Club Politique by Che Tibby

Lets take a step back from sameness this time. One of the problems I always found in my more difficult moments as a political philosopher was the need to define the content of my core social groups. For example, what the heck is a New Zealander anyhow?

There's tonnes of people out there doing what they can to definitively answer that question, and no-one's come up with the quintessential essence yet, so hows about we just let it be? Even better, why don't we just let everyone get on with being New Zealanders, and not try and tell them what they are and aren't?

But, in a political sense I found that there is a very real need for a definition to be put in place, but one that's flexible enough to accommodate all the myriad types and modes of personality that make up the nation.

Again, the sociological definition escapes me, but you need to have a political one so you can identify who is, and who isn't a member of the political community. Often the most convenient way is to simply say something like, you're a national of wherever you pay tax, or if you have citizenship, then you're a national.

That type of definition simplifies the matter too much though. Being a citizen for five minutes just isn't long enough for someone to be a member of 'the nation', and there seems to be evidence to back this up.

Lets look at the example of a British migrant. Now, I know that we're all part of the British Diaspora, or at least the one's who think they have a god-given right to govern tend to be, but the very recent British migrant is somehow 'different' to the average New Zealander.

Race can't be the problem, because the average Briton is largely indistinguishable from the average New Zealander, if not slightly more pasty. Likewise religion, we all share a common Christian girder in the platform of our culture, whether we each practice it or not.

And while a person from another culture may well see Britons and New Zealanders, or New Zealanders and Australians for that matter, as largely indistinguishable, any one individual from each of these groups will see the others as different. And it's that perception that is important.

There's a tendency among public commentators to refer to 'the nation' in shorthand for 'the New Zealand population', but the two are actually fairly distinct. The New Zealand population includes plenty of people who aren't nationals, and the citizen is pretty much anyone who has citizenship, of whatever degree. The latter group is pretty easy to cleave though, and usually along the lines of 'real' and 'recent' New Zealanders, like our British migrant.

Why that distinction is important is an argument for another day, but 'real' New Zealanders are the nation, and 'everyone altogether' is the citizenry. The trick in this example is figuring out how to identify the where you stand. Are you a real or a recent New Zealander?

There's actually a pretty easy way to find out if you are or aren't. Just walk up to someone and ask if they're a New Zealander. If they say they are, then tell them you're one too.

Obviously, they're going to look at you like you're nuts.

But try completely accepting that someone with a London accent is a 'real' New Zealander? You can't. Sure, you can accept that they're a citizen, and that they have all the rights and privileges of a New Zealand citizen, they may well have a passport and driver licence to prove it, but they're not a 'real' New Zealander in the same way you are.

So right there, within the overall group of 'New Zealanders' you have sameness through a purely political instrument, citizenship, with a simultaneous difference posed by a largely subjective and non-quantifiable opinion held in common by nearly all individuals.

What this lead me to think was, maybe being a member of a nation is being able to state that I am what I think I am, and have other people agree. Being a national is not simply about getting a rubber stamp from the state, but being able to mutually accept that we are all members of the same group.

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.

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...

Is there anything left to say? With the two main parties slogging it out I’m thinking that you’re all probably as keen as me to see the whole thing come to an end. The policy roll-out continues apace, and we’re starting to get a glimmer of the National Party’s main tactic.

With everyone but Hide locked out in the cold, excepting Dunne mind you, ‘those who know things’ are murmuring that the drive is to isolate all the minor parties if at all possible and govern without having to cut deals, placate whining minority groups, or handle difficult issues tenderly.

You know, all that stuff that makes politics what it is.

Of course, if they do get 61 seats on their own, there’s still the problem of grumpy or bolshie backbenchers, as Howard knows all too well from Australia. Maybe they can just clap them in irons, or discredit such backbenchers, the way that Howard has done all too often with dissenters.

That said, National appears to be staying the course in this regard, and is playing hard ball harder than a no-doubt slightly tired and pissed off Helen Clark did the other day. Pesky damn pilots, give a man a high-speed vehicle and the lives of dozens in his hands and the next thing you know he gets a god-complex.

Mind you, being scalded by the Leader of the Nation is something he gets to tell the other pilots in the bar. And bloody good on him.

Anyhow, National and staying the course. An image occurred to me that best describes what they’re up to. With their single minded determination to charge out the biggest majority they can, a foray into toilet humour is probably best.

Picture a blue man then, maybe the leader of a party. And no, we’re not talking about Poppa Smurf, although the near-complete absence of women is an obvious similarity. And he’s sitting on the dunny.

Now, I know that’s a little distasteful to some, but bear with me. There he is, on the crapper, pants round his ankles. And, as we all know, you can’t go anywhere very fast when you’re in that position. Naturally, you’ll feel a little vulnerable.

Next, picture the toilet itself, person on or not, in a white-tiled room. White on the walls, white on the floor, white on the ceiling. White basins and shower. Now put blue man, with trousers round ankles, on the throne.

But, and here’s the catch, the room is very, very big. Although the dunny and the bathroom fixtures are all in fairly close proximity, the room itself is maybe four or five times bigger than a normal bathroom ought to be.

And the door is on the far side of the room, diagonally, from the blue man on the dunny.

Weird? It gets better.

There’s no lock on the door, and no way the blue man’s legs can stop anyone walking in on him taking a constitutional.

That’s the National Party right now.

They’re firing that big one out as fast as they can before someone walks in accidentally busts them having one. They’re out there on their own, with no-one keeping an eye on the door, and no-one willing to vouch that they’re up to nothing dodgy.

I’m of the opinion they’ll be half-way through the roll of paper, standing just slightly, a self-satisfied look on their face, when the electorate walks on in.

One of the reasons people seem to underestimate the power of sameness is that it's so ingrained. And much like any habit we form, usually unknown to the holder. Worse, it's difficult to pinpoint how we all get that way.

A trick I like to use to explain how I see it is to get someone to refer back to their home town. When you're a kid you just know the streets, the secrets, the best places to go, where the other kids are, that kind of thing.

But, at the same time there are still all kinds of things about the place you don't know. Everyone has had that experience of actually going inside a place they've never been before, and going, 'well, well, so that's what the old Johnson/Smith/Clarke place is like!' And that can happen in a place you've been all your life.

Imagine then, going to a place you've never been before.

When I arrived in Melbourne I had nothing but my suitcase and my old hitchhikers dufflebag. I knew no-one, no-one at all. I knew I had to make it to Monash Uni by a certain date, and that was it.

Oh, and I'd bought a great map of the city. It gave me nothing but an abstract picture of where I was in relation to a bunch of other stuff I had no idea about. Terrific.

I relied on public transport and the goodwill of strangers (goodwill that they wouldn't send me in exactly the wrong direction that is), and ran a reccy out to Monash on Sunday to escape a hostel room full of hungover and farting backpackers.

What a mission. I took a number of wrong turns, got lost at least once, had to stop frequently to nurse my own hangover, but eventually, there it was, a giant building looking like something out of the Thunderbirds.

Once I settled into the on-campus dorms, after finding my way back there a day later to ask questions, I started to fill out the spaces in my surroundings.

It's been the same way every time I move to a new city. I learn my flat or house, checking out the gardens or lack of, finding a good spot to sit in front of the telly, digging out junk to brighten the place up and make it feel like 'home'.

Next I find my way to the local shops/ATM/cinema/bottle shop/work. Usually that involves making the most direct way there, and checking out the surrounds on the way. Eventually, I start to notice little things I'd missed on the initial trip. A Bay leaf tree that I can pinch leaves from. A good pizza joint or noodle bar. A new way to get to where I'm going that saves time or legwork.

What happens, eventually, is that what was a simple, straight line from A to B becomes a kind of multi-layered network of links between places, things and people, all kind of jumbled up, but comprehensible all at the same time. And from that maze of information comes a deepening understanding of the city in which I live, both as a place, and as a place of people. The city itself comes alive, in a way.

Cultures, and societies work in pretty much exactly the same way. When you grow up in one you think you know pretty much everything there is to know about it, even though it can still surprise you, and when you leave it for awhile, it changes slightly.

But, trying to understand another culture or society is like trying to come to grips with being in an entirely new place. You'll get lost occasionally. You'll make stupid mistakes and annoy the locals. You'll find the most amazing and wonderful places and things, things that will delight, and some that may well horrify.

New places are uncomfortable, lonely, frustrating, amazing, enthralling, and grow around you like warm old jumpers, while still leaving you lost in their folds and trying to detach yourself from little snags that capture you.

Sameness is the product of people having been through experiences and places they share, and which 'outsiders' could never share. These things may well overlap with different people in different circumstances, but there are people in Melbourne, Texas and Auckland who will never meet one another, and are only connected to each other via, well, me.

And should those people meet, all the problems of garnering familiarity will be theirs, as it was mine. Of course, the advantage they'll have is both knowing me, if you could ever call that advantage, though it is a subject for another day.