Dialogue: An odd demand for a royal nod

Requiring new New Zealanders to pledge loyalty to the Queen seems incompatible JOHN GARDNER.

This is a confession of bad faith. I don't want to appear ungrateful, but my recent assumption of New Zealand citizenship provoked a small crisis of conscience. Now I have my certificate safely stowed away I can own up.

This had nothing to do with doubts about making a commitment to New Zealand. After 13 years of living and working here, the decision was long overdue.

Our family members here have all taken citizenship, and we have always felt rather guilty about not getting round to it before.

There are few real practical advantages for us in taking this step.

Permanent resident status gives us a dependable guarantee of being able to continue living here, and as holders of a British passport and an indefinite visitor's visa to Australia we can travel as freely as we like.

But my affection and admiration for this country, its landscape, its peoples and the basic values which underpin its civic life become ever more deeply rooted, and it seemed a symbolic acknowledgment of loyalty and some payment of a debt to New Zealand to become a citizen.

A nation has every right to decide who it admits to its rolls, and the checking process seems to me to be perfectly proper and, in fact, less onerous than trying to get into the country in the first place.

I have absolutely no difficulty in agreeing to honour the laws, although that trick escapes a fair number of home-grown New Zealanders, and to fulfil my duties as a New Zealand citizen.

But I did find it strange, to say the least, that the first requirement in my pledge of loyalty was to swear true allegiance to the Queen and her heirs.

Swearing fidelity to the Queen was curious enough. But I am a native Briton, and know what I am getting with Her Majesty - a tough, hard worker with a timeless hair-do.

Pledging loyalty to her heirs, however, was a hard call.

It's nothing personal. Charles' heart is in the right place, even if his head seems sometimes to be elsewhere. And the young princes make very good women's magazine covers. But why was I being asked to give them my unconditional support?

They are the living embodiment of the hereditary principle, occupying their position through no merit, real or presumed, but purely by an accident of birth.

One of the things that appeals about New Zealand society over that of my native land is that, by and large, it bestows status only on those who have earned it. You don't get approval merely by having the correct parents.

But more wounding than this incongruous confirmation of the dynastic principle is the demeaning business of people who are becoming New Zealanders having to nod to a foreigner on the other side of the world.

Native New Zealanders, of course, don't have to do it, unless they hold certain offices.

And there is a modest amusement in having as Prime Minister someone who believes in the inevitability of a republic presiding over thousands of people who have sworn allegiance to the Queen.

As a Briton, I am used to it, and to singing that national anthem which makes no reference to the country but only to the perpetuation of the sitting monarch's rule.

And I know that the Queen in this ceremony serves as a symbol of the nation.

But on the evening of our citizenship being completed, I did wonder what the rest of the new New Zealanders made of it.

Here they were, anxious and grateful to be joining a new independent country, being asked to give a pledge to a lady of mature years who lives in England and occasionally stops by. To put it at its most basic, this seems incompatible with the dignity of a sovereign nation. Are we subjects or citizens?

This is not to disavow New Zealand's history. Like it or not, the basis of modern New Zealand society stems from the British imperialist urge.

We cannot and should not try to reinvent that history. But this is 2001 and what is New Zealand now ?

The whole citizenship ceremony was, for me, unexpectedly moving.

There were people there for whom, far more than for us, New Zealand represented a rebirth, an opportunity to escape from countries of repression, injustice and misfortune.

Even for those of us from happier homelands, the act of becoming a New Zealander was not an accident but a conscious exercise of choice I was pleased to make.

But my commitment is aimed at New Zealand, not at someone, however symbolic, 12,000km away.

* John Gardner is a senior Herald journalist.