The Opinionated Diner

What a Great Country This Is / like fuck it is

I note, with some bemusement, the story in the Herald about the failure of the website designed to lure expatriate New Zealanders (of whom I am one), back to the mother country.

It’s not really a surprise is it.

What a silly idea, dreamed up in some boardroom full of overpaid shirts trying to extract a fat fee from the government, and I’m sure it did. The only surprise is that someone was gullible enough to buy it, to think it might work. To think that those who have left might be prodded to return by this, is just silly. Even if one was to read it and take it seriously it fails. It simply tries too hard to convince the reader that something is happening and repeatedly tries to imply that New Zealand has made the jump from mediocrity to exciting. Witness the music and entertainment pages…so try hard…so “look, its all happening here”. And its all so unnecessary and thoroughly insulting to those of us who know that exciting things have always happened in New Zealand, that the only real difference now is the momentary interest the mainstream are now taking in the undercurrent. Musically, I’m still not sure if the recognition is a good thing, if the voluntary quotas achieve much more than a blanding of the centre. Certainly the “New Zealandness” of the music being foisted onto the airwaves, as the record companies direct all their efforts towards commercial radio play, seems to be lost, especially in pop. R’n’b and New Zealand’s hip hop are another matter. Try as it might, many of the urban sounds coming out of NZ do not sound like the massively polished sounds coming out of the US or the UK. It retains a naïve clumsiness about it and more power to that, it’s an individuality that gives it spark. And then there is Fat Freddy’s. I don’t like the music particularly but I love them for the people power it indicates, and the voice it gives to my belief that the tryhard aspect of the failing website is unnecessary. Things are happening in NZ, and they always have been and the lack of this is not the reason many have left.

One of the things that has driven many, myself included, away is intolerance. I was terrified by the failure to criticise and the acceptance by the media of inherent racism in the National Party’s election campaign last year, and the way in which so many of my countrymen rallied to the bigotry. I had hoped we developed beyond that. Any I find myself uncomfortable with the creeping mediocrity and aspiration to mediocrity that I see, and the media celebrates.

I hate the rules, the lists of bylaws that greet you as you arrive at the beach, the fascism of the road rules and the way they are enforced. I know these exist for a reason but it is the layering of these on top each other over and over again, with the myriad of other regulations and rules that neuter the soul. There are things like the mess that New Zealand’s Employment law is, administered by the overpaid, out of touch with reality, buffoons that call themselves the Employment Relations Authority who encourage a whole new industry of parasitic ambulance chasers.

Those are some of the things that drive us away.

And then there is the case of Phillip Sturm. I really should say, before I go on, I know Phillip. Not well, at all, more in passing, and I’ve never had a conversation with him beyond small talk. I should also say that I have not seen the court records and my understanding of this case comes from what I’ve read in the media and, more importantly, from people I know who are privy to the details, some of whom were witness to some of the events surrounding the alleged offending.

To say this stinks is a massive understatement. Nothing I have heard or read indicates that is anything more than good old fashioned gay bashing. Over one hundred years since the British establishment drove Oscar Wilde to an early death, on the other side of the world, in the old Empire we continue the grand tradition. Yes Sturm is guilty, but only of being a promiscuous gay male, and not a particularly pleasant, as those who know him will attest, human being. Neither crime should put him in jail for nine years. But it has in clean green NZ.

The evidence that Sturm drugged and assaulted several men is ludicrous. None of the drugs alleged to have been used by him are capable, as hundreds of thousands of highly respectable New Zealanders know, in the quantities alleged, of the stupefaction required to substantiate the charges, and the original judge was correct to toss that out. That a second trial and the appeal court overruled this indicates that the whole notion of justice is a farce in New Zealand when applied to those who don’t sit in the centre of society, who don’t play the game. I reside in a country now which the world derides for its corruption but this case went down a country which is trying to sell itself as one of the great places to live, a sophisticated, haven of lifestyle.

The whole case is an evil nonsense, and confirms the notion, that the earlier witch trial of Peter Ellis made many of us believe, that New Zealand is not necessarily a place we want to live.

And no one says a word….