The rundown so far is that I turned around from Auckland pretty much straight away and headed for the Mount. The car trip had been exhausting, but hanging out with some rellies and an amazing curry laksa later (in New Lynn of all places) I was a little drunk and well-relaxed. After dropping off the Avis relocation and catching a shuttle to the Bay of Plenty I was back in the home country.
My first impression? Kiwifruit. One of my first jobs was picking fruit, until I got too tall, and that smell of the vines has stayed with me ever since. In fact, I still find kiwifruit a little unpalatable, so driving into Katikati and 'vine-funk' was at first alarming. You'll be glad to know I recovered pretty quickly though.
The next impression was amazement at how far and fast the Tauranga area has grown. Amazement. There's estates and big shiny houses everywhere. Everywhere. It is, in fact, 'fountain lakes' on the Bay. Whatever happened to that sleepy little town I grew up in?
At least they still dramatically underpay their service workers. It's always good to see consistency in an industry. My brother is a Chef, and he's usually offered less per hour than I was working for as a dishpig in Melbourne. Seriously. The minimum wage over there for any service job is $A16 p/h. But hey, peanuts and monkeys.
Anyhow, other than family the highlight was a day trip to attend a Political Science conference in Hamilton. It's been interesting watching the regulars develop in skills and theoretical sophistication over the years, from the early days when I myself could barely talk in front of a seminar or lecture.
I presented the usual and obligatory paper on 'nation-building', which regular readers of Club Politique may be familiar with. Fortunately, I managed to have the involuntary freak-out meter only ratcheted to 'half piss-scared', and not 'gawping fish-mouth paralysis', and delivered most of the info I wanted to get across. I also drew some useful criticism, so thanks to the academic community for that.
Much to my surprise, and despite my ordinary delivery of the paper, I was invited to attend a caucus of academics involved in the study of media. An interesting group, I must say. Since writing Club Politique I've let the vanity of the leash a little and started calling myself a 'commentator', mostly because 'weblogger' draws blank stares in places like Tauranga, so with any kind of luck might be able to tap this group for comment on occasion. We'll see.
The remainder of the conference was, to my mind, characterised by what I saw as a bit of a positive movement away from 'older' methods of talking about and theorising politics in New Zealand. I should add that this is only really in my field, but the movement was fascinating all the same.
Although I only attended that one day of the conference, and missed an interesting discussion of constitutional reform in New Zealand, the papers I did see were a fascinating reappraisal of the means to understand Treaty politics and indigenous governance. I'm happy to be corrected on this impression, as I was concerning my comments about that student protest trip to Wellington, but I thought I noticed a pronounced movement towards an 'engagement' and 'negotiation' style of understanding the topic.
A few years ago, actually more than a few years ago, many papers I attended centred on concepts like 'social justice', 'rights', or a 'fair go' for indigenous people. The drive behind the things being discussed was always that Maori or other minorities were being short-changed, ripped off, or marginalized, and that something had to be done about it.
I'm forming the opinion though that New Zealand is moving past this, both academically and in practice. There's been sniffs of this development in the literature for years, and 'negotiation' seems to have been a mantra in Wellington for a fair while now. Again, this is mostly based on an impression from a mere five or six papers, but if conventional wisdom is actually moving towards this new model it is, in my most humble of opinions, a good thing.
The centre of this issue is the way people all too often perceive minorities as 'bitching' about their status. Much of the effort to 'close the gaps' on the part of the majority stems from an acknowledgement that minorities like Maori are or were clearly disadvantaged, and that something needed to be done. It was also because having a minority able to indicate that it's being hard done by is internationally embarrassing. The old mantra that 'our Maoris' are better off than 'their Aborigines' is proof of this.
Unlike Aboriginal people though, Maori are slowly escaping the poverty trap and the gap between minority-majority is closing. Which, to my mind, leaves us as a society with the question of on what grounds preferential treatment of Maori by Government or educational institutions (for example) can continue? As I said, the old argument was essentially, 'give Maori a fair go', so now that they have a fair go, what's the basis for their difference itself? There's nothing to bitch about, so lets all get on with the business of being New Zealanders then.
Why engagement and negotiation seems to me to be important is that it acknowledges the continuing reality of 'Maori' as an identity distinction from 'New Zealander'. Look, if you're the sort of person who'd like to see a single identity dominate New Zealand, you're either a dreamer or a fool. Even back in the bad ol' days of the hard-core assimilation policy a separate Maori identity continued to survive, and the warm-fuzzy social justice days have only reinforced this difference.
And the conference reinforced my impression that the upcoming generation is thinking new, and ways are being devised, fleshed out and argued to make New Zealand work as an authentic and ongoing relationship between two peoples, and not the scene of a gradual decline of the minority. As I may have said before, maybe one day New Zealand might turn into a single people, but it will be because it happened cooperatively, and not because Maori were dissolved into the mainstream.
Anyhow, made it to Auckland again the day before yesterday, and enjoying the sights and sounds of the extremely picturesque Mt. Eden. Back in Melbourne on Monday, which with any luck will be thirty-five degrees, and I'll probably be wearing my new Tino Rangatiratanga t-shirt. Only ten bucks from a shop on Dominion Road. TEN BUCKS! Excellent.