Dan Carter throws country into panic

A pulled muscle in Dan Carter’s nether regions is throwing the nation into a state of panic.

It is all very well for Dan Carter to tell the rest of the country to “move on” from his injury, but he doesn’t know how nerve-wracking it is to be a spectator who’s used to relying on him in the big All Blacks tests to now be without him. After all, he hasn’t been in our living rooms suffering with us as we’ve shut our eyes or bitten our nails, waiting to find out whether he’s successfully kicked another penalty or conversion. He’s been out there on the pitch with something to distract him, while we’ve just had to wait. Although Carter usually looked a picture of concentration in those big moments, his replacement, Colin Slade, unfortunately exudes a total lack of self-assurance as he prepares to take a kick. His look of near-permanent stage fright is possibly because he understands from now on in the Rugby World Cup if he fails to get the ball between the posts and the All Blacks lose a match, then not only will the nation wallow in misery at the defeat but all our other recent misfortunes will also be heaped on top of it.

On some poor bugger’s boot, and it is currently Slade’s, will hang the public’s collective misery about the Christchurch earthquakes, the global financial crisis, the Pike River tragedy, disappearing superannuation savings, credit downgrades and Dan Carter’s injured groin. No wonder Slade looks sick. A friend of mine who has never had much interest in rugby until now, wants to start an “Aunties for Colin” club as a way of supporting the new No 10. It’s a nice idea but in the end, although rugby is a team game for 14 of the players, being the designated kicker is all about individual pressure. And there is not much anyone can do to relieve that, not even borrowed aunties or Dan Carter with his texts.

When I was at school, a B+ was a pretty good mark – especially for me. I would take a result like that as a sign I had wasted too much time studying when I could have spent longer talking on the phone to my friends. I was, in this regard, topped only by my brother, who considered that if the pass mark was 50 then any score above it indicated rank inefficiency because it represented a waste of effort. But in the world of ratings agencies, a B+ is very poor and means a country is offering a highly speculative junk bond, which is like the equivalent of “not achieved” in NCEA, and by some margin.

Albania and Mozambique, for example, each has a sovereign credit rating of B+ and they are not the sorts of places on which any self-respecting country wants to model its economy. So in those circumstances, having New Zealand’s sovereign credit rating downgraded from AA+ to AA constitutes a telling-off from the ratings agencies, even though we can still pay our bills. But given the Government has in the past made such a big deal about maintaining our credit rating, the importance of which was used to justify any number of spending cuts, the downgrade has to be embarrassing, even if the Beehive is not admitting it.

A downgrade is also not the recommended way to go into an election campaign where economic management seems likely to be the key focus of all the parties, with the exception of Mana because it won’t be in a position to worry about it. Still, Prime Minister John Key and Finance Minister Bill English can at least be grateful they are not European leaders like Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, having to convince voters that forking out billions or even trillions of euros to Greeks bearing debts is a good use of taxpayers’ money. We can at least comfort ourselves that when it comes to economic crises, everything is relative.

Opposition leader Phil Goff says that once state assets are sold, they are gone for good. If only that were true. Sadly, KiwiRail was sold but even though we tried to later pretend we didn’t recognise it, it came back to us. It truly is a dog, in so many ways.