THE PRESS TUESDAY, APRIL 2, 1985. Mr Lange’s clear message

Press, 2 April 1985, Page 16

THE PRESS TUESDAY, APRIL 2, 1985. Mr Lange’s clear message

JhL Zealand Rugby Football Union has a ; ”" e - “ may obey or disobey the direction ? Yr n by tlie Prime Minister, Mr Lange. He has iwa the union’s council that an All Black tour 01 South Africa “must not proceed.” These ? fu’ * s now c i ear > are n °t j us t the opinion of the Government. They are an instruction; but they are an instruction that the union may ignore if it wishes. Although the union has repeatedly said that it does not want to get into the business of political judgments, it cannot pretend that the tour entails no political consequences. The point made by Mr Lange is that the Government, and Parliament as well, have made the political judgment and have found against the tour. The only choice for the union is whether it should accept or reject this judgment. Such advice would be . ignored only by a sports administration that is heedless of the country’s welfare and reputation. When sport is so constantly held to be important to a country’s standing, no major sports administration can afford to be so heedless and still command wide public respect. In essence, what is bad for the country in this area is also bad for rugby. If the rugby union proceeds with the tour, the status of the game must suffer as a result. This, plainly, must be the concern of the rugby union’s council. Much will be made of Mr Lange’s apparently dictatorial approach to the council; in the end, however, he can give no other advice: either the Government thinks that the tour should proceed or it does not. He may suffer politically as a result of giving such an instruction; but that is what doing his job entails, and he admits it. As a matter of record, and in a letter that Mr Lange can show to anyone on his tour of African countries, the Government’s attitude to the tour is absolutely clear: the Government “is totally opposed to sporting contacts with South Africa.” The Government will not admit representative South African individuals or teams into New Zealand to play sport here; sports bodies will have no choice in this. On the other hand, they will retain the right to decide whether a team would leave New Zealand, because “no New Zealand Government could or would interfere with that right.” This is what Mr Lange’s letter says, and this is what it means: rugby players can leave New Zealand if they want to; they may ignore the Government instruction and they may play against South Africans if they want to. They have simply been told that they should not do

so by the authority that is meant to be the best judge of what is good or bad for New Zealand. If they do not care about this, they can hardly be said to be doing any service to New Zealand. A delay in the union’s decision until April 17 cannot seriously be based on an argument about this point. Mr Lange prudently worded his letter so that, regardless of the union’s response on Saturday, the text will stand up well during his own African visits. Delay for the sake of clarification is not conspicuously necessary. The rugby union’s council may have its own, undisclosed, reasons for hearing more from Mr Lange. For all that, more obvious reasons appear to lie in tactics. Some members of the council may not have wanted to give the Prime Minister the satisfaction of taking a decision against the tour with him on his visit to African countries. If a decision against the tour was in sight, the councillors probably did not want it to be waved as a flag as Mr Lange campaigns through Africa. This would have been a further affront to the union’s disappointed hosts in South Africa, and the union’s council would probably wish to avoid such an affront. Rather unfairly, the union has been accused of causing unnecessary strains and costs by postponing its decision. The possibility of an All Black tour is certainly the reason for annoyance among many people; the rugby union, however, is not a party that is threatening to march in the streets or challenge the law while asserting its opinions about the tour. The danger in delay has been perceived by Mr Lange: some people in the anti-tour movement may make a fatal mistake and harden feeling in favour of the tour. This is why he issued a plea against provocative or irresponsible actions.

When anti-tour people take to the streets and demonstrate, when ugly memories of the 1981 Springbok tour are revived, and when the hint of a blackmailing, law-and-order question is raised, thousands of other people feel that such tactics must be ignored or resisted; they feel that they are not going to be bullied. Whatever may be the rightness or wrongness of the argument, the feeling is real. The council room of the rugby union is not likely to be immune to such a feeling. Instead, Mr Lange has declared where the decision should be made; and he judges that as soon as anti-tour people make the mistake of doing something provocative, his cause may be lost.