Kiwis' night to give a toss

OPINION: Toddler-tossing in the South Pacific – Reuters, writes Joe Bennett this week.

Celebrations erupted in the South Pacific last week when New Zealand was officially declared the least corrupt country in the world. Fireworks went off, car horns sounded through the night, little old ladies wandered the streets handing out smiles and roses, and no-one, but no-one, went to bed. The title was awarded by Transparency International, who used 13 independent surveys to rank 180 countries on a scale of zero to 10, with zero meaning highly corrupt and 10 meaning incorrupt. With a score of 9.4, New Zealand relegated last year's champions Denmark to the silver medal position.

"I can't remember ever being happier," said Olivia Richards, a retired nurse, as she took time out at three in the morning from dancing with the crowd in Auckland's Queen St. "This is confirmation of what I have always known. Here in New Zealand it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, brown or white, straight or gay. And the best thing of all is..."

But the best thing of all was drowned by a chant that arose spontaneously from the crowd.

"Three cheers for our impartial bureaucracy," they cried, "hip hip, hooray," and hats and champagne and not a few toddlers were flung into the air. "Hip hip hooray" and even the flying toddlers joined in the cheering before being caught in the arms of their fathers and tossed again. "Hip hip hooray."

Clutching his freshly tossed toddler, sheep farmer Peter Rasmussen, 38, was hoarse with the excitement. "To hell with kids' bed times," he said, "and to hell with docking the lambs. Reasons to celebrate like this don't come round every day. It's huge!"

"Let's hear it for the judiciary," bellowed the crowd. "Incorrupt and incorruptible. Hip hip hooray."

"I mean," continued Mr Rasmussen, "if civilisation is a work in progress, then we are showing the world the way forward. A few hundred years ago human societies everywhere were simply tribal. Privilege was inherited, justice for the poor unheard of, exploitation par for the course.

"And in most of the world that's still the bloody case. Do you realise that 130 of the 180 countries surveyed scored less than 5. That means they are more corrupt than they are incorrupt.

"Their cops are bent, their judges bribable, their leaders on the take, their rich above the law and their poor ground into the dirt. Tell me, what chance would this son of mine have of a fair suck on the teat if he'd been born poor in a place like the Philippines or El Salvador? Go on, tell me."

But without waiting for an answer he hoisted the grinning infant on to his shoulders and strode towards the champagne tent. "Believe it or not," said Grant Ding, 47, a pharmacist, "there are people, whole nations even, that only celebrate like this if their country wins a sporting event.

"If, say, their football team qualifies for the World Cup they leap up and down screaming, `We won, we won'. It's an astonishing misuse of the first-person plural pronoun when their only contribution to the victory was to sit in front of the television eating pizza.

"Their behaviour is actually a step backwards on the evolutionary scale. They are living by proxy. And they are revelling in someone else's defeat. It's tribal, inglorious, media-driven and dumb.

"But here in NZ I'm proud to say that we know better. When one of our women, say, wins the Olympic shot put we are naturally pleased for her, but we don't make the mistake of thinking that any of the glory reflects on us. I mean we didn't biff that shot, did we? The only quality we share with her is that we happen to inhabit the same bunch of windy rocks. What credit can we take for that?

"So in these days of professional sport and government funded sports academies, I'm thrilled to say that there is still one trophy that just can't be bought, the Corruptionlessness Cup.

"And that makes it not only the one trophy worth winning but also the one trophy worth celebrating, because everyone really has played a part in winning it.

"Every A&E nurse who ranks patients by medical need rather than depth of pocket, every planning officer who assesses applications by the rules in the statute book rather than the name on the form, every judge who sees not the person in the dock but the offence committed, every cop who refuses the proffered hundred-dollar bill or who nails his boss for driving under the influence of a cellphone, every juror, every taxpayer, everyone. Oh I'm so bloody proud to belong to a country that values fairness and honesty above its sporting heroes that quite frankly I feel the urge to toss my toddler in the air again." And he did.

» Joe Bennett is an English-born travel writer and columnist who lives in New Zealand with dogs. His columns are syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand.

- © Fairfax NZ News