Posts by Lucy Stewart
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What about apartment dwellers?
Defined by square footage/building amenities, maybe?
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When you have tasted Olive oil and can only seem to grow tomatoes and silver beet in your backyard vegetable garden successfully.
If you can grow tomatoes and silverbeet, there are no excuses for not being able to grow spinach, lettuce, or courgettes. Really.
(Okay, except not liking them, but for the purposes of this comment that doesn't count.)
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How about we just make simpler. Those wot has money are middle class, those wot has none are lower, and filthy rich scum are upper class. If you manage to fit in with any of these groups in spite of your income, good for you.
Or we can learn what this thread has taught us: that, when it really comes down to it, humans are just as obsessed with the minutiae of status as your average baboon. We can just draw the discussion out a lot longer. ;)
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You occasionally see blokes in suits and ties around the university but they must vice-chancellors or pro-vice chancellors (are there any anti-vice chancellors?) or SIS spies.
And my ex-finance-industry history lecturer, the only bloke under about seventy on campus who wore suits and ties.
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Um, it came up on one of David's threads. It's a Merivale Matron thing, though I'm pretty sure it's also a Sloan Ranger thing. Short blonde bob, string of pearls, standing-up collar. Even if you are also wearing gumboots.
I too am unfamiliar with the standing-up-collar thing (as I am with most dress signals that aren't glaringly obvious) but the blonde-bob-and-jewellery thing is an upper - sorry, upper-__middle__-class marker all over NZ. They were the absolute worst for returns in retail, too.
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The true state of things is revealed in Lyndon Hood's excellent The Calculator of Cthulhu - be prepared to stare into the still beating heart of true horror - not for the faint hearted!
Magic.
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But is it any less weird than the familiar trope that class does not exist in any concrete form in New Zealand, because it can be transcended ? This it seems, is essentially what Key and Clark stories tell us.
The trouble with that one is that it happens just often enough, in the public eye, for the meme to perpetuate itself.
I'm not sure how close New Zealand's class movements are to America's, but currently, in America, if you're born in the bottom 40% socio-economically, your chances of making it into the top 40% are just 4%. Compare that with the common myths of class. Pretty depressing stuff.
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The kind of economy only available to the wealthy!
Epitomised, because yes, this can never be mentioned enough, by boots. Including the other day, when I went to get my $180 pair of boots re-heeled for the second time in six years of ownership and my husband went to get new ones because his $50 boots had worn out. (He has finally been persuaded that spending more than $100 on a pair of shoes is not actually going to get him arrested by the Thrift Police.)
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I don't think population size has much to do with your chances of encountering the disparities. It's the income distribution. If anything, a small country makes it less likely you'll see the extremes. I met people in Australia who lived in houses that made the most fancy homes in Auckland look decidedly modest. And there were lots of bums too. How often do people beg you for money walking around NZ?
There are fewer extremes, but your chances of encountering someone in a certain situation - school, uni, a mate's party - and then realising they are at a very different end of the spectrum to you are higher, I think, at least if you're noticing that the spectrum exists in the first place. Sort of a corollary to what George was saying about being able to cross boundaries very quickly in the right circumstances.
But you certainly don't see the very obvious differences that you do in other countries - like, as you say, beggars - and I think that makes it much easier for people to pretend that the differences don't exist at all.
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The other thing about NZ is because of the population size compared to disparity in income, you can run up against class divisions hard and unexpectedly. I had to go to a function at the Beehive a few weeks ago, so I decided to take my husband, on the grounds that he'd never been and it would be fun.
What actually happened is that he spent a great deal of time being tense and I spent a great deal of time telling him to relax, because it turns out that functions at the Beehive are a big deal if you grew up in borderline poverty in a small South Island town, whereas to me, growing up in upper-middle-class Wellington, they were just something that occasionally (not *often*, but, you know, occasionally) happened.
By income, anyone earning over $40,000 in New Zealand is in the top 20%. Decile 6 starts at just $23,000.
I remember working out that the job I've just finished was in the top 25 or 30%, income-wise, and thinking "That can't be right, I just finished university." But it was; and by "just finishing university", I started on an income that was more than my mother-in-law had earned for the vast majority of her working life. That was a bit scary.