Post, which, of course, they associated with the Post Office. Aside from these practical considerations, the logo is very appealing to the eye and is a fine example of Australian design at its triumphant best.

  There is no limit to the amount of money we’re prepared to spend on developing a new logo. The cost is simply not a factor. The stakes are too high for petty mercantile considerations to be of any significance. What we’d like to do is annihilate our competition so comprehensively that it will be almost as if it hadn’t existed.

  I know this all sounds new, but we’ve done something very like it before. We ran a visually very satisfying campaign some time ago explaining to people what a telephone is. (In effect, a telephone is a thing that rings in the mountains of southern Europe, and the ringing stops if you pick it up and cry into it.) It worked better than we dared hope, and at the time of writing there is now only one organisation operating nationally as a provider of telephone services.

  In some countries, of course, both Telecom and the Post Office would be owned by the state, and the millions spent on advertising would be wasted on improving services and lowering costs.

  So buoyant did we feel after all of the above, and such was the feeling around the office, that we decided to keep going. Gamblers will know what I mean when I say we felt we were ‘on a roll’. It was resolved on a show of hands that we adopt the suggestion made by the young work-experience person, and change the name of TAA. We tinkered briefly with the conceptual work and decided to call it either ‘Australian Airlines’ or ‘Australia Post’. We eliminated ‘Telecom’ because we wanted to avoid imagery of mountains and crying and making expensive telephone calls to women who live alone in Surrey. After a heated lunch we also ruled out ‘Australia Post’ because despite the many common elements (uniforms, rain and sunshine), aeroplane travel and group cycling are fundamentally different. We felt this difference demanded expression. Very few of the sample group associated the name ‘Australian Airlines’ with the Post Office, and TAA is, as everybody has known for years, an Australian Airline. Simple really: ‘Australian Airlines’.

  But how to sell it, how to market this intricate and yet muscular idea. The answer was, of course, again, Educate the People. Paint all the aircraft, order new badges, new paper, new hats, new buildings, new front doors for the vans (the cost of all this to be charged against ‘Improvements’.) Follow this with a massive multi-media campaign, trumpeting the arrival of a completely new airline that no one has ever heard of, and which only a small number of people will think of as the Post Office. I have seen criticism of our decisions, but it is petty and ill informed. I will not dignify it with a response.

  Helpful Suggestions

  I don’t mean to harp on about this, but there still isn’t anything like enough public money being syphoned into the advertising industry. There are plenty of government-owned bodies spending virtually nothing on nebulous ideas and anthem quality statements of the obvious.

  I exclude the Post Office from this. I know I’ve been critical of them in the past, but my hat is now raised in a gesture of respect. Their television commercials have made them the market leader right across the country.

  They have filleted the competition to the point where, I believe I am right in saying, in some areas the Post Office is now the only Post Office still operating as a Post Office.

  I also have only the highest regard for the millions sensibly invested by Telecom in establishing that a telephone can be used for making telephone calls. I may have oversimplified this. The commercials actually indicate that a telephone can be used for making overseas or interstate phone calls. There is no suggestion that it is possible to make local calls, but there is probably a reason for this. Perhaps the phone is out of order and no one can look at it before Wednesday, or maybe all the phones in the whole area are out and nobody knows why, or it is possible that the phone has been cut off because the user is too poor to go on helping with the TV commercials.

  Neither do I intend any disrespect to the airline that used to be TAA. Their work in establishing whatever their new name is has been without parallel in the history of image-based money-flushing, although they didn’t have it all their own way. The Buy Australia Campaign must have given them an awful fright.

  This was a benchmark effort. It pointed out that people should not buy Australian products just because they were Australian. This broke down the old, stereotyped idea that a commercial should achieve what it set out to do. The Buy Australia campaign depended for its success on the ability of the buying public to reject the advice of its advertising. I’m presuming here that the aim of the campaign was to encourage people to buy Australian products, supposing such a thing were possible.

  It would be unfair to ignore also the spectacular media-spending embarked upon in the name of the Priority One campaign. It would not be at all appropriate to remember the campaign itself, but the figures involved were very reassuring.

  For the Bicentennial one can have only the most open-hearted admiration. Not only are they currently funding about a quarter of the world’s shipping, but the plan to sail the Deficit around Australia during the summer months is well advanced and the television campaign is on air, even though it obviously isn’t quite finished yet. There is a song about all of us doing something without hands. I’m sure it will all become clear once it has been edited.

  It is what is called an ‘awareness’ campaign. It doesn’t sell anything or provide any actual information. Its main aim is to be on television. It can then be demonstrated that a number of people might have watched it. They will be ‘aware’ of it.

  Whether or not the Bicentennial can recover from this advantage remains to be seen. There can be little doubt, however, that so far they are doing everything expected of them.

  What I want to know is, where are the other government departments? Where are the awareness campaigns for the Weather Bureau and the Official Receiver? Should their Australianness not be celebrated?

  Would not the romance of Soil Erosion lend itself to the screen? It is Australian Soil Erosion, after all. It is the best bloody Soil Erosion in the world and it wants to tell its story. A more natural subject for a song would be difficult to imagine. It has everything; wind, rain, floods, the pitiless heat of the sun. Perhaps the Weather Bureau could be part of it. The Official Receiver should also be approached without delay.

  There are others of course. The Albury–Wodong
a Development Corporation, for instance. Isn’t this the sort of dream that sustained the lads in trenches all over France and Belgium? Is there an Australian heart that does not quicken at the mention of The Inspector of Inflammable Liquids or the Department of Lifts and Cranes?

  These people cannot be expected to continue unless their work is accorded the simple dignity of being described within an inch of its life and sung about by groups of white Australians who are not hanging from prison ceilings.

  Farnarkeling

  Farnarkeling is a sport which began in Mesopotamia, which literally means ‘between the rivers’. This would put it somewhere in Victoria or New South Wales between the Murray and the Darling. The word ‘farnarkeling’ is Icelandic in structure, Urdu in metre and Celtic in the intimacy of its relationship between meaning and tone.

  Farnarkeling is engaged in by two teams whose purpose is to arkle, and to prevent the other team from arkeling, using a flukem to propel a gonad through sets of posts situated at random around the periphery of a grommet. Arkeling is not permissible, however, from any position adjacent to the phlange (or leiderkrantz) or from within fifteen yards of the whiffenwacker at the point where the shifting tube abuts the centre-line on either side of the thirty-four-metre mark, measured from the valve at the back of the defending side’s transom-housing.