Posts by George Darroch
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I do have to say, that while class is a very real issue in NZ, it is possible to transcend its cultural dimensions if you're the right kind of person. Join the university students association and a political party, and a few years later you can be spending time with cabinet ministers. You might always feel out of place in certain Auckland suburbs, and lack the connections to make it in business, but in a lot of domains the ability to transcend is real.
Of course, the caveats here are large. You have to be able to present yourself in the right ways, and understand or adopt the cultural language of those you interact with. Having extended families that 'educate' you in these, or rubbing off on people entrenched particular mores and ideas in them is a huge boost up.
And needless to say, these avenues are indeed closed to many, and as income stratifies in NZ, I would guess they're becoming more so. Compared to a base of 30 years ago, anyway.
Edit: which is to say that I agree with what Deborah said, in part however rather than in whole.
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By income, anyone earning over $40,000 in New Zealand is in the top 20%. Decile 6 starts at just $23,000.
NoRightTurn has helpfully laid out the figures. They're revealing. (it's always easier to find these things on NRT or TheStandard than on StatsNZ!).
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Unless of course they didn't forsee a controversy. Which is likely, because a strong cross-spectrum consensus in favour of action on environmental issues exists in Europe (much unlike "clean" "green" NZ), and Howard was trying to establish his environmental credentials at the tail end of a very severe drought widely linked in the public imagination to climate change.
Looking abroad, you would have thought it a perfectly reasonable thing to do, that nobody but crazy nutters would oppose.
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Yeah, you would have thought that after years in government, Labour would have realised that the NZ media's default mode is report the controversy rather than the issue.
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Yeah, I get that. I grew up poor. Not poor by world standards, but pretty much by NZ ones. I've found myself not looking at prices on supermarket shelves in the last year, and wondering about it.
Class is an extremely uncomfortable subject in NZ, and the easiest way to place yourself back in the comfort zone is to accuse the person of envy. Or, at the other end, of snobbery - but this is less common, since NZ's rich have until recently tried to deny the existence of serious class divides.
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I do think that the core of the message - focus on the economic hardship, focus on the 75% of us who live on less than $30k - is a very good one. Refusing to be distracted by other things is not the same as apologising for them, or being ashamed of them. It simply means not engaging.
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Thanks Hadyn. Depressing stuff.
Any ideas how we go forward from here?
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Yup, I've got no problem that people have to convince the Ministry about a genuine need to keep kids away from school.
I do. There should be regulations about how education is provided, and standards to be adhered to (including levels of social interaction with other children), but having to convince ministry officials that a child is particularly "special" should not have to be one of them.
I suppose I should disclose that I was largely homeschooled, for both educational and religious reasons - not that I endorse all of these postfacto.
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Yeah. They listened to weird bastard.
Thanks for the link. I get the impression that a lot of New Zealand politicians, and quite a few would do well to listen to weird bastard's sucessors. There are an awful lot of people crying out for less regulation. We need smarter regulation, which will foster the best products and services, and do away with the worst.
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The Human Rights Amendment Bill, under the name of Associate Health Minister Katherine O'Regan -- but don't let me fuck with the narrative.
There are plenty of things the last National Government did that deserve plaudits, and I acknowledge them. The point, which I think you will probably agree with, is that one man's social engineering is another woman, child, homosexual, impaired person's basic human rights.