A new Cabinet a breath of fresh air or of stale cliches?

Can you remember the announcement of an All Black team on the wireless, live from under the stand at Athletic Park?

You could almost choke on the cigarette smoke and smell the beer fumes as the chairman of the NZRFU gave a deadpan reading: "The team to play South Africa at Lancaster Park on 18th August is — fullback, D. B. Clarke, Waikato; wing threequarters, R. A. Jarden, Wellington ... " and so on. (I could once name them all).

It all came back to me when I watched Lucky Luxon announce the reshuffle of his Cabinet.

What amazed me was not who moved up, down or out. After all, none of this game of musical chairs is likely to avoid the crises we face.

Musical chairs? A cliche, surely? And that’s my gripe. 

Cliches, which I enjoy, seem to be absent from the comments which followed the announcement. Where were "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic" or "fiddling while Rome burns"?

Of course, they are cliches, hackneyed, overused and regarded by good writers as beyond the Pale. Oops! Perhaps better to say, "regarded as unacceptable".

Some subeditors will pounce on cliches and cast them aside like an old glove, but I’m not too sure about ditching them altogether. That they became cliches suggest that earlier in their lives they had added colour and emphasis.

Does "like an old glove" still work? I think it does.

"Fit for purpose" and "use-by date" should have cropped up but, being cliches, they are conspicuous by their absence. This last overused phrase gets a boring gloss in one style guide: "To be absent when you should be present, in a way that other people notice."

I warmed to the ODT Facebook contributor who enhanced her criticism of Luxon’s shuffling of the pack with, "throw Reti under the bus for underperforming", but surely it was Chris Bishop who was "thrown under the bus" as the new Minister of Transport?

Above all, after the new Cabinet was announced, I waited for the first appearance of a phrase like, "Simeon Brown was given a hospital pass" but I haven’t seen it used yet.

It’s a great image and surely not yet degraded to cliche status.

It has been around for years, becoming pretty general in sports reporting since the 1970s. What a picture it conjures up.

In 1975, Australian reporter Michael Foster put it well when describing a club rugby game in Canberra: "The backs just flung hospital passes in the general direction of the next man, giving the impression that they disliked one another intensely and sought each other injury."

Imagine the ball being passed to 175cm All Black Damian McKenzie, a metre away from an oncoming 100kg Springbok flanker. Surely "hospital pass" sums up exactly the plight of new Minister of Health?

Mind you, he’s been toughened up by surviving a lifetime of being called "Simeon". He’s shrugged off death threats which might have persuaded more flaky MPs to resign.

He is a regular churchgoer, and his name (biblical in origin) may have seen him mocked by schoolmates, but it gives him a bit of class compared with those lumbered with simple "Simon".

Chances are his takeover of the health portfolio is a first step towards oblivion as doctors and nurses flee Oz-wards, patients mortgage their houses to fly to Guatemala to get treatment unavailable in New Zealand, promised hospitals disappear amid the undergrowth of neglected building sites, and in Hamilton, whose two MPs are National Party stalwarts, an unnecessary third medical school soaks up vast amounts of cash with no political gain.

Good writers will avoid sentences like "Simeon Brown is Daniel in the lions’ den" or "Brown thrown to the wolves" simply because they are cliches, but don’t they work as well, if not better than, "Minister Brown faces some difficult tasks"?

That’s probably enough about cliches, so let’s put them out to grass with a quote from Yes, Prime Minister.

Jim Hacker, faced with appointing a new governor of the Bank of England, is told by candidate Sir Desmond Glazebrook, "City’s a funny place, Prime Minister. You know, if you spill the beans you open up a whole can of worms. I mean, how can you let sleeping dogs lie if you let the cat out of the bag? You bring in a new broom and if you’re not very careful you find you’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Change horses in the middle of the stream, next thing you know you’re up the creek without a paddle."

Hacker later comments to Sir Humphrey Appleby, "Glazebrook is such a fool. He only talks in cliches. He can talk in cliches till the cows come home."

Let’s hope the new brooms in the Cabinet will sweep more cleanly, to coin a cliche.

—​​​​​​​ Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.