Club Politique by Che Tibby

With everyone talking about Haka O Pango it’s probably a good time to raise the spectre of the National Party’s Treaty policies. Now, people are probably expecting me to label them ‘racist’, but I don’t actually think they are. Stupid? Yes. Racist? No.

Thing is, I don’t actually see them as race policies. The do genuinely seem to be about Treaty politics, and the relationship between Māori and Brash’s mainstream. What I do see them as is assimilationist.

With the failure to get substantial traction with their tax policies, there seems to be a consensus forming in the media that Brownlee will be trotted out to have a go at ‘separatism’. Well, bloody good on you Gerry. Bloody good on ya.

Pity you’re aiming to drag New Zealand back to the 1960s, but bloody good on you all the same. Nice to see New Zealand can reconnect to its roots. Roots that should have been soaked with round-up, or dragged out of the policy environment and doused with petrol, but roots all the same.

As I say, National’s Treaty policy centres on the idea that ‘New Zealanders’ should be homogenised, and invokes the spirit of ‘equality’ to undermine many of the hard-fought gains made by Māori since re-establishing their political voice in the 1970s.

The main reason I don’t think that the policy is racist is because there isn’t any real reference to getting rid of Māori, or Māori culture, as was the case last century. Plus, even if there is that kind of mindset in the National Party anywhere, which I can’t guarantee, then it’s unlikely to get a run on the field in an actual Government.

But of course, you could say that about the entire National Party itself. Which is why this suspicion of Māori-bashing is being peaked.

Not racism, but a claytons assimilation is what National is proposing. They aren’t racist, Don is married to an Asian lady, as he likes to point out, but you don’t have to be outright racist when you can achieve the same ends by pulling to rug out from under Māori society.

And that’s the key. Māori society.

As it stands, Māori society has found its feet here in post-Colonial New Zealand, and did so around the time we, as a nation, shook off the shackles of our British past. I know that commentators like Tze Ming like to point out that New Zealanders are essentially Anglo, but I’d like to reply that we don’t think of ourselves as being such. Or, you’d hope not anyhow. Pesky damn whinging poms.

Anyhow, what we have forming in New Zealand isn’t a ‘racial separatism’. That phrase is utter bullshit. What we have is a Māori society sticking up for itself and making demands for a better inclusion in New Zealand society. The difference between these two things is both profound, and the core of the issue.

OK, so lets go back to Te Haka o Pango. Apart from the occasional wowser, people seem to love it. It baffles me then that people will actively support some parts of Māori culture, like this and the Te Rauparaha haka, while refusing to acknowledge that Māori culture, and the society that underwrites it, needs a public voice in the mainstream.

What current National Party policy seeks to do is to minimise this voice. By purging the Treaty from Brash’s mainstream, and by removing objectively Māori political institutions like the seats, National is removing the hard-fought gains of Māori society, and pushing Māori culture down into some form of ‘private’ identity with no public reflection.

The best way to compare this lack of ‘public reflection’ is to look at the example of migrants. Migrants have no public voice in New Zealand, and are effectively victims or political fodder for people like Peters. Migrants have, in reality, no real option but to assimilate into the mainstream.

And why? Because assimilation is the best way to shed negative attention from the mainstream. It worked for the Dalmatians, the Dutch, Italians, the list goes on.

Assimilation is a policy that failed 50 years ago, and will fail again today. Māori aren’t about to assimilate into that mainstream, have fought against negative stereotyping and statistics, and have shown actual, demonstrable improvements since the 1970s.

What I mean by public reflection is that Māori culture is today part of the fabric of New Zealand society itself, and should rightfully take its place as part of the systems of government. National however, may well deliberately seek to minimise that inclusion, and push Māori society out of governance and into a weakened private identity.

Let’s see what Brash has to say in Whangarei before we judge him, and what Brownlee says when called to weight into the argument in coming weeks, but any argument that seriously considers Māori society to be an object to be purged needs to be seriously criticised.

Yes... I am a man. But a when friend emailed Farrar's note this morning I wasn't all that shocked. The last time this mistake was made it was on a feminist site somewhere, which obviously says something about my natural sensitivity. Or maybe the woman in question didn’t know who Che Guevara is either.

And no, I don't eat granola. I do however eat that Pams-brand muesli stuff from Pak N’ Save because it has very little sugar, and I know what I don’t like. I don’t like too much sugar for example. It makes you fat. And being fat is bad.

OK, so first things first. I am a man. A big man. I am nearly 2 metres tall and weight in at an athletic 90kgs. Except for my gut. Which is not very athletic at all. Unless of course you count the record for holding the most beer. 12 cans of Tui and 6 of Carlsberg Elephant beer on the Tour De Coma at Massey University in 1992.

I fell asleep in Palmie and woke up in my bed in Wellington.

I think the angels may have transported me home, because I don’t remember it myself.

Next, I have all of my own hair up top. So thanks to David Slack for offering to photoshop extra chest hair onto my photo on Island Life to make me seem more manly, but let's not get too carried away.

I also do not have excessive body hair. I have no hair on my back for example, but do sport a very large and at one time painful tattoo from shoulder to shoulder, as befits my status as a intellectuel bogàn.

And, for all those out there who seem to think for some reason that ‘Che’ is a pseudonym, no, you munters.

In 1971 I was called ‘boy’ for 6 months until ‘the man’ made them name me. Pesky damn hippies. They stood around and named me ‘Che’ by consensus.

'Tibby' on the other hand means ‘Ships cat’, and was the name given to one of my ancestors on the crossing to New Zealand in the 1840s. He was the ships boy, and it’s a job I’d never do. Because I am a man. A big man, with big, stinky feet, hands like a lumberjack, a habit of leaving everything I own on the floor, and a passion for Xbox.

But, if you’d prefer to think of me as a woman, well, bloody good on you. It ain’t going to happen, but if it cranks your handle, imagine away.

I had an interesting email the other day where someone asked me advice on how to vote. Naturally I can’t give advice on who to vote for, but it was obvious the person wanted to see Peters out of Tauranga, and needed the details of MMP explained.

Now, a good old tar, feathering and subsequent slap on the arse with the Key to the City is probably out of the question, and would probably drag Tauranga back to the wild west it once was. But it would be a laugh to watch from a safe distance. The hot air escaping from Peters’ rapidly deflating ego would cause a scene like that bit of the Lord of the Rings where Sauron buys it.

The emailer in question was wondering how to get rid of Peters when they were a Labour supporter, and realised that the local commie pinko just wasn’t likely to get the votes up. Sorry Sally, nothing personal, but I just can’t see the red team winning in a true blue heartland like that.

What I’d do if I lived in a place like Tauranga, touch wood, is split my vote strategically. There’s no reason why you have to give both your party and candidate vote to the same colour. And although you might not want to tell your chardonnay sipping chums that you actually split your vote, they’re unlikely to call you some kind of bastard half-caste once you mop up their spluttered canapés and explain your reasons.

How this works is that you give your candidate to the blue team, and your party vote to the red team. Simple. Shameful. But simple. And then it’s bye bye Whinny while helping the commies get back into power.

And I hear from people back home that Clarkson is a top bloke. One who might actually do something for his electorate, as my blue-voting family like to point out.

Mind you, all this local politics stuff seems very far away from Wellington, and what with Winston at No.1 on the NZ First party list we’re unlikely to get rid of him entirely, unless by some miracle they drop below 5%. So to the good folk in Tauranga, we’ll take that politician off your hands, and here, have one who you might find useful.

And on the subject of politicians, my, isn’t Wellington full of them. I know that’s stating the obvious, but when you can’t step outside your door without bumping into one of the buggers it’s tough to be a completely objective blogger. I saw John Carter campaigning with the Baloney Bus the other day and was a little taken aback.

It was Upper Hutt. My first thought when he tried to stop me and a mate on the street was to ask if he still liked to pretend he was Māori. And to ask it very, very loudly. There were a few hoodies in the Maccas who might have been interested in that one.

On the other hand though, it’s not too bad having all these well-paid pollies and public servants gadding about the place. Way back in the day Wellington was a seriously bleak place, and you can guarantee it’s not entrepreneurs of some variety that are spending their money in the huge number of brightly lit bars and cafes around the central city. Auckland? Absolutely. But here it’s the government that keeps this city alive.

Cuts in public spending would likely cut into that particular bit of trickle-down, in my humble opinion. Of course, we’re not talking about mass sackings of public serfs, but hiring is likely to freeze, which will in turn slow economic growth here in the city (slightly).

The converse of that argument would of course be that many of the public serfdom are on salaries right smack bang in the middle of the tax argument target range. So it's likely that even if hiring freezes, there will still be more money around. And if chuck the hugely increased numbers of contractors hired on inflated wages to cover for the lack of staff in the Ministries...

A figure I heard bandied around about increased salaries is that 80% of the money is likely to be spent (not saved). Take out the 12.5% that disappears in tax revenue, and you’re still looking at a substantial amount of money being splashed about.

So it’s kind of win-win for the bar tenders either way really. For former expats like me who only came home because of the employment bubble though it’s all bad. Unless of course they buy a bar or café.

But who the hell wants to be a servant to servants?

Maybe the best way to understand difference is to first understand what it is not. Sure, there’s a chance that sounds a little too zen for some, but really what I mean is understanding sameness.

You don’t have to do navel-gazing to understand when you do or don’t like someone. But, it’s also true that you can’t always tell exactly why you feel that way.

Sometimes you feel the same as people because of obvious links. Say, you both like the same music and get talking at a gig. You might be family. You might discover you both work at the same place and hate the same boss. The possibilities are endless.

Weirdly though, you might find that you feel entirely dissimilar to someone in one context, but feel connected to them in another. Aussies and Kiwis attending any particular sports match you could name will feel antipathy at the ground, but if they walk out of the stadium and into surrounds of London, they’re great mates.

Sameness can it seems be relative.

It’s always made me wonder then why people work so hard to foster sameness. Much of the time sameness is the product of completely ordinary events or things that you don’t really notice until someone points them out to you. And all too often these exact events and things will separate you from people you would otherwise like.

Regardless of the normality of difference, it’s very usual for leaders such as political figures to work very hard to foster similarity among their supporters. Not absolute sameness mind you, but sameness enough to ensure that supporters remain ‘tethered’ to one another.

The trouble is, among small groups difference isn’t too much of a drama, usually. When disputes arise they normally have to be worked through, feathers smoothed, the necessary words spoken and so on. But, as your group gets bigger and bigger it becomes very difficult to maintain the tethers that keep a group bound to one another.

In the past, sameness was usually maintained through allegiance. Even though you might hate the clan or tribe living in the next valley, your allegiance to a higher power or lord was what prevented you from paying them an angry visit. Uneasy alliances and fear of the loss of human life were stereotypically what held larger ‘groups’ together.

As technology changed, what with flashy, newfangled widgets like the Industrial Revolution coming along, new ways of keeping people from hating each other had to be invented, because the groups being managed were just getting too large to handle with allegiance alone.

The idea that some guys had was to start talking about ‘nations’ as natural groupings of people. And it worked a treat.

What ‘nations’ allowed was for increasingly large numbers of individuals to be tethered together, and for older identities like tribes or clans to be superseded. The trick in this case was for people to be encouraged to identify with things they didn’t immediately see.

Sameness in this case became all about people feeling attached to things they may not have any direct experience of, like their monarchy, sports events, or wars they may have heard of but not fought in. The result was that people began more and more to consider themselves similar, even though their daily lives may be completely different.

The consequence of this relatively new idea is that leaders these days spend large amounts of the public time fostering the impression of sameness among the populations of the state they govern. So even though the society they govern may well be mottled and multifaceted, the individuals themselves believe they’re the same as someone on the far side of the country.

And this is why you might find that you’re different to people, but similar all at the same time. It’s a weird kind of nexus, in which different and similarity are intertwined and overlaid in highly complex and oft-times mysterious ways. Worse, unravelling the nexus is something of a black art, one that a writer can only really understand in small glimpses.

Thanks to those who wrote in about one of last weeks post, it was good to get some positive replies to me waxing lyrical. Especially after a friend here read it, and asked when I’d become a ‘glue smoking homo’.

It ain’t easy being button-pushing bureaucrat you know. There’s all these countervailing pressures in play between wanting to engage in political debate, keep your head down, and still reach into one’s ‘artistic soul’. Ah well.

On the great news front though, I’ve gone and set myself up for a little embarrassment by scheduling a talk up at Victoria University. As part of the final jumping through hoops process over at Melbourne, I need to have presented the Thesis at least once in the past year. I got in touch with the kind people at the Politics department, and they’ve kindly loaned me a seminar room to sit and act the intellectuel bogàn.

Naturally no one will be expecting extensive preparation time, flashy powerpoint presentations or booming oratory, but it will be interesting to have to try and explain all the crazy ‘stuff’ that’s been gradually trying to escape by brain and onto my shoulders (from where it makes a pathetic dash for freedom). Normally of course I just pass it off as bad dandruff.

All the same, high noon on Tuesday will see anxiety producing sweaty palms and a shifty gaze in Che. Academic career? History.

This means that things are coming along nicely. As of just after the election I pass from short-term contract hell into a permanent slot here in the Public Service.

It’s not as bad as it sounds.

For one thing they’re paying me a respectable but not ludicrous amount of money, with which I intend to pay off years of accumulated debt (including but not exclusive to my student loan). They offer me a desk somewhere and high-speed internet with which to expand my knowledge of the job I’ve given, and never cyber-clack. And being a newbie I’m bound to end up with a glorious view of an internal meeting room. Or maybe a vending machine. It’s all good though.

But by far the best outcome will be the setting aside of a small amount of cash to go away next year to some place likely to badly sunburn me.

I’m thinking that with global warming well on the horizon I’ve only got a few years before half of the Pacific Islands disappear underwater, so I’d better get out there and do some decent diving before it’s too late. Hopefully, the locals will take my tourist dollars and put it towards some real estate here or in Australia where they can go live when their homes are drowned.

Having said that, I just realised that jet travel is one of the great polluters behind farty animals, hydro-power schemes in tropical climates, and cars. Maybe I can sail to Rarotonga? Wouldn’t that be nice… almost as good as the Bacon and Banana Pancakes at Fidels on Cuba, but I can’t laze around in the sun eating brunch for four weeks can I?

Actually, here’s a question someone might be able to answer me. Everyone is all freaky about cars producing CO2. But how much CO2 is produced by a billion Indians all breathing in, and out. And in, and out?

Yup, asking the BIG QUESTIONS here at Club Politique.

Might be time to cut back on a bit of the American beef taking up all that valuable oxygen to make a little more room for the Indian hot air.

Oh! And speaking of which, what with the Public Service Code of Conduct effectively hamstringing my ability to make large and potentially inflammatory comments about complete fools like Peters (note the way he likes Asian food. In Asia. Not here where it might foul his hot air. And Winston, you’d never make it in a kitchen. You are too much of a frickin ‘cat’), there’s a good chance the title of this blog may well have to change.

The main suggestion so far has been ‘Alterantively’. It’s likely this title will most reflect my commentary style anyhow…

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PS. If you do need to take a little break at work, watch this.