KEY POINTS:
Haven't the racist bigots had a field day with Massey University economist Greg Clydsedale's study, in which he slammed Polynesian immigrants to New Zealand as an underachieving underclass and a drain on the economy?
According to Clydesdale, we should limit their migration to New Zealand because their inadequate ability to educate themselves and their children means they will hinder New Zealand's future growth.
Naturally, he insists he's not a racist. He points to the fact that the study is compiled from data collected from the Economic Development Ministry, the Department of Labour and the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. And he points to the statistics that show Polynesians have the highest level of unemployment in every age group, that they're more likely to need government assistance for health and housing, and that they are over-represented in crime statistics.
Clydesdale says the facts speak for themselves. Do they, though? To quote my third-form maths book, an academic uses statistics the way a drunken man uses a lamp-post - for support, rather than illumination. You can make data jump through hoops to support pretty much any premise you like. For example, men are over-represented in all the bad stats, too.
Eighty per cent of the prison population is male. An overwhelming majority of murderers, and most rapists, are men. Would Clydesdale have all male children strangled at birth just on the off-chance one of them turns out to be bad?
And you'll find that poor health, overcrowding, high fertility, and over-representation in crime stats are not exclusive to Polynesians. Every country has an underclass, to use Clydesdale's term, and the problems are the same within any group of people who have low incomes. The ills are those of poverty, not race.
Clydesdale's study has been criticised as lazy but, to me, it just seems one-dimensional. I haven't read his masterwork so it may just be the way it's been reported, but it appears to lack any sort of perspective. I guess that's what you get when you see people as economic units.
We actively encouraged Pacific Islanders to come here during the 60s to do the crap jobs Kiwis didn't want to do. We're still doing it. Who do you think is picking the fruit that's in arty ceramic bowls on our faux colonial tables?
New Zealanders don't want the low wages and the laborious work, but the PIs are happy to do it. So we pay them the barest minimum, sneer at their attempts to assimilate into society and condemn them for the crimes of poverty - just as many nations did to Irish immigrants. They, too, were disdained for being criminally inclined, fertile, poor, and prone to fighting.
Their accents were mocked, they were ghettoised and, just as we shake our heads at the Polynesian practice of tithing, so too were Irish Catholics considered fools for supporting their priests and nuns.
Just as PIs are easily identifiable through their skin colour and names, so too were the Irish immigrants targeted through their names and their accents. And yet over time, the Irish assimilated into every country they called their new home. And that's all it will take for the stats to come right - time. But then I guess for economists, time's money, so we can't be having that.
And by the way, Greg Clydesdale, we're palagis in the middle of the South Pacific. If you have a problem with Pacific Islanders hindering your upwardly mobile trajectory, maybe you should think about taking up a post at the University of Reykjavik. You might find more kinship with people of Nordic and Gaelic descent.
