Club Politique by Che Tibby

Happy Easter people, and don't forget about the baby Jesus (oh, and I couldn't resist copying Keith's very humorous bylines).

After attending the 'Public Sector blogger' discussion at the National Archives last week I thought I'd better give you all a run down of what was said. Especially in relation to the important question: "that suppression order, and writing about stuff when you aren't technically supposed to have an opinion". Problematically, I wanted to also try to finally give you the run-down on where I reckon all the best noodles are.

A conundrum it seems. Let me answer this problem by just stating the obvious. Eat more fowl. You know the little bastards are asking for it. With their beady little eyes and freakish-skinned feet...

For those of you who aren't here for the noodle talk, just skip past the blockquote.

One good place is HK Cafe on Cambridge Terrace. The décor is conversely hip or tacky depending on which way you're facing in the restaurant, but the BBQ duck on rice is a great deal at $9.50. And seriously tasty. They also do a very reasonably priced dumpling soup that should not be overlooked. Although, I discovered last night that the wonton noodle soup is the exorbitant price of $10.50! All in all though it's the most authentic restaurant of its type I've encountered in Wellington.

The next, and little-known, place is Tans BBQ. With no street frontage it's not easy to find, and hides in behind the Fish N' Chip place next to the A-Mart over the road from New World. To be honest? The BBQ Duck soup ($8.50) is served simply and in foam bowls, but the duck far surpasses HK Cafe. There are too many noodles in there, and the décor is pretty much "Alley-chic", but who the hell cares?

For simple wonton noodle soups I'd recommend two separate places. Upstairs at whatsamathingo in Manners Mall, and Basin Noodles on Adelaide Rd. The former involves trying not to look like you've been into the porno stores when you go to leave the building, but they do a great lunch. What I'd consider 'real' egg noodles, decent amounts of BBQ pork, and a great chicken broth. The latter has the exact same dish, but far, far better. For the glorious price of $6.5 you get to share a table with a stranger in a slightly dingy premises and indulge in probably the best noodles in town. I've eaten there a number of times, and you're guaranteed to get a huge bowl of noodles topped with shrimp, BBQ pork, home-made wontons, the works. But! In an extra bonus you also (on occasion, it's a bit erratic) get some kind of savoury chilli sauce and a type of vinegar to garnish the dish. Fantastic.

Ok. Now for serious business. The public sector bloggers talk I attended last Thursday was interesting. It was myself, Tom from WellUrban, Hayden from Grabthars Hammer, and Geoff of Thorndon Bubble, and we ranged across a number of subjects.

I had kind of wanted to expand the issue of free speech and the obligation to adhere to the Public Service Code of Conduct, but we never really got round to it. As it turns out I pretty much said everything I needed to say back in November of last year, and I still concur with many of the points I made in that post. And that includes the effective suppression of a democratic voice the Code of Conduct creates.

The Nichols case featured fairly heavily in discussion though, which is hardly surprising considering the timing. I'm drawing a long bow, but in a way the Code of Conduct acts like a suppression order because it ensures that particular ideas and knowledge are not discussed openly in the public sphere. Sure people will discuss their gripes and ideas between friends, but airing these ideas in public is not advisable.

By way of example, a few weeks ago I learned the details of the emails that are/were being circulated about the Nichols case, but did not air them here. You can guarantee that it would have pushed my readership through the roof, as Farrar is doing (and as is common to many bloggers), but do I really need that much attention?

The simple fact of the matter is that, despite the suppression order, cops are just not the sort of people you want to fuck with. My most recent official interactions with police have been on the whole very positive, but growing up in the parochial atmosphere of Mount Maunganui in the 70s and 80s the very last people you involved in your life were the local cops. Two phrases spring to mind, when thinking about the local constabulary in the old days of the tit on the head, "thugs", and "god-complex".

So I won't say anything about the allegations of rape Nichols levelled, and the matter has been settled by the Court. What did interest me, and what was not discussed at the blogger discussion at the Archives, is the morality of the defendants. It was publicised that the jury were asked not to consider the question of the immorality of the defendant's behaviour, and Russell mentioned this the other day.

What in the hell were they thinking? There's a good chance that they were unaware of what they were doing, being themselves "young, dumb and full of [expletive]" as the saying goes, but doesn't their behaviour sounds a lot like grooming? I'm no shrinking violet myself, but what these guys were up to is not the sort of behaviour I'd encourage any son of mine to engage in.

Whether they choose to exercise it or not, cops possess extraordinary levels of power compared to the average bloke. A guy I know despises fireman because they use the hero image to pull chicks (when in fact they spend most of their time growing moustaches), and cops have long had the same kind of aura. Choosing to use that power to manipulate what was effectively a child into extraordinary sexual behaviour is almost despicable.

I know that at the age of 17 Nichols was legally an adult, and should have had more ability to control the situations she found herself in, but what we the public don't seem to have been privy to are the finer details of the defendant's behaviour surrounding their direct interaction with Nichols. Was there any systematic abuse of their role as police to gain access to other women for example? Did any interaction that could have amounted to grooming of Nichols occur, and was it inadmissible?

As I say, all these details are probably buried in the case somewhere, and I have no access to them. Hopefully someone else out there has the info, and the ability to shed greater light on this case so that everyone can learn from the wreckage of these people's lives. I know I've already learned the wisdom of the phrase, "don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys".

PS And speaking of cowboys, can anyone tell me how seriously to take this article? Because it scares the piss out of me. Rumours of a plan to use nukes against Iran? WTF?

Once upon a time you didn't have to think about things we're calling metics because any alien in your country was expected to get their act together and assimilate as soon as possible. The fact that this was all too often all but impossible tended to be overlooked by proponents of this model though.

The basis of the model was the presence of what we've called the 'majority nation', the 'normal' group within a country. The idea was that if you had more than one identity group within a given territory all you had to do was 'social engineer' this thing called 'a nation'. In time this nation thing would become the main point of identification and all this ethnic conflict and hullabaloo would fade away.

Nice idea... didn't work.

Today when public voices speak about the idea of 'one nation' or 'one people' it's this idea they're referring to. And why didn't it work? Mostly because history caught up with the imagined future the of Enlightenment philosophers who created the concept.

Back in the day population movements were relatively slow, and when you had a given territory you could control the people and ethnicities living within it. But as the centuries advanced life and commerce just became so damn fast that attempts to clearly distinguish between ethnicities started to prove fruitless.

Not that this stopped the really really keen from putting this 'spiffing idea' into practice though. Over time we've had terms like 'the civilising mission', 'assimilation', and 'integration' applied to the perceived need to homogenise populations. Even today's liberal intelligensia can be accused of a similar kind of dogmatism in relation to liberal ideas like 'human rights'.

I know that last bit is controversial, but what I'm trying to get at is the way in which it's easy to assume that your way of doing things, and your group's perceptions of the world are the only 'true' way to interpret life. Any philosophical liberal who applies his theory too rigorously is guilty, in my humble opinion, of a weak variety of the excesses that plagued indigenous people and non-European nations during the height of the Age of Colonialism.

It's at this point that we return to Metics Eleven. Once colonial majority nations (like the one's that make up the British Commonwealth) woke up to the fact that their efforts to engineer homogenous populations were failing, new methods to accommodate diverse populations had to be devised. And in a big kudos to the other side of the ditch, the most successful example of this accommodation in the modern world was Australia.

As late as the 1970s Australia had something like 40% of their total population born outside of the country. And something like 70% had at least one parent who had been born overseas. For many commentators of the time these statistics were a time bomb waiting to happen. But nothing bad happened. There were a few riots by disaffected migrants left in bush camps till work could be found, but there was no great or unusual upheaval.

So that leaves us asking, 'why?'

The answer is pretty simple really. The majority nation, in this case the dinky-di, meat pie and a beer, formerly British Ocker, decided that something had to be done about the issue and introduced this radical new idea called 'multiculturalism'.

In a nutshell the old assimilation ideas simply were not working. There was a growing body of literature demonstrating very clearly that migrants were suffering discrimination, poor outcomes in health and education, social isolation (especially among migrant women), and rising rates of crime. A new approach was needed.

These people, or metics, were Australian citizens (or permanent residents who had yet to receive the rubber stamp and a passport) but simply weren't 'real' Australians. Efforts had been made to try to turn them into authentic Aussies, but even the second generation was all too often experiencing the same hardships as their parents.

What multiculturalism did was fundamentally alter the way the majority looked at and treated the group. The desired outcome remained the same, the conversion of metics into proper citizens, but the methods changed to suit the minority. In effect the old assimilation model was turned on its head, and questions were no longer asked about how best to force migrants to become more Australian, and instead the focus shifted to how best to use the migrants introduced cultures and languages to encourage them to better engage with the majority.

And it was the engagement that was the key that actively prevented things from getting out of control. By making an appropriate amount of room in the 'British Australian way of doing things' for a few different viewpoints and methods, migrants of a variety of colours and backgrounds were rapidly assimilated without resistance.

Of course, this engagement profoundly affected the flavour of the Australian nation because it is a two-way street, but that's for another day.

PS And the other note from today still applies.

For those of you with an interest in ‘the new media’ there’s an interesting seminar on tomorrow night at Archives New Zealand. Here’s a link.

Apparently it’s four bloggers who work in the public sector talking, and none of them are David Farrar! The reason for that should be obvious.

Well I’d be lying if I said that a bunch of skinny white guys doing the haka at the drop of the hat wasn’t a good thing. In the grand scheme of things mainstream New Zealanders becoming more Polynesian is a very good outcome. Sure there’s a chance they have no freaking idea what that particular haka actually means, but just the fact that they choose to express their nationality in something more seven syllables, three of which are ‘oi’, gives us the edge.

And there was a lot of passion in ‘The Haka’. Which seems to be what haka are all about, based on my limited knowledge.

What I do wish though is that teams went the whole hog, and actually performed their own haka. It’s really not difficult. Just go and spend some a bit of cash on a choreographer. Then instead of Ka Mate, Ka Mate, which has become something of a national anthem, you can have a suitable haka that will scare the piss out of your opponents. You know, something for that athletic toughness.

Anyhow, enough sour grapes. I mention all this because after years of trying unsuccessfully to find some rumoured classes in Melbourne I attended my first te reo course here in Wellington. Did you know that Urewera can be translated “hot cock”? Me neither. I’ll admit to being a little shocked. I was however familiar with tutaekuri, “dog crap”. The things you learn when translating place names…

The upshot is that after years of berating people about not being sufficiently bicultural (or paying lip service to Māori culture) I’m putting some time into making sure I’m not a hypocrite. I’ll see if I can’t actually work a little reo into Club Politique, once I learn more than “Ko Che tōku ingoa”.

But this doesn’t mean that people don’t still require a little berating. So, as a public service I think I’ve come up with a little idea that is going to make everyone’s life a lot easier.

You know how sometimes people do or say things that you simply can’t believe? They say ridiculous things, or volunteer to give up a couple of hours of their life to do nothing useful. And all you want to do to these people is hit them on the head. Not like a punch or a wallop, nothing that would actually hurt them. More like the slap on the back of the head that guy on the Moro ad gives the other guy when he doesn’t want to go swimming with those two hotties. Like the slap you want to give that guy on the BP coffee ad, were he chucks the friendly Russian girl out of the car to go have ‘a coffee’ all by himself.

Thing is, hitting people can be misconstrued. Willy-nilly hitting of people on the head is likely to not go down too well at the office for example. Unless… and this is the clincher… unless you have some sanctioned medium to administer this hitting. Something that everybody knows is legit. In a situation like that you need a something, something like a little stick, you can give that munter a wee tap to the back of the head, and he’ll know what the go is.

Obviously it can’t be a hardwood or too big, or too small, and has to be well-recognised as a friendly reminder that “you’re talking crazy”. And for this administering of common sense I’m thinking of selling a handy item we can all recognise. After all, there are plenty of times when you need to Keep A Stick Handy. Yup. KASH is the answer you’re looking for there fella. KASH for everyone.

Your mate says, “I’d like to write a PhD!”, the stick, and maybe twice, just for good measure.

Someone suggests they might like to hang out with or join the Exclusive Brethren, give them the stick, and quickly. A friend recently had a run-in with a Brethren involving a near-sexual harassment. So maybe a little more stick for those dodgy bastards as well.

Someone suggests they might buy tickets to go see Russell Crowe’s new band play, get the stick out.

Some athlete decides to haka at the drop of a hat. Show them the stick, and point them to someplace to learn a unique one.

Someone suggests our sporting types need a little more mongrel in them? The stick.

Could be a winner I think. But I could just be asking for a tap myself.

PS. While I think of it, the promised restaurant reviews are coming. In fact I’m just nipping out to a favourite, Basin Noodles on Adelaide Road. So hang tight.