Club Politique by Che Tibby

God. It's like money porn. Two parties throwing money up in the air and rolling around in it, and it all seems very familar.

But I think the big difference between standing under this money tree and standing under the Australian money tree is that here, I’m included. In fact, I’m so included that I’m thinking about writing to Cullen and just asking for a cheque for $16k upfront.

On the other hand thought, it’s a pity there wasn’t any explicit information forthcoming about the not-so-mysterious Julian Robertson. I'm still wondering why National denied it so vehemently though. Labour seemed more than happy to acknowledge their donors.

As it is, the RMA is looking like the only thing saving it is the student loans policy we’re all clapping our hands in glee about. Like I say, to me, that’s $16k in the bank. But, as it is, removing the say of local communities in the kinds of development that effect their environments is a little foolhardy.

Look, here’s a shallow and poorly researched example.

I’m all in favour of wind turbines. In a place like Makara Beach they’re a great way to produce and therefore partially guarantee supply of electricity for everybody, forever. They produce no pollution we know of, they kill the occasional obnoxious seagull, and the only people they piss off are the locals. Now, personally, I think the locals can just go take a walk and calm down, it’s only a few picturesque windmills after all. But, you have to respect their opinions, because this is a democracy.

If suggested reforms to the RMA were to take place, you could just tell the locals to get stuffed and build the damn things. Personally, sure, it might slow things down a little, but sometimes that’s exactly what we need to make sure that developers don’t get away with building complete crap that poisons the landscape, and benefits the few.

After all the one major thing that New Zealand has to offer the tourism market is our landscape. And who wants leaky buildings all over it?

And there we’re talking about nice things, like housing and windmills. What if we’re talking about prisons and coal-fired stations?

Anyhow. The money. Ah… the money.

As Damien has pointed out, the gang at DFP are going freaking ballistic about the incumbent's student loans policy, which leads me to believe that it may not be such a bad idea. But in the interest of my self appointed role as un intellectuel bogàn (thank you to French-speaking reader “Richard" for attemping to translate the concept for me), I thought I’d do a small comparison for you all using my own debt.

Now, what National has promised me is a rebate on my student loan. What this means is that I subtract the amount of interest I need to pay on my loan from my taxable income. As I understand it that is… please correct me if I’m wrong.

So, my loan is approximately $27k, a meagre amount. I'm from the original early 1990s bunch, and can be favourably compared to many of my contemporaries, who can be toting a debt of up to $50k+. The annual interest on my amount is very approximately $1800, which I can subtract from my taxable income.

The trick is that all too often people assume that the $1800 is the amount they don’t pay in tax, but that’s not the case. In fact, the actual amount I save is the tax I would have otherwise paid on the $1800. And that amount is a trifling $450. Again, that’s the catch. The $1800 isn’t money I’d save. It’s only a taxable income rebate, not a tax deduction.

And this is where my math gets a bit iffy. Mostly because I can’t work out how much faster I would be able to repay the loan under the National policy. I think maybe a couple of years.

But this doesn’t matter at all, because the handy big red Labour calculator tells me that I get to not have to repay the EIGHTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS per annum, also pay off the total loan four years faster and save a total of SIXTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS…

Christ, as it is I already accumulated $10k of interest while I was in Aussie, and suddenly coming home to good old Godzone has paid off.

I think this fuss over difference started when I was young and foolish enough to tell my grandmother an 'Irish joke'. I'd heard the joke from a mate who lived over the back fence, and it went like this, "Why did the Irish banana factory go out of business? They threw out all the bent ones."

Now, when you're seven, jokes like that are gold. But, my grandmother did not approve. When asking her why I shouldn't tell Irish jokes, I received the reply, because I 'had Irish in me'. What? I thought. I might only be seven, but there was no way in the hell I considered myself Irish. Christ, my awareness barely stretched beyond the beach and school, let alone trying to expand out to a country I'd barely heard of, and would probably never go to.

I figured that she was most likely trying to wean out the racism early, which is ironic, considering that she was a hard-arse old Catholic bitch with a penchant for hating 'the Maoris'. But, I figure they like to start them on the right path early those Catholics, and I duly learnt my lesson. Didn't stop me telling racist jokes, I was only seven, but it did provide me with ammunition to stave of the accusation of racism, because I was making a joke about my own people, after all.

And that might well be the most important lesson of them all.

To stick with this question of the Irish, it's a good example of how when you're from what can only really be called a bastardisation of cultures, as New Zealand is, you're essentially given the choice of identifying with any number of backgrounds as the occasion permits. I've never actually been told which part of the family was Irish, I think maybe it was a great-Uncle or something, and he was a policeman, but other than that, no idea. But every St. Patrick's day? I'm as Irish as shamrock.

So how come I don't feel Irish? Or for that matter, why don't I feel British? After all, if we weren't Irish or Scots, then we must be English, or British, or some such shyte. But no, there is no way I was ever identified with any of these nationalities. Ever since I was little I've always been baffled by the attraction of my seniors to things like Coronation Street, the Monarchy, and the British Empire. To this day remember the pride the Grandfather carried his in voice when speaking about seeing the Red map, and being part of an 'Empire Upon Which the Sun Never Set'. Seemed like a lot of fuss about nothing to me.

As I grew older I came to realise that all that pride was something the oldies carried because it gave them a place in the world, and a tether to an Empire of glorious deeds. It was the nation of Winston Churchill, Admiral Horatio Nelson, the Battle of Waterloo. It was the nation that had brought civilisation to the globe. And hence all the red.

I still didn't identify though, because the myth of Empire had faded at Singapore, and disappeared across the horizon with the withdrawal beyond the Suez, and all before I came to search for my place in the world. And that place was no larger than the town in which I grew up. So my people? My people were always the New Zealanders who I found around me, who I saw every day at school, who ran the corner dairy, who occupied the houses around ours, and flocked to our town during the summer.

And none of them were British, and sure as hell none of them were freaking Irish...

I must have selectively edited the word ‘sporting’ the other day, because I immediately assumed the celebrity involved with drugs was that Hayley Westenra. After all, it’s always the quiet ones. And there’s just something about anyone who’s so damned clean cut that makes me instantly suspicious.

Of course, when I did find out I was instantly disappointed. I mean, were you surprised?

And speaking of suspicious, why in the hell is John Howard always at the that scene of terror attacks? This is not the first time extremists have struck when Johnnie is around. I have a message for the terrorists. These are directions to where Johnnie lives, it’s called Kirribilli House and it’s in SYDNEY… Leave the nice Londoners alone. I swear, if I was more conspiracy minded I’d think he was manufacturing attacks to shore up support in Australia.

The good news though is that now the people in that space can blog about it. I can see it now, “Today, I watched a big blue ball turn". “Today, I saw some clouds on the big blue ball". “Today, I heard that little Johnnie was almost run over by a bus on his morning power-walk, and then I watched the continents drift by". Riveting stuff.

But, the scandal most impressing me is the accusation that Julian Robertson is somehow covertly funding the National Party. The supremely clean-cut Dr. Brash is happy to describe Mr. Robertson as a personal friend, as the NZ Herald points out, so maybe there is some truth to the matter that Mr. Robertson might have donated a large sum of cash to the election campaign.

Now, before you go flying off the handle, I believe that this is called, ‘lobbying’. Having access to prominent political figures and donating money to their activities is hardly scandalous behaviour. In fact, it’s more commonly known as ‘normal political behaviour’. Sorry to those of you who might truly believe that politics is always conducted in the interests of the people, but no, it is not. Politics is all too often conducted in secret, and with borderline dodgy behaviour.

I’ve heard that many of the Fourth Labour Government reforms were actually argued out in the Fish and Chip shop that used to be over the road from Parliament. Or the pub.

As for the larger allegations, that the Bush Administration is secretly directing the National Party, well, I’m thinking that that is probably rubbish, but it’s a great dogwhistle all the same. Pesky damn CIA controlling the world.

There’s a conspiracy theory in Australia that the CIA was responsible for the death of the PM Harold Holt for example. Holt was opposed to the war in Vietnam you see. So, putting the pieces of the puzzle together, Helen is opposed to the war in Iraq, and the CIA is interfering with New Zealand politics…

Helen, STAY AWAY FROM THE WATER.

The bigger question is why Robertson would front with so much cash. It’s not like he has recently had an unfavourable decision from the Environment Court. Nor is there anything wrong with him buying up sizeable acreage in the South Island. Likewise, if there is opposition from some damn hippies to his redeveloping some of New Zealand’s more beautiful landscapes into gaudy playgrounds for the rich, what’s wrong with that? And lastly, if the RMA is getting the way of his plans to develop parts of New Zealand, then what’s wrong with him lobbying the National Party for change?

After all, foreign investment is what makes the New Zealand economy tick. Because you and I are such freaking spendthrifts, there simply isn’t enough domestic capital to keep the investments we need moving and Labour, like National, knows that you need guys like Robertson bringing their cash over. Whether this means that the CIA is pulling strings is another matter altogether though, and something that I’d quite like to see details of before I jump to any outrageous conclusions.

And finally, it seems that some in Australia want to ban Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Now, you want ‘PC Gone Mad’? This is the best example for years. If you’ve played the game you’ll know you can KILL anyone in the game. You can drag anyone out of any vehicle you see and BEAT THEM TO DEATH with your bare hands. You can buy/sell drugs. You can steal anything, shoot down choppers with surface-to-air missiles, and get away with it all as long as a cop doesn’t actually see you.

But if it depicts two people gettin’ jiggy? Ban it.

A weird, topsy-turvy world. Let’s ask the American space bloggers if it can be turned back up the right way. Guys, little help?

PS And sorry team, can't let on re:celebs. Besides, my info is probably mostly dodgy...

Taking a look at NRT yesterday I noticed this iconic picture and the attached byline. It is a truly great snap. Apparently the last atmospheric test at Mururoa was 1974, but it is timely reminder that nuclear testing is not some far-flung piece of imagination.

Naturally, I can’t make any explicit comment about the political ramifications of the election campaign NRT or Just Left (the source of the poster) are indicating, but the larger debate surrounding the campaign itself is fascinating to a politics geek like myself.

As someone with a passing interest in the processes of nationalism and nation-building, the one thing I see in this election campaign is the forces of said nation-building at work. The same goes for the most recent Australian election. When you’re gadding about the streets of Melbourne, the developmental direction of the Australian nation isn’t really something you think about to a great extent. Mostly it’s, where in the hell is my tram? Or, why do the ATMs only give out $50 bills? Or, god, how many pots of beer did I have, and who the hell are you?

But, around election time, when the focus of the average citizen is drawn towards the machinations of Canberra, it’s almost possible to avoid hearing leaders talking about the kind of Australian they’d like to see. We were mostly concerned with sitting outside next to the mint garden drinking bottles of Carlton Draught, watching the neighbours stroll by, and listening to ‘Permission to Land’, but that pesky damn politics just kept sneaking on in there.

Latham’s “ladder of opportunity" was an idea that particularly grabbed our imagination. In part, this was because it spoke about living in place where being born poor or different didn’t matter. If you needed a hand to get up, or were born black, yellow or Mediterranean, then Australia was the kind of place where you might find that help. Mind you, it was tempered by the statement that if you were just plain lazy then…

Howard on the other hand kind of ran a campaign aimed to discredit Labor. There was a bit of the ‘national imagining’ stuff, but basically it was without any overt statements about what the future of Australia looked like, other than as a direct continuation of the whiter Australia of the past.

There’s an author called Tom Nairn who calls this situation the ‘Janus Faces’ of nationalism. In part, nationalism and nation-building looks to the future. Statements about ‘my Australia’, or ‘our Australia’ tend to look to the way the speaker wants to see their country becoming something. Something like a place where people help each other out for example. The flipside of this approach is the way in which nationalism also looks to the past. Every good future needs to build on something from the past to provide social continuity. In a way, without our past, there can be no meaningful future.

I’m thinking that maybe that’s the reason why the reforms of Governments of both political persuasions throughout the 1980s and 90s were such a shock to many New Zealanders, because in a lot of ways we profoundly broke from our older traditions of collectivism, of helping one another, and started this new thinking of ‘me myself and I’.

It’s why the nuclear issue is so pertinent to many New Zealanders as well. In many ways, the no-nukes statement is not only an affirmation of the past we all embraced so readily during the insanity of mutually assured destruction, but it also indicates a time in our past when we stood up to the world and said we weren’t going to be the lap-dogs of any power. And in my mind that’s not a bad place for New Zealand to be, even today.

And when it comes down to brass tacks, that’s the sort of decision being made at any election. Sure, the devil is often in the details, and the habits of the bureaucracy don’t change dramatically between elections any more, but the future face of New Zealand is something we all need to think about. What kind of country do you want to live in? Because whether you realise it or not, that’s often the choice that is being presented.

Personally, I think that both faces are necessary to balance out the way today is. We need to take into account our collective pasts, and push the lessons we learn into our todays, to make better sense of how our tomorrows will become. Throwing away those lessons to enable better application of ideology and belief is a pointless exercise, and throwing away those lessons for short-term gain is foolish beyond reckoning.

Lets hear it for religion. Come on, whoo-hooo! If there's anything in the world that polarises people more than tax, then religion must be it. Actually, what in the hell am I saying, everybody hates tax.

Way back in the day, when I was merely a hazy undergraduate trying to figure out whether getting into law was a good idea or merely something I was talked into, I ended up taking a number of 'religion' papers to satisfy my curiosity. You know, they say that people tend to take up Arts majors that relate to something in their background. So people who do Politics tend to have power and control issues, economists are preoccupied with money, philosophers are intense dreamers, psychology students... well, you get the picture.

Religion had been a substantial part of my younger days, even though I myself haven't been 'religious' since I started to become self-aware just prior to puberty (and no, not 'self-aware' in a grubby way, more the point at which my social awareness started to kick in). Growing up in small town New Zealand usually means that being exposed to Christianity of varying sorts is kind of par for the course, whether you were swept in up in Evangelism or just plain dragged along to listen to a lot of Catholic dirges every Easter.

Learning about the greater religious experience was therefore something I needed to get out of my system, if not only so that I could make a concrete interpretation of all the kinds of religion I experienced in my less-that-twenty-years in the Mount. As I say, once my social awareness kicked in then rote-learning a bunch of morality just plain conflicted with all the things my (unusual) immediate family taught me about the world outside the boundaries of my town, and indeed, my country. Having one uncle who's a committed Hare Krishna, another who's a committed atheist, another who's a committed hedonist, and another who's a spiritual healer all kind of confused matters for a young fulla.

Actually, learning about religion in this way is one of the reasons I advocate better education for just about everyone, besides the fact that it made "John Safran Vs. God" even funnier (C4 Tuesday nights, a must see), it kind of demystified many of the things that are said about 'alien' religions.

Consequently, I now know that many of the things currently being spouted about Islam are stereotypes and/or outright lies, and learnt lots of disturbing things about Christianity that the church-going types like to keep under wraps. One great passage I read from some Eight Century Islamic scholars called Christianity "the people of the three gods" (father, son, holy ghost), and talked about them being "ruled by a god-king" (the Pope). They were also "barbarous pigs" who wallowed in filth while his city had running water.

This isn't the place to engage in a historical debate about these claims being true or not, but the perspective that scholar brought was profoundly influential on my undergraduate mind. For one thing, it shattered many of the illusions and mythology I'd bought into about my Judeo-Christian background. Hell, about our J-C background.

It seems to me that this is what is missing from the arguments of many of the people who vigorously demand more and greater input for religion in our politics. While I'm on the subject, and having mentioned C4, it might be good for the station (or maybe the other alternative station, Māori TV) to pick up a very good documentary called "With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America". If you've ever wondered just how much power a concerted religious movement in can acquire, you might want to watch it. In fact, you need to watch it.

Like I say, our laws and morality are already pretty much dominated by the guidelines established within Christianity. Which has long lead me to believe that the drive for more influence by Evangelists or Fundamentalists is really a demand for the power to impose these values on members of our society who aren't following them closely enough.

And frankly, that's a little frightening. Why? Not because J-C values are at all bad, except for the ones that are all too out of place in the Twenty-First Century, but because imposing anything almost automatically means that someone in our society is likely to be left on the outer. And if history has demonstrated anything again and again it's that marginalization, has "bad" outcomes for the group out in the cold.

To follow up on my rant from last week, there are groups and political leanings in this country that aren't too concerned if minorities are left on the outer in this way. In all likelihood having to deal with them would result in having to open their minds to 'alien' or 'new' ways of doing or understanding things. And when they are more often than not unwilling to question the infallibility of their own religion, what hope for a better life will be given to the people they close out of our society? And what hope will there be for our society to improve by understanding how they see us?

Do we really want the type of suppressive stagnancy that characterised New Zealand in the mid-Twentieth Century to return?