Duncan Graham: Welcome to Key Country

Every time I go into Woolies to collect the fortnight’s supply of rotgut I cringe at the price, the packaging and the choice.

Back in my once beloved Oz, chateau cardboard comes in four litre boxes around $AUD 10. Here it’s $NZ 20 for three litres.

Whingeing about supermarket prices defines the newcomer, comparing and contrasting local offerings with the imagined good stuff left behind. After a while the assimilation process kicks in and migrants realise all wasn’t so great back in the home state.

What’s good about NZ? Here’s a well-researched list worthy of an honorary PhD:

Rain: Never, ever complain about the rain – someone might hear and turn it off. Where I came from people pray, dance, plead and ask the government for the stuff. Usually to no effect.

There ain’t no flies on us: Well, not too many. Making the great Australian salute here means you’re greeting a mate. With no window screens you get a clear outlook, not a pixelated insect-eye view of the world.

Key and Goff: How to tell them apart? Politicians so bland, free of noxious ideologies and Rudd-Turnbull gladiatorial combativeness it’s no wonder sport and crime make page one. Oz-style compulsory voting will be needed to waken the electorate and maintain the myth of democracy.

White ants: How come they never got into NZ? Or have possums licked them all up? Anyone who’s been eaten out of house and home – literally – will bless the absence of termites. Talking about possums, NZ is the only place to see these cuddlesome creatures. In their homeland they’re so rare they’re protected. Instead of feeding them 1080 let’s promote them as a tourist attraction.

The Senate: NZ has a plague of politicians but at least there’s no federal system duplicating services and playing bureaucratic tennis, batting issues to and fro. Let’s have a national holiday to commemorate Julius Vogel who abolished provincial government in 1876.

Bumble bees: NZ seems to get along fine with these happy creatures that brighten the beauty of any garden, yet bio-security across the ditch reckons they’re the insect version of apple fire blight.

Cameras in courtrooms: The truth revealed - the judicial process is no Hollywood drama. Lawyers are boring overpriced gits, often inarticulate and the process is glacial. But name suppression is a Kiwi curse – identify the bastards so we can shun them.

Bill of Rights: Oz Tories and socialists agree – this is the swine flu of constitutional law and will destroy the nation. How come Kiwis survive?

Subsidised medicines: To know the real cost of prescription drugs take a script into a chemist over the ditch – but first mortgage your home. However the $3 fee here is offset by doctors’ charges. Medicare bulk billing is an Oz product worth importing along with a lower tax regime and higher wages.

Pedestrian kids: In my suburb littlies still walk to school alone. In a previous abode scaremongers successfully created images of children running a gauntlet of paedophiles to get to class. Grand business for security guards and school bus operators.

The outdoor lifestyle: Greatly encouraged by the lack of a commercial-free national telecaster and puddle-depth programmes of breathtaking banality. How does Coronation Street and CSI Miami reflect ‘our stories, our songs, ourselves’? Thank God we’ve got Nat Geo on the doorstep. Turn off and turn out.

Wellington journalist Duncan Graham (www.indonesianow.blogspot.com) is the author of The People Next Door (University of Western Australia Press).

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