Businessmen - the new elite?
by Mike Crowl
| Something curious occurs to me as a result of the Qantas collapse. Are
businessmen the new elite?
Suddenly I'm hearing about business class trips costing in the region of a $1200, merely to go from Dunedin to Auckland - and maybe back again. I know NZ has had expensive air travel for some time, and we'd all like to see Virgin or that Aussie crew come in and give us some decent prices, but since when did just being a businessman mean you'd have to pay exorbitant rates? What extra value does the poor businessman get for forking out large sums of money? Personal stewards? One per customer? Stronger drinks? More of them? Hardly. He gets more leg room. Of course when I say 'he' I really mean he or she, since no doubt women businessmen - or should that be lady business-persons? - presumably pay these excessive prices too. More leg room - but what else? The rest of us (the hoi polloi) get meals just as free. (So perhaps business class customers get larger trays with more food, which means they'd have larger tray holders, which means more room between the seats, and we already know they get that.) They can't get magazines any freer than the rest of us do. Perhaps they get two copies of the inflight job - one to take home to the wife, or husband, or partner. Or to leave at the office, and claim as a tax perk. Perhaps that's the idea - the cost of the air travel can be tax deductable. But if that's the case, why fork out such large amounts in the first place? Why not just travel ordinary/basic/same-frills-as-the-business-class-but-slightly-smaller, and save fiddling around with Inland Revenue at the end of the year? Because, as my wife keeps pointing out to me, (come March), being reimbursed for your taxable deductions doesn't give you all your money back. So, she says, if you didn't spend the money in the first place, then you'd have more in hand at the end of the tax period. Hmm. I don't point out to her that, equally, a bargain is only a bargain if you actually need it, because I know from past experience this isn't a good idea. So we're left with the conclusion that business people are somehow more special, and therefore they should pay more for being so. I remember Jim Bolger, when he was Prime Minister, pronouncing on the 'fact' that business people were 'heroes.' (This was in the days before the Hero Parade gave the word a somewhat different connotation.) I puzzled over his words at the time, since I'd always thought heroes were the sort of people who rescued others from burning houses, or dived into deep lakes when someone was drowning, or thumped a shark on the nose when the aforesaid denizen had a surfer's leg or arm or head in its mouth. But in Jim's view, business people were in a class of their own, and needed to be raised in status before the public. In his eyes they were an elite. I can see it all now. Jim gave business people elite status; the airlines understood all too well the definition of elite, and hey presto! up went their prices accordingly. It's such a simple world when you think about it. |
This column first appeared on Society and Culture section of www.soapbox.co.nz on 17th May 2001
© Mike Crowl 2001