Double Standards

“If there is a better combination than a bunch of hardened, pragmatic Pakeha tight forwards surrounded by a Polynesian loose forward combination, marshalled by a dictatorial Pakeha halfback or first-five and a backline of lightning fast, sidestepping Polynesians, then I don’t know what it is.”

Chris Laidlaw – described by Rosemary McLeod thus:-

Laidlaw is, of course, a serious commentator. He had the cachet in his time of being a brainy All Black, and is a former Rhodes Scholar. His National Radio programme on Sunday mornings, with its sonorous interviews and sharp media commentary, is loved by the worried liberal middle class, among whom he’s comfortable.

Haden is the one who gets picked on, but he was in fact only picking up on Laidlaw’s comments in a book of Laidlaw. As McLeod notes again:-

His credentials are impeccable. He’s a former Labour MP for Wellington Central, and is currently on the Greater Wellington regional council. Before that he was our high commissioner to Harare, an assistant to a former Commonwealth secretary-general, and a race relations conciliator. All of which makes some observations of his all the more remarkable in Somebody Stole My Game, the book Haden refers to.

So Haden is reviled, but Laidlaw nobody comments on. Yet potentially his comments are all the more damning, but nobody especially in the media picks up on them. Is it because laidlaw is one of them, the elite inner sanctum of the Wellington intelligentsia?

Double standards by Adam’s thinking.

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