Shutting the gate after the airline has bolted

Friday 21st September 2001

An old African saying goes that when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.

Two instances of this adage have blown up in recent times: kamikaze-style bombings in the US and Air New Zealand's own apparent transtasman suicide mission.

As initial shock has subsided over the atrocities committed in the US, concerned voices have started to be heard that are more sensible than those calling for revenge from the very beginning.

Justice is desirable. Revenge is not. Particularly because the latter will perpetuate the cycle of violence, which not only affects quality of life, but may also interfere with markets and investing.

We have had the global economy for some time. Now President Bush and his minions tell us to fasten our seatbelts for "global war." How terminology changes with the times.

Last century, which ended all of nine months ago, such conflict would have been called world war. Anyone for World War III?

George and his buddies are gearing us up for it but they don't seem to wish to use the old lexicon in case we baulk.

World War I started over roughly similar circumstances. A terrorist act, the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, triggered a wave of declarations of war based around treaty alliances and a gruelling conflict that lasted some five years. In World War II, another chain reaction of treaty alliances declaring hostilities started six years' worth of death and misery.

Now the treaty alliance of Nato decides for the first time in its history that it is at war because of an isolated incident in the US. But at war with whom and for what? Declared wars take place between states. There is no conventional state on the receiving end of the Nato offensive that has committed a precipitating act of war.

What moral authority has the US to drag the world into war over 5000 dead, not all of them US citizens?

The crime is a civil one and a police matter, not an international conflict to be settled by military aggression. This is not to demean those who died and those who suffer for their loss, but we have seen worse things in the past.

The US' own use of aerial terror is instructive. It scored bigger hits with carpet bombing Japan and Germany in World War II, even though it was inevitable that civilian casualties would be horrific. Two atomic weapons dropped on Japan to intimidate it into surrender capped off that effort. Then we have the American terror bombings of the Vietnam War to consider. It is not as if the US is a stranger to the extremist methods it now condemns and demands retribution for, as more recent examples of revenge bombings ordered by presidents Reagan and Clinton evince. Perhaps it is a case of some animals being more equal than others when it comes to deciding which civilians should be blasted and which spared.

World wars tend to last for years. They destabilise economies and affect material wealth adversely. Persons and capital are not safe during them.

Amazingly, some market analysts are saying that it could be a good thing for investments if this proposed armageddon goes ahead. A good thing to turn potentially every country into a Lebanon, a Palestine, or a Sri Lanka, where suicide bombing insurgencies have raged for decades despite violent government efforts to eradicate them?

If these thoughts are not sobering enough, then take a look at who is going to lead the charge from the nuclear bomb-proof bunker safely in the rear.

President Bush has been thought of as a candidate for a brain transplant and his second in line, vice-president Cheney, has a heart attack every other month, it seems.

Now we have the president talking in terms of "Wanted, alive or dead" as if, like Ronald Reagan, his natural home is the B-grade Western movie. It's back to cowboys-and-injuns morality plays.

We should all be concerned for our lives and safety, our wealth and prosperity, in the face of what could prove to be an intractable, unlimited conflict.

To give one example, what could happen to New Zealand businesspeople who go overseas and get themselves mistaken for Americans? Or for Muslims for that matter? President Bush is asking us all to bomb ourselves back to the stone age and to destroy our global village in order to save it.

As for Air New Zealand, much has been written so far on the plight of the grass beneath the warring elephants Ansett, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Brierley Investments, the governments of Australia and New Zealand, and the koru kamikaze itself.

However, some of the trampled vegetation that merits remembrance is the "mums-and-dads" group of shareholders who invested directly or via managed funds in Air New Zealand. Did these people get adequate disclosure from the company as the crisis exploded?

Were they properly informed as shareholders in a listed company?

The Securities Commission is just beginning to ask these questions. We await some action from the timid and torpid NZSE.

These two corporate world mahouts have not got the elephants under control yet and arguably should have intervened a lot sooner to ensure a better-informed investing public.

Time and again these authorities are seen to shut the gate after the pachyderms have bolted.

Comments from our readers

No comments yet