Object Lesson

Thanks to the zealous bureaucrats who write the rules, many a traveler arriving in New Zealand by air soon wishes he hadn't. Last week Tom Shand, New Zealand's new Minister of Civil Aviation, decided to give the bureaucrats a taste of their own medicine. He invited nine of the nation's top civil servants to join him on an airborne "picnic" to Auckland. It was a bumpy flight (the pilot had been encouraged to seek out the roughest patches of air), and before it was over, the passengers were handed landing forms to fill out--forms identical with those issued to visitors. When the queasy bureaucrats finished struggling with their own gobbledygook, the plane touched down. A Health Department employee promptly sealed its doors and sprayed the interior with a choking insecticide.

At last the coughing civil servants were released from the plane to find themselves facing a battery of stern and intractable officials at the airport. The crimes they had apparently committed were many. Some had failed to fill in their entry forms correctly. A police inspector was found to be carrying an undeclared pistol. A representative of the Reserve Bank was accused of smuggling in undeclared dollars. The Health Department man was found to be short one vaccination and was forced to take his shot then and there. Feeling duly humbled, the men who write New Zealand's entry rules were taken over to watch a planeload of genuine tourists go through the same agonies in earnest.

When it was all over, Tom Shand's picnic guests were herded into a meeting. Its agenda: possible ways of making things easier for visitors arriving in New Zealand by air.

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