Cathay Pacific magazine’s portrait of New Zealand

Press, 2 November 1982, Page 25

Cathay Pacific magazine’s portrait of New Zealand

“Discovery,” Cathay Pacific’s in-flight magazine, devoted 14 pages and the cover of its October, issue to New Zealand. The feature included a portfolio of colour pictures by New Zealand's leading photographer, Brian Brake, and an essay by Auckland author and journalist, Gordon McLauchlan. Brake’s cover picture, a silhouette of Lake Wanaka, was supported by a selection of 10 pictures including views of the Franz Josef i Glacier, Mount Cook, Lake Wanaka, and Central Otago. McLauchlan, author of “The Passionless People,” presented a profile of New Zealand and New Zealanders, and highlighted some of the probletas the country is facing. The real world had snapped up New Zealand, he wrote. “Nowadays there’s a fair amount of hand-wringing going on and, if you listen carefully, you can hear quiet sobbing in corners at the Reserve Bank. "The trouble, you see, in my New Zealand, is seemingly ineradicable inflation (around 17 per cent), huge internal budget deficits, growing balance of payments problems and a standard of living that has slid off the bottom of the OECD charts from second or third only a few years ago. “That might read like a diagnosis for most of the bodies politic in the western world — and it is. Trouble is that the ailing Kiwi, not used to real ill-health, is preoccupied with his own woe-is-bloody-me. “There’s nothing new about balance of payments problems, of course, in a country which has always relied on meat, milk products and wool exports in a

sensitive international market. But when times got tough before, we used to just store the goodies and borrow money until the affluent countries got hungry or cold enough again to send primary produce prices up. We then paid our debts and put a little aside for another rainy season. “The difference now is that refrigerated ships are up to the gunwales in lamb the Iranians can’t pay for and no one else who can wants; and wool stores are jampacked with short and curlies bought at support prices. And all the

■ market forecasts are dismal, t “Milk and horticultural t products are selling well, but i that’s not enough in a count try that not only needs to 1 buy in all its oil, the cars and - trucks the oil propels and j most of its other heavy ini dustrial goods, but also needs t to import capital to finance a “Think Big” strategy ... t “If this sounds a bit ) gloomy it’s because lamenta- ; tions are in this year, even in > God’s Own Country,” 1 McLauchlan wrote. 1 Cathay Pacific’s Boeing t 747 s will start flying to • Auckland next May.