New Zealand continues its stare-down with the rest of the world
The relationship is even more fraught in the time of COVID
In New Zealand, we grew up obsessed — grimly, often resentfully — with the way the rest of the world regarded us. Most of the time they didn’t notice us at all.
We grew up through dry seasons of whole years or decades when nothing happened in New Zealand to make it onto the front page of any of the newspapers from New York, London or anywhere else that were freighted into the country for globally-minded New Zealanders to read way after the news they contained had gone flat.
The exception was sport. The All Blacks, some runners like Murray Halberg and Peter Snell, and the great racing driver Bruce McLaren were awesome Kiwi achievers. But be careful. Even there, despite their achievements, we’ll easily take offence. In 2019 when the Bruce McLaren story got side-swiped by Matt Damon and Christian Bale’s star power in Ford v Ferrari, you had to look really hard to see the New Zealand connection. Well, you had to imagine it. New Zealanders knew we were back in our rightful place. Invisible.
Don’t get us started on all that. There’s the “disappointingly careless” way the latest season of The Crown treated the 1983 Charles and Diana photo opportunity with their toddler Prince William playing on a lawn in Auckland. It’s a scene our media routinely describes as “iconic.” The Netflix show transplanted it to the less picturesque but more dramatic Australian outback. “Disappointingly careless,” by the way, came from the intellectual property owner of the Buzzy Bee toy (also “iconic”) that the prince was playing with on that sunlit grass.
Until 2020 we liked to think our worst years as a hermit kingdom were behind us. Peter Jackson bought Hollywood to Wellington, and the Middle Earth branding is even now still all over Wellington Airport. Lorde became a genuine international celebrity, palling around, as we think Americans would say, with Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff and that crowd.
Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister, has enough face-recognition to appear on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN ads. And while, like all New Zealand Prime Ministers, she trudged off to the UN General Assembly back in the day when international travel was still a thing, her real triumph in New York was with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show.
Of course, her predecessor John Key had paved her way, making his own pilgrimage to David Letterman’s show to doggedly recite the top 10 reasons to visit New Zealand. Ardern had marginally better delivery, but the earnest intent was the same – to drive the New Zealand brand as a bit cool and edgy, but green and welcoming and safe enough to attract high-spending North American tourists.
Well, we might say in 2020, that worked. With New Zealand’s borders closed to all but homecoming Kiwis and a handful of special exemptions — like America’s Cup teams and film crews – international tourists are just phantoms in New Zealand this southern summer.
I’ll talk about COVID another time. There’s a lot to say about why our experience has been so different from much of the world’s. Most of it is about good enough management and common purpose.
But if anyone cared, they might think it’s ironic that New Zealand’s high international stakes right now are built on the massive walls we’ve built to keep the world out. We’ve been here before; “Always to islanders danger / Is what comes over the sea,” wrote Allen Curnow, one of the canonical New Zealand poets. He was coming to grips with our colonial past, but at the time we were pretty fresh from building lookouts to watch for Second World War invaders. At least until vaccines work, it seems like we’re again reduced to scanning our horizons with fear and suspicion.
But we can’t keep the drawbridge up forever. While the awful human tragedy of COVID still rolls on around the world, some New Zealanders are thinking about how we’ll have to carve out a new role for New Zealand in the world. Post-COVID, might we have something genuinely useful, valuable, even unique to offer the world, if we get it right?
But even thinking like that still seems a long way off.