Club Politique by Che Tibby

As I suggested the other day, this idea of the nation is predicated on some kind of mutual acceptance of belonging, one that reinforces our relationship to one another by recognition that we each share a non-quantifiable 'something' that makes us what we say we are.

It hasn't always been this way of course. The old version of nationalism, the kind that gave rise to National Socialism, or contributed to the tragedies of the Balkans, is centred on a much more narrow imagining of 'the nation'. More often than not, when you hear people talking, or ranting, about the 'evils of nationalism', they're talking about a kind of nationalism based on quite exclusive variables, like family. What really distinguishes old-school nations is this idea of 'blood' as the primary means of determining membership.

So, if you live in a nation-state where citizenship is mostly determined by descent, then not being a citizen is pretty easy to figure out. Was my mum/dad a citizen? No? Then I'm not a citizen.

But modern nations don't work like that, in places like the USA and Australia, both world leaders in inclusive citizenship, pretty much anyone can become a citizen if they meet certain arbitrary requirements. And this is the old melting pot idea.

So there you have two types of nation. One sourced in descent, another in a kind of 'rubber-stamped' citizenship. Both however experience nationalism, and both experience nation-building. Without nation-building, the differences of the myriad persons introduced to migrant nation-states would eventually result in social collapse, and nationalism is the ideology that underpins the process.

In itself, nationalism isn't a problem. But when harnessed to other types of social or political phenomena, such as racism, or authoritarianism, then it becomes something else altogether.

What both types of nation, and any variant of the two you might care to uncover, have in common is this the type of mutual authentication we talked about in Metics Six. Sometimes, in historic periods of stress for example, this mutual authentication is openly exploited by leaders for political or military ends. Appeals to 'real' citizens, or against 'false' or impure citizens, are not unusual in many nation-states.

I'd like to argue that having this type of affiliation between citizens is actually a good thing though, while exploitation of patriotism, racial identity, or nationalityto negative ends is not.

Anyhow, between members of a nation there are more interesting dynamics that occur, and which go will eventually go a long way to explaining why leaders can exploit nationalism to achieve 'bad' things.

It's not enough, it seems, to be able to claim belonging to somewhere. Pretty much anyone can do that. The Briton we spoke of last time may well have lived in New Zealand for twenty years, and although he hasn't lost his accent, has come to feel very much at home here, and it's only the parochialism of New Zealanders that prevents him from being a 'real' Kiwi.

This feeling is called 'homely belonging', and is very different to 'governmental belonging', the idea that your feeling of being at home somewhere can be translated into authentic political power. It's a crucial difference that is often overlooked in the study of nationalism.

When I deny our British friend authentication as a 'real' New Zealander, I am in effect denying him membership in the 'real' nation. Sure, he's a New Zealander, he has citizenship and feels at home here, but he chances are that he'll be denied the right to state what does and doesn't 'go' politically.

Now, I can hear you saying that this is drawing a long bow. There have been many political figures in New Zealand who have also been British, be it English, Scots, Welsh, Irish. And sure, I accept that. But, how many Ethiopians? Samoans? Germans? Chinese? Indians? The list goes on.

The trick in this case is that because of New Zealand's history, Britons almost automatically carry a degree of governmental belonging. Many other groups however do not.

Despite this exception to the rule, the rule does stand. There is a group called 'New Zealanders', who are citizens of New Zealand and therefore nationals. But within this all-encompassing group is another group, one that holds the right to govern, and the right to determine who is, and who is not, a 'real' New Zealander.

Naturally, I can hear conspiracy theories ticking over, but the content of how and why that group is couched there as 'the boss', is another matter, for another day.

Noticing this afternoon that none of the other PA bloggers had gotten in to do an election post-mortem I thought I'd put my hand up. Naturally there's no government yet, but there are still perhaps some lessons to be gleaned from the results as they stand.

Number one is Hide. Personally, I can't stand the guy. His politics are anathema to me, and I sincerely hoped to be dancing a little dance of victory on his grave on Sunday morning.

But Rodney, here's to you mate, full respect for battling it out to the bitter end, whether you won or not. And the fact you did win that seat, despite National doing their best to pull the rug out from under you, deserves admiration. So let's all raise a glass to Rodney, a winner without having to muck-rake his opponent.

Otherwise, National's vault in the polls and their huge increase in public attention from 2002 requires a little thought. So here's No Right Turn doing just that. He has a few good links there too.

Personally though, what interested me on Saturday night was a concern about what the result means for the centre right. The impression I got was this. Imagine your traditional left-right spectrum, red on the left, blue on the right. In its bid for votes, Labour kind of anchored itself out on the left near its own extreme fringe, the Greens, and then stretched inwards to pick up votes in centre/undecideds territory. National on the other hand more or less tried to anchor itself in 'the centre' with a plea to 'mainstream New Zealand', and stretched itself out to also encompass as many votes as possible over on the far right.

The result is obvious of course, the decimation of ACT and the gaining of as many NZ First votes as possible as well. This decimation is obvious in the relative stability of Labour's share of the votes compared to Nationals. Those votes must have come from somewhere after all.

Naturally, there are more explanations for the poor showing of the minor parties of the right, and even of United Future, than just the deliberate cannibalism National conducted, but the type of appeals National used remain pivotal.

What I'm looking forward to seeing is a break-down of what attracted voters back to National. Was it the all the Treaty-bashing? Was it the promise of more money? Was it the appeal to the middle ground, even though this was little more than National deliberately trying to establish that ground itself, and to then drag the entire electorate rightwards to where it felt more comfortable.

I know I'm more or less interviewing my PC here, but the question remains, why?

The right's agenda in this election hasn't really been clear. Other than as a series of more or less naked appeals to at times converse prejudices and attractions, there wasn't really an obvious representation of 'what they stood for'.

Yes, there was a lot of 'we're sick of this government, and so are you' information being pushed onto the electorate, a glimmer of the old neo-right agenda of privatisation, and the big one of 'low taxation', but you have to ask, what purpose did it serve?

There's still the outside chance that National will form a Government of course, the slim majority I alluded to last week, but if they do occupy the Treasury benches there's every chance it won't be for long.

Of course, on the other hand, considering the kind of coalition Labour is going to have to put together, you can guarantee this isn't won't be a term of highly controversial legislation. The kind that got them in this pickle in the first place that is.

Again, I'm looking forward to seeing if it was just the disgruntlement factor of policies involving Treaty-bashing or 'social engineering' that actually drew votes, or whether undecideds actually voted for Nationals more ideological policies like tax cuts, and why they were considered relevant.

And this is because I'm beginning to think that we could just have seen the last roll of the dice for the old neo-right agenda afflicting us during the 80s and 90s. I mean, where the hell else do they have to go? If their remaining idea is to drag us all out towards the lunatic fringe of the right, a set of people with absolutely no idea about society and culture, the things that give a nation-state meaning, then what do they have to offer the centre, the real mainstream?

Like the group Clark spoke to in her victory speech, the mainstream in New Zealand is broader than what the far right wants it to be. If 'social engineering' means recognising New Zealand for what it is, and not what an elite would like it to be, then that's all good.

It should be an interesting few weeks of waiting.

Well, there you have it. Two days out, and they went and dropped the ball. Tightest run election in years and a key 'balloon' promise is likely to turn a 'millstone'. Nice one team, nice one.

If you've read this blog for more than five minutes (the number of people in the blogsphere who continue to ask if I think that 'Che' is just a cool nickname continues to irk me), you'll know I was in Melbourne for the last Federal Election in Australia.

What that campaign saw was a reasonable effort on the part of the Australian Labor Party to oust a fairly entrenched John Howard.

For all polls, the old saying goes that 'Oppositions don't win elections, Governments lose them'. Over there, a number of mistakes were made which prevented the Opposition from getting up enough momentum to knock Howard off his perch, but the pivotal error was in relation to Forestry policy. It's way down buried in this post here, and a little post-election misery here if you want the outline.

Latham screwed up big-time in the last week of the campaign, by presenting a very good policy, but not having enough time to explain it to the electorate. Howard exploited that mistake, and actually increased his absolute majority.

In a nutshell what has thus far prevented National from looking like winners this coming Saturday is their lack of a head of steam. They looked as though some their policies were just about enough of a wedge to get them close to the Treasury benches, but not quite enough. And stupid, cowardly actions like the Wanaga incident this past week weren't helping.

This morning though? After digesting the likely reaction to the Student Loans scandal, and building on the back of buried blogs containing my reaction to things like the 'mainstreaming' ethos that will undoubtedly infuse the new Government, I'm calling this one for a possibly very slim National majority.

Please prove me wrong.

Look, I don't know the first thing about these Exclusive Brethren guys, except that the last bunch of blokes I heard of who insisted on relative moral purity and their wimminfolk wearing headscarves flew a few planes into buildings.

Of course, there's absolutely no similarity between the two. One are a bunch of guys who look remarkably like Boers, and the others a bunch who are a lot more multicultural. Seriously. Al Qaeda wins the cosmopolitan thing hands down, you've got to give them that. Cosmopolitan within the narrow bounds of a singular religion, but in my five minutes looking at those Brethren turkeys, they'd beat them hands down.

The heavy weapons training would help, although the Brethren could probably call in American help. Hmmm... might make a good WWF cage match that...

OK, so let's clear the air on this one before I go any further, because I don't want anyone writing in complaining that they're suspicious I'm prejudiced. There's going to be no equivocating on this point, and I won't mislead you.

I. Think. Religious. Types. Are. Nutters.

And that's almost any religious type. Lutherans, Brethren, Presbyterians, Fruitarians, Solar Eclipsarians, Muslims, Jews, Libertarians, Vegetarians, Hindus, Aztec sun worshippers, the bloody lot of you.

Nuts, to a (wo)man.

As I've mentioned in the past, my involvement in different types of religion has been fairly broad, and I've been to all sorts of religious gatherings, from ogling Hare Krishna women in those sari at the Temple in Wellington (they used put on this great $2 feast on Sundays that was pretty much all the vitamins I got all week), to seeing people around me breaking out in Tongues and dancing in the possession of the Holy Spirit, to accidentally attending a Wicca wedding, to getting my weekly exercise standing and sitting every five minutes in a Catholic Church. I still wonder if I'll ever get the chance to be woken at 5am by an Imam calling the faithful to prayers without the aid of speakers. Must be an amazing sound.

That said, there's something to be said for being in the company of people who truly see themselves as having found the peace that is the search for answers. It's the weird kind of calm they exude. Like they've glimpsed something the rest of us mortals can't see for the fog of daily needs and demands.

That look, and that calm, it's something a rationalist like myself can barely explain, and only because I force myself to dip a toe in the type of experience that has lead them to be that way. But there they are, bathing in the light of a knowing I can only grasp. Weird.

And then there's the proselytisers. Really, these are the ones I have the most trouble with. The ones who wake you up in the morning to share their viewpoint with you, while you stand there in your bathrobe trying to be polite past the pre-coffee haze, and gently nudge their shoe out of your ranch slider without having to slam it on their hush puppies.

SunnyO has a great quote this week that pretty much summed it up: People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. -Dave Barry, author and columnist (1947- ).

The tricky thing is, apparently the Brethren don't proselytise. So I can't nail them with that one, but, they seem to be exactly the kind of 'we've found the answers and you can just go to hell' kind of religious buggers you've got to dislike.

In my most humble of opinions, the difference between these types, and the calm types I mentioned above, is polar. And it's probably why I have such a great respect for Buddhists.

There's always the odd smug fucker in any religion, but on the whole, the Buddhist ideal of self-discovery was something profoundly influencing on my early years. Ignore what you may have seen on John Safran vs. God, Buddhism is largely about wise old dudes indicating a few signposts, from which you find your own path to enlightenment. I'm suspicious that in the real world they save all the smacking for the bedroom. Which would make them much like the Auckland Club.

And on the other hand, many Christian sects are all about control. Controlling knowledge, lifestyles, and people. It's a closed minded and petty way of conducting a religion more in keeping with absolutism than humanism or fraternity.

But wasn't them associating themselves with the Tories just the biggest laugh of the last week? Much better than this week's spectacle of the User-Pays Party trying to argue that users of the roads shouldn't have to pay market rates for it...

With all this talk about 'peak oil' the subject has caught my attention. Well, actually, that's a lie, I've always been curious about what it's going to take to get millions of people off their wheels and onto public transport.

Thing is, what we've always been told about oil and it's use is that it's being consumed at a high rate because it's cheap. And oil is cheap because there is high supply. Sooner or later, the argument goes, oil will become expensive, and then we move onto something else.

It's baffling therefore that when oil becomes expensive, instead of thinking about alternatives, everyone just bitches and spends the money anyway.

Which just reinforces my perception that economics isn't a science, it's just a lot of opinions (much like politics...).

I should add of course that I'm aware that part of what contribute to high fuel costs is forms of taxation, but that's kind of beside the point. Taxation is just a component of the cost, and isn't the primary driver of either supply or demand.

I should also add that at various times I have worked in the transport industry, and know that fuel is a number one cost. But, again with the supply and demand thing. If costs are too high to transport tomatoes from Whangarei to Dunedin in the frickin winter, then maybe people should get used to eating a winter vegetable, which you'd hope are likely to be grown locally?

What this whole argument seems to boil down to, and which I'm writing up in far too little detail, is the idea that oil as allowed us to turn big distances into little ones. It's also allowed guys like me to own and drive cars like the 3.5L XD Falcon really really fast, but that's another matter.

When you go to a famous 'car city' like LA the first thing you notice is that it's waaaay too spread out. People live an hour commute from where they work or play because they know they can afford the cost of travelling that far. But, with the increase in the cost of oil, that commute is likely to become far too expensive to make on a regular basis.

Now, the logical answer would be to find a cheaper way to get to work, or just live a little closer to where you have/want to be, as people in Wellington seem willing to do. But most people aren't logical. The travel and the distance has largely become part of the lifestyle people are accustomed to, and they're reticent to change. And that's normal.

It's again with the big/little distance thing. Living as much as 50 or 60km from where you work is a comparatively new thing in history. In the past it just didn't happen. People lived and worked locally, with travel reserved for necessity.

This isn't a bad thing of course, it's meant that relatively distant communities mingle on a regular basis, or at least you'd hope so, but it still means that people spend what is now an ever-increasing portion of their income on getting from A to B. And worse, oil has been so cheap that people have been spending more and more of their own resources on things to waste it.

And to the person in the 4L 4x4 bitching about how much it costs to fill that 80litre tank, that means you. Maybe you should have thought more than five minutes ahead before pissing away all that cash to impress the neighbours?

A mate went to a seminar a few years back, and the only thing that seems to have stuck is this argument, "we didn't leave the stone age because we ran out of stones".

'Peak oil' is a furphy. The real problem is that people just prefer to exploit their ability to travel big distances quickly and easily. And like to have things they can't get locally brought to them cheaply. It's a lifestyle thing.

Oil running out isn't going to solve that problem, but people basically being Magpies may well. We left the stone age because better alternatives were offered. Why are you going to find dinner by stabbing it with rock, when a piece of metal does a better job?

In the case of transport, we used to have a system that delivered things big distances cheaply and easily. They were called 'trains', and ran on these things called 'rails'. Amazing stuff really. You can make them 'electric', which is where they are powered by cheap things that aren't oil. Getting to work can be made to go the same way.

Maybe, just maybe, with oil becoming more expensive, and assuming it stays that way, some of these big shiny alternatives just might be presented, and move us away from easy consumption towards something else. Or, at very least force us to reappraise shitty things like mass and public transport, and make them more attractive and amenable. We can but hope.