PETER WILLIAMS: Who are you?

Why a question from 35 years ago is problematical today

For a variety of reasons I’ve recently been remembering a fellow called Len Potts, a man many consider the greatest creative mind in the history of New Zealand advertising.

I knew Len a bit because we played some golf together where I watched him smoke more cigarettes than I’ve ever seen anybody consume over 18 holes.

Len’s work is still fondly remembered nearly 10 years after he died because, among other campaigns, he was behind the Crumpy and Scotty ads for Toyota Hi-Lux and the “Sailing Away” song for the first America’s Cup challenge.

My favourite Len Potts work though is from 1990. They were actually ads for the Bank of New Zealand in the days before it was called the BNZ and owned by the Aussies.

But it was more than advertising, it was a philosophical reflection of the times. The series featured some archetypal kiwi themes – a beach, a bach, a boat, Saturday morning kids rugby, a Maori carving – and references throughout the series to Aotearoa.

The brilliance of the campaign comes through Potts own Benson and Hedges soaked vocal chords intoning “Who are you? You’re a New Zealander.” It actually goes on to say “.. and we are your bank” as the New Zealand flag flutters under Murray Grindlay’s music.

The bank was sold to the Aussies a couple of years later but that’s another story.

So that was 35 years ago, for me half a lifetime back. It’s a time that only about half of us will remember with any clarity yet the question that Len Potts asked and answered back then should be as relevant today as it was in 1990. Sadly it’s not.

In 2025 if you ask “who are you” how many would say “I’m a New Zealander.” Many might say ‘I’m a Maori,” others perhaps “I’m gay or queer or trans,” or “I have a disability.”

A combination of identity politics, indoctrination through education and a mainstream media lacking awareness of the need to reflect the entirety of New Zealand society means that we have a nation way more divided than it was thirty five years ago.

Maybe I’m being soppy and nostalgic in my pensioner years but wouldn’t it be a better place if the immediate response from all of us to Lens Potts’ question was still “I’m a New Zealander”?

So why are we such a disjointed and incohesive society?

Bizarrely for a series of television commercials, I felt a sense of national pride as I watched those bank advertisements , even if they didn’t convince me to change banks.

But remember this was a time before significant economic and technology change. It was five years before the first treaty settlement with Waikato Tainui, eight years before Google was developed and seventeen years before the iPhone changed our lives.

While few deny some form of reparation has been due for the misdeeds of early colonists, those settlements have evolved into a constant stream of entitlement by Maori leaders while economically underprivileged Maori are still no better off than they were before the cash and compensation wagon was unhitched.

Treaty settlements and internet technology were touted as forces for good when we first encountered them. But really haven’t they been the foundations for a time of self-absorption, of perceived victimhood and of a country wracked by intersectionality?

Len Potts asked a very relevant question all those years ago, the year we called the Sesquicentennial - 150 years from the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Who are you?

I’m proud to say I’m a New Zealander. I just wish everybody who lives in this great land would identify that way before anything else.

A video version of this essay was presented on Family First’s 100th episode of Straight Talk on November 3, 2025

Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Subscribe to Peter William's Substack here