KEY POINTS:
If you're still stewing about not getting a gong in the New Year's Honours List, then maybe it's time to greatly improve your odds next time round by shifting to Wellington to live.
According to the calculations of one mathematically inclined non-recipient, residents of the capital city are almost three times more likely to be honoured by the Queen than those of us living in Auckland. By his figuring, Wellingtonians have a one-in-10,278 chance of getting the royal nod, while Aucklanders have only a one-in-27,591 chance.
For residents of Christchurch, it's one in 24,513; for the rest of New Zealand, one in 22,542.
My bemused correspondent - who doesn't want to jeopardise a coveted Order of the Kakapo, second class, in some future list by my revealing his name - suggests it's a case of "the bureaucracy looking after its own".
The bureaucrat in charge of the system hastens to refute such a suggestion. Dave Baguley, director of the honours secretariat, says the bad old system of certain honours being allocated to judges and senior civil servants has long gone.
"The only honour that is automatic these days is an honour for the governor-general on appointment if they don't already have one, because the governor- general is by statute the principal companion chancellor of the New Zealand Order of Merit." Other than that, "everyone is considered along with everybody else".
Taking him at his word, one can only assume that it must be something in the water that makes Wellingtonians - particularly bureaucratic ones - three times as meritorious and deserving of an award, on average, as the rest of us.
In the latest New Year's honours, 11 of the 20 top honours went to residents of Wellington, including six of the seven top spots. Just three Aucklanders (from a region with three times the population of Wellington), scraped on to the list. Amongst these top 20 were the retired Ombudsman, a retired judge, the retired secretary of education, the retired secretary of defence, the retired director of the security intelligence service and a retired government minister.
Mr Baguley says the honours appointment committee, a Cabinet committee chaired by the prime minister, "does its best to try and balance honours according to the spread of population around the country, but that's not always possible".
But how does he explain the preponderance of Wellington names on the list then?
"The problem with Wellington is, of course, it's an area of concentration of people in senior public service-type jobs ... "
So there is an allocation for judges and ...
"No, there is no allocation whatsoever. It just so happens a lot of senior judges are here, yes, and occasionally they get the odd one or two ... "
He argues it's not a case of Wellingtonians being more deserving than the rest of us, just that "sometimes different regions might do well on one list".
This old, it-balances-out-over-time sleight of hand might have been fair enough if it was true. But a quick check of previous recent honours lists suggests it's not so.
Indeed, the only pattern I could find was that the odds for Wellingtonians getting a gong just keep getting better. Using the 2001 Census population figures for Wellington and Auckland regions I found that in 2005, Wellingtonians' had a one-in-16,298 chance of getting a New Year's honour and Aucklanders one in 23,650.
Six months later, the odds were Wellingtonians one in 17,656, Aucklanders one in 26,950.
In January 2006, Wellingtonians' chances improved to one in 14,125 while Aucklanders recovered slightly to one in 24,657.
Six months later, Wellingtonians chances of a Queen's Birthday honour were up, to one in 13,242 while Aucklanders' chances were back to one in 23,650.
By this month, the odds in Wellington's favour had got even better, while Aucklanders' odds had slumped. By my calculations, Wellingtonians had a one-in-11,453 chance compared to Aucklanders' one in 26,338 - showing a disproportionately large swag of honours are ending up pinned to the chests of Wellingtonians - many of them public servants.
The unfair distribution of awards, which are supposed to be granted in a way "consistent with the egalitarian character of New Zealand society", grows apace.
