Te Radar: A threatening encounter in the park

Waitangi Day is lurching towards us in a manner not dissimilar to the three young men who confronted me in an inner-city park recently: ambiguous, threatening and cliched.

In their hooded sweatshirts and clutching cans of cheap beer in their oversized hands, they approached my companions and me and asked (or was that demanded?) cigarettes. In the dark, in the park, that distinction was hard to make.

Like many people contemplating Waitangi Day, I stood before them wondering whether I was being racist or simply cautious in feeling a sense of foreboding.

As one of my pals offered them some cigarettes, I politely suggested that smoking caused lung cancer.

After all, surely this was my duty in the New Zealand we now share, for are there not innumerable state apparatchiks from various taxpayer-funded departments roaming the countryside to see whether the proletariat are complying with the state's dictums in this and other equally vacuous areas?

The disfranchised youth didn't take too kindly to this honesty. As they began to crowd into us, standing close and demanding we talk to them, they began to appear like bad extras in a terrible film.

It seemed ironic, as I was only in the park due to a film - I had just attended the quintessentially Kiwi premiere of the latest Geoff Murphy film, Spooked, in which I star (albeit for a mere 17 seconds).

Outside the theatre the thin red smear of the 6m red carpet, too short to reach from the road to the stairs, lay like a floating island of nylon in front of several bemused Asians and what passes as paparazzi in New Zealand (in this case various photographers and Temuera Morrison filming for his new show).

My 17 seconds of onscreen time was received with copious laughter. This was not the intention. I had been trying to bring serious drama and poignancy to my role as "Phone Technician".

It could have been worse. I could have been as misunderstood as Don Brash.

Still, at least Don hasn't slain any children's pets.

The furore after the country club buffoons slaughtering the poor (heterosexual) duck so the unfortunate fowl wouldn't foul their golf course was also a very New Zealand phenomenon. Slaying innocent animals is almost a national duty.

Who can forget DoC's genocidal rampage that exterminated the entire Enderby Island cow population? These cattle, having survived on the island for over 100 years, had become a genetically distinct line and were the only known cow species that could survive eating seaweed.

Nonetheless, DoC viewed them as an introduced pest with no right to live there.

Over this Waitangi weekend I wonder how many people will be indoctrinated with just that concept about those who arrived on these isolated isles later than their folk?

Scampering away from the park thugs, I had the feeling that we wouldn't be spending Waitangi Day together celebrating our national unity.