ADVANCE AND RAISE YOUR ARMS

Melbourne, March 26 NZPA - Yes, there was some marvellous competition and maybe that will be the lingering memory of the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, but in the short-term the things that shouldn't matter will nag at me.

My current fear is that I'll curse five seconds after waking every morning for the rest of the year because I've realised I'm mentally singing Advance Australia Fair.

At the Commonwealth Games, it was the dominant theme. Australia won more than 80 gold medals and that meant more than 80 renditions of "our home is girt by sea".

The trouble is, the home broadcaster Channel Nine played those medal ceremonies over and over again.

At the media centre, there were channels dedicated to each sport in action at any one time and they showed the medal ceremonies too.

Some nights when they were all blaring, you could hear Advance Australia Fair sung a cappella, so it's no wonder heaps of people are complaining it's etched on the back of their brains.

It often seemed they were not the Commonwealth Games, they were the Australian Games.

Channel Nine unashamedly sought out Australian winners and ignored others. Promised coverage of the sevens final was dropped when Australia missed the final.

Small countries complained they were being denied their brief televised moment in the sun.

Delaying coverage can have its pitfalls. When the Australian non-actor Brad Pitt was winning gold in the boxing ring on Saturday, Nine were interviewing the Games florist.

Serves 'em right if they get grief for that.

They were not only the Australian Games, they were the regulated Games.

Wherever you went there was a ticket inspector with a clipboard, a pass inspector with a clipboard, a security guard with a wand, a bus warden with a clipboard, a parking warden and an unsmiling X-ray machine operator.

The Games organisers had hosts of volunteers, in the main cheery folk checking tickets and passes and giving directions.

A minority took their jobs far too seriously. You could sense the empowerment they received from their aqua-coloured uniforms.

They shouldn't have grabbed people by the shoulder to tell them they weren't not allowed in the officials-only zone, but you know.... give an Aussie a uniform and I'll show you a dictator.

In too many cases, even the good guys were administering iron-cast rules to situations that demanded flexibility and this often caused friction.

Buses, for example, were sent on the most time-consuming circuitous routes. The bus trip from the media venue at the Exhibition Centre took half-an-hour to get to the netball courts. A driver told me he could get there in six minutes if he was allowed to take his own route.

"Some bloody boffin at a computer designed this. Why we have to go through the central streets stumps me. They never consulted a bus driver about this."

And then there were the security checks. Yes, in this terrorised world, it seems to be necessity, but several times a day is tedious, particularly when after emptying your pockets of mobile phone and handfuls of coins and having your laptop searched for a pocket howitzer, the red-uniformed security master chooses you to be searched by the wand waver.

It happened so many times to me, I automatically raise my arms when I see anyone dressed in red.

One day I was inevitably chosen by the master for the wand, but the wand-waving woman, God bless her, told me I could go on through. I almost kissed her, but there was a hiccup.

The master told the wand waver: "It is rude to the gentleman to be told he will be searched and then not to search him."

I was about to say "it's OK, I am most unoffended", but the wand-waver retorted that she had to be allowed the authority to make her own decision on who to search.

"We searched one in five at the shooting yesterday," she screeched.

"We do one in four here," he snarled, as I gathered up my bag and phone and empty wallet and coins and moved quickly forward.

Colleague Kevin Norquay got snarled at when a golf tee emerged from one of his pockets at a search station.

"Don't bring that tomorrow," the security guard warned.

I got a similar response when I appeared at the search booth with a brown paper bag.

"What is in the brown paper bag?" asked a security guard.

"A sandwich," I said.

"That's a no-no sir."

"Why?"

"Because there is splendid catering inside the building."

"But don't have wholemeal sandwiches."

(They do, but I was famished).

"I'll let you away with it this time, sir, but not again. If it was McDonalds or Subway, there is no way you could bring them in."

I had a final victory. I was heading towards the search booth one day when a limo drove up and out popped the great George Foreman, about to head to watch a Games boxing contest.

"Are you enjoying Melbourne?" I inquired as a bodyguard bigger than George advanced forward.

"Love it here, great place, great people."

I was about to ask my "scoop" question - "are you devastated to be two days late to see the New Zealand boxers in action?" - but a Channel 9 greaser butted in and got George to repeat his views about Melbourne and the weather.

The guts of it was that I walked ahead of George and his retinue into the search booth.

They gestured me through, wands behind their backs. They waved George through wandless too.

See, there are ways around everything.