CoolI was doing my usual mid-morning online read of the Sydney Morning Herald and came across this article.
It's so nice to see positive observations from our trans-tasman cousin.
Forget the Joneses, keep up with the Kiwis
Our trans-Tasman neighbours may be the butt of many fush jokes, but they have plenty over us, writes Paola Totaro.
The drive from Auckland airport to the CBD is a long one - about $62 worth - but the Indian taxi driver's guileless observations about trans-Tasman differences sew a seed: "In Australia, passengers see you are foreign and demand to know if you know your way. In New Zealand, they ask you if you're OK, how you are settling. They wait to hear the answer. Do you know what I mean?"
First impressions, especially cultural ones, are often gut-driven, gleaned via the heart rather than the intellect. They are shaped by circumstance and refined by further visits, reading, longer immersion. But intuition is a deeply undervalued human trait, one that science acknowledges but has yet to fully explain. And so, with intuition alone as a guide, here are seven reasons why New Zealand has it all over us.
1. There are real women on TV in New Zealand, ones with grey hair, wrinkles and imperfect upper arms. They ask questions of politicians with unabashed irreverence, refuse to accept obfuscating answers and allow their faces to reveal every emotion - from utter disdain to disbelieving exasperation. The obsession with beauty and youth - and deadpan, emotionless Q and As - plays second fiddle to experience and a gutsy honesty.
Kiwis exude a confident, intelligent feminism that spreads across all generations and sectors - forget the women priests debate, NZ already has an Anglican woman bishop. (Oh, and apart from the Prime Minister, the Governor-General, Chief Justice and Speaker of the House are all women, too.)
2. Kiwi politicians have yet to succumb to the culture of spin. Helen Clark and her Nationals nemesis, Don Brash, deigned to debate each other and went head-to-head on TV several times. Both hit the streets to meet and greet - not just once a day for the TV cameras - and campaigned in halls, pubs, clubs and often hostile university campuses.
Their campaign itineraries were made available in advance - an unknown in Australia where we are told that "security" considerations preclude knowing where our taxpayer-funded elected representatives are going to be. "Staying on message" - the mantra of the spin-meisters to this nation's politicians - has yet to homogenise the political discourse in NZ, allowing politicians room to answer questions in a way that doesn't bore us all rigid - and even reveals a little of their characters, occasionally even a hint of genuine warmth or humour.
3. NZ police are not armed and the nation's crime rate is at its lowest since 1982. Law and order and national security play a significant part in the nation's public consciousness but it has yet to be exploited ruthlessly by politicians in the way federal and state politicians have done at home.
Helen Clark disbanded the nation's air wing (a realistic assessment if ever there was one). Even Winston Peters's revelation that a former Iraqi minister associated with Saddam Hussein had arrived in NZ on a visitor's visa was handled without too much strident rhetoric; it simply prompted the necessary reform of immigration policy and frontline character assessment criteria.
(That said, NZ also has a very high imprisonment rate - 157 per 100,000 compared to Australia's 116 per 100,000. More than three-fifths of the world's nations have rates below 150 per 100,000.)
4. The politics of race and separatism - in language, funding, in parliamentary seats - is spoken about as just that. There is no euphemism, no pussyfooting around. The debate is sophisticated, upfront, and Maori are omnipresent: visible, powerful, intellectually combative and yet profoundly civil in their rhetoric.
The newly formed Maori Party took on Clark's Labour after a massive falling out over foreshores legislation. Dr Pita Sharples, the veteran Maori leader and pioneer of Maori language schools, challenged Labour's young gun, John Tamihere, and won his seat.
Despite the big stakes and violent political disagreement, both men expressed a dignified respect for one another as human beings in public that is unheard of here.
5. Similarly, the health debate is relatively untrammelled by social or political taboo: the rationing of resources is discussed openly (should smokers be offered intensive care beds, should taxpayers fund fertility treatments?). Universal health care is untouchable; however, there is growing talk about what it is that people can reasonably expect from a public health system and where lines may have to be drawn.
"I've had people tell me angrily they won't pay for their pills. I say, 'Don't take them, then. If you don't think you are worth a dollar a day, I certainly don't'," said Wayne Brown, Auckland's District Health Board chairman, in a pre-election article.
(A bureaucrat allowed to speak out at all; there's another big difference.)
6. Clark's personal sense of identity is so strong and blissfully unaffected by vanity that it seems to have rubbed off on her countrymen and women. Who else could have sent one of the world's first trans-gender MPs and a former sex worker - Georgina (originally George) Beyer - to meet the Queen at the airport?
It takes a confident nation to make a small decision like that - and big decisions like kissing goodbye the possibility of a free trade deal with the US to retain an unstintingly pacifist stance on the world stage.
"The bottom line is that this Government doesn't trade the lives of young New Zealanders for a war it doesn't believe in, in order to secure some material advantage," said Clark more than two years ago.
7. The New Zealand PM sticks to her word. See point 6.
Man, I love this country LOL.
Tart at 11:53 AM |