Dialogue: Despite conflict, our common core is solid

In the past three months, many New Zealanders have contributed to the Herald's Common Core Debate. CARROLL du CHATEAU explores what their ideas suggest we have in common - and what can be done to get New Zealanders pulling together.


Last summer we joined a charter boat heading for the big yellow kingis that feed near the Mercury Islands off Coromandel.

There were four men aboard: Snow, who had bought a courier business in Whitianga when his wife died three years ago, but been forced into early retirement by a dicky ticker; then there was a guy called, I think, Phil, who ran a dairy farm in the Waikato; and his brother-in-law, who used to work at the Glenbrook steel mill and was now doing something else.

Our skipper, Rod, had tired of running his open-all-hours dairy at Oparau in Kawhia, sold up and moved east to Whitianga, towing R&R, the launch he had built in the backyard to ferry everything from groceries, alcohol and people up-harbour.

While his wife took a job in real estate, Rod went into business, running fishing charters. In other words, no one, except maybe Phil, was remotely wealthy.

Tanned as they were despite the patchy summer, it was impossible to establish who was Maori and who entirely Pakeha - and it didn't matter.

And 10 hours later, after banging through some heaving swells, a morning dogged by undersized snapper and conger eels which we tossed back, an unscheduled detour through a hole in the rock to a breathtaking, cathedral-like pool filled with deep emerald water, we were back.

No one mentioned that we were four hours late. We just shared a couple of beers while we filleted our kingfish, two mighty snapper and countless smaller fry, then wrote our cheques for the half-day initially agreed on, climbed into our cars and left.

Because the fishing was dismal in the morning, Rod simply stayed out - and charged us the half-day price. A fair go for the decent bloke - because he'd built the launch himself, it was his boat, his time, his choice.

And no one, over the entire 10 hours, told anyone else what to do.

The anecdote is apt because it ties in so well with New Zealanders' strongest intrinsic value - our sense of adventure, of going to the edge, our craving to be free.

Our parents or grandparents, Pakeha and Maori, sailed here, to the "last, loneliest and loveliest" place on Earth on a boat or a waka. There were no photographs of palm trees or pohutukawa to lure them, no prospectus, no promises.

And our ancestors, pushed by a thirst for adventure and a hunger to find a better life, hitched up their grass skirts and crinolines and stepped into the unknown.

We were the self-selected bravest people around. Even for those great waves of migrants who came later - the refugees fleeing a broken, disenchanted Europe, the Asians who now inject life into our cities, families craving light and space - New Zealand was a punt. So it is no wonder that our children still have that restless spirit that drives them to search the world for fresh and better opportunities. The fact that most of them eventually come home simply means they love it here.

That common core that is New Zealand culture may now be surrounded by conflict and controversy but it is still solid.

Imagine New Zealand's identity as a round table. The middle 80 per cent is the area which New Zealanders agree about - our common core. The outside 20 per cent is our rim of fire, our area of confusion and conflict.

And while it might be painful and difficult to come to agreement on this crust of deep division, getting through it will be the process that takes us to the next stage, that make us mature.

As editor-in-chief Gavin Ellis, who opened this debate, says, the way forward must be from the middle: "If you start from our points of commonality and work outwards, you feel very different about New Zealand culture than if you start at the crust of conflict and move in. Working from the middle, outlining our objectives, then getting the nation to buy into them is so much easier if we start with the things we believe in."

At the very centre of what it means to be a New Zealander are things like love of the land - which transcend both Maori and Pakeha - the joy of bare feet, four-wheel drives and Swannies.

Remember the success of the Speights, Bugger and Mainland Cheese advertisements that everyone identified with? How come the West Coasters won the battle with DB over Monteith's? That is just New Zealanders revelling in their culture.

Then there is repugnance towards any sort of class system, an attitude brought here by Britons worn down by a ruling upper class; the joy of a deal (or even a swiftie) within Maori and Pakeha alike; an enduring historical, but sadly now mistaken, pride in our race relations; pride in our liberal attitudes, first to feminism (first nation to give women the vote), second to homosexuals (our enjoyment of the Hero parade); our self-sufficiency and a willingness to have a go at any kind of job that presents itself coupled with the ability to reject all that has gone before and create something new and different; the delight of a putdown joke; our compassion and concern for the underdog; and an unwillingness to be bullied. In other words, as Ellis wrote, we are freedom-loving pack animals, at our best when supported by our mates and living in relative stability, but free at the same time.

Our common core consists of honest, easygoing, steady-working, amiable, law-abiding, healthy people with wanderlust in their eyes, a love for our country and its icons and lives built round the idea of duty towards their families and neighbours.

Complicating this picture is the fact that we are emerging from a single generation during which almost all of our dearly held values were smashed to bits.

We prided ourselves on our quarter-acre sections, our race relations, our pioneering social welfare, health and accident compensation. We took pride in our egalitarianism, our efficiency, practicality, self-sufficiency and standard of living.

We loved the fact that by just lugging around hay bales, chopping wood on our farms and riding our horses on the lambing beat, we could whip all comers on the rugby field, athletic track and cross-country course.

Now, we are told, even the land is in peril. After 60-odd years of enthusiastically adopting the most efficient farming methods international scientists and biotech companies could come up with, there is that disquieting feeling that we may have poisoned our birthright - and possibly the people with it. Even the motorcar that gives us the freedom we crave is now seen as potentially evil.

Which brings us to the outer 20 per cent rim of the tabletop. Without doubt, the biggest pain in our collective backside, Maori and Pakeha, is race relations.

For the past 15 years, academics and radicals have fed the culture a steady diet of separatist, biculturalist theory and black activist rhetoric. Most of it is imported from the United States and ring-fenced by politically correct politics which makes it dangerous for a fair dinkum Kiwi bloke to question for fear of being labelled racist.

And while the resulting Maori renaissance may have strengthened the Maori culture, it has done little so far to nourish and enlarge our common core.

At worst, the bicultural movement is part of the handbrake on our collective way forward.

We've all met people with sandy hair and freckles toting ketes with greenstone meres, identifying with their Maori side. However, too many of them, unlike their Maori forebears, ignore what Pakeha culture has to offer.

The second destabilising influence has been the move from welfare state to free market, threatening our dearly held egalitarian tradition. User-pays policies, university fees and unemployment have stretched the fabric of middle New Zealand so thin it is torn in places.

People who did voluntary work or became great parents are now at work, leaving voluntary agencies bereft. At the same time, the poorest among us have come under intolerable pressure and many have lashed out - at others, themselves and, most tragically of all, at their children.

Government-led reforms which allowed our former Government departments, companies such as Fletcher Challenge and even boutique wineries such as Matua Valley to be snapped up by multinational companies have made people feel vulnerable.

Although we concede that Rob Muldoon's attempt at "fortress NZ" was a joke, the fact that decisions affecting our lives and jobs are - and always have been - made in some boardroom in New York, London or Singapore is unsettling, too.

Well-meaning welfare systems such as the domestic purposes benefit, partly designed to help women out of unhappy marriages, backfired, producing thousands of fatherless families. Young mothers under pressure - often dragged down by a series of opportunistic partners - are all too normal.

And young adults, while understanding the new need to provide for themselves, have necessarily become more self-interested, more calculating and cynical, especially about institutions, politicians and big business.

It is not just a New Zealand malaise. The "me" generation that came out of the US in the 1980s, fostering a climate of competition rather than collegiality, has confused much of the Western world.

The replacement of religion with materialism and quasi-scientific secularism has created huge inner discontent and much avoidable psychological and social pain amid affluence. The loss of so-called menial jobs, depriving our most needy of the dignity of meaningful work, has had a resounding effect.

Mix those elements with an unhealthy dose of spiritualism verging on plain superstition and the result is dangerous - and amazing in this age of knowledge. Yet how many New Zealanders tie dream nets to their bedheads, crystals to the rear-vision mirror and live their lives more by horoscopes than goal-setting and dreaming?

Another element to hack away at our common core is television, specifically American television. Today's South Auckland teenager is virtually indistinguishable from a young rapper in Los Angeles or New York. He wears a baseball cap backwards, an outsized T-shirt, baggy cargo pants and Nike sneakers - a uniform deliberately copied from the US.

He is also lippy, hard to teach, difficult to parent, often anti-Establishment and going through an identity crisis.

As the Herald's Ellis points out, the side of American culture our children do not see on television is pride in the country, a belief in the Declaration of Independence and a reverence for their flag that is drilled into Americans at elementary school.

Here, it is a brave principal who flies a New Zealand flag on the school flagpole and, in the absence of a written constitution, composes a set of common principles that have not been subverted by political correctness to the point of meaninglessness.

So, after all the debate, what sort of a New Zealand do we believe in and want for our future? Do we even understand why so many people feel a deep sense of unease and dissatisfaction, while a socially significant chunk of the population - some young, brown and male, others bewildered by changing values - are so marginalised that they put the brakes on the rest of us?

The resounding message is clear: before we even start, we must realise that core values have to dwell first on what we know permits human beings to thrive rather than become disillusioned and broken.

Listen to Richard Whitfield, director of an influential British think tank: "Secure attachment early in life is the best predictor of all good life outcomes, including mental health, relational and educational success and avoidance of crime. Yet this birthright is not being delivered for about half of New Zealand's children. This is a scandal. No culture has survived without sufficient care over the relations between genders for procreation and child-rearing."

This is truly a wake-up call - and one which must crash through all notions of political correctness. At-risk children, like the 2-year-old who was locked in his bedroom without food or water for eight lonely hours, must be taken from the family and the whanau and given a chance, not just for his sake, for all our sakes.

Our latest statistics, for 1996, showed that 24 per cent of all dependent children under 18 - and 41 per cent of all Maori children - lived with one parent. Teenage pregnancies (15 to 19) ran at 31 a 1000 compared with eight in Singapore and 14 in Ireland. Child-abuse deaths average nine or 10 a year.

Lesley Max, of the Pacific Foundation, which finances early childhood education for at-risk families, echoes the message, pointing out that the $277 million of Government money going into pre-school education is not adding educational value to children. It merely enables their parents to get to work.

"We must," she says, "base policy-making on evidence rather than sentiment, pay attention to how positive values can metamorphose into obstructive ideologies and work to enhance the chances of each individual from birth and even before."

Sir Gil Simpson, of Aoraki Corporation, insists that the key to moving forward together is to start by looking back into history. This will provide a solid understanding of where we come from: "The brilliance of a Lord Ernest Rutherford [pioneer of atomic physics] or flying genius Richard Pearse had nothing to do with elaborate national strategies or Government grants, but something deeper and more intrinsic," he said.

"Theirs was a spirit of a unique combination of the tangata whenua and British settlers. It's not No 8 wire, it's something different. We have to get back that sense of exploration and that feeling of being on the edge of the world ... We have to eradicate the mind-control of political correctness that hampers our policy-makers, weakens our education system and suffocates the brilliant minds in our midst ... Maybe we need to create a new institute of learning outside the existing system - one that values the pioneering spirit over everything else."

As Peter Biggs, of Creative New Zealand, suggests, perhaps it is happening. Our pioneering spirit grown up is now showing up strongly in our national ability to innovate and create. Becoming a more creative nation has always been part of us.

But to perform to our best, we must also learn to pat ourselves on the back. Gordon McLauchlan, who wrote The Passionless People back in the 1970s, now says our tolerance and acceptance of others is world class.

"This is the hardest country in the world in which to buy a fight over religion, politics or race," he says. "An argument, yes. A fight, no ... We are fumbling towards rediscovering that it is culture in its broadest sense that will lead us to a new sense of well-being, a shared view of how we want to develop as a people ... I don't believe ideology will ever take in New Zealand.

"As a people I believe we have energy, intelligence, open minds, generosity and a serious intent on giving others a fair go."

Certainly, there is no need to be depressed or frightened by our crust of conflict. It is challenge that makes a society dynamic and exciting to be part of. Conflict makes us face up to our differences and gives us the energy to move forward.

Let us stir in a more positive attitude towards personal responsibility - especially towards our children - to offset the individualism, get rid of an intellectual culture where people are taught almost to be ashamed of excellence and make youngsters aware that it is knowledge and creativity which New Zealanders have in abundance that are the source of social dynamism around the world.

And then let's get on with it.

Herald Online features:

* The jobs challenge

* Common core values

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