KEY POINTS:
A while back, a survey appeared which suggested that down here in remote little Auckland we'd created the most cultured community since the day of Renaissance Florence. Either that or we're the world's biggest romancers when the pollsters come knocking.
Now we have the latest Sport and Recreation New Zealand physical activity survey which suggests we're a bunch of Energizer battery bunnies as well. That's when we're not off singing in a choir, swinging a poi or making a film - all activities we claimed to be busy doing in the culture survey.
Perhaps I'm just trying to spread the guilt about my own inactivity, but I do find it hard to believe that, for example, 27 per cent of adults have meaningful interaction with weights or treadmills or other equipment-based exercise, as claimed in the report, or that 8.9 per cent of us - 290,753, to be exact - keep ourselves trim by indulging in pilates/yoga.
Perhaps we are a nation of hot and sweaty, weight-lifting, ab-crunching, fitness freaks - but if it's true, it hasn't caught on in my circle of sloth.
Perhaps the explanation is in the Sparc document's small print, which says you can qualify as an exerciser "irrespective of the intensity or duration of the activity undertaken".
In other words, if I was to sit just once a year on my very dusty, 20-year-old, as-good-as-new exercycle, I could claim to be a signed-up statistic in the "equipment-based exercise" squad.
To put it another way, when the report proclaims that "sport and recreation continues to be a major part of the lives of New Zealand adults", it would pay to swallow that with a grain of salt - that's if salt wasn't bad for your blood pressure.
"During any week," the report continues, "nearly 80 per cent of adults participated in at least one sport or recreation activity; over 12 months, one in four Kiwis provided support to sport and recreation as volunteers, and almost 40 per cent took part in at least one event or organised competition."
It continued: "In terms of how active Kiwis are, nearly 50 per cent of adults met physical activity guidelines for adults advocated in New Zealand (at least 30 minutes of physical activity a day on five or more days a week)."
Of course, Sparc receives $70 million of public money to try "to achieve our vision, which is a nation inspired to be active, participate and win", so it's not surprising they trumpeted these results.
But I hope they don't take the claimed margin of error of plus or minus 2 per cent too seriously. You only have to walk through a suburban mall to suspect the lily's been over-gilded.
I feel rather sorry for the Asian community. On the face of it they come out as the sluggards. But could it be they haven't learned the Kiwi tradition of telling the pollster what they think is the right answer?
For example, the survey has 21 per cent of Asian New Zealanders qualifying for the couch potato prize as "inactive", nearly twice the national average of 12.7 per cent.
Only 13.7 per cent volunteer to help at a local recreation group compared to the national average of 25 per cent (and Maori and Pacific figure of 32-33 per cent), and only 21.5 of Asians said they'd participated in one organised recreation event in the past year, compared to 36.9 per cent of the general adult population and 44.5 per cent of all men.
If you're an Asian Kiwi and by now starting to feel guilty, then relax. It's just that the rest of us have had more time to perfect the fine art of telling the pollster the "correct" answer.
Even if true, I'm not all that sure just what the worth is of including in the overall percentages someone who might have only jogged or lifted a weight or hip-hopped once in the year. Doesn't it just risk lulling the nation into a false confidence about the overall health of the nation?
Still, just as the Auckland City Council/Creative New Zealand survey of 2006 was good for a giggle when it had 16 per cent of Aucklanders claiming to write poetry and 36 per cent saying they were "actively involved in painting, photography, sculpture, web-art, ceramic making or film making", so is this Sparc skite sheet of our physical prowess.
