The State of the Pākehā

Posted on February 21, 2013 by chrismiller

Last week was kind of a busy one for me, final week of summer school and all that. I had an exam on Thursday for which I had to write four essays, prepared in advance so the pressure was higher; once that was over, I took a couple of hours off before I had to turn straight to the final essay and catch up on notes for my other paper. The final essay alone was 50%. Meanwhile, on Saturday we were attending a cultural festival in the inner city east where we had a stall for us weavers and sold our small work (putiputi mostly) cheap out of respect to the demographics of the area. Even with prices probably half of what they should have been, even a little less, we made a staggering $175. We’ll be setting up a bank account to funnel the money straight back into our mahi, paying for dyes and petrol for road trips for when we want to harvest outside of the city. (In April, we plan to take a trip to Kaikoura.)

The day after my essay was due we had our usual weaving class at Te Awa o te Ora, which was somewhat overshadowed by the budgeting guy who’s coming in at the moment to patronise to everyone. I mean, budgeting advice, that’s hella useful, but this guy… To fully understand, the demographics of this place are: mostly Māori. Mostly mentally ill or intellectually handicapped in some way. Mostly on either the sickness or disability benefit. Things he talked about included how expensive it is to run a car and how no one on welfare had one in 1974 (duh, a lot less people in GENERAL had them, and very few people in the room have one NOW) and the fourth item on his template budgeting spreadsheet was repayment of debts to WINZ. Because beneficiaries, you know. He also told us all about how if you have four or five different debts to WINZ you can consolidate them and repeated several times that if you spend over a hundred dollars a week on cigarettes they’ll probably tell you to cut down. If anyone even vaguely knows of anyone on a benefit that spends half their income on cigarettes I’d love to hear about it because seriously, how would they ever cover the rest of their bills? He also talked about how to make extra income, like collecting cans to recycle and selling spare assets on TradeMe, getting a job, and talked quite a bit about how people dump furniture on the footpath and you can pick that up instead of buying new. You know what you need for that? A car. With a towbar. And a trailer. You know, the thing you told us all was so expensive to run.

Anyway, enough of that. Once he’d gone, I started work on a kete that I’ve had the whenu waiting for for ages, and my sister came up with a name for our group: Putiputi Whetu. I have all the course materials for next semester (ie, Monday) as of today, so I’m ready for that. I have I think one week left of work. And tomorrow is That Day.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do with myself tomorrow. Maybe sit around and play games. Catch up on tv. Drink. Bake and eat cake. Move rabbit cages around. Or sit online wallowing with everyone else. We haven’t had any repairs yet aside from patching up the roof where the chimney fell through, but the waste water works outside have been fucking up everything for the last couple of months and we had the asbestos testers in yesterday. EQC says we’re under cap. Insurance thinks we’re over. When repairs eventually start we’ll move out for (they say) two months, so probably a lot longer. Depending when that happens, it’s possible that I might as well fuck off to Wellington. A bunch of schools have just been announced really for real this time as definitely closing (sorry, “merging” still means one is closing), including several that have had very recent upgrades and new buildings done and the government is being caught lying about pretty much everything.

Painted on a bare wall in the city centre

Amidst the shards of glass
& twisted steel
Beside the fallen brick
& shattered concrete
we began to understand
that there is beauty in the
broken
Strangers do not live here
anymore.

I’m not sure how long that poem’s been up but I’ve walked past it before. I took that photo yesterday (after noticing the way the bottles rattled as I walked the aisles at Bin Inn, and the traffic lights swayed in the wind as I leaned against one waiting to cross the road) and the last line’s been stuck in my head. In some ways I think it’s no longer true – the initial pulling together of the community has long since worn off – but in others it is. Everyone’s pretty broken around here, going through similar things.

When government fails

Posted on February 6, 2013 by chrismiller

Some months back, a seasonal Victorian firefighter was injured on the job. He suffered serious internal injuries and burns, bad enough that he was admitted to intensive care and had to spend months in rehabilitation. Then he was told that he would not be re-hired for the next summer. He was offered a week’s pay in settlement on the proviso that he not speak publically about the whole thing.

Money ran out and the ex-firefighter, Joe Brown, his partner Ben and their two cats became homeless. While the Fire Service claimed they were providing support, Joe says that he only ever had one meeting with Parks Victoria, that they underpaid him, and that he had been cleared to work by a doctor. He hasn’t been able to find work, and after losing their home it became a struggle just to keep up with living costs.

Here’s where Joe and Ben got lucky. Twitter user @Jamus_ set up a curation account in the style of @sweden, @PeopleofNZ and @WeAreAustralia, specifically to feature the homeless population of Melbourne. First Joe and then Ben each spent a week using the account to share their story. It helps that in many ways they fit into the model of the “deserving poor”, an ideal that has an extremely long history. Their situation was not of their own doing. Joe had held a frontline job in an extremely highly regarded profession, and was injured in the pursuit of that work. Neither of them have drug or alcohol problems or mental illness (with the exception of Joe’s likely PTSD, which he’s said is an effect largely of how he was treated while in recovery rather than the accident itself). They’re literate and well-spoken. In short, their problems couldn’t be attributed to any moral failing on their count – and if this could happen to a firefighter, a noble protector of the people in a country where fire is a seriously big deal, it could happen to anyone.

While tweeting from the account, Joe and Ben found an estate agent who’d let a flat to them. All they had to do was come up with the $600 bond. They went to Victoria’s DHS and it seemed they’d be able to get the money from them. However, the next week they were told that Joe had an outstanding $450 debt dating from 2004, and until it was repayed they wouldn’t be able to get any help. Joe says he’d repaid it, and even if he hadn’t they hadn’t heard anything about it in the nine years since, but short of getting the decision reviewed there wasn’t much they could do. There was an hour left on the deadline to raise the bond.

In New Zealand the banks were already closed for the day, and none of them would process a payment in less than a day anyway. I offered to repay anyone in Melbourne who’d be able to put up the bond money, but an hour ticked by with no response. It was too short notice.

Today, though, everything fell into place. The agent was still trying to find out if Joe and Ben would be able to pay, and now more people were becoming aware of the situation – even @Asher_Wolf, a well-established Australian activist, was tweeting about it. While I was still researching the best and fastest way to get money out of New Zealand on Waitangi Day, the internet was stirring, and shortly after I decided on Western Union Joe tweeted that someone had donated the $450 needed to clear the debt with the DHS. I still don’t know everyone who donated, but I know there have also been offers of further help and the word put out to source things like furniture and manchester. One person even said that when they got a fridge they’d be receiving a lemon meringue pie. They don’t have the power on yet, or cleaning products, but they have some money for food and are discussing renting a van to pick up the furniture they’re able to get through donations (whether directing or using donated money). With a home base they’re now much more employable, as well as under much less stress, not having to spend so much on nightly accommodation or sleep in their car, able to get out of the heat during the day and generally just in a much healthier environment.

This is a fantastic outcome. There is absolutely no questioning that. It does raise questions, though, of what makes one person’s crisis go viral when another’s doesn’t. It’s a question that applies on multiple scales, right up to human rights abuses and genocides. There is simply so much suffering in the world that we will never hear about all of it, and the processes that make certain narratives make it into the wider consciousness while others fade away with barely a murmur are somewhat less than transparent.

That is why we can’t rely on charity to form a social safety net. Charity has always been plagued by “morality”, particularly in the name of religion, which can be a very toxic kind of help – or, in some cases, refused outright on the basis of who is asking for that help. LGBT people (like Joe and Ben and I) are especially vulnerable to this. That’s where government should come in. And that’s where austerity fails. Victoria is fighting that oh-so-familiar battle against “bloat” in the public service – cutting public employee numbers by 4200, something that perhaps contributed to the decision not to re-hire a contract employee who’d been injured, no matter what the doctors said. Welfare is stretched thin and no longer nearly as generous as it once was.* For every Joe Brown there are countless more who aren’t as lucky, and it’s highly probable that we’ll never know their names.

*A disclaimer here that I’m far more well-versed in the history of welfare in New Zealand than in Victoria, or Australia in general.

It’s not just prescriptions

Posted on January 8, 2013 by chrismiller

For my first prescription fill of the year, I went to the brand new rebuilt St Martins pharmacy near my house. The man who seemed to be in charge was really great – I had to wait a while longer than expected because he’d sent someone home sick and then there was a busy patch, but he kept me informed of what was going on and chatted to customers while he worked. At one point as he was serving an elderly lady I heard him talking about the new charges.

Not the prescription charges, though. I’m assuming most people reading this have used a pharmacy in New Zealand before. You may have noticed the advertising many of them have for those trays you can ask them to put your meds into, with little pottles labeled by day, and sometimes time of day, so that you can just open one compartment to get all the pills you need to take. You can buy the trays themselves and set them up yourself, but it’s also a service they provide which is very useful for people who a) take a lot of different pills and b) might have problems with memory or keeping track of what they have and haven’t taken. Mostly elderly people or those with brain trauma or similar mental/learning disabilities. So, you know, not right up there in the workforce.

Originally, you could get these trays done for free. According to what he was saying, the government then instituted a $2/tray fee, which has apparently now gone up to five dollars. These trays do a week’s worth of pills. So on top of your theoretical $100 max yearly payment for prescriptions, you have a $5/week fee to have them put into the trays to make sure you don’t miss doses or overdose, which comes to more than $250.

I just tried to do a google search to see if I could find any details on this, but ‘new zealand pharmacy pill tray’ came up with a first page full of Viagra and I’m a bit too exhausted to try to magic up the right search terms. If anyone could confirm though, that would be good.

Incidentally, I’d also recently heard a bus driver telling an elderly lady that she couldn’t use her SuperGold card for free fare in the morning and was pretty confused because as far as I knew there weren’t any restrictions on it. Surprise! They provide free travel only between 9am-3pm and after 6.30pm, plus weekends and holidays. Again, I don’t know if it was always like this or not, but since that first time I’ve seen a few other retirees who apparently had no idea about time restrictions.

What happened, Metro?

Posted on January 7, 2013 by chrismiller

I’ve written a couple of angry letters to MetroInfo recently on the subject of bus drivers not stopping. I mean, I get it when they don’t stop if you don’t see them coming and you’re still sitting down, especially if it’s a stop that serves multiple routes. But when you get up from the seat and pull out your wallet and wave to them, you expect them to pull over. Otherwise you get late for work, or stranded at Eastgate for an hour before the next bus comes on a day when pain is bad enough that there’s no real way you’re going to be walking that far and it’s hot and you have groceries to carry.

But anyway, tomorrow I have a doctor’s appointment, and I’ll either be at the place I’m house-sitting or at my kaiako’s place finishing our tukutuku panel depending how well I’m feeling, and I also saw today that the Huntsbury is the 17 now not the 18, so I thought I should check the bus routes so I’d know how to get there. It used to be I could take the Murray Aynsley (which was the 66 after it was the 12 and before it was the… whatever it is now. 115?) from home to five metres outside the GP’s office, but now the Murray Aynsley is the MA-Sydenham link and it doesn’t hit Colombo St south of Brougham or so and also goes from Murray Aynsley to Sydenham in a weird zigzagging hairpin circuitous route that sort of blows my mind.

What even is this?

It turns out they have a lot of new routes like this one. I had a look through the three digit ones and I’m not sure which is my favourite. The 114 Barrington/Cashmere is pretty ridiculous, because there’s already a bus between those two places, and it’s called the Orbiter. Granted the Orbiter doesn’t venture a few blocks up the hill like the 114 does, but anyone who wanted to do that could easily transfer to one that did at PMH. I know this because I accidentally got engrossed in a book once while traveling from the GP’s office to PMH so I could switch to the Orbiter and had to walk down that hill when I realised where I was. The 535 Eastgate-Lyttleton doesn’t look too stupid until you realise that the 28 to Lyttleton/Rapaki nearly goes to Eastgate on the way anyway, and if they really want to go there why don’t they just shift it a bit? (Except don’t, because they haven’t changed it in about as long as I can remember and it’s really useful where it is.)

Then there’s the 107 and 108, and I’m sorry but their network map doesn’t allow you to choose 1>x>all routes to show so I’ll have to display this in two images:

108 route 107 route

Now I know Northlands is the biggest mall in Christchurch if not the busiest, so there are people around there quite a lot, but is there such a huge mass of people traveling just north of the mall that would require those two different routes? Would the system be too overloaded if they only had one? Northlands also has two other link routes, Bishopdale (northwest a bit up Harewood Road, give or take a block) and Edgeware (which is legitimately a completely different direction).

Covering more of the city is a fair enough goal, I’ll totally cop to that. And these new routes do that, kind of. But they do it in a way that’s utterly illogical, because you have all these unconnected bus routes that are so bendy they’ll take you twenty minutes to get three blocks away, as well as waiting time, and what’s the point of that? Not to mention how many times you’d have to transfer to get anywhere out of the immediate area if your starting point and/or destination aren’t a major hub.

In the end, I’ll probably use the 115 and walk for longer to get to the doctor when I’m staying at home. Otherwise it’s the Blue line from town and whatever route will get me there… as long as a bus driver stops for me.

White people perform ceremonies at temples; members of actual religion watch

Posted on December 22, 2012 by chrismiller

Predictably, there is an article on Stuff today about the end of the baktun. It describes all the celebrations held in spiritual places around the world, some historical armageddon fantasies, and gets quotes from “Maya experts” on how some white people are super dumb. Oh, and a single actual Maya, who apparently spent the day selling souvenirs outside the Mayan temples in Mexico.

“A few minutes before the north pole reached its position furthest from the sun on Friday, a spotlight illuminated the western flank of the Temple of the serpent god Kukulkan, a 30 metre tall pyramid at the heart of Chichen Itza.

Then a group of five English-speaking tourists dressed in white made their way across the plain, dropped their bags and faced the pyramid with their arms raised.

As the sun climbed into the sky, a man with dreadlocks played a didgeridoo at the north end of the pyramid. Nearby groups of tourists meditated on brightly coloured mats.”

The most appropriate word I can think of for this is “gross”. Why? Not just because of the standard appropriation, complete with distortion and inaccuracy (a didgeridoo?). But because I’m willing to bet most of these tourists aren’t even aware that the Mexican government banned Maya from performing rituals in their own temples to mark the beginning of the next baktun. For “health and safety” reasons. Because of the crowds. This isn’t exactly an every day ritual – a baktun lasts nearly four hundred years, so the ceremonies for a new one are kind of a big deal. But instead of performing them in the temples that their ancestors built, the Maya will be finding space wherever they can – porches, vacant lots, fields.

“Contrary to popular (mis)belief, the end of the long-count calendar is being viewed as something positive. As Mayan priest Jose Manrique Esquive recently pointed out, the current Baktun, which began around 1618, has been drenched by a continuous reign of misery that included the introduction of European disease, culture and language being erased and entire populations being extinguished.

‘This is the ending of an era for the Maya, an era which has been very intense for us, in which we have had suffering and pain,’ said Manrique Esquivel, adding ‘we are praying the wars, the conflicts, the hunger to end.’”

I guess basically what I’m saying is, things aren’t looking good for that, Manrique.

Education in base 12

Posted on December 14, 2012 by chrismiller

Thanks to Shelagh at Ruth Dyson’s office, I’ve just had a call from a lady who works at Studylink who attempted to explain to me what the issues with my application were. First she told me that there were two different program codes, which was true in my first application. Massey explained the problem to me (you can’t get a student allowance using two different programs to get your 0.8 EFTS) and I sat there painstakingly withdrawing and re-enrolling in all my papers to put them all into a BA rather than a DipArts, then re-applied. I told her this and then she moved on to the problem of my EFTS values. You see, I’m doing 0.6something in 2013 and 0.2something over summer, which makes 0.69something and–

“Sorry, point-two or point-oh-two?”

She confirmed point-two. I pointed out that 0.2 and 0.6 add up to 0.8.

She put me on hold, where I languished for all of Bic Runga’s Sway and most of Slice of Heaven before she returned to say that yes, 0.2 and 0.6 do add up to 0.8.

Apparently the problem now is that they have two verifications of study from Massey, one for summer and one for next year (which I suspect may be more due to how they’re asking than anything else) and she needs to talk to someone with more experience to see if they can put them next to each other and add them up or not, even though she’d already added them up to tell me that it only made 0.69something. If not then either Massey needs to send one verification of study for the entire study period or I need to re-apply for limited full-time, despite being full-time.

On the plus side, when Massey asked what I wanted to do with the extraneous limited full-time application I had them send it back to me instead of destroyed, because it has a verified copy of my deed poll in it and I find it really tiresome to get those done. So if needed I can just re-envelope it and send it back again.

ETA: She’s just got back to me to say that (shocker) everyone’s gone home for the day so she’ll send an email to someone with more experience in this area and follow up on Monday.

For the record

Posted on December 8, 2012 by chrismiller

Largely for my own curiosity, I’ve just lodged a request with the Ministry of Social Development to be provided with a list of all verification of study queries that Studylink has sent to Massey University about me, with the dates they were made and the dates they pertain to. Their “email us” links are actually form submissions so I don’t get to keep a copy in my sent folder, and they haven’t sent a verification, so I figured I’d just put it in the record here that I’d done so with about five different pieces of personal information to verify my identity. We shall see what transpires.

New lows

Posted on December 7, 2012 by chrismiller

You thought this was finished. Or at least, I know I did. So I was pretty surprised on Wednesday when I stopped at Barrington Mall to pick up my medication and get a milkshake at Wendy’s and my debit card was declined. Typically I get paid by work every fortnight on a Thursday, and by Studylink every Tuesday, so there was no way I should have had less than $100 in my bank account. In fact, I had $6. And when I investigated further, I found I hadn’t received my allowance for two weeks running – I hadn’t noticed it was low because I’d been making sure to keep money spare for Christmas, which has now gone on bills. (Though not my life insurance, which is now overdue, and I have a direct debit on my health insurance in a week.)

A call to Studylink revealed that when they’d asked Massey about my timetable, they were told I was doing an EFTS of 0.375, whereas full-time study is 0.8. The guy seemed very nice and helpful and I came away pleasantly surprised that the fuck up didn’t seem to be on Studylink’s end for once – it was Massey who’d only given them the EFTS for summer school, rather than the whole loan period of November ’12 to November ’13. So I sent an email off to Massey and returned to my sick bed.

Today, I received a response including this:

“To date we have not received a Verification of Study from StudyLink for the dates specified in Agnes’s email, 19/11/2012 to 13/11/2013. A number of verifications have been sent by StudyLink to Massey University however none with the above mentioned dates.”

Reading the most recent letters from Studylink again, the approval letter I received on November 13 actually says, “Your Student Allowance is approved at this rate from 27 February 2012 to 18 November 2012.”

Are you fucking kidding me, Studylink? You sent me an approval letter for a study period that was due to end in LESS THAN A WEEK and never actually bothered to ask Massey for the correct information? How do you even function, seriously?

The post of +10 constitution

Posted on November 29, 2012 by chrismiller

Despite what the public and certain opinion columnists may think, New Zealand does have a constitution, most of it is written down, and it’s nothing like a list of family rules pinned to the fridge. That would be legislation. The constitution is more like when an angry tween yells, “Why are you always telling me what to do?” and gets the reply, “Because I’m the mother!”, combined with the agreement that the authority figures will back each other up in front of the kids but can disagree privately, the convention that lunch can be whatever but dinner is a sit down meal, the idea of having a chore wheel and the rule that if you don’t do your chores you don’t get your pocket money.

In short, the constitution defines how the government is set up, the relationships between different parts of government and the populace, and how it’s allowed to do things. One thing that’s interesting about the New Zealand constitution, apart from that it’s one of only three like it (along with the UK and Israel) in being scattered around all over the place rather than in one place, is that all those different pieces of constitution have the same weight as other laws. In other countries like the US, the constitution is “supreme law” – it automatically outranks any other law.

So where is our constitution? That’s a bit of a list. We can start with the obvious one: the Constitution Act 1986. Yes, 1986, twenty six years ago. We’re a pretty young country remember, and we’ve spent a long time gradually drifting apart from the UK. If I recall my history lessons correctly, we didn’t actually have a national identity as separate from England until the first World War, when our troops went and joined theirs and realised how different they’d gotten from Back Home. Back to the Constitution Act, though, it’s basically a statute that establishes the Queen and Governor-General as our Head of State and her representative, outlines the three parts of government – the executive (Ministers and Cabinet), the legislature (MPs and Parliament) and the judiciary (the justice system) – and lays down a few rules about them. It’s what tells us that one term of government equals three years, rules that Ministers must also be MPs, and makes sure the ruling party can’t fire senior judges without following the correct procedure, to protect them from political pressure.

More of the constitution can be found in:

the Official Information Act 1982
the State Sector Act 1988
the Reserve Bank Act 1989
the Bill of Rights Act 1990
the Electoral Act 1993

They do things like establishing the public sector (officials, aides, advisors), placing day-to-day monetary policy into the hands of an independent governor, protecting citizens from discrimination over various characteristics, etc.

Then there’s a few pieces we still have that were imported wholesale from Britain: the Bill of Rights 1688, the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, etc. So technically, we have (Western) legislation in New Zealand that actually dates back to the 13th century. Beyond these written pieces of legislation, though, there’s even more constitution to go around! I mentioned the judiciary above; an awful lot of constitutional rights we have were formed by case law or common law, where judges interpret legislation through application into real life situations. A lot of these were later included in the Bill of Rights Act 1990.

So where does the idea that our constitution is unwritten come from? That would be our many pieces of constitutional convention. Conventions are basically governmental traditions which aren’t written but are always followed, like the fact that the Governor-General can take legal action but never does unless directed to by the ruling party, or that a caretaker government doesn’t bring new policy to be debated. One that (we can only hope) may prove topical is that a government can only remain in power if they have confidence and supply – they must have a majority of votes on big, important things like the Budget. If they don’t, then by convention it’s game over. Time to either quit or try desperately to change someone’s mind.

Finally, there’s the Treaty of Waitangi. We all know the Treaty of Waitangi, right? There’s no real accepted agreement on exactly what role it plays in the Constitution, but everyone agrees (sometimes reluctantly) that it is part of it, unlike at some times in the past when it was basically completely ignored.

So, what does all this mean for the government of New Zealand? Basically, we actually have it very easy in terms of changing direction in a big way here, especially when we still had FPP. Ignoring the Sovereign, we have three branches of government which I named above. The legislature, Parliament, is responsible for passing laws, by debating and voting. The executive, Cabinet and the Ministers, does a lot of the work behind preparing laws, and most legislation to be debated comes from the executive (except for Member’s Bills). The judiciary resolves disputes. However, all members of the executive are also part of the legislature, and are appointed by the ruling party. This means that the executive will almost always be on the same team as the Parliamentary majority, so it’s very easy for them to pass new legislation. So through history we have some pretty major changes in direction, such as the creation of the welfare state in the 1930s and the switch towards a much more market capitalist system in 1984 (and even moreso in 1990). And because most of the constitution is just standard legislation, all the government needs is a simple majority to change it. Funnily enough the two examples my textbook gives are both in Canterbury. Firstly in early 2010, when the National Party fired all the elected representatives of Environment Canterbury and appointed commissioners, and more chillingly canceled the upcoming elections, because of “a failure of governance” by the elected Council. (ie, they did not like the decisions the elected representatives made regarding freshwater management.) The commissioners are still in place today. The second example is from about six months later, on September 14 2010, when CERA was established with the ability to override pretty much any other Act of Parliament and which couldn’t be challenged through the judiciary. To be fair, this still would have happened if it had required a super-majority – the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act 2010 passed unanimously.

So that’s our constitution. It’s in bits and pieces, some written, some not. It’s a bit quirky and strange and it gives us almost unparalleled flexibility to change course, which can be used for both good and evil. It holds the same weight as any other legislation, and in a lot of ways only public opinion is really able to hold the government in check. But it’s there, and you can read the government’s version of it here if you’re interested enough to want something other than a second-hand retelling of a first year public policy textbook’s explanation.

The Little Pakeha

Category Archives: government