Posts by Russell Brown
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Isn't it great that the Gang of Four, Bow Wow Wow, the Cure, Adam and the Ants, New Order are having their day in the sun again?
Not to mention the rather lavish tribute being paid to some of them by the current crop of new bands ...
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even less overwhelming. Russell you've put it as doubling, when the total population percentage didn't double.
Not my wording - it was a quote from the Herald story.
Seems to be a negative to me - Maori are increasingly unlikely, relative to the general population, to earn at least that amount of money.
Depends on how you look at it. In 2001, the rate for the general population was exactly three times that for Maori. Now it's less than 2.5x. Innit?
But I think you're both smacking a straw man around. No one said it was overwhelming. But the trend is encouraging.
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Spooky - my mate Andy was just telling me how cool Blair Parkes' new band was, and now here it is. Nice.
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But we do have warring racial gangs; it's just that it's on a smaller scale. I'm pretty sure if we had the same population and as OZ we would see much the same occurring. I don't think we in NZ should be taking too much credit for what is a fluke of demographics.
Do you have to cringe quite so much, Neil?
It is not purely a "fluke of demographics", it's a different social environment. It's a difference in kind.
Yes, we have white racist groups. Do we see them leading thousands of ordinary citizens in race riots? No, we don't.
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The percentages seem a little misleading to me: 41% on is $14,800 (Maori) is about $6,100, while 31% on $18,600 (Pakeha) is about $5,800. So, the gap has closed $300 rather than 10%. Not to be sniffed at but but also hardly overwhelming.
Fair point. But the relative rate of increase in median Maori income is still markedly greater, and your point becomes less significant as real incomes converge (assuming they continue to do so). As you say, not to be sniffed at.
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Deja Voodoo with Tim Finn, One Night in Saigon':
Trash rockers Deja Voodoo, best known for their anthemic tribute to methamphetamine, 'P', teamed up with Kiwi music legend Tim Finn in 2005 to record an equally anthemic version of Billy Joel's AOR hit. Band founders Matt Heath and Chris Stapp continue to play the song in place of "Auld lang Syne" at New Year's Eve gigs, and on their radio show, to torture drivers stuck in traffic.
But here's the thing: everything above is true_. In fact, they just played it ...
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On a happier note, Mr. Slack has reduced my productivity today to something so close to zero a pure mathematician would round it off within a blink of an eye.
My favourite so far from www.fstdt.com is:
I had to consciously force myself to cease with it. But I thought this was genius:
"Marijuana is the Gateway Drug.
And Darwin is the Gateway Science.
First it's evolution. Then comes plate tectonics and the Big-Bang. Then comes Athiesm. Then comes self-loathing and misanthropy, which leads to elitism and superiority complexes. The resulting social ostracization leads to homoeroticism and other perversions. The insatiable demand for money to fund extravagances coupled with the sloth that accompanies the welfare check creates a visceral hatred of capitalism. Finally, the abuser is no longer able to feel for his country and multiculturalism takes over. The transformation is complete.
I've seen it happen again and again."
The world in a nutshell.
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How would you know that? You said the onlookers were as peeved as your mate. In Australia or Britain their sympathies would most likely be with the yobos. I have lived in some racist countries and this is not one of them.
Relatively speaking, I think you're right. We are hardly free of blight, but I don't think an independent observer would pick us as a particularly racist country.
Also, having lived in London for five years, it strikes me that while we may lack the sporting passion of some similar countries, we can all sit next to each other at sports matches. At the football in Britain, opposing fans are almost always seated in separate parts of the ground. They still occasionally kill each other.
On the other hand, I was always aware that - living in Brixton anyway - I was in a very different environment to that in many American cities. At the bar, at the market, whatever: it was integrated. So I guess there are no simple pictures.
Perhaps we're all striving to be reasonable, but we're coming to different conclusions than people did in similar discussions on PA in 2005. Two emails from a Dec 2005 Hard News, first from an anonymous reader:
Was born in Australia and live in Godzone on my Oz passport. I have (again) requested the papers to apply for NZ citizenship. Last time was when the Tampa thing was going on.
When I lived in Sydney I was torn between the fundamental nice-ness of your typical strine, and the raving red-neck that lurked beneath.
It was surreal, like some Sci-Fi thing where they land on this perfectly ordinary paradise planet, and then get served boiled-alien-baby for dinner or something. You'd be chatting to a perfectly sane Strine about tax avoidance (a most popular Bar-B topic) and all of a sudden some bizarre Nazi statement about "Abo's" would pop out.
The whole ethos was centred on assimilation (aka integration, to use the PC right-wing term). You _will_ become dinky-di Aussies. Resistance is futile. Spooky. Too spooky for me.
During the Tampa thing I came as close as I ever have to smacking someone in their ( extremely large and obnoxious) gob. He was repeating the Howard Govt bullshit lines about refugees. No rational argument, just keep repeating "throw babies in ocean".
Recently I noted the Federal government are running TV ad's saying "beware... we're under attack... they're all out to get you". All this crap serves to feed an underlying feeling that the Australian way of life is under threat by people who wear different clothes. The Howard government has validated the ravings of the right wing nutters by it's brown-nosing with Bush.
Howard has consistently made me ashamed of the passport, and the Australian people for succumbing to such blatant FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) tactics.
I just need to find the $$ for the citizenship application now!
And Ben Wilson:
I spent 5 years in Melbourne, working firstly for an NZ software house selling software to a huge ozzie milk company, and then in the most reputable stockbroker as IT support and eventually as a support manager.
Not once in all those years did I see one aboriginal in employment anywhere. In fact I scarcely saw any aboriginals at all, except hanging around the train station sinking piss. I met more maoris and PIs there. Which was odd since Victoria was reputedly the most densely populated part of Australia prior to european colonization.
When I asked people about aboriginals, I was shocked to find moderate educated people telling me things like 'they're a fucken useless race', or 'we're not sure they're actually the same species'. 'Rock apes' was not an uncommon phrase.
The papers persist to this day in calling aboriginals 'Blacks', without the slightest hint of embarrassment. When I asked one 'leftie' guy about that, he said 'well, they are black'. I warned him not to do it in NZ if he liked having his original teeth.
It kind of sickened me, to see how low a people could be driven. You begin to wonder to what extent the aboriginals brought it on themselves. Then you do a bit of research and find that systematic slaughter and relocation happened on a scale that make the maori land confiscations look like acts of altruism. The first employment ever given on an official basis to aboriginals was the job of tracking down and killing other aboriginals for rustling sheep. I believe in Tasmania you could buy a license to shoot any aboriginal you wanted from the post office.
So that's just the attitudes to aboriginals, to set the scene. Immigrants fared better - barely. The PIs and Maoris that I met were never in the corporate environment, they were entirely in jobs of manual labour or semiskilled trades. But not unhappy with that lot, it would seem - at least they earned good money. Statistically they were an insignificant group - one in a thousand, it seemed like.
The real tension in Melb was between 'skippies' ('Anglos' in Sydney?) and mediterranean folks, particularly Greeks and Italians. They fared quite well, the Italians better than the Greeks. Italians were represented right up to upper middle management. But in the stockbroker they were completely absent from the board of directors. Similarly for the Greeks.
Attitudes towards them ranged from mild annoyance to open contempt, in the skippy crowd. The same didn't seem to go in reverse. But I think Melbournites don't realize quite how much the fiery latin temperament has rubbed off on them. Italians were always blamed for gang activity, although I think they were not responsible for any more than their fair share of the hits, protection rackets, pimping, drug selling and standover tactics which seemed to be so widely accepted there and so foreign to me. It is a strange experience to see a cop come into a restaurant, abuse the owner, get a free meal, then help himself out of the till before leaving.
Asians were totally underrepresented in business. None in any management role I ever saw. I saw violence towards them several times, and constant niggling.
Kiwis were the most tolerated bunch, generally, however much australians complain about us. There is so much cultural similarity that the oppression I felt was about as lame as what I'd feel being an Aucklander in Wellington. Generally, we're hired as expendable attack dogs. Many people are genuinely fond of kiwis, seeing us as their little brothers. Until we assert ourselves, of course, then every silly stereotype comes flooding out. I kept thinking of Wellington when it happened.
My perspective, not scientific, but it's what I've got. I'll never forget in my life the vitriol I received when I resigned from my management role and suggested my second in command, a Greek lady, be my replacement. You find out who your friends are and who are merely sycophants.
To be fair, I met many non racist ozzies. But they were mostly what would be considered 'extreme lefties' here.
I'm a bit dubious about the distinction between a racist environment and one where it's permissible to voice and act on racist sentiments. Don't they amount to the same thing?
Anyway, my observation was that Australia is a different place, and it is. We simply do not endure the same kind of social conflict. We don't have warring racial gangs staging riots and mob beatings, and producing popular hate videos that are, on both sides, deeply, scarily racist. We just don't.
I find it interesting that right-wingers in Australia invariably blame multiculturalism for conflict. Hasn't assimilation had long enough to prove its merit?
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While it can now be seen as a pretty brave move and helped bring long-term results (as evidenced at last world cup), David Hill didn't survive for long, the 'old-school' ethnic rivalries banding together at the first available opportunity to force him out.
Thanks - interesting.
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When it came to the "If you're a fag, he hates you too" aside, I laughed and spurted coffee on my jeans.
And yesterday someone spat all over their geeky twin monitors. I am not up for your cleaning bills, folks ...
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