Public Address - Club Politique (Home)

Theory of Relativity | Aug 19, 2005 08:54

OK, I'm going to whinge about this one because I plainly don't understand it. Why in the hell do some political factions whine about the need for fiscal independence, then in the same breath gasp at the implementation of social freedoms?

This one has always stuck in my craw.

The thing about freedom, and the love of freedom, is that it seems to be entirely dependent on what the individual thinks is important.

The situation is more often than not this: Person 'A' believes in small government. They think that any interference by government is a bad thing, especially if it seems like government is interfering in something they find very important. Like their income for example. Taxation, apparently, is interfering in their ability to spend the money they deserve.

Whether they deserve that money is of course another question. There are plenty of people out there whose very high incomes I find, well, offensive.

So ignoring this, government should be prevented from interfering in our lives by lowering taxation as much as possible and freeing up money for us to spend as we see fit. If we want to help out the poor by giving them money we can, and if we want to use that money to employ people, like cleaners, then we can.

This is overstating the case of course, and I'm probably being a little too obtuse. Having lived poor I know for sure than money does make your life easier.

The question though is how much money do you really need to make your life more free? If you've got enough to put food on the table, pay all the bills without stress, put away a suitable amount for a comfortable retirement, and still get away for a holiday at least once a year then what in the hell are you bitching about?

Again, more often that not it's a particular type of person that sees tax as them being robbed. Take away all the guff about how the money is being spent, for instance on things like cheap health care or decent education, and what you have is people who are basically just stingy.

And I use the word stingy for a very particular reason, because I've noticed that these same types of people, though decrying the lack of freedom in regard to the theft of their money by the state, are all too willing to restrict the freedom of other people.

I realise that I'm potentially drawing a long bow on this one, but why is it that people who want the state out of their money are all too willing to have the state restrict the freedoms of people like homosexuals, ethnic and religious minorities?

It's a weird kind of relativity, and more of a stereotype than a hard fact, but if you're demanding more freedom in your own life, then you can't go demanding the restriction of other peoples freedoms without setting yourself up for accusations of hypocrisy.

Sure, there's the argument that financial and social policy are two entirely separate political spheres, but to me that's simply being Janus-faced in your opinions.

A better way to put it is that the financial sphere doesn't impinge on relative morality that the social does. But again, that's being selective.

Quite frankly, I find conspicuous consumption obscene. Flashy wealth and big money is just gaudy, shallow and at times outright rude. If you only drive an $80,000 car in order to demonstrate your wealth, then I think you are in all likelihood just a wanker, plain and simple.

Thing is, to me consumption is a moral question. It is immoral to waste money on things you don't need, or food you'll just throw away, or toys you'll break for fun.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one to argue in favour of radical wealth redistribution. It's good to have incentives for people to work harder, to try to better themselves, and to try to escape things like welfarism. But how much money do you really need before your spending becomes taking the piss?

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Burying One's Feet | Aug 17, 2005 14:46

Yup, I'd better come clean. The thesis isn't actually finished and handed in. All the hard yards are done, and I'm kind of kicking back making small structural and wording changes as they are indicated. So, technically it's finished because all the research is done, gone, over, but unfinished because the supervisors are poring over it looking for inconsistencies.

In other words they're doing the hard yakka now.

Anyhow, leaving Australia once the final draft had been submitted, and saying goodbye to Melbourne was probably the best move I've made in years. The city is great, and I'd love to live there again, but maybe not for a long time.

I've lived in a number of cities now, on a couple of continents, and returning to Wellington has been something like an emotional homecoming. Not emotional in the sense of getting at bleary and not wanting to let go, but emotional like it just feels 'right'.

As each chapter comes back, with amendments and the digital equivalent of big red scrawl, I'm drawn back to that tiny little office space, in a pokey student dive, with a three feet view to a grey paling fence, flowers grasping over the tops once a year or so to brighten up the spring.

These days I'm sitting in front of a picture window, with a view across Te Aro to Mt. Vic, with the hospital at one end of my view, and the hills surrounding the harbour and Hutt Valley at the other. How things change in a year ay?

I get to walk to work, as I did in Melbourne, but here I see places I recognise as something else altogether, and have memories of people I used to walk with who are no longer present. I get to point out places that once housed people I knew and streets I may well have stumbled along in drunken stupors. I get to meet old friends with whom a distance has fallen and remained.

That said, there's something 'deeper' about being here. In Melbourne it was always like I was spread too thin on the ground? Even after six years I knew half the city all too well, had found out all her secrets, had friends I'd known for as many years as all but my closest and oldest mates, and was intimately familiar with her moods, but there was still that intangible feeling like I didn't really belong.

Here though? Here I can cast my minds eye back to days long gone, to a montage of changes and incremental difference falling past me as I push them down into the earth and the past when my feet carry me through rolling and variable time.

There's something to be said for that impression we each make as we go about our daily lives with the flakes of our memories burying our feet in the places we stand.

Another way to see it is standing in the shallow waves. They pull away the sand around your feet and sink you while some remains to anchor you there, the cold water keeping you keenly aware of the changes taking place.

In Melbourne my feet never really reached the ground. It was always like I walked above it all, a traveller, itinerant, unrooted. I was the water more than the feet, one of the people who washed through the city without really leaving an impression but for the few lives my own reached?

Here though? Here I sit and read chapter after chapter written in that whole other place, and while I see the ideas and who I was forming layers around the person I was becoming, the detritus of the daily life in that world has rotted away leaving little.

And so it is, the wind has swept me up and brought me back to a place where wind belongs, leaving scattered behind me bits and pieces enough to lead me back should I choose to return. And I romanticise the past as the past deserves, and joke about the hardships.

But here I am all the same, happy, content and a little too secure. Surrounded by an old home that's bigger than just the four walls of this room, one that reaches to the shores where my people came off sailing ships, married local and carved lives out of rugged bushlands.

A place where my feet touch the ashes of lives who have shared mine but have long since passed. A place where I stand, look up, and see tomorrow's memories falling graciously, gently, toward me, and for which I am happy to wait.

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