The Kiwis

I'm at Singapore's Changi airport as I write this on the way home from a short work trip to Vietnam and Singapore. That's a typical Hanoi street scene at left - never seen so many bikes!

There's a logic (which is one way of putting it!) to the traffic flow that defies my ability to describe it. Not a great place for running and I was confined to doing multiple 500 metre circuits of a park near my hotel to get in my run (I thought of Scott in Japan with his 10x3k loops).

My future posts are going to be much more Boston related but first I have to deal with a New Zealand theme. I have been promising Vicky in Auckland that I would do a post on something New Zealand related and here it is. WARNING: mostly non-running content follows.

I first visited in NZ in 1975 for a family holiday and have visited many times since to both islands, nearly all for work. While I find the Kiwi's 'chip-on-the-shoulder' attitude irritating at times I love New Zealand and love New Zealanders.

The beauty of NZ takes my breath away and the New Zealanders themselves have made many enormous contributions to the international community out of proportion to their population and geographic size. I think of famous Kiwis over the years and remember Sir Keith Park, Rutherford, Katherine Mansfield (an absolutely wonderful poet) and of course that great nugget of a man, Sir Edmund Hillary.

When it comes to runners, the Kiwis have made a very distinctive contribution. Names such as Lydiard, Snell, Walker come to mind to name just a few. I have worked and drank a beer or two with many Kiwis both in Australia and abroad and there wouldn't be another national group that is as like-minded to us as your typical Kiwi.

I have heard all the sheep jokes (which work both ways by the way) and received all the barbs over that underarm incident of the early 1980s (still remember the day well!) and had to deal with a Kiwi almost in tears over Australia's defeat of the All Blacks in the 1991 Rugby World Cup (another day I also remember well.)

But the point of my tribute to our breathren across the Tasman is this: I think it is time to look seriously at a trans-Tasman Federation.

Now I know Helen Clarke and 4 million Kiwis will be coughing up their Steinlagers when I said this. But there are many compelling political, economic and social reasons why both countries should consider federation, which I wont go into here. I will just say for now that I am not considering a situation where New Zealand is placed on similar status to an Australian state.

I've got in mind a scenario where New Zealand has a special status superior to an Australian state but still within an Australasian federation. We would have a single defence force and common foreign and defence policies and a range of other unified economic and social policies.

But both countries would retain their own sporting teams for international competition much as England, Wales, and Scotland operate within the United Kingdom. Whether we would have unified Olympic team is a tough one, which I will leave to another time.

There are an enormous range of complex constitutional, political and other considerations that would need to be tackled for Federation to occur. But it is time they were.