Paul Holmes: All dressed up for super future

I don't know what to talk about first, Miss Universe New Zealand, Ria van Dyke, or compulsory superannuation.

They seem in all respects, I know, too diametrically incompatible to be enclosed in the one column.

Miss Universe represents youth and beauty, and compulsory super represents the cruel inevitability of that beauty falling inexorably and sagging round your knees.

Well, let's try to put them together, anyway. Even Miss Universe will one day need her super. Maybe. Her name would imply she will watch the pennies, in any case.

Anyway, our Miss Universe NZ is quite stunningly beautiful. As I say, her face bristles with strength and vitality.

She is one of the hot picks to take the title in Las Vegas so my wife tells me.

I have been too busy following Michael Laws and his most unusual lover - although to do myself some justice - I must say that my attention never lingers upon them for long.

There has been a frisson of concern expressed, however, about Ria van Dyke.

Her black ball dress, or whatever they call the gown that covers a lot of them in those affairs, is not made in New Zealand but was made in the States.

Well, what an outrage, I don't think. And, it turns out, poor Miss Universe NZ and her mum have been so hard pressed for funds that they had to go scouring the op shops looking for stuff she could wear or alter to make up the more than 25 costumes that a national Miss Universe needs in the big international contest.

In the end, I read, Woman's Day came good and got a few of our best designers on the job.

And someone's made her a great silver fern pin to put in her hair that makes her look as if she comes from the Enchanted Forest. But never mind that. It looks nice and sparkly.

But I couldn't care less if our Miss Universe NZ has her clothes made in Rome or Ruatahuna as long as she does her best and I'll care even less about where the gown comes from if she wins. And, as I say, she's a hot pick.

I mention this matter only because I am shocked at where we seem to have come to.

I cannot get my head round a Miss Universe NZ having to trawl through the op shops.

I know, as I've mentioned for the past couple of weeks, that we are broke as a country - but it occurs to me that things have fallen to a parlous state when our Miss Universe hopeful has to cart her mother round the op shops looking for stuff to wear.

I cannot think of a Miss Universe from any other country who has ever had to look for good second-hand clothes with which to go to Vegas.

In Vegas, I would have thought, they would have keen eyes on the provenance of a garment but, having said that, Vegas being what it is, a luck town, an up town and a down town, they might even have an honest appreciation of a struggler prepared to go the extra mile, as Ria obviously is.

Then again, they might just look down their snotty noses at Ria but, by the look of Ria, I don't think that will happen. They are all ambitious strugglers, those girls. That is what the beauty contest circuit is about, I think.

But even in the clapped-out countries (that is to say, even in the countries we in our prosperous New Zealand arrogance think of as clapped out, like Haiti, like the Dominican Republic, like Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Burma, like Bolivia, like Kazakstan), there will be a few super-rich old crooks who would have come to the party out of generosity or perhaps the possibility of favour later on.

Here, not only are we broke, but our rich old men must be tight-fisted.

I can think of only one historical parallel to the plight of our current Miss Universe NZ.

In 1992, at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Barcelona, at the height of the Balkans war, there appeared in the stadium the tiny, determined team that had made its way from Croatia just in time to march into the stadium. The crowd was delirious.

My hair still prickles when I think of that moment. The entire stadium went off because of the war, because this team was alive, because they were so dedicated and because they had made it through thick and thin.

They were broke, they had borrowed gear but they were there for the Olympic ideal. As Ria van Dyke is, in her own way.

BUT ENOUGH of that. It seems that since my column in this fine newspaper last weekend, the entire country has now jumped on the bandwagon for compulsory superannuation.

The Prime Minister thinks it a great idea. He said so. The New Zealand Herald opines that it does not know what the Government is waiting for, that we should get started on employee and employer contributions right away.

After the column appeared, however, I received a nice email from Don Brash, who said he hoped I wasn't pushing for compulsory super. I kind of thought it was fairly clear that I was most impressed by the Brian Gaynor article I was quoting in which he said Muldoon's destruction of Labour's compulsory super scheme in 1975 was the worst political mistake of the past 40 years and that I thought he was right.

I was also enjoying a new licence that I feel now exists in the country to say that Muldoon was a stupid, dictatorial, bullying and useless pig to whom nothing mattered but his own obsession with power and his own inflated sense of worth.

That's all he was, Muldoon - a bullying, destructive, charismatic screwball who intimidated everybody. But that is what charismatic dictatorial screwballs do to our heads. For a time. Until we get over it.

Anyway, Don Brash seemed to be saying that compulsory super was not a good thing and it was doing Australia no good. He attached a recent speech which I regret I have not had time to read, what with being 60 and still having to earn a buck and all that because we don't have compulsory super.

But I cannot understand Don's thinking. It all seems too complicated for me.

What I and the rest of us see, is that all kinds of people in Australia are retiring with a million bucks in their pension fund. What's more, the Australian Government can borrow from the fund and pay interest to a fund owned by its own people rather than to a bank in Shanghai.

I mean, it seems to be doing all right, Australia. No one calls Australia a banana republic. Australia seems, in fact, to be as rich as King Croesus of Lydia, whoever Lydia was. The truth is, as we have all come sadly to realise, that the free market on its own does not know how to plan.

I think Don is just making things difficult. I don't know of any country that is falling over because it has compulsory super.

And what's more, Australia's Miss Universe didn't have to go trawling through the ops shops to find something to wear in Vegas.

So there. End of story.