Chris Laidlaw: All our pretence at modesty has gone

Opinion

Summer is a striking time of the year. It induces not just a collective exhale after the demands of a long year but it also conveys a hard truth about the structure of society in this country. It flushes out into the clear, brilliant light of day a new reality - the stark contrast between the lives of those who have plenty and those who don't.

Each year that reality is reinforced. Every summer the evidence is more clearly apparent as the well-off head for fashionable resorts and holiday homes that have become part of the expression of their well-being, while those who struggle to make ends meet try to find somewhere by a beach or a lake that they can still afford.

Or they simply don't go anywhere, trapped in the mire of relative poverty in the suburban fringes of the bigger cities or in the smaller towns which prosperity increasingly leapfrogs.

We have always been a bit reticent when it comes to talking about the notion of class. New Zealand society drew its original ethos from the very antithesis of the class-ridden societies it sprang from. This was "a better Britain" where social division would become an irrelevance.

We nearly made it. For a century or more we ironed out an appearance of difference with a fervour that astonished the rest of the Western world. We obliged Maori and anyone else who happened upon New Zealand from elsewhere to learn the steps to the national dance of uniformity. Those who had a few bob more than the masses knew instinctively to keep it well hidden.

Demonstrations of wealth, after the first few flourishes by unusually successful merchants or squatters in the late 19th century, almost disappeared. Jack was always as good as his master, and his master knew implicitly that he was no better than Jack. To suggest that New Zealand had a class system was akin to denying the Holocaust. It wasn't a smart thing to do. So nobody did it. And hardly anybody does even now.

In truth New Zealand has always had class differences. There were little enclaves in the larger cities which set themselves apart socially and which, particularly among the women, remained determined to preserve that shade of difference between them and the rest.

The vowels would be just that little bit more rounded, even if there was the occasional slip, and the consonants were carefully swallowed to disguise the Kiwi in the accent. It was a discernible social stratum but it was rarely, if ever, trumpeted beyond the leafy walls of Remuera, Fendalton, Kelburn or Maori Hill.

And everyone else just ignored the fact that it was there.

Now, all pretence at modesty has finally gone. A swing through Paritai Drive, Pauanui, the fringes of Queenstown or Wanaka provide breathtaking evidence of that. The McMansion is back. Columns are okay again. The gated community is the symbol of extraction from the proletariat. Wealth is no longer an affliction; it's cool to be seen in a Bentley and there are plenty of them.

If you have it, then by all means flaunt it. The demands of conscience that once obliged those with resources to show solidarity with those who don't has evaporated as comprehensively as a summer morning mist.

Whatever happened to the old uniformities? It all seems to have happened so suddenly. The answers aren't hard to find: it's all about freedom, really. You deregulate the economy and you deregulate the mind of society. You open the consumer door to choice and you get variety. And variety begets differences - differences of quality and of price.

The extraordinary sharemarket boom followed by the explosion of choice real estate prices meant that inequalities would soon be irresistible.

In one sense New Zealand has simply fallen into line with the rest of the Western world. We've accepted that stratification of society is the inevitable product of all that choice and all those opportunities to make a buck a lot faster than ever.

But because it all happened so fast it induced extremes, and those extremes are now manifest in a thoroughly stratified society. We still don't care to talk about it too openly, because to admit that we have a class system is somehow akin to spitting on our heritage - denying the very quality we thought set us apart from the rest of a troubled world.

Class is no longer the product of old wealth or the first ship syndrome, it is the expression of purchasing power. No matter where it is amassed, or how dubiously, money now guarantees a place in the social pecking order.

It opens an automatic door to civic status and all its associated trappings and opportunities to prosper further in exactly the same way that it finally has in Europe and in other new world societies where unabashed elites appeared early on, clearly distinguishable from the huddled masses.

Even in Australia, where equality was a watchword, they have long abandoned any real effort at self-deception, assisted, of course, by the abject condition of the forgotten Aborigine. A few years ago there was only a single book about class in Australia in print. Now there is a whole library. In New Zealand we are still awaiting the first treatise on the subject.

Is it all a zero sum game? Are the wealthy prospering at the expense of the less fortunate? Or does greater prosperity, fuelled by the enterprise of the energetic or the clever, guarantee a better deal for all?

The answer to that rather depends on your political philosophy.

Critics of the trickle-down theory claim to have irrefutable evidence that it results rather more in trickle-up.

Is it an immutable law of human nature that the few will have plenty and the many will have little, and that the two communities will continue their march toward total estrangement?

Whichever way you look at it, the stark reality of it simply can't be denied. The gap between the lifestyles of the affluent and the needy is widening faster here than just about anywhere else.

We have an entrenching class system but we can't quite bring ourselves to admit it.

* Broadcaster Chris Laidlaw is a former diplomat, Labour MP and Race Relations Conciliator.