Club Politique by Che Tibby

The annoying thing about being a public servant is of course the public service code of conduct. Annoying because when you find out really juicy information, or get a new perspective on something interesting you simply cannot take it to the public. It's a conflict of interest that ensures that a reasonable number of subjects are simply off limits to me.

Of course, were I to praise the Government on a subject they're bound not to notice that I'm discussing an issue. Unless of course I either cause a fuss, or am too flattering. No one likes a sycophant. But it does mean that I can't actually do the opposite and directly criticise the Government of the day in this, a public forum. If we're talking at the pub I could probably tell you what I really think about the Foreshore and Seabed Act, but this is not the time or place.

Worse still, because there is a chance that the current opposition parties could become the next Government I am also expected not to alienate them by my actions. The story is that, as a public servant, I am expected to retain the confidence of all political factions. Political neutrality is of course the best way to maintain this. I'm increasingly finding myself actually adopting political agnosticism, and if any residual partisan leanings show it's more a chance of a leopard not being able to change his spots.

The upshot is that you can't actually criticise anyone too harshly. Which is not very much fun.

What this all boils down to is the simple fact that I'm not paid to represent the opinions of either the Government or the Opposition. I am in fact paid to go to a building in the city and eat lunch. Between the to-ing and fro-ing from the place I eat lunch and the place I sleep/watch TV/shower/etc I handle a number of documents about public service stuff and try to make things easier for you, the citizen.

It is exhilarating.

I have had it explained to me a number of times that my job is supposed to be a little boring, and completely uncontroversial. If it wasn't boring a member of the public might notice me, or what I'm doing when I'm not eating lunch, and talk about it with a member of the media. And the media are evil. And over-excitable.

But sometimes it's a bit like having a bag of lollies and trying to not let a group of five year olds know about them. The minute those little fuckers find out about the lollies, no one gets any peace for many hours. And my job is therefore to keep the lollies well out of sight, and therefore out of mind.

We in the public service just keep the nation running nice and quietly, without anyone noticing or causing a fuss. None of this 'waving of the arms', or running around making too much noise, or talking to those pesky children in the press gallery.

Consequently I cannot go into depth about people that I consider a bunch of freaking whingers kicking up a fuss about nothing at all.

I can however ask, on a sociological level, what happened to the stoic farming man?

Here we are in the public service, just minding our own business, trying to efficiently manage the interests of near-four-million and one group decides that they get to be the exception to the rule and kick up a ungodly fuss. Barry Crump would shed a tear for the death of the real New Zealander. If was sober enough to figure out what in the hell was going on. Which was never a given.

My former political self would say, "Just chip the damn dogs and stop bitching will you? The 80s, when farmers ran this country, was a long, long time ago". You're not in charge any more.

I am. Me and a few thousand people paid to sit quietly, eat our sandwiches, and listen to the public piss and moan about anything and everything, while administering sage advice.

Here's another gripe. How is it that farmers will be the first to demand that we get rid of 'the PC', get 'solo mums' spayed, stop listening to 'the maoris' and put an end to hand-outs, but be the first in line for public money when a cyclone hits?

It seems they have not heard of insurance.

To try to rein in my annoyance, I will admit that turning to the gubbermint for a solution a soon as the slightest misfortune hits seems to be a natural Kiwi trait. The Crown does always seem to have this air of the potentially good big brother, the one who sorts out the bad guys.

But that said, and to be as balanced as poss I'll likely start documenting cases I notice of people looking to the government to sort shit out when they really just need to get their act together. And I probably should have done so before I drafted the blog.

Any good examples people have noticed will be greatly appreciated, in that case... Please sign in triplicate, here, here, and... oh yeah... here.

In response to Metics Twelve I received a note from Michael, who pointed out that dealing with diversity is hardly a modern phenomena. And he's right. There's a political philosopher called Ernest Gellner, pretty much one of the doyen of the study of nationalism, who argues that many of the pre-modern empires adapted to the reality of diversity by utilising what could be called 'vertical integration'.

I'm simplifying this a lot, but Gellner noticed that most of the old empires tended to be characterised by vertical 'strata' that separated groups, usually with their own elites. These ethnic silos were in turn governed by one horizontal group that sat across the top of the strata and were the 'natural leaders' of a given sovereign territory. He goes on to argue that around the time of the industrial revolution a new idea was brought to bear, nationalism. This new type of society sought to capture the energy of the fractured empires by encouraging everyone to identify with the culture of the imperial elite. Bretons and Basques were encouraged to become Frenchmen, Scots and Welsh to become English.

Once again, I'm simplifying this a great deal, but nationalism was an idea that really took hold as the industrial revolution got up a head of steam, and had well and truly overtook Europe, and the rest of the globe, by the time the First World War had rolled round.

In a nutshell, the old system of hierarchical 'vertical' integration of empires couldn't complete with the new horizontally integrated states. Assimilation and the minimisation of diversity was an idea that worked well, and delivered very real outcomes for Western Europe. But despite having become the norm it was an idea that was starting to come under serious scrutiny by the 1970s.

What nationalism assumed was that social equality could be achieved by educating and socialising the range of individuals in a state into a relatively uniform identity. Where older empires tended to create a range of rules and exceptions for each ethnic minority (the Ottoman Empire for example), these new things called "nation-states" reached new levels of efficiency and cohesion by focussing attention on the one nation.

As I say, by the 1970s this system had pretty much reached with zenith. Despite years of attempts to overwrite minority identities they had not entirely disappeared in any nation-state world-wide. In the search for solutions to this issue of pesky non-assimilating minorities the main idea taken up was called 'multiculturalism' and the exemplar of the model was in my humble opinion Australia, as mentioned in Metics Twelve.

The Australian example is very interesting though, because what it demonstrated was that assimilation is not really a one-way road. Despite trying to turn a huge variety of metic identities into dinky-di Aussies, the process of doing so profoundly influenced the majority nation, and produced a number of shifts in the nature of Australian identity. Out the door went the emphasis on the exclusively British nature of the Australian people, and in came a more nuanced national mythology of the 'welcoming British settler'.

However, this story was not all roses and big warm hugs from Mediterranean men with giant moustaches. While the migrant metic was conversely welcome and alienated in Australia another group, Aboriginal people, was only alienated. Doubtless the influence of the Aboriginal is present in contemporary Australia, witness the wonderful token dance troops and outback guides in the "Where the bloody hell are you?" ads, but the substance of Aboriginality is not.

And that's the rub. What we have in multiculturalism is a method devised to accommodate the larger project of homogenising populations. The nation-state is a political system built around the idea of a single-identity group that has the sole right to govern. Another author called Wimmer calls nation-states a perpetual cultural compromise. When a group is introduced to a nation the majority makes subtle adjustments in the way it does things to make the other group welcome, and then absorbs it with minimal disruption to the larger nation-state. Wimmer provided a number of examples of this, and Australia could easily have been one of them.

Where multiculturalism falls over though is when placed next to minorities disinterested in assimilating into the majority. In other words, permanent metics.

It's an issue that Australia still has not solved. Although it really wants to make things better for Aboriginal people its default setting for minorities is, 'make them happy, and turn them into Australians'. But Aboriginal people keep insisting on remaining metics, while also being full Australian citizens.

This sends politicians into frenzies, and causes liberal philosophers no end of confusion. Because to be a citizen you have to be 'the same', but being a metic means you're not. And the answer to this has eluded thinkers for a fair old while.

And that's where I come in, if I could be so humble.

Nationalism and liberalism, two great Western traditions of thought, are usually considered antithetical. But I'm not so sure. Although classical liberalism is all about the individual, and classical nationalism is all about subsuming the individual into the collective whole, the tenets of both are essentially the same.

Unfortunately though, I am out of space here, just for now.

The main difference between Melbourne and Wellington at this time of year seems to be flowers. While Wellington is a world greener, Melbourne is still covered in a variety of summer flowers. Which is very nice, and particularly pleasant.

Fortunately the place warmed up a little by ANZAC day, and I got to spend a little time in the outdoors getting around looking at stuff. All in all a very pleasing.

Something else fun was hanging out with a few of the people I once worked with at the restaurant. Back in the darkest of study days it was the crew at La Luna that really carried my sorry arse with long, wine-fuelled conversations after closing and promises of better days to come.

It's true that groups who spend a long time working together, or who go through traumatic experiences tend to bond closely in a way that can only be compared to family. And Luna was a family to us all for a while there. From the nutcases in the kitchen to the control freaks on the floor, the common bond was perception that the customer really is "out to get you".

Not that this is the strangest thing I've ever heard though, stranger still was the waiter who was obsessed with the idea that gingas are "cursed by the baby jesus". I wasn't sure where she got the idea from, as funny as it is. For one thing she's from the South Island, and New Zealand does seem to have an extraordinary number of redheads compared to Australia, so you think she'd learn to cope? As we all do. I'm thinking the Aussies got all the Irish, and we got the Scots. So maybe the waiter just had an issue with Janet Frame? Who knows.

The traumatic experience thing relates to that bond between blokes that forms in those unique situations of hardship. I mention this because while wandering around buying cheap shoes (Adidas, one pair, brand new, $60...) I needed a wee rest and a cinema hove into view. Seen as the only film on any time soon was Kokoda, the Aussie tribute to the diggers in dubya-dubya-two, I parted with my cash and sat down.

I shouldn't have bothered. What was a great opportunity to relate a potentially great story degraded into an Australian version of Platoon. They could have just dubbed the latter with Ocker accents and have been done with it.

Ah well. Once I got out of there I went back to enjoying the necessity to not go someplace and shoot other blokes, and bought some trousers. Which I managed to stuff up royally. I bought this blue pair, and upon getting them home realised they were unnaturally tight in the region of the buttocks. Knowing that this was likely to draw some unnecessary attention I took them back and attempted to trade them.

So this is what you need to know. I traded the blue trousers for a kind of chocolately-brown pair. This was because they were the only pair in the store that fit my ape-longish legs. Unfortunately, I had bought a pair of chocolately-brown trousers the day before. I was also already in the possession of a pair I bought just after Christmas. So I now own three pairs of trousers that look pretty much... exactly the same.

This is my tribute to masculinity.

What I should have spent the money on was new undies... I got home to find that the washing machine couldn't process the backlog fast enough, and had to dip into the emergency supply. You know the ones. They live in seclusion at the back of the undies draw on account of their ugliness. The elastic is gone. They're likely a little stained, a little torn, a little manky. But when wash-day runs around and there's potentially nothing between you and an unfortunate introduction of zipper to oldfulla, out they come.

But sometimes a bloke just has to prioritise his spending. As it was one of my chocolately-trousers, selected because they conveniently hide the majority of stains, was a little too large in the waist. I checked out K-Mart for a belt, but they were hugely expensive at $15! I wandered into the emporium version of a cheap and cheerful and found what is possibly the greatest belt ever, for $5!. The buckle has a central bit that can flip between a faux-Harley-Davidson emblem... and a Mexican flag.

So why the Mexican flag?

Because all the best fun is South of the Border, baby!

(Oh, and I also bought a T-Shirt that says, "The Man, The Legend". You know the ones. Even better than a BBQ apron that says, "Please kiss the Chef").

Ghosts. It’s difficult to know what to say about them. Certainly I’m not the type to believe in creepy-crawly, ‘boo’-type ghosts, but I do believe ghosts exist.

Here’s the rub. Like I may have said before, places change gradually over time (as do people), but memories of places remain for many years. Once I talked with you about the way it felt to wander the streets of Wellington after a long absence, and the way it felt to be a part of a new place that evoked old memories and past events. It is the shadows of things that have been that I see as ghosts.

Ghosts are shadows of former selves that lodge themselves in our memories, only to stir when the right trigger manifests. They sit there unnoticed and quiet, only to rise up into our consciousness when they’re called to tie us to the people we were.

There’s another way to liken it. Have you ever met an old friend after years of absence and you don’t immediately recognize them? It happens to me sometimes that I’ll hold someone’s face in my memory, but when I see then after a long separation they’re completely different. What usually happens is that their face will kind of ‘pull into focus’ as my mind replaces the memory with the way they now appear. I always find it a strange and slightly disconcerting experience, but seen as it happens time and again it must be normal, right? At least for me that is.

A ghost is a different kind of disconcerting, but similar because it is overtaken by the here and now, and I mention it because I’m writing this in a pub in Melbourne. Besides the fact that it’s goddamned freezing in this city you’ll need to know that I’ve been away from Melbourne for about a year, and I’m back in town to drop off a copy of the thesis to my supervisor (as promised, a very long time ago).

You should also know that I was miserable when I left here. Absolutely. Fucking. Miserable.

So it’s strange to be back. Strange because all those memories of who and where I was have all but faded into my new life in Wellington, but there’s still this residual ‘something’ that’s hanging around about my time here. Not a bad something, but a set of memories of places and things that have changed, in some cases beyond recognition, in the short time since I left.

In other words, the ghosts of a former life remain, but both who I am and what this place is like have changed.

Yesterday I told a friend that the world is no bigger than the width of one’s arms, and in a selfish sense that is true, but in another way it’s wrong. Because I have proof the world ticks over daily without my intervention. So while the ghosts of my memory travel with me, the real world beyond my fingertips ticks over, unaided.

I find that both comforting and disconcerting, because it’s good to know that change will always await me whenever I travel to and from my former lives, and bad because it makes me wonder about all those lives I could have lead had my path been different.

Ghosts are to my mind these reminders we place for ourselves on the landscapes we inhabit. Sure I’m selfish enough to believe that the things I reach are all there is in the world, but I bring with me the people I’ve know and the things I’ve seen. They provide me with guidance and reassurance, and allow me to preserve the memory of times I’ll never experience again (or wish to again, in some instances).

All in all? It’s been a good few days, I know now I’ve slaked off the history that forced me out of here and back home. I can tell that the ghosts of what was this life have faded into the background. It’s a good feeling, liberating.

Wish I brought my heavy coat though, this place is making Wellington seem positively tropical.

Since my last engagement with the issue of the Māori seats, National has again attempted to depict the racial divide as something we all need to be concerned about. The good news for everyone is that it just didn't really fly this time. Even attempts to dogwhistle this one on a centre-right blog only garnered about seven comments.

The mention of the matter piqued my interest though, so I took the time to track down Prof. Jack Vowles of Auckland University. Jack has a long track record writing and studying electoral politics, and currently heads up the New Zealand Election Study, and is a great place to start if you're interested in the actual details of how all the MMP elections have shaped up.

I'll get to the commentary, but let's start with the guts of the questions Jack answered about the nature of the Māori seats, and that pesky overhang.

Dr. Che It's common in the blogsphere for people to accuse the Māori seats of being anti-democratic for a number of reasons, and for these same commentators to claim that vote-splitting aggravates this 'gerrymandering'. While the seats do have lower turn-outs than general electorates, and slightly lower populations (and consequently return members on lower numbers), I can't see how that constitutes a gerrymander?

Prof. Vowles It's not [a gerrymander]. We don't draw electoral boundaries based on the numbers who vote, but instead on the basis of 'electoral population' that includes people who may not vote (including children!). If we allocated Māori seats on the basis of voters only, but drew general electorate boundaries on the basis of electoral population, that would be racial discrimination.

Dr. Che More what I'm trying to drive at is the 'ethnic gerrymander' argument floated by opponents of the Māori seats. If the seats are an inappropriate aggregation of a 'natural political community' of some sort, then there is the chance that it is a gerrymander, despite being procedurally fair.

Prof. Vowles The concept of an 'ethnic gerrymander' doesn't stand up. The overhang is an artefact of MMP and keeping the Māori seats under that system - which the Royal Commission recommended abandoning. It's a problem for both MMP and Māori politics - the overhang does raise legitimacy issues that Māori should be careful about but no one planned it as such. [Consequently, t]he Māori Party needs to be careful that it is not seen as seeking to exploit the overhang excessively.

Dr. Che Obviously it was split voting that caused the current overhang, and in another blog I tried to argue that vote splitting is not characteristic of the Māori seats. Put very simply, enough citizens voted for Māori Party candidates to ensure that, in proportion to the nationwide vote, they were due four seats had they not split their votes.

Prof. Vowles Well, it's simply not the case. The Māori Party would have only got three seats on the basis of the party vote alone, which is calculated as close to proportionality as is possible in the circumstances. The extra seat is an overhang, and if this goes further - as it could - proportionality will suffer even more from high split voting in Māori seats.

Split voting, as you say, happens in general electorates too for similar reasons - but not so far to the extent of an overhang [this is because a party like ACT may win one seat, but have enough Party votes to ensure they have their share, two seats. Had ACT won three electorates on the same Party vote, the last seat would have been an overhang].

Dr. Che Your reply suggests that the Māori seats do incline voters towards voting for a particular party.

Is there any indication that Māori voting is effected by the (relative) ethnic homogeneity of the seats? Or do you think that recent split voting is a reaction to the somewhat 'anti-Māori' campaign conducted by National et al?

Prof. Vowles Voting among Māori in the Māori seats is different than that among Māori on the general roll. But this is a selection effect. By and large, Māori on the Māori roll identify more strongly as Māori and with a specifically Māori politics.

Dr. Che I see, so do we have any data or information about voting among Māori not on the Māori roll? Do they vote in much the same patterns as other voters?

Prof. Vowles We have data from the 1999 Māori Election Study - Māori on the general roll tend to vote more like non-Māori.

Dr. Che I realise that Māori have traditionally favoured Labour, but is there any evidence that this behaviour continues because of habit? Or are there indicators that Māori continue to vote for this party because of a lack of viable alternatives?

Prof. Vowles In the past, the main non-selection effect on Māori voting on the Māori roll has been low turnout - because the seats were safe Labour, under FPP there was less incentive to vote. Under MMP, that's changed, but the pattern of lower Māori turnout generated under FPP survives to some extent as a kind of historical 'footprint'. [FPP is the pre-MMP system]

Māori have traditionally voted Labour because Māori were working class and/or welfare beneficiaries and voted Labour for the same reasons as Pakeha in those positions. In addition, there was the Ratana effect and a lot of work put in by Labour politicians at the elite level from the 30s onward.

Māori are less likely to vote Labour now because they were really annoyed by the foreshore/seabed legislation. National['s post-Orewa policies] had an 'egging on' role in this to some extent, but National is peripheral in Māori politics.

Dr. Che Finally, what is your thought in response to the suggestion that the best solution to this issue may well be better campaigning in the Māori seats by National? At the last general election National received a paltry <1% of its party vote in the Māori seats, with numbers of ballots cast being much the same as 2002. Meanwhile, Labour received <8% of its party vote in these same electorates (with NZF receiving much the same proportion).

Perhaps the issue isn't the 'ethnic gerrymander' problem, but the lack of campaigning?

Prof. Vowles National could campaign as much as it liked in the Māori seats but I doubt it would have much success unless it developed policies and linkages with Māori that would give Māori more incentive to vote National. "One law for all" is hardly going to do that. National would have to change its policy stance, and I don't see that happening in a major way. As far as Māori are concerned, National is a minor party not much more attractive to them as Act is to New Zealanders in general!

What I gleaned from the question/answer emails is that the overhang isn't so much a direct product of the Māori seats, rather a natural feature of MMP exacerbated by tactical voting. Consequently what could be seen as alliance-building, encouraging constituents to split votes to aid potential coalition partners, ends up producing an overhang.

And interestingly the inability of one major party, National, to appeal to these constituents means that the voters are likely to always vote against them, increasing the likelihood of an overhang that favours their opponents.

So if we abolish the Māori seats voters formerly on the Māori role are likely to vote against National, because the party currently offers no appeal to this constituency. So we might not get an overhang, but National would find it harder to win a number of electorates.

At present these people are 'confined' to the Māori roll, but this seems to favour National. The impact of this 'confinement' on General Roll seats with high numbers of voters on the Māori roll should be obvious, as it was under the old FPP system. We might not have had to deal with John Banks, for starters.

What I would like to offer though is an interesting scenario. Let's pretend that National had campaigned in the Māori seats, with policies that appealed to this distinct constituency. Obviously we can't know the outcome of this, because it may not have resulted in so many votes for Māori Party, it may have resulted in dramatically fewer votes for Labour (because they didn't present the only viable coalition partner), National had a strategy of actively suppressing minor parties, there is always variation in voting patterns between seats... the permutations go on forever.

But if you bear with me, even with the traditional low turn-out the Māori seats offered over 79,000 votes for the two major parties in 2005. When the difference between Labour and National was as few as 45,000 votes, you've got to wonder what would have happened if National had campaigned with policies to win the votes on offer. As it was they won less than 6,000 votes in these seven seats. The assumption they could have won half of those 79,000 is probably too large, but even 20,000 would have made a difference to their overall vote.

In fact, using the calculator at the Electoral Commissions website and assuming all other variables to remain the same, a swing of 20,000 votes in the Māori seats would have given one further list seat to National. The less likely "half of the major party votes from the Māori electorates" would have would have given National two list seats, and taken two from Labour.

Perhaps wedge politics isn't quite the right strategy?