Posts by Deborah
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Thanks for the news of HarvestBird, Lucy.
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Good to see the PASers checking in. Shame about those chimneys, Ian, but I'm glad to hear that you're otherwise fine. I'm hoping that we might hear from HarvestBird soon...
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I didn't shop in Pak 'n' Save for exactly that reason - just too damn scary. Especially with small children in tow.
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Hmmm... instead of worrying about whether you would happily tell people that your child is a sex worker or a banker, try this thought experiment.
One of the requirements for being able to receive the unemployment benefit is that you are trying to find work. WINZ will even help you to find work. If you turn down a job that is offered to you, your benefit may be cut off.
Should WINZ require people to be sex workers? It's legal, after all.
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I get to vote in the Australian federal election, for the first, and probably the last time. I'm going for the local Labor candidate for the House of Reps, because there's an small chance that he might roll the Lib man who has been there for 17 years and done nothing. In the Senate, I'm preferencing the Greens and then Labor, with the nasties (One Nation, Family First) right down the bottom of the list.
I've been curiously detached from the whole affair, because it has been so farcical, and because we'll be home for good in December anyway.
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My mother has been keeping irises for my return home.
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Regarding teachers as middle class vs teachers as working class, and 'owning the means of production' as a marker of class, I thought the more usual distinction these days (y'know, about 150 years AM [After Marx]) was wages vs salary. Them wot works for an hourly wage are working class, and them wot works for a salary are middle class.
Clothing... management lecturers wear suits and arts lecturers wear whatever. I struck some problems in this regard this week: on Monday I was teaching in political theory in the morning, and 'Business and Society' (1st year business course) in the afternoon. What to wear, what to wear.... I compromised in grey pants, cream shirt, no jacket. By today, I was back to Arts wear: scrubby jeans, an embroidered top, and my purple Mary Jane Docs (I luvs them). It's about what I would call, were I teaching 'Speaking Theory and Practice', which I have done in my time, "register" i.e. the appropriate voice and style for the occasion.
Regarding class, this week I was talking to students about Plato's republic, and in particular, about how he divides people into gold, silver and bronze, and assigns them work accordingly. (Philosophers are gold, and they get to be the rulers: I think it's an excellent theory.) I asked them to consider how we assign work in our society, and after a while, pushed them to think about whether we deliberately create areas in which we breed brute labour. They were shocked. It was good for them.
Part of the reason that they were shocked is because like NZ, Australia is intensely egalitarian, in its ideals, if not in its practice. I think that there are ways in which we just don't get class.
boobies
Thanks to Emma, I have now worked out why I am incorrigibly middle class. No blonde bobs or upstanding collars, 'though. My hair is red. And short. As I said to my students, that's why my feeble lady brane is urging me to vote for Julia.
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@Islander, and all the other bookie types around here:
pats 899 pages of ms*
Ooooohhhhh! Goody goody goody.
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Individual income is not a great indicator of class / socio-economic group. So NRT's figures are valuable, but the more interesting one is household income after tax.
However, that's by-the-by. I think we often forget about the "socio" bit of socio-economic / class. John Key may well have grown up in a state house, but he has never been anything other than middle class. There were times when my parents really struggled for money, but we were thoroughly middle-class, with all the aspirations that come with it. And when we shifted over here, we were very cash poor for a few months, but I budgeted carefully, but we always knew it would be temporary, and I still afforded all those nice middle class things for the kids, like music lessons, and drama lessons.
Spending a lot of money on a dress may well be an indicator of increased age as much as anything. I got myself a nice frock for my last concert, and while I didn't just casually put it on the card and not think about the expenditure, my thinking amounted to working out what I could defer buying, and how it would fit with the rest of my wardrobe, and would I want to get new shoes to go with it (no), rather than whether or not I could afford it at all.
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Umm... me too. On like all the white space, that is. But I'm a luddite w.r.t. mobile phones. I only txt and call people - none of this fancy 3G stuff, whatever that is.