Yellow Peril by Tze Ming Mok

So... the Maori Party supports universal work-for-dole. The 'cab' metaphor is getting tired, but what, exactly, are they driving at? Is this a political feint that accidentally became a blunt stab? For their constituents, is it a stab in the back? And could this painful extension of mixed metaphors and hypotheticals get any more Sex and the City?*

The Maori Party generally and Tariana Turia in particular have fielded suspicion and discomfort from much of the left - for various reasons but including, I believe, for daring to be Maori for the sake of Maori people, and not necessarily for the sake of national cuddly togetherness and cross-cultural validation of Brand New Zealand, our postcolonial DIY be-mulleted paradise, nor even for the sake of the Left, the Natural Home of Oppressed Coloured Folk. Granted, Pita Sharples does play that inclusive 'national vision' line well to the nervous white libs, but Turia bothers much less. Armchair crypto-separatist that I am on Sunday afternoons, I admire her for that. Well now, with a concerted bridging of their two approaches, they've answered that gap in truly 'national' policy by coming up with a shady version of ...a National policy.

What a bloody shame.

Said the Herald on Saturday:

It should be compulsory for all unemployed beneficiaries to be placed on work-for-the-dole or training schemes, Maori Party co-leaders say.

Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples said: "It is hardline but this is a serious situation and it's our people trapped in that whole benefit package idea. If we are going to break it, then that's how we do it.

"We're tired of our people being tied to the benefit strings, it leads nowhere, it gives no hope, it becomes a way of life instead of a stop-gap measure and that's what we're fighting against.

...

"If you are going to give benefits out, let the people start using the skills of working and supporting something in order to get their benefit.

...

Asked if he wanted compulsory work or training for all people on the unemployment benefit, Dr Sharples said: "I'm talking about all people, it has to be all people." [my emphasis]

Yeah baby - One Law For All! Discursive revenge at last?

It's obviously not actually a policy yet, just some calculated thinking out loud. There are no details on the Maori Party website, so it can't even be called 'cobbled together.' You can see in the article that the Maori Party is worried about Maori school leavers going straight onto benefits, and long-term unemployed people trapped in multigenerational cycles of dependence. We do know though, that Maori school-leavers are increasingly going into training and further education of their own accord thanks to institutions like te Wananga o Aotearoa. Also, nearly 67% of everyone on the dole is short-term unemployed as of the September 2006 quarter. Long-term unemployment has steadily shrunk as a percentage of overall unemployment over the past few years, and is currently holding steady. In the current labour market, most people on the dole are actually capable of finding a real job without being made to work in a fake one for, like, practise.

If this is discursive revenge, you can almost see the joke. Sharples is taking what he, and all the conservative elements of New Zealand, want to do to the Kahui family, and applying it to everyone in a hyperbolic social policy explosion. Tough love! One Law For All! Not just chain-gangs for uneducated brown people, but for university grads in the 'motivated self-starter' category, and all those white-boy alt-pop Lil' Chief bands on PACE! Heh. I mean, terrible.

All this aside, there's this glaring detail: Work for Dole didn't work. Here are a couple of tables from the original WINZ evaluation I just linked to. Neither programme improved participants' chances of actually moving into real work, and in fact reduced those chances for a year.

Even before that report came out, everyone hated the Work for Dole scheme, including capitalists. Very pertinently, The Maori Employment and Training Commission thought it was crap.

To make it work, according to the Commission in 2000, the programme would have had to transform into something else entirely - that is, sustainable and well resourced Maori/iwi-based community development that led to the creation of actual real jobs that paid real wages. In other words, not a Work For Dole scheme. Also, with the need for state injection of ongoing resources into what would essentially be a relaunch of the Community Employment Group (ref: Hip-hop tour), such a scheme would be anathema, surely, to what National and Act had in mind for employment and benefit reform in a potential coalition government with the Maori Party.

Iwi-based community development & employment projects, and increasing Maori participation in post-school skills training (such as as been achieved through wananga) are some of the best examples of what decentralisation and devolution could deliver for Maori people. But these things have nothing to do with a universal 'work for dole' employment policy, or other punitive benefit-eligibility measures.

If there had been any point in giving the Maori Party your party vote at the last election when you weren't on the Maori electoral roll (ref: overhang), I'm one of the people who probably would have. Good thing I'm not actually Pakeha, or you might have just vomited on your keyboard. This possible not-quite policy however, could be about to lose the Maori Party my hypothetical lame lefty bourgeois non-Maori vote that I can't even give them and that they're not interested in anyway.

But if the Maori Party want to seriously swing right, it's their prerogative, and something for their voter base to respond to. So if there is *anyone* reading Public Address who actually votes Maori Party - ie. on the Maori roll - or is a member, now's the time to chip in. Er... anyone?

*(Sharples is clearly the Carrie, Turia is the Miranda. Hone Harawira and Te Ururoa Flavell can fight it out for Samantha, but I think we can guess who'll win.)

The traditionally English-speaking Chinese groups - Singaporeans, Malaysians, NZBCs, Hongkies - have been long trotted out as the identifiable, homogenous yellow face of 'Asian/migrant' advocacy. That's why it's so heartening to hear the Filipinos making serious noise on the six-month work permit issue.

They've scored three hits in the Herald in the last few weeks: in this feisty op-ed by a Pinoy advocate, a folksy mention in Lincoln's column, and today's news article on the (thankfully) quick review of this awfully stupid policy.

The article mentions a petition to Government signed by 1300 Filipinos to reinstate the 2-year work permit period. 1300 Filipinos is nearly 8% of the entire resident Filipino population. That's an impressive degree of mobilisation. Despite various forms of political craziness in the Philippines, it's a place where civil society movements are politically organised and are a normal fact of life, even if normal life can be variously crazy. It's not surprising that as their population increases, Filipinos are taking the opportunity to make their voices heard, nor that they have articulate advocates and vocal vox-poppers with something to say in fluent, kind of American-sounding English. Mainstream journalists bored of the same old people should be looking forward to more of that.

Every new strand helps in breaking the Commonwealth-educated-Chinese stranglehold on public 'Asian-ness' - given that the Chinese are on our way down. After slapping in the new 2006 Census ethnicity figures into this table, we can confirm, as suspected, that while the Chinese are up 40,000 in raw numbers, we are down - down! - from 44% of the Asian population in 2001 to 41% today. Indians rose from 26% to 29%, and South Asians collectively rose from 30.5% to 33.4% of the Asian population. Indigenous South East Asian ethnic groups (ie not counting Southeast Asian Chinese who proudly write in 'Malaysian Chinese' etc...) dipped slightly from 13% to 12.3% of total Asians, because of the expected chunky 40K increases in Chinese and Indians. However, Filipinos consolidated at 4.7% of all Asians, roundly beating out the Japanese for fourth biggest Asian ethnic group, and leading the SEA pack by a country mile.

And so, the yellow:sepia 'Asian' ratio continues to shift, down from about 55:45 yellow to sepia, to around 53:46 (the leftover 1% is increasingly confused). In line with my plea here last year, please, somebody, notice.

Taking Shortland St as the national arbiter of multicultural awareness, I am also informed that there were plans afoot to introduce a Filipina nurse character. Awesome! Except that they couldn't get the cute NZ-born Chinese actress they wanted to cast, to sound or pass as 'Filipina'. Really? Now the word is that the character will instead be a 'Hong Kong'-born nurse. Because we have soooo many of those. An appreciated attempt, I suppose, but I didn't notice that there was any obvious topical DHB-buzz about the demographic trend of all those nurses and caregivers arriving from ...Hong Kong. Apparently, this character, instead of having to do a fake Cantonese accent badly, will do a British accent, which is realistic enough for a Hongky. You would think though, that the actress could have just done an American accent, and played mestizo Chinese Filipina, considering there are about 1.5 million Chinese Filipinos in the Philippines... Oh well, I suppose it's better than... nothing? Over to the Pinoys on this one.

Firstly, A New Year's message from Yip Phanchan, an acclaimed Thai novelist with limited English, after the Bangkok bombings and my 'are you okay?' emails:

Happy New Year to you. I m ok but Thailand not ok.

Having lost the will to blog in December, here's a round-up of interesting loose ends I failed to mention in the last month or so.

For local ethnicity geeks:
Now that the National Party's all-out gambit for the centre ground is underway, isn't it time for some serious analysis of Bill English's perspective on the Treaty? After all, there's a strong chance that it's going to be the one that matters. Unlike the deeply shallow and easily mockable Brash-Bassett line, English's 2005 Chapman lecture was historically nuanced, too grown-up to work properly as a dog-whistle, and would take some serious thought and energy to address with any degree of justice, which is clearly why I haven't bothered doing it. Did you? Go swot up. You have less than two years.

An 'Asian' friend of mine google-stalked and wrote an inquiring email to Tahu Kukutai, the demographer quoted as 'warning' Maori about the impending swamping of Maori by 'Asians.' This angle of course, kick-started the Thread that Would Not Die. Tahu noted that she was quoted out of context, but that her qualifying statements somehow did not appear to be quite so interesting to the media. Shock! Horror! etc.

Five or six skinny 15-year old Freemans Bay wannabe gangstas (white and brown if you're interested) gave me the foreign-lady-love-you-long-time treatment, and a bit of a shove, in broad daylight on the Wellington St overbridge. I freaked them out by waving my umbrella threateningly and abusing them in English. One of them promised to 'fucking kill' me and reached swaggeringly into his little manbag, in some moment of pure 'Get Rich or Die Trying' filmic fantasy. He pulled out... a spraycan. 'What are you gonna do?' I asked, 'tag me to death?' They looked really embarrassed and ran away. That week, I saw a little Chinese student girl get her bag snatched in Mid City by someone who knew she wouldn't know how to shout for help, and one of my (fluent English-speaking Singaporean) Chinese 'Aunties', athritic and nearly 60, was weirdly bullied by a traffic cop who made her stand outside her car on a cold, windy day while he slowly wrote her a ticket, and wouldn't let her get back in, even when she knocked on his window to say she was cold. I guess he couldn't tell her apart from the boy racers. Cops, robbers, teenage idiots, could it be that they think Chinese women are meek easy targets? Horror! Shock! etc.

For Foreign Affairs & War geeks:
Global Voices is still the best one-stop shop for finding out what bloggers and dissidents in Iraq, Iran & China are thinking about Iraq, Iran & China, without having to deal with what American bloggers who can't read Arabic, Farsi or Chinese are thinking about Iraq, Iran & China (uh, who cares?).

For China Rising geeks:
In China, despite massive cable-disruption causing internet outage through most of Northeast Asia, we can still check on what the Chinese dissidents are up to. Tip 1: you can interview them legally now, if the government hasn't spirited them out of the urban centres to get them away from journalists. Tip 2: if you want to join in some legal/illegal Chinese strike action, start off with a rousing Mandarin chorus of the Internationale: Qilai! Qilai!

Will Hutton's causing a stir with a new book on China, which has some alarmist tendencies, but not the usual ones. It's worth looking at his excerpt in the Guardian, a less measured online article of his, which was subjected to some kneejerk postcolonial argy-bargy from Meghnad Desai, and a piece on Shanghai that gets the best of both worlds by Pankaj Mishra.

For Asian-American Pop culture geeks:
Jin has slapped down Rosie O'Donnell, who had slapped down Donald Trump for slapping down Rosie O'Donnell for slapping down Donald Trump for not slapping down a slapper beauty-queen, which was sort of unrelated to Rosie O'Donnell making 'ching-chong' noises while making fun of Danny DeVito, who appeared shit-faced drunk on her talkshow. I wonder if this has made it onto CCTV-4? MTV-Chi's Simon Yin goes and asks his mum, the kids at the pearl tea parlour, and his brother's poker game, what they thought. Yep, your mum, the pearl tea kids, and your bro's poker game are truly the new golden triumvirate of Diaspora Chinese Opinion.

Jen at Reappropriate live-blogged the whole series of Survivor: Race Wars, including the finale. As she observes, the race narrowed down into a competition between the 'Rainbow Coalition' and the crumbling 'White Alliance.'

Jeff Yang proposed that Asian-Americans invent their own holiday of late December considering that everyone else seems to have one, and name it after either Survivor's Super Asian Man Yul Kwon (Yul-tide or Kwonzaa) or Masi Oka from Heroes (X-Masi). The Asian-Americans have been emoting for months about Masi Oka - he's making all those geekboy-superhero dreams come true. On television.

If you're not some kind of geek, I can't help you.

Look. You're bloated and sleepy after the latest pre-Christmas office lunch/booze-up. You're not going to do any work. You're definitely not going to think any more about the Thread that Would Not Die. You will instead open the the best present ever from Justin Timberlake and SNL.

I am aware that posting Youtube clips does not count as blogging. Will get back to you once bloat subsides.

They're taking over. The 'New Zealanders' I mean. As you can see, they're actively killing off the white-folk, looting their homes and renaming their children. Once this demographer realises that we 350,000 'Asians' aren't actually one ethnic group, she may choose instead to worry about the 'New Zealanders' threatening to outnumber Maori to become the minority with the most leverage.

Now, there are undoubtedly some people in this new ascendant minority group who are not just white people who don't like to be called 'Pakeha' or 'European'. But... you can see it right? How the dip from the 'European' category on the left appears to tetris itself rather exactly into the 'New Zealander' category on the far right? The more you look at it, the funnier it gets.

If we could just bump up the MELAA (learn to love this random pan-ethno-acronym) and the Pacific bars, we could make the whole bottom row disappear!

Plink!