Posts by George Darroch
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To my comment above:
Racism in Australia, both low level and covert, and high level and overt, has a strong class dimension. Australia was founded on a prisoner colony which rested on the backs of lower class English, and Irish. Throughout the 19th Century this remained true, with elite aristocracy asserting themselves over this group, and against Aboriginal Australians. In order for European Australians to claim legitimacy when stealing Aboriginal land they had to state that Aboriginal Australians were first dumb brutes and savages in need of civilisation and salvation (19thC), then people unable to care for themselves (20thC), and again people unable to care for themselves (the Howard/Rudd-Gillard intervention 21stC). In every case, an economic motive pervades, enabling the rich to ride on the backs of the poor other.
Chinese and Indian settlers were inevitably pushed to the bottom of the pile by white Australians, and then throughout the 20th Century immigrants with varying degrees of 'whiteness' were imported to provide labour, and each in turn attracted the opprobium of whites who were up the ladder, or attempting to climb there. The Wog, anyone not "anglo" was the major object of racism during the mid-late 20th century, and still is.
Now you also get Middle Eastern groups assuming this mantle as "wogs" and "Lebs", and satirising themselves publicly in the same way that Pacific New Zealanders played up stereotypes in recent decades as 'dumb PIs'. It's shocking, but everytime I get off the plane in Mangere and see brown faces doing the cleaning I remember that New Zealand is no racial paradise, even after 100 years of declaring it to be true. In New Zealand, as often as not, poverty has a brown face.
Do I mean to imply that all Australians are racist, or even that Australia is more racist than New Zealand? No, since these are attitudes of the heart, and I can't peer into there anymore than you can. But these things are certainly much more publicly acceptable than in New Zealand.
Are working class white males immune from racism? No, certainly not. You only need watch an Australian election or pick up a Murdoch tabloid (it's better disguised in the broadsheets) to disprove this. But a large part of this is the way in which racism is used against them, to turn them against the men who will steal their jobs and women.
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I've seen too many people in the last few months of their PhD try to work out why Word is skipping footnotes or refusing to paginate their document properly; it's just not designed for long-form work. The proprietary file format it uses is also a minus.
I started a thesis on Open Office, moved to Word 2003 with Zotero as my reference manager, and then spent part of the last month making minor corrections on Open Office. Russell notes that things like instant response matter. In my case, what really bugged me was the scrolling - in Word it is clean and smooth, in OO you can never use it to find the page you want. And since OO paginated the document differently that was a major headache too. Since I'm poor I use the free product on my home computer, but if I had to do a lot of work I'd very happily shell out for the superior product.
As others have said, it will take a little learning styles and pagination, things that should be learned well before a final deadline. It took me two days to build an autopaginated table of contents - that would have killed me had I only two days left. I've heard that Word 2010 supports a variety of TeX-like features, but I haven't used it
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I'll reply in due course, but I'll just add for the moment that you have a fairly flawed understanding of race and class in Australia, Tom.
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then you're using the wrong software.
Which do you use? I find all the alternatives equally painful.
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Do not forget, unlike New Zealand, Australia has no Bill of Rights, nothing more than an administrative framework 'constitution', a miserable indigenous rights record, stronger conservative Catholic presence, a federal same-sex marriage ban and partial welfare privatisation occurred under Howard.
There's a much greater religious influence, which comes from identifiable religious groups - particularly contestable lower and middle class Catholic voters from immigrant backgrounds, which gives them greater sway. Not all of the difference, of course, but some of it. If National had been able to play Pacific Island New Zealanders in the same way, it might have been a different country (of course, many other things would have had to have happened).
. After an embarassing silence something else like footy gets to be the topic of conversation. Spooky. Like one of those scenes where the stranger comes into the pub.
Have you seen Wake in Fright? I recommend it to anyone trying to understand Australians. There's a deep dark undercurrent behind that sunny 'mateship'.
Queenslanders are weird, even considered so by other Australians. The Australian Greens picked up very good results (10-15%) at a lot of Queensland booths on election day, and quite a few rural ones, so it may just be pockets which are large in area, but sparse in population.
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I am about to move to Queensland for a period of months. I will report my findings.
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Plenty of darkly negative ads on Australian television during the last election campaign, and little to hope for. If voting wasn't compulsory, I think the turnout would have been much lower.
I also hear Australians speaking with pride about their Electoral Commission. But there are a lot of things they should be reluctant to crow about. The system is a mess - voters theoretically have preferential voting. They can either give their preference to a party, who will allocate it. Or they can vote preferentially themselves - but should they choose to do so, they must number each and every candidate from 1 onwards. Given that there were up to 80 candidates on the ballot, that's a big ask - especially since if you screw up any of it your vote is invalid. Almost 5% of votes were invalid, although some of that was protest against being forced to vote. Lines at the polling booth I was at were up to half an hour. There's no impetus for reform, with everyone accepting such peculiarities as normal.
There's also the fact that parties can advertise on the day, with posters and billboards and "how to vote cards" which are necessary because of the confusion noted above. I was handing out the cards, as every party does at every booth, and it just felt wrong.
There were also plenty who missed out. Australia's AEC isn't a patch on the NZEC. In Australia you have a short window of time to enroll before an election, and there is a fraction of the resources and advertising put into enrolling voters. Most kids enroll when they're at highschool, but plenty don't. And they're forever on the margins politically.
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Er, didn't National and Labour go through exactly those processes during the Rogernomics, Mad Mike and Ruthenasia eras?
Yeah, I get what you mean. A very small clique effectively ruled the nation.
What I mean is the pure nakedness of power within political party membership, with warring factions whose aims are primarily winning over the other bunch within their own party, everything else being a distant second.
I'm too young to know if that was ever properly the case in New Zealand, but it's my impression that the fish and chip brigade and then Ruth's mob took to the top on the backs of the mass membership parties they had emerged from. They weren't so much a product of their parties as a band apart.Even Muldoon, as hated as he was, came from a party that unified around him. But that is just my impression, nothing more - it might be an ill-formed one.
I don't hold the New Zealand Labour Party in particularly high esteem, but I don't count being beholden to warring grey-men and backroom-boys as one of its sins. Closing the gaps may yet eventuate, as the parties become ever more dependent on apparatchniks and follow the hollow men on a merry dance around the polls, but I'd say we're not there yet.
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But mostly I couldn't really get their sentiments, the politics seemed weirdly backwards and conservative, whilst at the same time far more socialist than NZ. This might have changed.
No, it's much the same. It's far more acceptable to be openly racist, for example, and gender roles are more narrowly defined than in NZ. But things that New Zealand Labour would struggle to find it in themselves to bring about are considered part of the political landscape and not to be touched by either right or left.
I tried to stay away from the election, but ended up doing a bit with the Greens in the last week. I think that was because their campaign was so gloriously positive and hopeful. It was the first time in years that I felt like I could participate in politics without glum cynicism about what might come. There's a lot the NZ Greens could learn from their Australian counterparts about why things like the economy, education, and health, are important to voters, ahd how they can be addressed in a campaign.
On the other hand, the level of institutionalisation - parties being controlled by small aggressive and closed factional elites - is not something I'd like to import.
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Can you fly me back to Auckland for it? I can't DJ, but I will be very thankful.
Jealous of you all, will have to try and catch the December one in Wellington, I think.