Imagine that changes to the All Black jersey were to be foisted on us. Nothing would be announced publicly, but the fundamental change would be obvious and all the more remarkable because nobody was officially discussing it. Our uninquisitive fourth estate would be prevented from discussing the changes by conditions imposed to ensure ongoing funding from the Rugby Union, access to the group and security of personal careers.
Such change might seem extremely unlikely. The funerary football shirt decorated solely by a left-breasted silver fern, and the remarkable successes of those enclosed by it, would ensure ipso facto that all New Zealand sporting codes would want to emulate its monochrome minimalism in solidarity with the footballers. Conceived well before a New Zealand Rugby Union existed, it was nevertheless adopted by that august board at the behest of lawyer, and member of the first fifteen to ever don the dark garb while playing for the ‘New Zealand Natives”, Tamati (Tom) Ellison. Adopted too by the entire country, ‘all black’ is steeped in the national psyche: it’s not written down anywhere, it’s simply morphed into who we are. They are us.
Yet this is happening: strand by strand, our country is being pulled apart, quite deliberately: socially deconstructed, ‘de-colonised’, but it hasn’t made the news. Our ‘leaders’ are afraid to wade near the experiment, our biggest experiment, bigger even than 1936’s ‘Welfare State’ transformation. It should be the subject of everybody’s conversations, but it’s only whispered, except by those who belong to that mysterious lodge and celebrate it.
The prime minister was recently asked “What is a woman” and couldn’t (wouldn’t) answer. But he hasn’t been asked ‘What is decolonisation?’, and if he were and I was to place a bet on the answer, I would wager he would disavow all knowledge of the term. Yet it’s everywhere to see. It should be the national conversation, at the very centre of this ‘election campaign’. Not just Hipkins – all the wannabes, Luxon et al, should be fronting this most important issue: ‘What is decolonisation? Do you support it? Where and when will it end?’ (The correct answer to question three is: badly.)
Colonisation is a dirty, dirty word nowadays, far above Marama Davidson’s ‘c-word’ in dirtiness, such is the power and reach of decolonisation propaganda. Colonisation apparently is the cause of all bad things, responsible even for the sexual repression and psychological abuse of children in care, according to one of our great and good government’s latest official publications:
Consider that last sentence: “The subject of decolonisation is very current”. Which it is: current in academia, current in the Labour caucus, current in the dinner parties of the perfumed priesthood of public servants, but not to be discussed by the hoi polloi or the great unwashed, whose lives are, and will be, affected most – but whose opinions don’t matter.
We are extremely poorly served by those who presently guide us in refusing to even discuss, let alone condemn, this woeful experiment. In trying to raise the subject you may well be met with rolling eyes and whispers of ‘conspiracy theorist’. But tell them the All Black uniform is being unravelled, torn up and discarded, and boy, oh boy, you’ll get a reaction.
