Posts by Chris Waugh
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Speaker: All aboard: The choice for…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Could the NZ govt make it easier? I’m not sure they could, and even if they did, I don’t know what proportion of people would still stay.
Yes, absolutely they could make it easier. Chris has pointed out some areas in desperate need of work. But even from a purely economics/employment point of view there is a lot of work that could be done. From my very narrow sinocentric language geek's point of view, I like the work I see the government doing on building up relations with China*, but I've heard too often that Kiwis are crap at doing business - they show up, sign a contract, then vanish, thinking they've done a deal, but blithely unaware that their Chinese partners are really confused, thinking they've tried to start a relationship only to have the other half vanish into the ether. My own boss, who has done business with NZ and has visited NZ many times, has been known to say that Kiwis are great farmers but crap at business. My own experience, from people asking me why the hell I would major in French, what could I possibly do with that (yeah, because communication is so completely unnecessary, right?) to trying to get jobs in NZ - and having a WINZ case officer tell me "Well, there's really nothing I can do to help, you're way overqualified to be here", or standing in the queue at WINZ listening to Manic Street Preachers' sing If you tolerate this, then your children will be next - to reading recently of the difficulties people with Asian names still have getting jobs in NZ, backs up the impression that NZ's business leaders grossly undervalue linguistic and cultural skills and knowledge. This has got to change, and fast, and the government could be playing a strong leadership role in driving that change, but the only good thing I hear or read about this government is what it's doing to build up relations with China - but even there it seems determined to shoot NZ in both feet. Of all the govt departments I've had to deal with, MFAT has been the best and the most consistently professional, and yet they want to cut their budget too?
I know I'm not the only Kiwi who racked up a huge debt getting an education and then found exile the only way to get ahead. Comparing what I read of the NZ government with what I see happening around me in China, I can think of a multitude of areas in which the NZ government could be showing some leadership for positive change, but isn't, and one area in which they've got the right idea, but I can only grade them with a "could do better".
*And the media could help, too. There's been quite a few local and central government and even National Party delegations visiting China this year, but you wouldn't know it from what Stuff, the Herald, TVNZ or TV3 have up online. Case in point: Celia Wade-Brown just visited Tianjin. Searching the Dom-Post gets me an article saying she will be leading a delegation to China, nothing about the trade fair she attended in Beijing, and nothing about what she actually did in China. Not for the first time, I get more information wading through stodgy as all hell Chinese government press releases. This one is as uninformative as always, but it does say that Wade-Brown said:
天津在城市建设等方面有许多可借鉴的经验，希望通过此次访问进一步增进了解，深化友谊，在金融商贸、环境保护、影视文化、创意产业等方面深化合作，共同发展。
"Tianjin has a lot of experience in areas such as city-building that can be learned from, and hopes that through this visit we can increase understanding, deepen friendship, deepen cooperation in such fields as the finance trade, environmental protection, film and TV culture and creative industries, and develop together."
It ain't much, but it's more than I've found on Stuff. How are Wellington's business leaders supposed to know what to do in China when their local newspaper apparently can't inform them what their own mayor got up to over here? Heck, even asking my wife, whose work unit organised CIFTIS - the trade fair in Beijing Wade-Brown attended, gets me more information than I can find on Stuff - apparently she's quite beautiful and wore a white tiki to Wen Jiabao's speech. Not much use to anybody in Wellington, but something.
And of course it's not all about China. There are several other countries on the rise while Europe and America waffle themselves into obscurity. What are NZ's government, media and business leaders doing about them? I don't know, because there's precious little information available in the NZ media, and the rest of the world is only barely aware we exist.
Excuse the incoherence. This post was interrupted by a run around the corner for lunch, and there are several stacks of test papers and essays staring at me with increasing malevolence demanding to be marked and reminding me final exams are just around the corner.
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Speaker: All aboard: The choice for…, in reply to Islander,
You’re familiar with ‘faux ami’
Very much so, having majored in French and studied German and Russian. I remember feeling a little silly in one Russian class hearing na primer (for example) and catching myself thinking it was the French word premier. I seem to remember my students stumbling across a Chinese-English faux ami earlier this semester, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was, and it seems I foolishly didn't go and blog about it at the time. Oh well, maybe I'll have the good fortune to stumble across it again one day...
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Perhaps you could weigh in on the other great Press story of Gerry Brownlee’s ‘straightened times’ …
Is this government or theatre of the absurd?
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Speaker: All aboard: The choice for…, in reply to Islander,
O- people who like wordplay might like to check out meanings of ‘here’ in both Maori & English.
Took up the challenge. I hadn't expected 'here' to be a Maori word - although I guess I should've, considering that particular arrangement of letters seems to fit all the usual rules of Maori word formation. All I can say is that for all these years in China I still feel a very strong tie or bind or even obligation to the chain of islands I was born and raised on.
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Speaker: All aboard: The choice for…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
So now the choice is:
contribute in NZ where you get paid less and have your income taxed to pay for your temerity to do tertiary study
orExcept now if you leave you can expect to get an email from IRD demanding a contact phone number and convenient times to talk so they can discuss with you your loan repayment obligations. They can't tax your money overseas, but they are developing other ways to get that money.
Please note: I am certainly not blaming IRD. I owe them money, it is their job to get it back. I am blaming the government and NZ's excuse for business leadership for making it so difficult to pay that money back. One New Zealand Dollar currently equals five-odd Yuan Renminbi, which puts my loan balance somewhere stratospherical and my earnings seem minute considering I live in a third world country and earn third world wages. Guess I should've looked for a job in an Australian mine instead of a job where my particular set of skills and experience are actually useful....
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So we're stuck with a rubbish government... but the news isn't all bad. Sometimes some people are called to account for their actions.
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Hard News: Press Play > Budget, in reply to Lilith __,
What I've heard of the trickle-down effect is that it's the rich pissing on the poor.
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Capture: Going Walkabout in Sydney, in reply to JacksonP,
Revisiting the Opera House.
Is that a ghost shell to the left?
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Public clocks seem to have vanished, as if time’s been privatised.
Kinda way off topic, but is the clock still on the hillside above Alexandra? I always liked that clock. First time I went to Alexandra we drove in after dark and the clock kinda hung there as if suspended in space as if put there by the solar system's horloger.
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Capture: Dogs Love Cameras Too, in reply to Jackie Clark,
a nation of not completely well socialised dogs.
I was talking to an American friend the other day, and he asked me there was anything unusual about Chinese dogs as compared to NZ dogs. I said, and this is something that has always struck me about China, right from my very first tentative steps around Changsha in '99, that Chinese dogs seem to be much better socialised. He agreed and pointed to the dogs that had just walked past us blithely ignoring us as if we were part of the flora (we were sitting on the benches lining a vine-covered corridor in the garden outside our apartment block, we probably did look like odd growths of the vine) and said that would never happen in America, that an American dog would at least come and have a sniff, and that you couldn't walk past a dog-inhabited yard without it coming up to the fence to bark at you.
In China it might be a function of population density. Chinese dogs will certainly bark when a stranger enters their apartment or, in the countryside, their courtyard, but outside of that space they'll very rarely bother anybody.