A bizarre call, but what the coach actually said should not be faulted.

“You want these players to want to be All Blacks and to want to stay in the country but it’s tempered by the fact they are offered a lot of money and it’s hard for young men to see beyond that at times.

“It’s a major issue that we need to address as a country. It’s not just the Rugby Union who can come up with the answers – the whole country, including the Government, needs to be part of the solution.”

We’ve all noticed the exodus of doctors and radiologists. In the law we can see our top young people being slower and slower to return from OE, if they come back at all. 100 skilled emigrants a day has long told us us that Sri Lanka status approaches.

We’re getting our reward for repeated choices of “lifestyle” over “business”. Like Sri Lanka we can be an impoverished backwater  investing desperately in ‘education’ only to see our world class graduates go off to look after the world, everywhere but here. We may avoid their type of  race war but crime and class and generational recrimination will accompany economic decline.

When the world-beating All Blacks cry for government help surely the penny must drop for the voters.  It matters when we can not compete financially.

There’s a cost for electing people who despise business or know nothing about it. There’s a price for every vote to add a cost, to waste an economic opportunity, to support a drone instead of a worker, to subject yet another productive person to the endless dispute and consultation and compliance procedures that make it so much easier not to be an employer.