Public Address - Club Politique (Home)

No place quite so humble | Sep 07, 2005 08:11

I was heading out to Seatoun today for lunch, and made the mistake of jumping a bus. Instead of getting to Seatoun, I ended up in state house hell in Strathmore. For those of you who don't know Wellington, don't feel bad. I had no idea there were places like that this side of Johnsonville either. Personally, I thought I'd lived in all the near-slums back in the day during my time as a student, but apparently not.

Part of the problem was the bus driver. This dickhead gave me the bum steer. When the bus stopped I'd asked from the street, 'does this bus go to Seatoun?', to which I received the answer, 'it goes near Seatoun'. More fool me. 'Near' Seatoun meant stepping out into Strathmore and walking down some streets I'd never seen before, finding my way through a suburb or two I'd never been in, and all in the freezing cold wind and occasional bit of rain.

I assume.

I parked my backside in another bus on its way back into the city and made a mental note to send that driver a series of evil thoughts. Near Seatoun my ass... Bad karma be on you, buddy...

Strathmore. What can I say except that let's hope these places go over to market rentals, because the locals will probably pay less than they already do. The place is up on a hill, exposed to the southerly wind, and mostly speckled with these mildewy old weatherboard places built waaaay too long ago. Nice views of Cook Strait but.

The state house I grew up in, and I mean actually grew up in, from the time I was eight till I left home, wasn't too bad. We lucked out and were pepper-potted into a suburb in Mount Maunganui with at least some non-welfare-bludging neighbours.

One thing to note is that Arataki these days is a heck of a lot more flash that it was back then. In the 70s the local pub was the kind of place a whitey like me didn't show his face, the local cop came round to Arataki primary one time and told us a delightful story about getting kicked in the head by the Mongrel Mob during a Friday night dust-up.

Excellent.

Still, the bottle-store there sold me a keg for my sixteenth birthday party, so they weren't all bad.

These days houses all over the Mount sell for heaps, but then, you had to drive half hour just to reach Tauranga, and the place was a quiet hamlet of 16k.

Anyhow, I digress (just for a change). Wasn't too bad a house really. It had this great stuff called 'insulation', where the heat stayed in the place, a free-standing range we used to fuel with off-cuts from the number of houses being built around us, and we never owned more than one dog, and never had more than one half-clapped out car in the yard at a time.

Although one summer we did have a couple of the guys from what became the Headless Chickens and their mates playing a gig on the front porch, on account of them all being mates with my uncle. Does that still make us white-trash?

The only real shit about being in a state house was the uncertainty. One of those things kids like is stability. As it was, whenever a decision was made by any of the governments in power during the nearly twenty years my family lived in our house, it always seemed to reverse our expectations about eventually buying the place.

More often than not, it seemed like we were just cattle to be eventually herded out of the property of someone else. All I can say about that is, at least it wasn't a private landowner, who could have put even less money into maintaining the housing stock, and might have been even less caring.

To be honest, the whole experience of helplessness is likely to have pushed me into studying politics, just to gain some kind of understanding of the distant place that had so much control over our day to day lives, in the form of an absolute say over our income and accommodation. Pays not to be the child of a widow I suppose.

And that's what I saw in Strathmore. The same kind of people dressed in odd combinations of second-hand and ware-whare clothing, run down, paint-flaking houses adorned small symbols of that need to escape, usually flash cars.

People of all kinds of backgrounds, all united only by their common disenfranchisement from the truly equal New Zealand we all keep hearing so much about. The kind of place where owning small objects of worth becomes so much more meaningful, because you know you'll never be in a position to make things, or people, disposable.

Yeah, she's a tricky one to understand, that poverty mentality. The way in which people cling to things they think grant them dignity?

Sometimes people in that kind of 'space' hold onto the crappiest, most unusual things because they remind them of a better time before they were forced to wade in the glue that is bone-crushing poverty. I've known people reverently hold up to the light things a wealthier person would have thrown away years ago, but to whom that object holds huge significance. A piece of furniture they actually made themselves. A found pair of sunglasses they get to pretend they bought.

Objects become the certainty it seems. Objects become the substitute for the lack of control you feel over your life, and you cling to them and the memories they evoke.

And that's what a state house all boils down to. It's a bit like living on borrowed time, so you garner smaller things that mark your passage in the world, and give it and you meaning, regardless of whether the roof over your head will disappear because you can no longer afford the rent.

A life only half-lived, I suppose.

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White Nation | Sep 04, 2005 16:22

In response to the Pauline Hanson phenomena Ghassan Hage wrote a great book called White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. It's a great little read, and recommend you to do so, if you can lay your hands on a rare copy of it.

To make a long story short, Hage identifies a number of ways in which Anglo-Australians, the 'real' Aussies, use multiculturalism as a way to assimilate all minorities. And that also means non-Anglo-Celtic white minorities such as French or Dutch. There is considerable irony therefore in the all too frequent attempts of Australian commentators since the London bombings to blame 'multiculturalism' as one basis of minority dissent.

As I seem to be ranting more and more often, multiculturalism does not mean state support for diversity. Multiculturalism, of almost every variety (it differs at times substantially from country to country) is the tolerance of diversity. This tolerance is in place as a trade off for the eventual assimilation of minorities up into the majority.

'Multicultural' policies, like English-language education, or native-language medical care, or a host of other policies, are all in place to help non-national individuals become more like the majority, and not vice versa.

If there happens to be cultural or religious festivals of the 'ethnic' variety, they are not usually supported by governance bodies. Certainly some such festivals are supported by taxpayers, but according to most multicultural doctrines this is the exception, not the norm.

Blaming some generically labelled boogie-man called 'multiculturalism' for minority dissent therefore foolish, because the policy encourages nothing but the better and faster integration of minorities.

As it was, the policy was introduced to Australia during the 1970s as a means to alleviate the well-documented suffering of minorities under extreme and intolerant Australian nation-building. But, now, a generation later, the policy is under fire and being blamed for fomenting minority dissent.

Around the time of the introduction of multiculturalism to Oz, Pat Hohepa wrote a chapter called "Māori and Pākehā: The One-People Myth" in a book by Michael King called Tihe Mauri Ora. What Hohepa argued is pretty much summed up in the title. It was also around this time that the Community Services Report was published.

What both these publications argued was that Māori could be expected to perform better socially and economically if their unique culture was recognised, and that being rolled up into a generic 'New Zealander' identity continued to serve little purpose. The latter document is generally regarded as the primogeniture of biculturalism.

I outlined biculturalism here, so I'll spare you that conversation again, but lets look at this idea that New Zealanders all share one identity.

The short answer is yes, we all do share an identity as New Zealanders. But, and there's always a but, Māori and mainstream societies have been two very different things ever since the signing of the Treaty. Examples? Read James Belich Making Peoples or Michael King The Penguin History of New Zealand, both of which talk about Māori and Pākehā as two separate entities since colonisation.

Naturally, we're all waiting for the new Tory historical revisionism that denies this to have been the case, but till then, sweet as.

There are clearly a number of contemporary political figures that should be forced at gunpoint to read these books.

The 'One-Nation-Myth' works to undermine the reality of New Zealand being a country composed of a number of actively bicultural citizens, not all citizens mind you, but a fair few. And policies that seek to undermine this reality are not only arrogant, but potentially dangerous.

Does anyone remember the protest movements of the 70s and 80s? They occurred because a large number of Māori determined themselves to be excluded from Pākehā New Zealand, and the One-Nation to which they were supposed to belong.

So tell me, what purpose would it serve to take a step back into that era?

Much like the argument that multiculturalism serves to undermine assimilation, the argument that Māori distinctiveness serves to undermine New Zealand nationality is in effect a using a policy of great worth as a justification to isolate and potentially victimise a minority.

And of course, the latter seems to be the only current raison d'être for some parties with what was once a great history of bridge-building in New Zealand.

Next victim? Solo mums. Bring back Jim and Doug I say...

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