Maybe it's high time we came up with a new word for the kind of politics espoused by our good friend Mr Peters. 'Wedge' seems to be the word of choice these days, but it just doesn't really encapsulate the deliberate division he aims for with mindless grass-roots redneckery masquerading as policy.
No doubt we've all seen the endless streams of vitriol and threats of legal action he likes to assume as soon as someone so much as suggests that he is in fact little more that a pin-stripped mafioso, so there is no way that I would ever assume to label him as one. Maybe when I'm in Wellington in November he'll offer to buy me a drink and bring me round to his way of thinking.
At present the most appropriate term for this type of politics is "ethnic outbidding". What this refers to is the act of turning a political debate that can or could be conducted at talking volume into a screaming match.
So for example, a debate on the ongoing role of the Treaty in New Zealand politics turns into hysteria surrounding the potential for 'civil war', the complete disintegration of the New Zealand nation, or the exploitation of the public purse to fund a mysterious cabal of 'elites' and their gravy-train minions.
This all leaves me very confused you see, because on one hand it's all about the redneck vote, the people who don't understand or simply don't like minorities, and want to see them assimilate into the greater New Zealand nation. But on the other hand it's all about the rubberneck vote, the people who see that something terrible has or is happening to a minority, but are more interested in getting themselves to the golden arches than stopping to help.
Tell you what, it's a quandary.
Maybe then the best thing is to all step back, take a deep breath, relax, and listen to Uncle Che tell a story about a land not so far away. A land of milk and honey where opposition pollies are happy to squander more money than the entire Fiscal Envelope on just one election, in just one sector of the electorate, and everyone loves them for it.
If you can characterise this Federal Election as anything it is like standing under a money tree. Howard and crew have been spending taxpayer funds "like drunken sailors", and Latham's team have been making promises to dismantle almost everything Howard and Co. have built and reinvest the money in "the ladder of opportunity". Dismantle everything except the GST of course.
This leaves us with something like $A6 billion in election promises. $A6 Billion. The Fiscal Envelope was less than $A1 Billion. Latham, the more sober of the spenders, only a few days ago announced something like $A1.5 Billion to make sure the blue-rinse set gets free hospital treatment.
Other than the occasional highlight such as the Coalition trying to have a Labor MP labelled a terrorist (which surprisingly enough was leaked to the media the day before the Labor election launch. It turned out he was a researcher into terrorism, hence the association with known terrorists twenty years ago), and the alarming prospect that this election would be fought on foreign policy after the Jakarta bombing, its all been a little dull.
The one thing that's really lacking is any attention at all being given to indigenous people. Unless you count small measures without any forethought.
The one certainty about this election is that a minor party called The Democrats is likely to become defunct, taking the only indigenous representative, Aden Ridgeway, with them. So unless Richard Frankland can get up this time round, no real representation for the 350,000+ indigenous people.
Mind you, it's probably all for the best that Aboriginal people have slipped under the radar this time, the last election fought on this ground was 1996, when Hanson first appeared on the scene. Other than the threat to remove ATSIC, most of Hanson's ideas have already become so mainstream that she's hardly noticed at all. There's a great little book called Race: John Howard and the remaking of Australia by Andrew Markus that spells out where Hansonism came from and how Howard adopted most all of her policy.
The thing is, old red was the consummate ethnic outbidder. By making highly inflammatory statements based largely in myth, Hanson was able to grab both the red/rubberneck votes throughout the country. The only possible response to this was for the major parties to directly appeal to her constituency with equal or stronger policies, thereby slipping to the right. The consequence? A lot of talk about 'practical reconciliation' and improving the lives of Aboriginal people by making them more like the mainstream.
The catch is that this is not an indigenous policy. It's assimilation, the typical conservative approach to dealing with difference.
The source of the problem seems to be that the Australian nation has never really been all that comfortable with diversity. Even multiculturalism, a policy in which Australia is a world leader, isn't actually about diversity. Multiculturalism in Australia is really about providing breathing room for migrants to practice their original cultures until such time as they give them up voluntarily (for example, the benchmark is usually three generations for complete loss of native language).
In practice, what you have is a 'core' of British institutions, English as a lingua franca and 'the Australian way of life' as the guiding principle for nation-building. What is means for the bloke in the street is that the word 'Australian' usually represents a person who sees all these things as completely ordinary. Or, in other words, if you have a problem with English being the only language used in Parliament, or the bureaucracy operating entirely in English, then you're probably not a dinkum Aussie.
'Multiculturalism' was introduced in the 1970s as a way to acknowledge that strict measures to make migrants dinky-di weren't working well, and give them a bit of breathing room to be foreign. Diversity in this sense was all about accepting ethnic differences existing at the fringes of the Australian nation, with these people gradually coming into the national fold. It was never about making the nation itself diverse, because 'Australian' still meant conforming to the 'core'.
In New Zealand though, while biculturalism is an ideological variant of multiculturalism, it's actually nothing like 'Australian multiculturalism'. I think I'm going to have to save that lecture for another time, but in a nutshell New Zealand biculturalism is all about making the nation itself diverse. And in that regard New Zealand is a world leader, and New Zealanders can be very proud of the advances they've made without realising just how avant-garde New Zealand biculturalism really is.
When people like ethnic outbidders hear the word 'diversity' and link it to some stereotyped 'multiculturalism', they seem to over-react to a perceived potential threat to social or political consensus. Or, they think that it forms some kind of assault on the 'core' nation. But, of the three major multicultural countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, none uses the same model, and none expresses real or serious ethnic conflict.
In Canada, multiculturalism is all about giving breathing room to Quebec (French Canadians) or Nunavut (Inuit Canadians), in Australia it's about letting migrants settle at their own pace, and in New Zealand it's about finding a way for Maori society to exist within the boundaries of a common New Zealand nationality.
As well as these differences, there's one very important thing about New Zealand that sets it apart from these other countries. I was talking to a guy the other day about Aboriginal politics, and we both shared concern about what happens when the welfare ends. Lets pretend that one day Aboriginal people have the same socio-economic indicators as mainstream Australians, where's the justification for providing 'special' or targeted funding for Aboriginal organisations such as health providers?
We both agreed that there is likely to be none. None at all. What this means is that the Aboriginal organisations that have done the hard yakka to get Aboriginal people up to first world living standards are likely to then be regarded as 'obsolete' by the majority, potentially loosing their public funding.
But I personally think that this is not likely to happen in New Zealand once Maori have modernised and closed the gaps. And why? Because the Treaty says that Maori culture is a part of New Zealand nationality, and that means majority, modern nationality. What outbidders in New Zealand are really doing is undermining the long-term potential of Maori society itself, and that, in my humble opinion, is a stupid and bigoted thing to want.
Oh, and on the rock front, fans of AC-DC will be pleased to hear Melbourne now has a laneway named after them. Melbourne's Lord Mayor Jon So announced it through his thick Asian accent with the immortal words, "Let us rock". Best TV all week.