Dialogue: Who needs a knighthood?

by JOHN ROUGHAN

It struck me this week as Don Brash did his job, withstanding pressure from left and right, that he hasn't got a knighthood. More to the point, it didn't matter.

Back when Governors of the Reserve Bank were grizzled mandarins who never spoke - except periodically to bankers about monetary aggregates, asset ratios and other things deemed unnecessary for the rest of us to understand - they invariably were knighted.

And they weren't nearly as important in their day as Dr Brash has been for the past dozen years. He is quite literally the single best asset of the economy today; he and the act of Parliament that allows him to do what he can to keep inflation within the bounds of stability.

When international reviewers lament our private sector's trading performance but take some confidence from our public policy, we largely have his organisation to thank, not only for the fine art of keeping inflation quelled but indirectly for the budget surpluses that have slashed net public debt. A government contemplating deficit spending knows his Reserve Bank will send voters the bill, in the form of interest rates.

That doesn't necessarily mean that if we lost him tomorrow capital would take flight, although if he was to resign over a cabinet instruction that made his task impossible, it wouldn't do to contemplate the consequences.

The task is lonely and thankless. On Wednesday, as he lifted interest rates another notch, the Auckland Chamber of Commerce expressed the usual myopia of its membership. Radio talk host Leighton Smith found himself in rare harmony with Jim Anderton that "there must be a better way."

For more than a decade now Don Brash has been so clearly explaining the monetary antidote to inflation, and so assiduously courting the economic outlook of everyone he meets, that all sorts of benighted punters announce how they would do his job.

But it was a new test of the Brash bank's fortitude to take pressure from an Acting Prime Minister this week. Mr Anderton made much of the harmless proviso he has managed to have written into the Governor's latest contract - to avoid "unnecessary" instability in economic output and interest rates - and hoped "wisdom would prevail."

It did. Dr Brash went right ahead and raised the cash rate by the 0.25 percentage points generally expected.

This is beginning to sound like a futile nomination for one of those fusty titles that the new Government has just consigned to the colonial dustbin. It is not. It is an exemplary case of the first law of knighthoods: truly exceptional contributors to national life didn't necessarily get them, want them or need them.

Look at the Prime Ministers of the century past. The knighted: Ward, Holland, Nash, Holyoake, Marshall, Rowling, Muldoon, Palmer. Among the untitled: Seddon, Massey, Coates, Savage, Fraser, Kirk, Lange.

In doing away with knights and dames the Government has taken its first step beyond its electoral mandate. It is a fairly courageous one despite the Prime Minister's attempt to portray it as just something the previous Government left lying around.

It is another small but important step towards a distinct identity, although let's not overplay that. As Roger Kerr, of the Business Roundtable, told that constitutional hui a couple of weeks ago, there is something of the "little New Zealand" outlook of the 1960s in these issues. Back then we were still a colonial economy. Now we are not.

Truly mature societies, like individuals, do not feel the need to reject all inherited characteristics. The English blood in the national veins still warms to chivalric honours and traditional Maori seem to relish them, too.

But really those titles are not us. Our conversation gives us away. We still talk of Richard Hadlee, Peter Blake, Susan Devoy, Roger Douglas. It's mainly in the media that we are obliged to remember who wears a title, and tug the forelock no matter how incongruous that might be in the context.

But then newspapers are consistent to a fault when it comes to all forms of address. Either we insist on Mr, Mrs, Miss, maybe Ms, for everybody (except artists, sportspeople, writers and criminals) to the point that stories about teenagers can lose all sense of youth and exuberance, or we ban honorifics with equal rigidity and make oddly brutal references by surname alone to the likes of elderly women in unfortunate circumstances.

In conversation, these things present not the slightest difficulty, We use formal forms of address or not, without thinking, as the tone or context requires. Why we cannot do the same in print is beyond me.

But it is a small mercy that there are to be no more new knights and dames (until National returns, perhaps). The titled can grow old gracefully and truly exceptional citizens, like Don Brash, Peter Snell, David Lange, may be appreciated all the more for remaining exactly as they are.