Category: history

Did Richie McCaw Destroy International Rugby?

The Sydney Bledisloe Cup match of 2000 was a high water mark in international rugby. In front of 109,000 people, the world champion Australia team and the desperate, wounded All Blacks fought to the death like Ali and Frazier. Many who saw it said at the time it was the most extraordinary rugby match ever played, with an iconic match-winning performance from none other than Jonah Lomu.

The All Blacks prevailed on that night, 39-35, but the Wallabies would win by one point three weeks later to retain the Bledisloe Cup, and at the time it seemed like the advent of professional rugby was about to make for a titanic era of contests for this trophy.

Professional rugby seemed like it was going to bring a lot of razzamatazz to the Southern Hemisphere circuit – Super Rugby was also huge that year. The ACT Brumbies topped the table at the end of the pool stages, and ended up losing the final at home against the Canterbury Crusaders by one point.

The next year, 2001, marked the Super Rugby debut, also for the Crusaders, of one Richie Hugh McCaw. As it turned out, McCaw was not so much a rugby player as a genius that played rugby.

He only played eight minutes of Super Rugby that year, but he did play a full NPC season, and was good enough to win selection to the All Blacks’ end of year tour, where he was handed a debut against Ireland, and promptly won Man of the Match.

The next year, 2002, McCaw became a Crusaders regular. In an odd echo of the future, the Crusaders won every single match that year, taking the Super Rugby title undefeated – something never achieved before or since.

2003 might have been the end of the golden summer for Australian rugby. They lost the Bledisloe Cup, but managed to knock the All Blacks out of the World Cup, going on to take an all-conquering England team to extra time in the final.

Come 2017, and Australia has not won the Bledisloe Cup since. Richie McCaw may have retired two years ago, but in the same way that Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca depressed the price of gold in the Middle East for decades afterwards, McCaw’s decade of almost total dominance still depresses Australian rugby.

This year’s Super Rugby table makes for confusing reading. The current leaders of the Australian conference, the Brumbies, have fewer tournament points than the current wooden spooners of the New Zealand conference, the Blues.

New Zealand rugby is so dominant that the 4th-ranked Kiwi team, the Highlanders, has only lost three games all season. Despite this, they can’t climb any higher than 4th because the Hurricanes have only lost two, the Chiefs one and the Crusaders zero.

Even worse is the effect this dominance has had on the Internet rhetoric. At the turn of the century, trans-Tasman rugby banter was between equals. In recent years, however, it has taken a darker turn: the prison rape metaphor, once only applied to descriptions of All Blacks matches against the hapless Celts, crept into summaries of Bledisloe matches.

At its nadir, the Internet rhetoric was entirely based on the degree of sexual impotence the Australian players and fans would suffer as a consequence of the losses and for how many years afterwards. The jokes were that the children of Australian players would be too ashamed to admit their paternity to their classmates.

So the question is this: was Richie McCaw so good at rugby that he actually destroyed the international game? Did he set standards so high that all other nations just gave up on hoping to ever match them?

Probably not. After all, Australia made it to the World Cup final in 2015, and they did about as well there as any other side could have hoped to have done – namely, a loss by a two-try margin.

Alexander the Great died at age 33, and within months of the same age Richie McCaw retired from international rugby. The struggle for a successor to Alexander saw his empire shatter into four pieces and then to further disintegrate.

Kieran Read now leads the All Blacks, and his side might play the role of the Seleucid Empire, the early favourites to recreate the total world domination that McCaw once achieved.

However, no order can exist indefinitely, and it is in the nature of peaks to erode into valleys. The standards set by McCaw are unlikely to be maintained for the simple reason that the men tasked with doing so will not possess McCaw’s genius.

This column believes that it is in the Australian nature, despite a decade of denial, to recognise the smell of blood at the first opportunity and to take advantage of it. Therefore, it predicts that the current sorry state of Australian rugby will not last for much longer.

And as long as one side can stand up to the All Blacks the others will always believe themselves to have a hope.

Understanding New Zealand: Internet MANA voters

As the Maori Party split away from Labour, so did the MANA Party split away from the Maori Party, and then it joined up with Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party to become the Internet MANA chimera. But who did Hone Harawira’s machine end up appealing to?

Like the Maori Party, Internet MANA appealed to Maoris. The correlations between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and with both voting Maori Party in 2014 and being Maori were 0.84.

Correspondingly, there are strong correlations between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and voting for all of the Maori-heavy parties in 2014. Between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and voting Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2014 the correlation was 0.76; with voting New Zealand First in 2014 it was 0.44; and with voting Labour in 2014 it was 0.41.

Curiously, Internet MANA voters were exactly as unlikely to have sympathies for National or Conservative as Maori Party voters. As with the Maori Party, the correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and voting National in 2014 was -0.75, and the correlation with voting Conservative in 2014 was -0.64.

Perhaps the major demographic difference between Maori Party voters and Internet MANA ones is that the latter were slightly less Maori and slightly more Pacific Islander and Asian. The correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and being a Pacific Islander was 0.07, and with being Asian it was -0.23 (compared to 0.01 and -0.30 for the correlations between these two groups and voting Maori Party).

In fact, the general demographic trend is that Internet MANA voters, despite being generally disenfranchised, are doing slightly better than Maori Party voters. Correspondingly, the correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and turnout rate in 2014 was, at -0.69, slightly weaker than for the Maori Party (-0.74).

Although most of the demographic distinctions are subtle, one of the clearest is when it comes to education. The correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and having no qualifications was 0.42, which was weaker than the equivalent for the Maori Party. Also, unlike with voting for the Maori Party in 2014, voting for Internet MANA in 2014 had no significant negative correlation with holding either of the two highest academic qualifications.

Further underlining the minor class differences, Internet MANA voters were marginally less likely to be on the unemployment or invalid’s benefits, and marginally more likely to be on the student allowance. Also, they were much less likely to work in manufacturing and slightly less likely to be regular tobacco smokers than Maori Party voters.

They were, however, essentially the same age. The correlation between voting Internet MANA in 2014 and median age was -0.65, making them the smallest smidgen older than Maori Party voters. This underlines the degree to which Internet MANA differentiates itself from the Maori Party primarily through subtle class differences and not age.

Curiously, Internet MANA voters were more likely to be self-employed than Maori Party voters, but were less likely to be self-employed with employees. This might reflect the degree to which Internet MANA voters, or at least a significant cadre of them, are more likely to be immigrants and therefore less likely to be established than Maoris.

It may be that, in so far as Internet MANA appeals to a newer sort of New Zealander, it also appeals to a sort of person who does not have the intergenerational poverty and trauma that many Maoris suffer from. This may explain the small differences in wealth, health and educational outcomes.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

The Great Division at the Heart of Generation X

The 1999 film Fight Club was highly prophetic for those too young to identify with the Baby Boomers and too old to identify with the Millennials: those of us who vaguely, apathetically, identify with being called Generation X. Speaking to us in the midst of a quarter-life crisis, Tyler Durden told us what we already suspected, but dreaded being forced to accept: we are the middle children of history, no purpose, no place.

It’s true. We stand for nothing. Nothing unites us, apart from this cynicism. We have no Great War – Afghanistan and Iraq will never define our generation like Vietnam did the one before us and World War II the one before that. Very few of us fought in it, and the body count incurred simply does not compare.

Neither do we have a Great Depression.

The proportion of Baby Boomers raised in absolute poverty dwarfs the proportion of Generation X raised in absolute poverty, as the several decades of technological advancements and massive industrial and economic expansion after World War II all but eliminated childhood poverty by the 1970s, save for the unfortunates born to mentally or physically ill parents.

Where the Baby Boomers used the political system as a weapon to enslave the coming generations and to keep them working to maintain Boomer leisure and privilege, Generation X mostly refused to engage.

And where the Millennials are taking measures to overthrow the current political and economic systems and to replace them something not borne of the poverty mentality of the Boomers, again Generation X mostly refuses to engage.

In this sense, Generation X is a generation of springtime, in that we comprise the part of the sine wave where yin transforms to yang, and life begins to blossom but without direction, owing to its inexperience.

But in the same way that the springtime is a season of broken weather, so too is Generation X naturally unstable, and so too will we break apart.

But can we really like ourselves without knowing who we are, and doesn’t that require a purpose and a place?

The natural division at our heart is like this: half of us are like the Boomers, half are like the Millennials.

It might be that the Boomers end up representing the “old left” in the exact same way that they once represented the “new left” against the “old right” of the Greatest Generation, with the Silent Generation playing the role of autumn.

This suggests that half of Generation X will sell out and throw their lot in with their parents, resisting change and acting to perpetuate the same injustices on the Millennials that the Boomers imposed on them.

In this way, half of us will become the “old left”. Probably this means that, as we age and become the leaders of industry alongside the Boomers, we will advocate for more governmental control and regulation, fewer entrepreneurial freedoms and the continued importation of millions of third-world people to destroy the solidarity and so also the wages of those we employ, screaming “racism” every time a Millennial or Generation Z complains about anything.

The other half of us will become the “new right”. Probably this means that, as the Millennials also age and gain in economic and political influence, they will still look primarily to members of Generation X for immediate guidance, and those of us willing and able to fill these roles will naturally do so.

It’s very possible both that the Millennials and Generation Z, having been raised in an abundance mentality that sharply contrasts with the poverty mentality of the Boomers and their immediate predecessors, will demand a radical transformation of society and revaluation of values, and that they will look to members of Generation X for moral, philosophical and spiritual guidance.

This column predicts that half of us will succeed in reciprocating these expectations from the next generations, whereas the other half will cling to the old ways out of fear and fail.

The next generations might well be horrified at the sexual permissiveness, the suicidally reckless obsession with alcohol, the negligent attitude to the potential negative consequences of mass immigration, the indifference to the mental damage of exposure to suggestive television advertising and the brutally cognitively restrictive education system that all combine to characterise the culture that we have become used to – after all, none of these phenomena are caused by the expression of universal or eternal moral truths.

Will we stand aside for the next generation, or will we try and strangle it in the crib in order to shore up our own positions? That is the essential question that will divide Generation X over the coming decades.

Understanding New Zealand: Demographics of Employment Status

Knowing about the category of person who is self-employed with employees tells us a lot about the sort of person who has most of the power in New Zealand at the moment.

This sort of person has more power than anyone because they can legally cause more disruption than anyone. No politician cares too much if a single individual threatens to leave the electorate, but if an employer threatens to relocate their company with its 200 jobs then a politician will suddenly care very intently.

Surprisingly, there is no particularly strong difference between those who work for a wage or salary, those who are self-employed, and those who are self-employed with employees when it comes to median personal income.

These three groups have correlations of between 0.54 and 0.41 with median personal income, with the self-employed the strongest and the self-employed with employees the weakest.

However – as this section seeks to illuminate – holding political power is not merely a function of wealth, although wealth is a contributing factor.

There were very strong correlations between being of European descent and both being self-employed (0.58) and being self-employed with employees (0.70). This relates to the point made above about the power in an economy being held by a sort of person who was not necessarily the same as those who made the money.

Pacific Islanders were the least likely to be in either of those two categories. The correlation between being a Pacific Islander and being self-employed was -0.50, and with being self-employed with employees it was -0.61.

Being Maori was also negatively correlated with being in these categories of employment status: -0.44 with being self-employed and -0.36 with being self-employed with employees.

This reflects the fact that Islanders generally have less social capital than Maoris, despite often being better educated, and that Islanders generally have less financial capital than Asians, despite often having moved to New Zealand earlier and being more culturally established.

Anglicans comprise a large proportion of the power elite, as can be seen by the correlations between being Anglican and being self-employed (0.40) and being Anglican and being self-employed with employees (0.58).

This latter correlation is strong enough to tell us that Anglicans have a lot of political power in New Zealand through occupying essential positions in industry.

Other religious orientations with the strongest correlations with being self-employed with employees were Presbytarianism (0.45), having no religion (0.37) and Brethren (0.22).

These four groups: Anglicans, Presbytarians, those from no religious tradition and the Brethren, comprise the true power elite of New Zealand. The reason for this is because it is these people who own everything: generally they are directly descended from early settlers and owners of large farms.

Here it is possible to further illuminate the distinction within the highly-skilled occupations between the managers who run everything and the professionals they depend on to get things done.

Certain religious traditions had positive correlations with working for a wage or salary but negative correlations with being self-employed with employees.

Catholicism was the most notable of these. The correlation between being Catholic and working for a wage or salary was 0.30, with being self-employed it was -0.23 and with being self-employed with employees it was -0.31.

Other religious traditions which had positive or near neutral correlations with working for a wage or salary but negative correlations with being self-employed with employees were Buddhism (0.11 versus -0.24, respectively), Hinduism (-0.03 versus -0.44) and Islam (-0.03 versus -0.49).

Ultimately these statistics reflect how these latter traditions have higher proportions of recent immigrants who, despite often being highly educated and earning good money, have not had the time to establish themselves as part of the power elite. These immigrants often moved to New Zealand because their high skills were needed by the landowners and managers who were more established.

It’s also possible to observe the fault lines of a generational conflict between the Baby Boomers, whose education is patchy, and Generation X and the Millennials, who generally have modern educations but who are yet to dislodge the deeply entrenched Boomers.

The correlation between having a Master’s degree and working for a wage or salary was 0.33, and with being self-employed with employees it was actually negative, at -0.02. This latter correlation is incredible if one also considers that the correlation between having NZQA Level 1 (School Certificate) as one’s highest qualification and being self-employed with employees was 0.22.

Explaining much of this comes down to the fact that establishing oneself as a member of the power elite is more a function of age than of education.

The correlation between median age and being self-employed with employees was a strong 0.71, whereas with working for a wage or salary it was -0.37. This tells us that, over and above just about anything else, the power elite is old, and the people they hire to do their bidding are young.

To take a more granular perspective, the correlation between being aged 65+ and being self-employed with employees was 0.56, which is interesting if one considers that any person in this age bracket can also claim a pension of $350+ per week which is not means tested.

This is not just a function of greed, of course: realistically, many of the people running a company, especially if it’s one they own, cannot simply give up all of their responsibilities at one moment.

Generally they employ the under-50s. The correlation between being in the 20-29 age bracket and working for a wage or salary was 0.37, and between being in the 30-49 age bracket and working for a wage or salary was 0.52.

The power elite is also much more likely to be male than female. The correlation between being male and working for a wage or salary was 0.11, but the correlation between being male and being self-employed with employees was 0.50.

This isn’t simply a matter of male nepotism: the correlation between being male and doing unpaid work in the family business was 0.48. The truth is that it is in the nature of Kiwi men to work, and the vast majority of us would rather work than just sit around or have nothing to do.

The last point about the power elite that might not be well understood is the degree to which it is intergenerational, especially in the case of farming interests.

Some light can be shed on how strong this degree is by consideration of the correlation between working in agriculture, forestry and fishing and doing unpaid work in the family business, which was an extremely strong 0.90.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.