In his best-selling 1976 book The Passionless People, the late author and journalist Gordon McLauchlan characterised his fellow New Zealanders as ‘smiling zombies’: polite, cheerful and hard-working but smug and compliant. It was cruel but not inaccurate.

It takes a lot to provoke New Zealanders politically. The last time it happened was in 1981, when a tour by the South African Springbok rugby team tore the country apart.