Posts by Che Tibby
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
richard, i think i can channel tom... waitaminute... here it is....
OHMYGODAREYOUJUSTPLAINCRAZY!!!!
(just kidding)
the abiding feature of urban sprawl is uniformity... acres, and acres of uniformity. strangely, diversity comes from getting up close to people.
tom?
-
I love suburbia.
careful, thems fightin' words.
-
tom, that visit to ten-buck-an-hour tauranga profoundly effected you, methinks.
speaking of quarter-acre hell of endless people-hostile subdivisions:
http://wellurban.blogspot.com/2007/01/great-place-to-live-if-youre-kiwifruit.html
-
yeah, the difference between the RB and the Tom Beard comments on NZ identity illustrate my point well. both are completely valid interpretations, and if you imagine a process where Tom sells his idea as one that everyone should share, then you have one nation-building conversation (and vice-versa).
national stories of this type change intergenerationally, with the popularity of the story determining how much it sticks in the nation's memory.
as an example the farming story (or myth) was so popular that it's pretty firmly stuck in there, and will probably take a while to work it's way out.
but in regard to landscapes, a couple of christmas' ago i was sent a dvd compilation of nzl music videos. i was in oz at the time, and what struck me was how many of these videos included big south island vista. that and how out of place a bunch of PI looked, on a farm, wearing toweling hats (Che Fu video).
-
ouch. good clash there. might attend te papa and then bail before the more lunatic questions start up from the audience.
and yes, one of them may well be mine...
-
from an academic perspective, a slogan like "the australian battler", "the mainstream" or "the kiwi way" are just ways to define the speakers perspective of "the nation".
so to Key, "the kiwi way" is his particular ideal new zealand. there's nothing incipid about it, because nation-building is *always* future-focussed. i've tried to define it before as being like standing in a field and looking both forward and back (nairns famously calls nation-building janus-faced, because it looks in two directions at once).
the forward looking part of nation-building picks a point on the horizon to work towards, but that point is meaningless without reference to the place you've come from (hence Key's mention of his past)
the drama with nation-building is that while Key might be looking to a place he wants to guide the nation, there's 4 million other perspectives on where that point should be, all of them competing, complaining, shouting, and nodding assent at the same time.
welcome to democracy.
-
accompanied by a choir of dog-whistles
that is a great image.
you'd need them to flash mob a 'Best in Show' venue for full effect. or crash a stockyards on sale day.
-
no, that's 'the muslims'.
-
what occurred to me this morning is that before mr. key gets this citizen's vote, how does this 'underclass' argument tie in to all those people who barely earn more than the minimum wage?
are we only focusing on getting dole bludgers into work? or are we talking about raising the living standards of the minimum wagers?
there are plenty of people like me who earnt minimum wage for a short time while they study/train, but what about all those workers (mostly female) who do our cleaning, look after our old people? i'm sure the members of his audience have hired one from time to time.
are we only looking to get people out of low-income public money into low-income private money?
-
- i should also point out that it was a contractor i was speaking to.
- i read your comment RB and agree with it. generally there are some successes in this field, and from hearing sharples on the radio i have confidence that *he's* the sort of bloke who can make one of these programmes work.
but in general social programmes seem to work best when you don't have political intervention. if the nats can make that work, the separation between the "hui" and the "do-e", then they'll be doing blimmin well.
- in regard to the attendees, i've long thought 'economic underclass' was shorthand for 'all those dole bludgers and solo mums'.
- did tze ming have numbers for long term unemployed? isn't it something like less than 5k individuals? i had the impression it was a very small percentage of the workforce. i.e. we have over 2 million employed, and a few thousand not. cue 'the waving of the arms'.
- finally, michael. back when they were devising the treaty settlements there was concern that the crown was absolving itself of responsibility for managing social outcomes and buying marae programmes on the cheap. the money withdrawn from the ministry of maori affairs paid for the fiscal envelope in 4(?) years. naturally this was denied. i guess time has told us.