What Waitangi Day Could Mean For New Zealanders

Today is Waitangi Day, the national holiday of New Zealand. Our national holiday is today because it commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the document of partnership between the native Maori tribes and the British pioneers that led to the founding of modern New Zealand.

Everyone knows that. Here’s something you probably didn’t know. In the original articles of Australian Federation, which are held for public viewing in the Australian National Museum, it stated clearly that only white people and Maoris were allowed to vote in Australian Federal elections.

Why Maoris?

The framers of the early Australian Constitution were no fools, but they were not right about everything. Back in the late 19th century when the desire for federalism swept the Australian continent in response to an ever-increasing majority of the people being native born, it was anticipated that New Zealand would join the nascent Southern nation as another state.

After all, New Zealand was born of exactly the same sociohistorical phenomenon as Australia – the British Empire – and the white majority of New Zealand was not much culturally different to the white majority of Australia.

There was one catch. The early framers of the Australian constitution knew that the New Zealand Maori had been treated in a significantly different manner to the Aborigines of Australia, and that race attitudes were very different across the Tasman Sea.

Maori New Zealanders have had their own Parliamentary representation since 1868, about a century before Australian Aborigines were considered proper human beings by their settler culture.

In other words, it has been known from the beginning that our attitude to the native people made us fundamentally different in mentality to our brothers across the ditch.

The reason why Maoris were given the right to vote in Australian Federal Elections from the very beginning – unlike any other non-white race on Earth – is because it was understood that white New Zealanders would simply not accept federation into Australia otherwise.

Let’s be very clear about something at this point: this relationship is not one-way traffic. This intent of this essay is not to glorify the mostly middle-class people who colonised New Zealand and contrast them with the mostly working-class people who colonised Australia.

The Treaty of Waitangi is a partnership agreement that the Maoris have lived up to. By the standards of most international treaties in history that makes it very rare – and very precious.

One time at a factory I worked at in Brisbane, a pack of local bogans had cornered me and one of our co-workers, a Maori fellow named John. They engaged us in a conversation about who would win in a fight between the two of us and the six or seven or them.

John grinned and said: “We Kiwis are lovers, not fighters.”

It was a cunning way to defuse the situation, and it ended in good cheer. But it occurred to me shortly afterwards, based on what else I had observed in my half a year in Australia about the relations between white Australians and Aborigines, that it was highly unlikely an Aborigine would find cause to say the same about a white Australian.

Can an Australian Aborigine genuinely look at a white Australian and see one of his own, in the way a Maori New Zealander can look at a Paheka? Of course not. In fact, nothing like it.

This column’s contention for Waitangi Day is this. Forget the attention whores, the tub thumpers, the race baiters, the shit stirrers, and all the other dickheads who have turned this day into a low-rent freakshow. Let them have their day in front of the peanut gallery.

They have tried to divide and conquer us, as the ruling classes always have done to the people they have ruled, but in this they have failed.

However, let’s not dwell on that.

Instead, let us focus on the fact that the way we Kiwis have conducted race relations since the foundation of New Zealand has left us with far fewer daily unpleasantries than people of most other European colonies.

On my first day in Sydney, I walked out of the train station and up the main street towards the central city. On a dirty, water-logged mattress shoved up against a brick wall were a group of Aborigines, drinking meths out of plastic bottles.

On one of the first days I spent in Los Angeles I cycled to Malibu from Manhattan Beach. At Malibu, one can look up to the hills and see houses built like castles on huge sections, each property surely worth eight figures. From the same spot, one can look down to the beach and see several dozen people who sleep in cardboard boxes, and all of them are black.

And these are stories about the Functioning World; the non-Functioning World has horror stories about the friction of cultural borders rubbing up against each other that one can hardly believe.

On Waitangi Day, let’s spare a thought for the naked fact that, in most of the rest of the world, race relations are so bad that your skin colour is akin to a uniform and every street akin to a battlefield.

We managed to dodge the vast bulk of that – partly through design, partly through goodwill, partly through luck. Let’s take this day to appreciate that.

Understanding New Zealand: Turnout Rate of Party Supporters

What sort of political party supporter actually turns out to vote? It’s not as straightforward and simple as just old, rich, male and white. However, turnout rate can serve as a useful indicator of general disenfranchisement.

Interestingly, the correlation matrix gives us a clue about a line of information that is completely closed off to anyone running a simpler analysis: we can know which party has the supporters that are most likely to vote by looking at the correlation between party vote in each electorate and the turnout rate in that electorate.

It seems fair to assume that, all other things being equal, the turnout rate of any party’s supporters is roughly equal to the degree that those supporters feel their needs and desires will be taken seriously by the eventual representatives. After all, if your vote will not count for anything because your MP will ignore you anyway, why bother to cast it?

Perhaps more than any other set of correlations, this one tells us who is running the country. If you have money and wealth, you can vote knowing that whoever wins the election will listen to you out of natural shared solidarity. If you are disadvantaged – poor, physically or mentally ill, female in some cases, the wrong religion or race in many others, you can’t.

Unsurprisingly, there is a strong correlation between turnout rate in 2014 and voting for National – this was 0.76. The Labour one, at -0.67, was almost as strong in the other direction. This difference represented by this correlation arguably reflects the most fundamental political division in society – between the haves and the have-nots.

This correlation is large enough that we can predict the vast majority of people who do not turn out to vote are Labour supporters.

Reflecting that the average Green voter is significantly wealthier than the average Kiwi, there is a significant correlation between turnout rate and voting Green – this is 0.26. Probably this would be higher if it reflected the level of class privilege of the average Green voter, but because the average Green supporter is also so young the turnout rate is somewhat suppressed.

The turnout rate was, as it was for Labour, significantly negatively correlated with New Zealand First support. The correlation here was a moderately strong -0.40, which is possibly even a little less negative than one might have expected based on the income of the average New Zealand First voter. Even though the bulk of New Zealand First supporters are working-class Maoris and thus have a low turnout rate, the party has a core of elderly white voters who can be counted on to vote.

The turnout rate was moderately correlated with voting for the Conservative Party in 2014 – this was 0.55, easily the second highest of all the correlations between turnout rate and voting for a party. This is even though voting Conservative in 2014 did not have a significant correlation with median personal income.

The main reason for this is the strong correlation between voting Conservative in 2014 and median age, which was 0.75. Because old people vote at significantly greater rates than the young, and because old people are religious fundamentalists at significantly greater rates than the young, old people will vote for a party (like the Conservatives) that appeals to religious fundamentalism.

All of the parties that had a high proportion of Maori voters had a significantly negative correlation with turnout rate. The correlation between turnout rate and voting Maori Party in 2014 was -0.74, with voting Internet MANA it was -0.69, with voting Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party it was -0.68 and with voting New Zealand First it was -0.40.

None of these are surprising considering the strong negative correlation between turnout rate and being Maori (-0.74). It may be that the natural support levels of both the Maori Party and Internet MANA are closer to what the Conservative Party is pulling in, but because of massive disenfranchisement among Maori are unable to translate that support into seats in Parliament.

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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.

A Look at the Fashions This Political Season

With a General Election called for the 23rd of September this year, the political fashion season is now upon us. Kiwis everywhere are asking themselves “What political cause do I have to pretend to support this season in order to virtue signal my advanced and Christ-like moral sophistication?” This article has the inside goss.

The first thing that everyone needs to know is that gays are out, refugees are in. Gays have been fashionable for long enough – homosexual law reform has been fashionable since the 1970s – and have now become an entrenched part of the Establishment, fielding more than twice as many MPs as would be proportionate for their numbers in the population.

Cynics might point out that the sort of refugees that have the tens of thousands of dollars necessary to make it to New Zealand are probably middle class anyway, but the trendy thing to do is to blame it all on American bombing.

Now that America has a white man in the big chair once again, it will now once again be fashionable to talk about the drone strike campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of people during the reign of Barack Obama.

Talking about this was exceptionally fashionable during the last years of George W. Bush, because the indiscriminate nature of the killing naturally upset human rights fans. Drone strikes regularly claim dozens of ancillary fatalities that are written off as ‘collateral damage.’

It was highly unfashionable to speak about this during the reign of Obama because he was just so goddamn ball-achingly cool. But now that it’s trendy to compare Trump to Hitler it will also be trendy to talk about the drone strikes again, as one can have little doubt that drones are something Hitler would have gleefully used had he been able.

Women are also out, and this has made it even more fashionable to be pro-Islam this season.

The fact is that, despite the rhetoric about the gender gap (almost entirely produced by yuppie lesbians trying to smooth the path to a C-suite position), it is really hard to get away with paying a woman less for literally the same work in New Zealand.

The vast majority of the feminists who were fashionable at university are now middle-class and assuming positions of power themselves – and often at greater rates than the males of Generation X because the females tend to have higher educational standards.

And what’s less cool than a competent, educated middle-class person in a position of power?

Throwing women under the bus is probably the only way we political fashionistas can cope with the cognitive dissonance that would be brought about by simultaneously supporting them and an aggressively male supremacist religious tradition that considers women barely better than animals.

Do note that transsexuals are not the hot new thing this political fashion season. It seemed for a long time as if they would be, because of all the noise they had been making.

But New Zealand has long ago had an openly transsexual Member of Parliament – a Georgina Beyer, assigned male at birth, who completed two terms as an MP for the Labour Party from 1999.

On the clearly unfashionable side of things is the economy. Bill English said that the economy was the primary issue this political fashion season, and he’s the epitome of uncool.

So whatever you do this political fashion season, don’t point out the fact that refugees cost the country $100,000 per year each, and so taking even as many as a thousand per year costs more money than the Feed the Kids Bill would have done.

Hungry kids are out, unless they are foreigners. So mentioning the $100,000,000 per year expense of taking in 1,000 refugees might be this season’s biggest faux pas.

Cannabis users will have to continue their forty-year wait to become fashionable, because most of them are poor, mentally ill and Maori and all of those are associated with being grotty and poor and uncool.

Alcohol will still be fashionable, though, because the alcohol industry will continue to dump tens of millions into advertising until the plebs can’t talk or think about anything else.

So get ready to crack some chardonnay with your newly-made Syrian friends on the 23rd September this year.