Category: history

Understanding New Zealand: Voting Patterns of Age

The electoral divide between Labour and National is usually characterised as one of wealth, and to a major extent it is. But it is also about age to a major extent, and some of the correlations between age and party allegiance are surprisingly strong.

The correlation between being in the 50-64 age group and voting for National in 2014 was a very strong 0.74. The correlation between being in this age group and voting Labour in 2014, by contrast, was also very strong but negative, at -0.68.

These correlations are especially strong if they are compared with the respective ones for the 30-49 age group. This age group is almost entirely indifferent to the mainstream parties. The correlation between being aged 30-49 and voting National in 2014 was 0.19, and for voting Labour in 2014 it was -0.04.

Really old people like to vote Conservative more than anything else. The correlation between being aged 65+ and voting Conservative in 2014 was 0.71. Even the correlation between being aged 65+ and voting National was weaker, at 0.65.

Some might be surprised to see that the correlation between being aged 65+ and voting New Zealand First was not near as strong – only 0.10. However, as mentioned in the section about the party, the association between crotchety old pensioners and New Zealand First support is mostly a fabrication.

Indeed, at the other end of the age range, support for New Zealand First was about the same level – the correlation between being aged 15-19 and voting New Zealand First in 2014 was 0.05. This suggests that the early signs of Generation Z being a conservative throwback to a previous mentality may well be replicated in New Zealand.

Young people, for their part, prefer to vote Green more than anything else. The correlation between being aged 15-19 and voting Green in 2014 was 0.22, and between being aged 20-29 and voting Green in 2014 it was 0.56.

The big two parties appear to have very little support among young people in general. The correlation between being aged 20-29 and voting National in 2014 was -0.34, and with voting Labour it was only 0.32. Worryingly for them, the correlation between being aged 20-29 and voting for a party as unlike them as ACT was 0.25.

Taking this into account alongside the strong correlation between being young and voting Green, it appears that the big two parties are fated to fall into ever weaker positions as the Greens absorb the discontents from Labour, ACT absorbs the discontents from National and New Zealand First absorbs the discontents from the entire system.

The very youngest two age brackets obviously does not tell us about the voting preferences of those aged under 15, but they do tell us about the voting preferences of their parents and therefore gives us a clue as to what influences will be at work on the next generation.

In particular, we can see the influence that the higher birth rate of Maoris has. All of the parties generally associated with a high degree of Maori support (Maori Party, Internet MANA, New Zealand First, Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and Labour) had correlations of at least 0.45 with both of the age groups of 0-4 and 5-14 years of age.

The Maori Party and the ALCP were the strongest of these, New Zealand First and Labour were the weakest, and Internet MANA was in between.

The degree of disenfranchisement that the young suffer can be seen from the fact that there is a very strong correlation of 0.77 between median age and turnout rate in the 2014 General Election. This correlation is so strong that it speaks of a widespread perception among the young that there really is no point in voting on account of that the entire system is set up specifically to serve people other than them.

The strongest negative correlation between median age and voting for any party in 2014 was with the Labour Party, which was -0.70. The reflection of this was that the strongest positive correlation was with the National Party, which was a whopping 0.81.

The only other party that generally appealed to old people was the Conservatives. The correlation between voting for them in 2014 and median age was 0.75.

Definitively underlining the fact that the stereotype of creeping swarms of pensioners voting New Zealand First every three years is totally false, the correlation between voting New Zealand First in 2014 and median age was actually negative (although not significant) at -0.08.

The Greens, despite that they are the mutual nemesis of the New Zealand First Party, appeal to a similar average age of voter. The correlation between voting Green in 2014 and median age was -0.17.

Predictably, there were significant negative correlations between median age and voting for any of the minor Maori-heavy parties. These were Maori Party (-0.66), Internet MANA (-0.65) and ALCP (-0.55).

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

The Many Manifestations of Kek

Kek is more than most people realise. He is not something that can be entirely understood with a five-minute Google. Very little is known about exoteric Kekism, even less about the esoteric forms. This essay is an attempt to share some insight into the esoteric elements of this tradition.

In the ancient Egyptian Ogdoad cosmogony, Kek represented the primordial darkness. Darkness is the colour used to describe the chaos from which the order of our reality arose, and Kek is therefore a chaos god that represents yin forces.

Kek is male, but in representing chaos he represents a female principle. This might explain why he is depicted in the form of a frog – because the genders of amphibians are extremely loose and indeterminate. Like a Bangkok ladyboy, the gender of a frog is not necessarily what a person might think it is.

This might also explain why the word ‘Kek’ is often used where one would expect a pronoun – because a gendered pronoun makes a firm decision about which gender the subject is and this is not appropriate for a frog chaos god.

The use of ‘Kek’ as an adjective, such as in the forms “Top Kek” or “Royal Kek”, is oddly similar in both sound and meaning to the Irish word craic, a catch-all term covering “news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation”.

There appears to be no actual link between ‘craic’ and ‘Kek’ despite the phonetic and semantic similarities. But that sort of weird maybe-coincidence maybe-synchronicity is just what one has to expect in one’s life as a follower of Kek.

All of this suggests that Kek himself is an original – perhaps even the archetypal – trickster god, and in this sense the cult of Kek has had many manifestations throughout history. It is said of the trickster gods that they “…violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.”

In Scandinavia, Kek manifests in the form of Loki. Loki is generally depicted as male, but little more than generalities are known about him. Fittingly for a chaos god, Loki “sometimes assists the gods and sometimes behaves in a malicious manner towards them.”

However, Loki is the also mother of an eight-legged horse, as told in the Gylfaginning. I think we can all agree that being a tranny who births octopedal horses is top kek.

Kek manifests as Maui in Maori and Polynesian folklore. His most famous exploit was beating the shit out of the Sun with a jawbone to make it go slower through the sky so that the people had more time to enjoy their day.

Maui also has a story in which he attempts to win immortality for humankind by transforming himself into a worm and slithering into the vagina of the goddess Hine-nui-te-pō, in the belief that if he can come out of her mouth then humanity would become immortal.

In the end, he is chopped in half by a set of obsidian teeth contained within the goddess’s pussy. Clearly, whoever dreamed this story up was touched by the spirit of Kek.

In Roman folklore, Kek manifests as Mercury, the patron saint of tricksters. Mercury was once tasked with escorting a nymph to the underworld but fell in love with her and ended up getting her pregnant. This is the sort of thing that regularly seems to happen to chaos gods.

Alchemically, Mercury represents the gender fluidity also represented by the frog god. Mercury is alchemically between the divine masculine represented by Gold and the divine feminine represented by Silver, and he is therefore also somewhere between the two commonly accepted poles.

In modern culture, Kek has manifested in the form of Pepe, the cartoon frog in the title image. Pepe, fittingly for a chaos god, has an unclear origin. He started to rise to prominence on 4chan and the Shroomery about a decade ago, finding a place in the mainstream consciousness in the lead up to the 2016 US Presidential Election.

He achieved this by being used in the Great Meme War that saw the defeat of Hillary “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton. It was believed by followers of Kek that Clinton represented the hateful, oppressive forces of the Establishment, and that the maverick Donald Trump getting into the White House would be top kek – and so it came to pass.

But in much the same way that Kek, as chaos God, was naturally opposed by the earthly interests that tried to oppress the citizenry with an excessive degree of order, so too has Kek in his manifestation as Pepe been designated an official hate symbol by those same control freaks.

But because the meme magic of the control freaks and the dominator culture is weak, we know that this action has merely assured the place of Kek in the hearts of free-thinkers around the world.

Perhaps we can all be glad that the spirit of Kek shines brightly through into our lives once more in his manifestation as Pepe.

Understanding New Zealand: Demographics of Men and Women

There has been plenty of talk about the “gender gap”, which is the fact that the average Kiwi woman earns less per hour of labour than the average Kiwi man. This article looks into why this might have come about.

The correlation between being male and median personal income was on the border of statistical significance, at 0.23. That tells us that the average Kiwi male controls an income that is a fair bit larger than what the average Kiwi female controls. Looking at this on a more granular level, we can understand why.

There is very little difference between men and women when it comes to the plum jobs. The correlation between being male and having a personal income between $100-150K was 0.01 and with having a personal income of $150K+ it was 0.03.

So being a male and working in a plum job is essentially uncorrelated. However, as one goes down the income bands, it is possible to see that there are more men in middle income jobs than women, and more women in lower income jobs than men.

The strength of the correlation with being male peaks at $50-60K, where it is 0.22. A person in this income band is likely earning between $25 and $30 per hour, or at least 50 hours a week, so this is where a solid part of the full-time work force is cranking away.

As one goes even further down the income bands, however, we can see that an ever higher proportion of the workers are women. In the $30-35K income band there is a perfect absence of correlation with regard to male or female, but every income band lower than this has a positive correlation with being female.

The most significant is having a loss or no income, which has a correlation of 0.27 with being female.

By far the heaviest contributor to the fact that men occupy disproportionately more middle income bands than women is the moderately significant correlation between being male and working full-time (0.48), and the moderately significant negative correlation between being male and being unemployed (-0.48).

After all, it’s hardly suprising that a man’s paycheck is 20% bigger if he also works 20% more hours. In fact, the gap perhaps ought to be even larger than this because men work the vast majority of overtime hours.

There is no significant correlation between being male and working for a wage or salary – this was 0.11. There were, however, significant correlations between being self-employed and male (0.40) and being self-employed with employees and male (0.50).

This tells us that a disproportionate amount of the risk in the area of employment is borne by men. Women are more likely to take a safe job that had slim prospects of both advancing and of being fired or made redundant, whereas men were more likely to take entrepreneurial risks or to take on jobs in highly competitive (and highly rewarding) environment.

For example, there were significant correlations between being female and working in the healthcare and social assistance industry (0.43) and the education and training industry (0.32), and a near significant one between being female and working in administrative or support services (0.17).

In all three of these industries it is common to have a regular, secure 9 to 5 job.

On the other side of the coin, there were significant correlations between being male and working in the agriculture, forestry and fishing industry (0.45), the hospitality industry (0.28), the construction industry (0.25) and the rental, hiring and real estate services industry (0.24).

All of those industries are characterised by it being common for either workers to have the option of working longer hours or being more or less forced into it. The hospitality and rental, hiring and real estate industries in particular make it easy for anyone wanting to work 60+ hours a week to do so.

So talk of a “gender gap” that evinces an instituional and endemic underpayment of women across the nation is hyperbole. The best jobs are split evenly between men and women and, below that, men earn more because they choose to work themselves to death at a much higher rate.

Somewhat surprisingly, there is a correlation of 0.42 with being male and living on the South Island. That might seem very strange until one takes into account the vastly accelerated death rate of Maori and Pacific Islander males, especially past age 50 or so. Because most of these men live on the North Island, their early deaths leave a significant imbalance of women among the remaining communities.

Other facets of this same phenomenon can be observed in the significant correlation between being female and being Maori (0.32). Obviously, as males and females are born at roughly the same rate, much of this correlation has to be explained by a greater death rate among Maori men.

Some may be interested to observe that there were significant correlations between being female and belonging to a number of religious traditions generally associated with disadvantaged people. In particular, these were significant correlations between being female and following any of Mormonism, Ratana, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Maori Christian, Pentecostalism or Christian not further defined.

The main reason for this is the tendency for women to turn to religion or spirituality after a significant male other has left their lives, particularly in the case of Maori women.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.

Did Richie McCaw Destroy International Rugby?

The Sydney Bledisloe Cup match of 2000 was a high water mark in international rugby. In front of 109,000 people, the world champion Australia team and the desperate, wounded All Blacks fought to the death like Ali and Frazier. Many who saw it said at the time it was the most extraordinary rugby match ever played, with an iconic match-winning performance from none other than Jonah Lomu.

The All Blacks prevailed on that night, 39-35, but the Wallabies would win by one point three weeks later to retain the Bledisloe Cup, and at the time it seemed like the advent of professional rugby was about to make for a titanic era of contests for this trophy.

Professional rugby seemed like it was going to bring a lot of razzamatazz to the Southern Hemisphere circuit – Super Rugby was also huge that year. The ACT Brumbies topped the table at the end of the pool stages, and ended up losing the final at home against the Canterbury Crusaders by one point.

The next year, 2001, marked the Super Rugby debut, also for the Crusaders, of one Richie Hugh McCaw. As it turned out, McCaw was not so much a rugby player as a genius that played rugby.

He only played eight minutes of Super Rugby that year, but he did play a full NPC season, and was good enough to win selection to the All Blacks’ end of year tour, where he was handed a debut against Ireland, and promptly won Man of the Match.

The next year, 2002, McCaw became a Crusaders regular. In an odd echo of the future, the Crusaders won every single match that year, taking the Super Rugby title undefeated – something never achieved before or since.

2003 might have been the end of the golden summer for Australian rugby. They lost the Bledisloe Cup, but managed to knock the All Blacks out of the World Cup, going on to take an all-conquering England team to extra time in the final.

Come 2017, and Australia has not won the Bledisloe Cup since. Richie McCaw may have retired two years ago, but in the same way that Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca depressed the price of gold in the Middle East for decades afterwards, McCaw’s decade of almost total dominance still depresses Australian rugby.

This year’s Super Rugby table makes for confusing reading. The current leaders of the Australian conference, the Brumbies, have fewer tournament points than the current wooden spooners of the New Zealand conference, the Blues.

New Zealand rugby is so dominant that the 4th-ranked Kiwi team, the Highlanders, has only lost three games all season. Despite this, they can’t climb any higher than 4th because the Hurricanes have only lost two, the Chiefs one and the Crusaders zero.

Even worse is the effect this dominance has had on the Internet rhetoric. At the turn of the century, trans-Tasman rugby banter was between equals. In recent years, however, it has taken a darker turn: the prison rape metaphor, once only applied to descriptions of All Blacks matches against the hapless Celts, crept into summaries of Bledisloe matches.

At its nadir, the Internet rhetoric was entirely based on the degree of sexual impotence the Australian players and fans would suffer as a consequence of the losses and for how many years afterwards. The jokes were that the children of Australian players would be too ashamed to admit their paternity to their classmates.

So the question is this: was Richie McCaw so good at rugby that he actually destroyed the international game? Did he set standards so high that all other nations just gave up on hoping to ever match them?

Probably not. After all, Australia made it to the World Cup final in 2015, and they did about as well there as any other side could have hoped to have done – namely, a loss by a two-try margin.

Alexander the Great died at age 33, and within months of the same age Richie McCaw retired from international rugby. The struggle for a successor to Alexander saw his empire shatter into four pieces and then to further disintegrate.

Kieran Read now leads the All Blacks, and his side might play the role of the Seleucid Empire, the early favourites to recreate the total world domination that McCaw once achieved.

However, no order can exist indefinitely, and it is in the nature of peaks to erode into valleys. The standards set by McCaw are unlikely to be maintained for the simple reason that the men tasked with doing so will not possess McCaw’s genius.

This column believes that it is in the Australian nature, despite a decade of denial, to recognise the smell of blood at the first opportunity and to take advantage of it. Therefore, it predicts that the current sorry state of Australian rugby will not last for much longer.

And as long as one side can stand up to the All Blacks the others will always believe themselves to have a hope.