My country tis of thee

It's census time in Australia. The 2011 census report was released yesterday, with some surprising findings. The second most spoken language in Australia is now Mandarin, one in four Australians was born overseas and 43 per cent of Australians have at least one parent born overseas.


I've recently been working on a little survey of my own, looking at some demographic information of health care users. For the most part this has been relatively painless, asking information on people's age, medical condition, employment status etc. But it got really interesting when we started looking at how to ask people about ethnicity. 


In fact, the very first debate was about what to call it. There are so many terms that mean subtly different things, subtleties that are lost in the general public but are the kind of thing politically correct health policy workers care deeply about. What is your ethnicity? What is your race? What is your country of birth? It took a great deal of research and negotiation before we finally agreed on 'What is your ethnic or cultural background?' Covering all bases there...


But the next hurdle was by far the most interesting. Australia has significant populations from hundreds of countries. As a major post World Wars destination, there are many deeply ingrained European communities who have been here for generations. In Melbourne alone there are Jewish neighbourhoods, Vietnamese neighbourhoods, Italian neighbourhoods, Turkish neighbourhoods... So how do you make a list of options for ethnic/cultural background that is inclusive of all major population groups? And what do you call white Australians?
Caucasian Australian? No, nobody knows what Caucasian means. Australian of European descent? No they're not from Europe. White Australian? Please! So we finally settled on.... an open box. And the funny thing is that most respondents simply write 'Australian'.

So what does it mean to be Australian? And why does it matter so much? Well in New Zealand, its a debate people have been having for a while. In fact a whole movement was formed to replace the census classification New Zealand European with the term New Zealander/Kiwi. And they were successful, as in 2006 Statistics New Zealand caved and created a new category called New Zealander.

It is a fascinating debate, and one that I don't have a clear position on. On the one hand I understand that people who are descendants of settlers feel distant and unrelated to the country those ancestors moved from. Their grandparents, and often their grandparents' grandparents, were not from Europe. So why the European label? On the other hand, I can't help but feel deeply distrustful of people who so firmly reject their colonial past. Their ancestors were from Europe. It isn't anthropologically correct. Yes their nationality might be New Zealand, or Australian, but their ethnicity is not.

The other problem, and I think my main problem with this form of thinking, is that it is a subtle and underhanded way of othering people who are not of European ancestry. If people of European descent fall under the ethnicity 'New Zealander' where do Maori people fall? If people of European descent fall under the ethnicity 'Australian' where do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders fall? Where do I fall in all of this? This 'New Zealander' and 'Australian' nonsense seems to me a natural extension of the Don Brash One New Zealand line of thought, or that horrible icky term 'post-racism'. No special treatment, no other cultures, no other race. We are all one, and of course that one has no room for anything other than majority right?


Maybe my issue is that my sense of identity is so fragile. Being mixed race and having lived in three different countries now, I'm pretty confused. I have very little affinity with South Africa - pictures of the landscape, the music, the cinema, it all leaves me cold. I have even less affinity with India - I don't speak an Indian language, I'm never identified as Indian and Indian South Africans certainly never accepted me as one of them. And don't get me started on my feelings about my European roots... Nationality wise, I feel a complete and utter affinity with New Zealand. When I travel and people ask me where I'm from, the answer is always New Zealand, without pause. That doesn't help me fill out a census though.


My feeling reading the census results was mixed. I'm happy to be living somewhere so multi-cultural. I'm glad that minority populations might soon approach majority. But I must say I'm very sad that I no longer live somewhere that challenges ideas of nationality and ethnicity as rigorously as New Zealand does. 

The backpack of privilege

When you're someone who talks about isms a lot, people often think you have a victim complex. In fact the other day, when trying to give a colleague an abridged version of my concerns with The Help, I was told 'Oh it's not so bad! Cheer up!'

However this couldn't be further from the truth, and it wouldn't happen if people were more fluent in the language of privilege. I'm actually well aware of the massive amounts of privilege I carry with me every day. As a heterosexual, cis-gender, able-bodied, normal weight, medium complexion woman with hair in a 3A pattern, life is pretty easy for me compared to many other people out there. But when I talk of some of the challenges I face, it is so often interpreted as complaining or feeling sorry for myself or, my personal favourite, 'playing the race card'. What these attitudes evidence is ignorance of critical race theory or a deep discomfort with some of the central tenets of feminism.

It isn't hard to see why this has happened. Acknowledging ones own privilege can be confronting, and it is often assumed to be an attack by the person who points out the privilege. People become defensive - 'I made it here through hard work,' 'there were no scholarships for me,' 'I'm struggling too!' In today's difficult fiscal environment, privilege has not exempted anyone from difficulty, so it is harder to understand the more nuanced elements of this discussion. Which is why Peggy McIntosh's 'The Knapsack of Privilege' is one of the best and most timeless illustrations of privilege around.

"I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks."

It is reassuring to see that a number of McIntosh's examples are either dated or not translatable into the New Zealand or Australian context. Hey, at least we're doing something right down under! But sadly, many others are not:

I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race 
I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection
I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group
I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race

Of all my reading on critical race theory and feminism, no other article has resonated with me as much as this one. As a member of a "model minority" I actually share many of McIntosh's privileges. But as a member of the non-white minority in Australia and New Zealand, I also do not. That last point, about affirmative action, plagued my university days with a number of other students and lecturers insinuating that things were easier for me because of 'quota'. I've often been asked what Indians/Maoris/Samoans/Mexicans think of particular issues. And don't get me started on finding a hairdresser.

My husband and I had an eye opening experience on a recent trip abroad. I can guarantee that at least once, on any international trip, I will be pulled aside for a 'random' check at an airport. While it may indeed be random, I can't help but wonder if it is because of the way I look (and Jeremy Clarkson hopes it stays that way!) My husband, however, who is the whitest man alive, breezes through airport security. But on our last trip he had his first experience of a random spot check.

What for me is a humiliating and expected experience, for him was almost welcome. He found it surprising and informative. He was pleasant and chatty with the staff, where I am generally annoyed and abrupt. For him to see something I go through almost every time I'm in airport as a learning experience, is a perfect illustration of white privilege.

I've come to realise that travelling is a perfect microcosm of white/male privilege. Assumptions seem all the more pronounced and thoughts that usually remain silent are spoken. I've termed this the "backpack of privilege", and here are some things it might contain:

1. You are handed the bill in restaurants, as my husband always is
2. You can go through customs without a customs official expressing surprise that you are a New Zealander
3. You can enter bars and fancy restaurants without concern
4. You are asked to make decisions on behalf of you and your travel partner
5. You can go through airport security confident that you will not be racially profiled
6. You can travel with a partner of a different race and not have it assumed you are a prostitute, as happened to me in Sri Lanka and Brazil

I'm sure there are many more, and I'm sure it's harder for many others. Acknowledging privilege isn't easy for most, but having privilege doesn't mean one is a bad person. It's just the way it is. Perhaps if more people were willing to talk about it, we could move towards a world where privilege mattered less.

Why I'm such a bleeding heart

Last week my extended family experienced a tragedy. Two girls lost their big sister, two parents lost their daughter and a grandmother lost her granddaughter. While not being that close to me, it's the kind of experience that is very difficult to process. It's a tragedy that goes against the natural order of things, a tragedy that should never happen, but a tragedy that is all too common in the country of my birth.

And in typical Western tradition, I've been spending this time making it all about me. Or about not me, and about the life that could have been mine but wasn't. And I've been doing a lot of thinking that has reaffirmed my beliefs in social liberalism, anti-racism, poverty eradication and feminism.

One of my key beliefs is that the fate of most people is heavily predetermined at birth. Without discounting personal liberties, motivation or merit, so much of our life paths are simply functions of the family and socioeconomic class we were born into.

As a little kid I played with many of the children who lived around my house in 'squatter camps' or shanty towns, groups of houses made of scrap materials. It struck me how much alike we were, except for key differences like the fact that my house had a locked cupboard dedicated to lollies and their house didn't have a ceiling. Our games were the same, our laughs were the same. But as we grew up and started to reach puberty, more and more differences became apparent. I would stress about a C on a test and they would stress about finding their next meal. I would try and get the cute boy up the road to notice me, and they would try and get their middle aged neighbour not to rape them. I became increasingly uncomfortable with my massive amounts of privilege, and more and more confused. What had I done to deserve this life? It upset me too. I didn't want my friends to suffer. What had my childhood friend done to deserve a life of alcoholism, regular beatings, extreme poverty and rape, all by the age of 14?

Moving to a small town in Northland, New Zealand, further broke down illusions I had about the way the world worked. In South Africa I lived two lives, one with my privileged friends in private school, and the other with my friends at home, the children of our maids and gardeners. New Zealand was a much more equal society, and I had no privileged little shell to retreat to every day. I learnt that some people don't care about education and couldn't wait to reach age 15 when you could drop out of school. I learnt that going to university is not a given for everyone, and is a massive achievement for some, where it was an expectation for me. I learnt that having a curfew wasn't such a bad thing when your friends had parents who wouldn't notice whether they came home that week.

My first job out of university was working in men's remand prison. Like any good knee-jerker, I had many predetermined ideas about offenders and criminals and punishment. Meeting these people and talking to them blew all those notions out of the window. Seeing three generations of men in a prison at the same time, the youngest being 17 years old, made me again question our ability to influence our fate and the degree to which it was already decided by the actions of our parents, and theirs by the actions of their parents. I also met some downright nasty people who I absolutely knew made active decisions to harm others, but surprisingly the nastiest of these was a prison officer and not a prisoner.

During this time I also volunteered with a domestic violence agency on a helpline. I once talked to another volunteer who had just visited a house where the children were playing Playstation in a carpeted room that was stained with their mother's blood. Some of the stains were fresh. The kids hadn't even noticed. Again I wondered 'how do these kids ever have a chance?'

It might seem at this stage that I am a fatalist, resigned to accept an imperfect world where people act according to an unchangeable script. But I'm really not. And I think where the optimism kicks in is where the liberal political beliefs begin. I feel that too often social conservatives see the world as being essentially equal, where we all come in with a clean slate and through a series of decisions determine our own fate. The weak who make bad decisions ought to, at the very least, live with the consequences of their decisions. At worst, they must be punished for them. Those with the fortitude to make good decisions, even when it's hard, are clearly those of best merit and should be rewarded.

I don't believe this is true. And I believe it is the responsibility of the lucky, of me, to take active steps to make things better for those who were not as lucky. To ensure that government policies do not push people further into poverty, do not make domestic violence worse, do not reinforce the patriarchy. I believe government policies can make a real difference to improving the people's lives. New Zealand has, against all odds, reported a 15 year low in recorded crime. Teen pregnancy is at a 70 year low in the USA. These rare good news stories illustrate slow burning gains that are possible under consistent government policy.

How can we change? By acknowledging the complexities of solving seemingly intractable social problems. By not victim-blaming. By recognising that our comfortable lives might be less to do with us and more to do with the good luck of our birth.

And I'll keep navel-gazing and remembering my cousin and I playing fashion designer, doctor, supermodel. She taught me how to paint my nails and tried to make me cool. She succeeded in one and failed dismally at the other. Rest in peace dear cousin.

Raindrops on eucalyptus and whiskers on wombats...

It's always a risk when you write a blog that focuses on issues of prejudice and isms, but recently I feel like I've been a bit of a complainer. So to counter some of the complaining, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the things I like about Australia. I'm a reasonably risk averse person, so moving to Australia was a thought through and carefully weighed decision. We knew the risks and what we'd be leaving behind, but decided to take the risk regardless. And six months in to the move, I think it's turned out a lot better than I expected. Helped by having family and friends here, a warm and welcoming workplace and knowing I'm only a four hour flight from home, I've not experienced any major homesickness yet. So here are some of the little trivial things that have helped me feel happy here:

• the weather - it's an obvious one, but for the first time in many years I felt like I've had a summer. It's been hot, so hot my husband had a spot of heat stroke. Melbourne's weather patterns are actually pretty close to Wellington's weather patterns, but I've loved wearing shorts at night, not needing a cardigan for months and actually needing a fan.
• the employment conditions - as we've all been told a million times, salaries and contracts are generally much better in Australia than New Zealand. I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration, but it isn't. Moving here has made working for a charity a viable option for me, where I could have never taken the salary drop in NZ.
• public transport - again NZers constantly hear about how bad our public transport is. It makes a city so much more accessible and tourist-friendly when you have an extensive public transport network. It isn't amazing by world standards, but compared to NZ it's on another planet.
• living in a big city - there's a certain charm in living in small towns, and I've lived in towns with a population of under 500. But there's so much to love about living in a big city again. From exploring little neighbourhoods every weekend, to the many specialist craft shops, there's so much variety and choice. And I feel like I'm more a part of the world than in NZ.
• ethnic diversity - NZ is a lot better than when I moved there 14 years ago, but it still doesn't compare to the diversity of Melbourne and Australia. I read a statistic that over half of Australians were either born overseas or have a parent born overseas. You really get that sense here, pho and mee goreng and tajine are part of the vocabulary, every suburb has an Asian grocer and immigrants even have their own acronym (CALD - culturally and linguistically diverse). That's not to say that people are more tolerant or less racist, but it's nice being less of a minority.
• wildlife - it sounds so silly, but wildlife is one of the things I missed most when living in NZ. I come from a place where I'd find snakes on my windowsill and my dog would hunt wild monkeys, so moving to NZ and seeing people be excited over a tuatara was a big (and bizarre) culture shock. It's exciting knowing there are dangerous snakes and spiders here, that a few hours drive out of the city and I'll see koalas in the wild. And I can't wait to see the crocodiles in North Queensland.
• cost of living - it's a bigger country with the ability to create more of its own produce, so of course things are going to be cheaper, but it's actually been quite remarkable. Fresh fruit and vegetables are generally much cheaper (and I understand it was even more so before the Queensland floods), internet is cheaper, phone contracts are cheaper, public transport is cheaper, power is cheaper. It's actually been quite bizarre as many people have been complaining that produce is so cheap it's hurting the farmers. As the high cost of food is a live debate in NZ, I wonder if Australians shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
• friendly, helpful people - I've been taking a lot more public transport so I've seen a lot more of the 'people' than I did in NZ. I've left my sheltered life behind and have seen so much drama, people fainting, having strokes, falling off trams... And I've been utterly impressed at the willingness of people to help out and step in when required. The one that impressed me most was when a man on a train loudly threatened to punch his female partner. A young man stood up, approached the offender,  reprimanded him and then called the police. That one really made my day.
• call out culture - related to the last one, I think Australians are much more comfortable calling out behaviour they find inappropriate. Maybe it's related to the higher quality journalism here, but there is much more mainstream discussion of bad behaviour. 
• everyone here hates Paul Henry - no explanation needed.
• entertaining politics - the Gillard-Rudd saga was like a long, embarrassing, really bad soap opera. I savoured every minute of it. I doubt I'll be loving it so much when Tony Abbott is elected Prime Minister, however.
• not caring about politics - aside from a few issues, I love that I can turn off a little when it comes to Australian politics. NZ politics drove me insane, but here I don't know the players and the issues well enough to care. But something tells me that once I'm better informed, I'm not going to like it.

So there is my silly list of the things I like about Australia. You might notice there is little of substance in the list, nothing about social services or outcomes for indigenous people and minorities or gender equality or inequalities or poverty. And there's a pretty good reason for that.

So you must not want children...

I am a very suggestible person. I blame moving around so much at a young age, but I take on the characteristics (including accents) of the people around me at warp speed. My first move to New Zealand at age 13 resulted in me replacing my accent in about 2 months after some kids laughed at me saying 'can't' (or 'cawn't') when we were reading aloud in class. The moment I realised it was a problem however, was when I worked in a prison and started thinking selling methamphetamine was a viable (and lucrative) career choice. But since then (and after promptly leaving that job) it hasn't been too much of a problem, mostly because I've associated with people who are like me or tolerant of difference. Unfortunately my move to Australia has brought me back into the danger zone.

But unlike being influenced by people with criminal records, these suggestions are a bit more benign. And these suggestions seem to be that a proper life for a woman is to marry young, change your surname, either stop working or do a few part time hours and have children as soon as possible after marriage. 

Now I'm aiming for neutrality in this discussion, and I hope that my anger at being judged doesn't manifest itself as judgment of the judgers (phew!). But I genuinely do not hold any judgment for these lifestyle choices. They are just not mine. And the objection I have is not that people make these choices, it is at the insistence that these are the only viable choices.

It's probably a combination of factors that had led me back here. The first is likely that I'm a new immigrant to a place where I don't know very many people, so my social circle is limited to people I or my husband works with and their friends (along with people we knew from New Zealand). The second is that I've never worked for an NGO before, and this world seems to attract a certain kind of person - one that doesn't mind the low pay and loves the flexible hours - perhaps because they are raising children or are married to someone who's income is enough that the pay is not that important. I don't know how justified the third one is, but I wonder if it is in part because the traditional paradigm is much stronger here than in New Zealand.

We all know Australia is the lucky country. Blessed with abundant natural resources (and a willingness to exploit the shit out of them), the wage gap between Australia and New Zealand is constantly on the Kiwi political agenda. But I wonder whether New Zealand's low wages and high cost of living has been both a blessing and a curse for the country. Beyond the obvious cheap exports and cheap labour stuff, from a sociological perspective, many New Zealanders would never be able to support a family long-term with one income. And maybe that financial pressure has led New Zealanders to be more open to non-traditional family situations. And maybe that has led us to be more open to women having a greater role outside the family.

I've spoken before about the much more extroverted nature of the Australian personality, so perhaps this is part of it. Perhaps my Kiwi compatriots also thought I was some kind of sexless unfeminine feminazi and were just too polite and reserved to mention it. But I don't think so. I think in general, that people in New Zealand are freer to lead the lives they want to without as much judgment. It's no utopia, but even looking at foreign policies (nuclear-free-NZ versus we'll-send-our-troops-to-a-war-we-have-nothing-to-do-with-to-please-you-Australia) New Zealanders seem a bit more OK with difference.

If anything, the recent Julia Gillard-Kevin Rudd debacle has illustrated to me the strong hold the traditional paradigm has here. Sure people were nasty to Helen Clark, but this vitriol has been unrelenting and shameless. An Age opinion piece questioned Australians' distrust of Gillard and whether it was due to their inability to reconcile political power and the role of a woman. There is so much not to trust about her. She is career-driven, atheist, childless and unmarried.

And unfortunately most of those terms can describe me. In my New Zealand life, most of these decisions never really warranted an eyebrow raise. But when asked how long I've been married, the most common follow up question is 'And no children yet! [horrified face!] So you must not want children!' When I corrected someone who assumed my surname was my husband's, I was met with more shock - 'But why? You're married!' 'Working and studying - why bother? It's a waste of time!' 

But in what I hope is a marker of me growing up, this time I've been a lot firmer in my beliefs. I know that working and studying is important to me, I know that keeping our surnames was a mutual decision that my husband and I made together and has nothing to do with the quality of our marriage, and I know that we're not quite ready for children until we complete our studies and I have my chronic health condition a little better managed.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to comfortably fit in the dominant paradigm and that it would be nice to not have to explain my choices all the time. But society doesn't change by people making themselves fit where they don't. And who would run my methamphetamine business if I had a gaggle of kids to raise?

Kissing the girls and making them cry

I love reality TV. So much so that I'd say it's one my defining characteristics. 9 times out of 10 I'd rather be watching reality TV than almost anything else. It's embarrassing and I don't understand it but I've come to accept that I have incredibly low-brow tastes in television.

In fact, my tastes are so low-brow that I can't even handle good reality TV. You know the kind where you actually learn something, like Man vs Wild, or the kind where people with genuine talent compete for industry recognition, like Project Runway. None of that hoity toity stuff for me. My basic rule of thumb is if it isn't on VH1 or MTV, I'm not interested.

So when someone recommended Jennifer Pozner's Reality Bites Back to me, and I ordered it, I worried about my apparent masochistic tendencies. You don't purposefully ruin something you enjoy right? This book was going to be a takedown of everything I held sacred, my belief that I too could be a top model if only I were more fierce, or that my million dollar prize was one phonecall to a friend away. I prepared myself for my second major life disappointment (after Tom and Nicole of course).

Pozner's book is an excellent and conversational introduction to feminist media analysis. Her message isn't devastating to a reality TV fan such as myself. It's not to stop watching, but to instead watch with a critical eye. And most of her arguments aren't surprising. It isn't hard to see that a show like America's Next Top Model doesn't exactly promote an anti-racist or body acceptance agenda. Or to see how a show like Wife Swap promotes animosity between women, playing off the "ignorant" "pre-feminist" stay at home mums against the "selfish" "defeminised" childless or working mothers. Pozner paints a striking picture of a genre of TV that owes it's success to bringing racism, homophobia and 1950s stereotypes back into fashion. But what I wasn't expecting was the incredibly strange phenomenon of what I like to call 'Girl Crying Porn' on one of the most harmless and sterile of all the reality TV shows.

The Bachelor is one of my favourite reality TV shows. I love it all, the boozy cocktail parties to the over the top helicopter dates to the declarations of love within two minutes of meeting. I watched Ashley Herbert's season on the Bachelorette pre Reality Bites Back and was appalled by her humiliating rejection of the loveable but dorky Ben Flajnik. I was ecstatic to hear that he'd be the next Bachelor (I'm admitting a lot of stuff here...) but didn't anticipate my new reaction to the show with the insights Reality Bites Back had given me.

One of Pozner's major critiques of the Bachelor is the racial uniformity of the show. The show seems to exist in a world that is not only free of interracial dating, but free of minorities completely. For the first few seasons, one of two women of colour were cast amid twenty white women, and they stuck around for at least two episodes before that fatal rose ceremony. Nowadays they don't even bother with tokenism and for the past three seasons I watched at least, all contestants have been white. The Bachelor or Bachelorette is always white. For a show that is up to 23 seasons, this is no coincidence. Pozner believes the Bachelor is meant to be a kind of aspirational dating scenario. Its a fairytale where a beautiful woman meets her wealthy Prince Charming who woos her with helicopter dates and expensive jewelry, gives her the final rose and sweeps her off into the distance. And we all know there is no room for black people in fairytales. In contrast, dating shows who heavily feature minorities and are comfortable with interracial dating, like Flavor of Love, are modern minstrel shows. Dating in the black world, according to these shows, is characterised by promiscuity, physical violence and gold plated grilles in lieu of diamonds. In other words, it's a joke.

But a critique that Pozner only alludes to in her talk of the 'exquisite cruelty' and misogyny of reality TV is one that I haven't been able to get over, and that is the Bachelor's obsession with making girls cry. Watch the sneak peak of this season of the Bachelor, and see what you notice (especially at 1:36 and then again at 2:42):

One of the main selling point of this season seems to be that if you watch it, you will get to see lots of beautiful women crying over a dude they've known for five minutes. If Pozner's central argument is true (that reality TV owes its popularity to the fact that it plays to and reinforces our deeply ingrained societal biases about men and women) what does this season of the Bachelor tell us about ourselves? What are our beliefs about women? About dating? Let's take a look at some stills from the show:

And you know what? This is less than half the stills I had to choose from. In a show that has had six episodes so far.

If we like reality TV because it reinforces our beliefs about the world then, while Flavor of Love illustrates that we believe low socioeconomic women of colour are objects of ridicule, the Bachelor illustrates that we're obsessed with seeing beautiful white women put in their place and crying. My theory is that this is similar to the point made above regarding Wife Swap - that women are constantly being pitted against each other. It's schadenfreude mixed with misogyny mixed with classism and baked until we get a delightful shit-show of a mess that is the Bachelor. It breeds hatred and superiority while, almost by definition, excluding minorities from a world I'm pretty sure we don't even want a part of. In this world, men are the gatekeepers of relationships, of money, of power. Women are the flustered messes who lose all dignity and rationality in pursuit of a man. And who cry. A lot.

As I've watched the show I've been more and more shocked by its exploitation of its, often very young and very naive, female contestants. Last week a 23 year old woman was pressured into admitting she suffered an eating disorder so that she wouldn't be sent home. The week before that a contestant fainted and potentially injured herself, and this was a major selling point in the pre-season publicity. And the worst thing about it is that it pretends to be an aspirational show, a glamorous dream life we all desire. And it almost literally sells the tears of women.

Before I read Reality Bites Back I was aware of the exploitation and latent racism of shows like the Jersey Shore or Jerry Springer (showing my age here). But it's the Bachelor that I've reserved my true hatred for. Nobody wins when you have TV like this. TV that says men must buy women's love and women must do anything in return. TV that says there is no room for interracial dating, or any minorities in a dream dating world. Nobody wins, except maybe Mike Fleiss.

The injustices of national days

As I write this, Australia is still dealing with the fall-out from last week's Australia Day. Due to a stunning double whammy of racism and sexism, Labour is polling at record lows and much of this is attributed to Prime Minister Julia Gillard's apparent weakness in dealing with some pretty substantial Australia Day protests.

It was a story that went around the world, due largely to an incredible photograph. Julia Gillard, leader of one of the most influential countries in the world at present, fallen and broken and in need of rescuing. What had brought us here, to such a remarkable turn of events? A comment by opposition leader Tony Abbott that the Tent Embassy, an Aboriginal political movement that has existed for 40 years outside Parliament, has passed it's use by date and should "move on". The disrespect and tactlessness of such a comment on the 40th anniversary of the Tent Embassy is another matter. What is important here is the palpable tension that this day causes, and the total lack of awareness that a significant section of the Australian population has of the continuing issues faced by the original owners of this country.

National days have always felt slightly uncomfortable to me, especially in the case of settler states like Australia and New Zealand. In South Africa, our national day is a nice one - 27 April, the day apartheid officially ended. In the USA things seem a little cleaner too, with Independence Day being a celebration of independence from the UK (although Thanksgiving is another matter). But in Australia and New Zealand, things are a lot murkier...

Australia Day is always on January 26, the day that the first English fleet arrived and Australia officially became a colony of England. Sounds harmless right? Except we all know it was anything but harmless for the people who then experienced the brunt of one of the most ruthless colonisations the English ever undertook. And the reason it was so easy to declare Australia a colony? Well that's because it was terra nullius or unsettled land. The Aboriginal people did not even warrant a consideration by the English legal system. That's why many of them call the day Invasion Day. 

New Zealand's national day is another story, as is New Zealand's colonisation story. While NZ has no official national day, the closest thing to one is certainly Waitangi Day, February 6 every year, the day that marks the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. We all know the history of that, and the broken promises that followed the signing of the document. And it, like Australia Day, can be a flashpoint for protest and racial discord. But to many, perhaps more optimistic, Kiwis the day represents something more hopeful. Perhaps it's moving on, perhaps it's saying sorry, perhaps it's the continuing special relationship the document represents.

I've been horrified at the total disdain most Australians have for the ugly history they mark every year with Australia Day. Focusing  more on BBQs, the beach and some American style patriotism, most are completely unaware of why the date even exists. Except that they like that it's in summer. Australia Day doesn't even pretend to be cognisant of the colonisation of one of the oldest and most established populations in the world. It doesn't include them in the definition of "Australian". And suggestions to change the day to something that includes more recent immigrants, like Citizen Day, or something that marks Aboriginal history, like the historic 1967 referendum are met with viral Facebook status updates (that I know have caused me to defriend a person or two).

In contrast, New Zealanders are more aware of the meaning of Waitangi Day. Maybe it's because it's right there in the name. Maybe because it was (slightly) more recent. Maybe because in New Zealand we have a more politically active, socially prominent and cohesive indigenous population. Or maybe it's because simply having a document, a signed agreement, that was breached so many times and so blatantly, makes us more comfortable with admitting our shitty behaviour. Whatever it is, while Waitangi Day is never pretty, the awareness and the reverence and the attitude is infinitely better than Australia.

I've never ever felt more uncomfortable and disgusted with a paid day off work.

Deodorant, queuing and toilets...

Every few years a right wing politician (or shock-jock) says something dumb (as they are prone to) and opens the Pandora's box that is any public discussion on immigration. Today's stunner comes from Brisbane Liberal MP, Teresa Gambaro's comments that mandatory immigrant education should involve instructions on using deodorant and queuing. 

Immigration is something that the world has been grappling with for centuries, but never more so than the 20th and 21st centuries where two world wars, apartheid, genocides, economic crises and ethnic cleansings changed the cultural and racial make up of the West as people fled persecution, violence and crippling poverty. Countries now look completely different to how they did before and people don't know how to deal with that. I couldn't count on my fingers and toes the amount of times I've heard the statement 'You walk down Queen Street/Lambton Quay/Lygon Street and wouldn't know you're in Australia/New Zealand/Nazi Germany anymore. What is this - Tokyo/Beijing/another interchangeable East Asian country?' 

While I have plenty of experience as an immigrant, and a visible one at that, I have no experience of being in my country of birth and witnessing it change as a result of immigration. It's something I've thought about a lot as I've tried to unpick what New Zealanders, Frenchies or Australians think of me. As much as I try not to let idiocy affect me, the public support of Paul Henry's comments on being a 'real New Zealander' got to me in a big way. I wondered what people thought defined a real New Zealander, I wondered whether I was maybe half a New Zealander (having an Anglo name, Kiwi accent and Maori looks), and I wondered if I could ever be a real New Zealander in their eyes. And I contemplated being so challenged by change. Change was a part of my life, I'd never lived anywhere for more than 5 years since the age of 13. Why do people hate it so much?

From the perspective of this immigrant people are challenged for the following reasons:

• White guilt - Guilt isn't quite the right word here, it's more a form of vulnerability. I think people in settler states (that is all Western countries bar most of Europe) are subconsciously aware of their precarious status as the dominant power and majority population in countries that weren't rightfully theirs to begin with. The colonisation of countries like the USA, Australia, NZ and South Africa was done with lies, broken agreements, theft, genocide and often plain old war. I think there is an awareness that if we used their 'go back to where you came from' argument in its purest form, where they came from would often be somewhere they've never been. 
• Economic difficulties - if fifth form history taught me anything, it's that racial tension is always worse in times of recession. Nazism, in part, sprung from the debilitating reparation payments for Germany's role in World War I. Apartheid, in part, sprung from the threat of cheap black labour to white economic wellbeing. We're now in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Unemployment is at record highs across the Western world. And immigrants are often better skilled and cheaper to hire than locals. In short, they're stealing our jobs.
• Fear of the unknown - to the people of my generation and socioeconomic class, moving around is normal, if not expected. But people of older generations have never seen their countries this way before. All these ethnic restaurants, grocery stores and different accents are scary. Interacting with people who've led lives so different to yours is scary. Change on this scale is always scary I guess. And it isn't a choice for the locals. It is, in a way, forced on them.

It's a complex issue. I think most are aware that immigration is often, like in the case of small, population net-loss New Zealand, economically necessary for a country to survive. Relying on people for survival but being simultaneously irritated by their difference leads to confused emotions. And it leads people to say things like we need to teach immigrants about deodorant. 

For bullet point list number two, let's look at why statements like this, and NZ's very own Lockwood Smith's statements on Asian's small hands and Pacific Islander's body odour, are problematic and do not in fact 'tell it like it is':

• They create false binaries - Asians have small hands, everyone else has large hands. Immigrants don't use deodorant, all Australians use deodorant
• They group all immigrants into one group - I doubt Ms Gambaro was talking about immigrants from England or New Zealand in her comments, but comments like this group everyone else in the world into one homogenous group that doesn't use deodorant.
• They reinforce stereotypes without any evidence - that immigrants are dirty or have no concept of how to behave in a well mannered way
• They "other" people - if one person from say, Swaziland, didn't put on deodorant on 2 December 2011, all people from Swaziland, nay all Africans, nay all black people, don't use deodorant. If an Australian didn't put on deodorant on 2 December 2011, they forgot that day, or are maybe an individual with poor personal hygiene. Immigrants, in this thinking, aren't allowed the benefits of individuality that Australians are. They are the one uniform other.
• They assume Western standards are the norm - perhaps deodorant isn't such a great thing after all, perhaps queuing is an ineffective way of being served. We'll never look into issues with an analytic eye  if we simply assume the Western way is the right way.

So I'll continue to watch the saga  of Ms Gambaro with interest. I must admit that I've had the complete opposite reaction to this saga than I did to the Lockwood Smith and Paul Henry sagas. I don't really know why. Maybe because I don't intend to make Australia home for too long I'm less invested and more distanced. Also I know that with my new accent and my new passport, I'm in a pretty privileged position as a model minority. I'm now identified as a New Zealander. Full stop. No questions about 'yes but from where originally?' like I used to get in NZ. So I know those statements don't refer to me. It's a pretty plum position to be in, I may get used to this model minority business actually...