Speaker: What Diversity Dividend?
112 Responses
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Done! Next?
Large parts of Nelson I believe (see, also "dirty smelly hippies").
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(see, also "dirty smelly hippies").
Hey man, that's like totally unfair you know. Save the whale, don't use water, man.
Where's my lentil stew. -
Surely "dirty smelly hippies" are part of diversity, too?
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Surely "dirty smelly hippies" are part of diversity, too?
Only if they support people's retirement. We could compost them or something.
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Only if they support people's retirement. We could compost them or something.
And only the retirement of at-least-4th-generation NZers whose ancestors were drawn to these shores by a genuine sense of destiny. Anyone in your family tree who arrived on an assisted passage, merely to "fuel economic growth", like those creeping wetback hordes currently eroding our social contract woven of a billion backbreaking beads of backblocks browsweat? Sorry, but you're dog tucker.
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@Steve Reeves:
if you put in the effort to learn te reo, i'm sure you would be find it interesting and useful--exploring a completely new culture.
learning another language and culture require humility. something that seems to be in short supply in some parts of aotearoa...
kia kaha -
And only the retirement of at-least-4th-generation NZers whose ancestors were drawn to these shores by a genuine sense of destiny.
I like being able to claim 6th generation illegal immigrant status in NZ. The founding ancestor was a shipjumper.
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So, exiled to convict-land then? :)
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I like being able to claim 6th generation illegal immigrant status in NZ. The founding ancestor was a shipjumper.
You seem to have a well-organised family tree. The last of my foreign-born male ancestors jumped ship in 1869, aged 13. More desperation than destiny.
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One of the things I liked most about the years I lived in London was the diversity of faces and voices (I don't think that's unconnected to Britain's continued cultural vitality). It was actually a relief to return to New Zealand and find our cultural homgenity breaking up.
Parts of London possibly, but for Britain as a whole, the UK census stats I posted elsewhere would disagree.
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Few working class members travelled.
Actually a couple of generations of young men got to travel quite extensively, not necessarily voluntarily, and meet all sorts of nice, and not so nice, people in some very exotic locations.
Not all of them came back to share the experience.
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@ Rich of Obs and Steve Reeves: no offence intended.
I certainly did not intend my words to imply a generalised judgment of all UK migrants. That's why I specified it was about UK migrants i had met. Perhaps some more information is required.
I live in a very conservative part of the country - we brought you Simon Power, after all (well, not me, but...) - which depends on farming and the Defence Forces to prop up the local economy. In fact, most of the migrants i encountered and socialised with were ex-RAF coming into the RNZAF, plus a couple of builders/sparkies and a business consultant. What struck me was that all of these families seemed to think they were coming to a Little England, 1950s style. The RAFs had all been sold the same picture via a recruitment drive, but even the civilians had pretty similar expectations and none had come for a visit prior to migration.
My response to these families was firstly, to listen. Encourage them to share their stories - why they came, why they left, what they hoped for - then offer an alternative picture of NZ. Of a country trying to come to terms with its history and find a workable balance - that this was the society they would find a place in. Suggested they have a read of King or Belich. I'm not into browbeating people over who they "ought to be".
Steve, there are plenty of kiwis around with the attitudes you encountered and found distasteful. It's commonplace in these parts. I truly hope you make your own place here and come to call it home.
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Steve, there are plenty of kiwis around with the attitudes you encountered and found distasteful. It's commonplace in these parts. I truly hope you make your own place here and come to call it home.
And Canada, for all its officially recognised multiculturalism, is still getting to grips with Anglo-French relations, probably even more so than the Maori-Pakeha equation.
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(wealthy? Really?)
Do you know what the median income is in this country? By the sound of it, no, you don't.
which I think is where you're angling
I'll remember that the next time I cut a check to the Labour Party or pay my sub.
I think you're quite wrong. Brasch and Fairburn et al did, and were shaped by, their OE in the 1930s. Before that, Mansfield left and didn't come back back, but Maori chiefs were doing their OE to Britain 150 years ago.
I suspect the boomers were the first generation for whom travel became a general rite of passage (Tom Scott is said to have coined the term "OE" in the early 70s), but that's not exactly "very recently".
I think your comment proves mine. Kiwis didn't start to travel until very recently. We float in the middle of nowhere with no point of comparison upon which to grow. We are a reflection of oursevles.
That was the consequence largely of licensing laws.
So?
but no, modern cafe culture as we know it didn't appear until the early 90s -- actually ahead of most of the world.
Ok, your jingoism is starting to hurt you. Most of the world? Where? Chad? Burundi? Don't make me laugh Russell. You've only ever lived in London. For some reason, on his "Big OE", the Kiwi goes the two countries most culturally similar to their own: Aussie and the UK. So maybe our cafe cultural was ahead of the UK, the other part of the world with which you're familiar. I know you love Brand NZ more than anything but this is getting silly.
This is both untrue, and unamusing.
English is the most-heard language in every large city except Montreal.
I meet Canadians of every generation between 1 and about 10 every day. Including proud fourth generations.
Spoken like a true Albertan? Maritimer? Newfie? Not from the Centre of the Universe, that's obvious.
Except of course for that fact that Canada is much of a country at all anymore. it isn't much of anything really, it is more an historic accident that sort of exists because political inertia is easier than falling apart.
What kind of banality is that? You just don't want to accept that Canada's identity IS it's multiculturalism. I usually really agree with your comments, Tom. I didn't know you were a closet racist. Bummer, dude.
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I don't think we should repeat the mistakes of the Anglo-Canadians and the English and allow excessive immigration to wrest control of our destiny from ourselves.
See, that's really daft. Whatever few Anglo-Canadians feel this way are now forced to hide under their beds and wait for death. The horse has bolted, Tom. Wresting control? Where do you get this stuff?
For example, i think it is prudent to discuss how much - if any - Muslim migration we want here BEFORE we have a huge Muslim minority, not after. We need to have a national discussion about what values and assumptions we want to shape out immigration policy. And just because some people might find that debate uncomfortable or distateful doesn't mean we don't need to have it.
And yet, and yet. I have to agree with that sentiment. I have to accept that we have certain values and that immigration is a political issue subject to national policy. And a lot of Muslims I talk to, usually in cabs, tell me I'm going to hell because I don't believe in Allah and that NZ is pathetic because you can't hit women whenever you want.
Back when we didn't let in many brown folks, there was quite a degree of prejudice against Dutch immigrants. It was felt that they worked too hard.
How does this differ from today? The only difference is that the immigrants don't assimilate like mofos.
That MP from Rodney would have had to flee the country in Canada after making jokes about fruit pickers during an election. The current PM didn't even growl him let alone cut him loose. That would have been hanging offence #1 short of having kiddie porn or eating one's young.
Funny, no one touched this comment. I'm telling you, that idiot would have been cut loose like a rotting limb. Remember how Dubya fucked over Trent Lott? Bye bye Trent. You carry Mississippi? Fuck you. You don't get to say that segregation was a good thing and be Senate Majority leader. Now that what's his name in Rodney is a married man, I'm sure his racist invective will calm itself down. Still, many of our political leaders, which the Speaker most certain is, are hayseed embarrassments.
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Cutting! Excuse me while I pull up a chair. This should be good.
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The only difference is that the immigrants don't assimilate like mofos.
Erm. Don't they? It's always taken a generation for that kind of 'assimilation' to occur. I think we're suffering from presentism to assert that sort of thing about current immigrants. There is nothing new under the sun, blah blah.
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I think your comment proves mine. Kiwis didn't start to travel until very recently. We float in the middle of nowhere with no point of comparison upon which to grow. We are a reflection of oursevles.
I think that you're partly right, but that it's slightly more complicated than that.
Firstly, I agree that only a few of any generation before the 1960s travelled overseas in large numbers. But those who did travel were more influential than the rest, due in part to their social and cultural position within the societies they lived in.They came back, and their comparisons of New Zealand to the world were listened to and taken as reference points. Since then, a good number of New Zealand born have travelled and lived overseas before returning.
Of the rest of the population, at any point in the last two centuries a good proportion of the population has been foreign born. For most of that time, the majority of the foreign born population has been from the British Isles. As a result, the inevitable refraction has been to old country, and the values of that time and place have transferred across with the immigrants. There are still a good number of people whose benchmark is an anachronistic Britain.
I think that this has been a problem in the past, too singular a comparison. It is a fading (but still present) one now as people do base their understandings of the world on what they know, and measure NZ against the countries they're most familiar with, but with a much more diverse set than in the past. Those doing the travelling are now more diverse, and aren't all going to London either (if only to spend time with Europeans on the beaches of Thailand).
I don't think that it's right to say that we're a reflection of ourselves floating in nowhere, because we've always been more connected than that. Many of us are indeed self-referential - one only need see how New Zealanders are influenced much more by artists from previous decades than from overseas. I think that's a good thing.
We're now more free to create a destiny unencumbered by the expectations of a historical country that more than likely never existed. But as a country of immigration, we'll always have a fistful of memories. I don't think that's a bad thing either.
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1. up to the end of the second world war, the vast majority of immigrants to nz were from britain and ireland. there were very tiny minorities from places such as central europe, nordic countries, the balkans and southern china.
2. the majority of maori lived in rural maori settlements.
3. nz was not diverse.
4. after the war, we got a whole lot more british immigrants and a few others (dutch, greek, pacific island, fijian indian, etc.).
5. before the mid-70s, only a tiny minority of people travelled extensively beyond australia. and even then, most still only went to london. most people until the 60s left school at 15 (or earlier) and went straight into employment or an apprenticeship. then they got married at 20 or so and had children. travelling? maybe for the well-off minority.
6. extensive travel by a large proportion of young nz-ers to places other than sydney and london only got going in the mid-to-late 80s. two decades ago. not long.
7. now, with a much more diverse base of immigrants than ever before, and greater interest in going to places apart from Aus/UK than before, young nz-ers are spread much more far and wide.
8. the attitude of a lot of nz-ers to the rest of the world is still very insular. "provincial and parochial" is one way of describing it. "extreme insecurity about one's own (dominant) culture" might be another way. -
I've often wondered: are the people of other countries filled with such endless angst about their own provincialism and insularity? Or do they just not give a toss?
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I've had the disconcerting experience, on more than one occasion, of being asked to concur that, while I may be an immigrant, I'm not an immigrant in the same sense of somebody from Asia, and that we should let in a lot more of me and a lot fewer of them. If nothing else (and obviously there's a lot else) the idea that it should be more desirable and advantegous for New Zealand to establish connections with Italy as opposed to, say, China or India, seems laughable.
It is a bit discombubulating. But then I learned to use my adorable British accent to convince everyone I'm a charming genius, rather than a surly idiot.
Cultural cringe for the win!
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I've often wondered: are the people of other countries filled with such endless angst about their own provincialism and insularity? Or do they just not give a toss?
Me too. I've certainly detected something of that insecurity in Singapore, mostly around the issue of whether the world perceives them as a real country, rather than a glorified airport.
It's certainly a long-standing tradition in in these parts. In the American author Robin W. Winks's These New Zealanders (1954), an outsider's overview of NZ that found a ready local audience, the author claims that New Zealanders are afflicted with an anxiety that someone will someday publish a map of the world, and casually slap an advertisement over NZ.
When the much-travelled English botanical artist Marianne North visited NZ in 1881 the crassness of the inhabitants, along with the freezing weather, severely tested her usual cultural sensitivity. She found a like-minded soul in the then governor, Sir Arthur Gordon:
. . . I moved into his house and heard him abuse the island with as much heartiness as I did. He said, justly, something must be wrong with a country that required so much laudation.
It was later that same year, when Gordon was on a visit to the Pacific Islands, that Premier John Hall's Government took the opportunity to invade Parihaka, an action bitterly opposed by the Governor.
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are the people of other countries filled with such endless angst about their own provincialism and insularity?
Danielle, I reckon think of our nation as a teenager. In a world mainly full of grown-ups.
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Me too. I've certainly detected something of that insecurity in Singapore, mostly around the issue of whether the world perceives them as a real country, rather than a glorified airport.
An insecurity likely born out of the post-independence race riots, and addressed by imposing a form of soft-totalitarianism and conscripting everyone.
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Danielle, I reckon think of our nation as a teenager. In a world mainly full of grown-ups.
All nations have insecurities, at least all nations that I've seen. Most are recently defined, in transition, and at least in some way incoherent. We're not the only ones afflicted with a great desire for recognition.
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