WILL A CGT GET TO NZ AT LAST?

                           Should Kiwi values fly north?

           

New Zealand’s image has always been less coarse than Australia’s.

Both nations claim to be egalitarian. They salute the ‘fair go’, sharpen scythes to slash tall poppies and assert Jack and Jill are as good as their masters and mistresses. (The NZ Governor General and PM jobs are held by women).

Though the differences have been good for barbie banter, they lack protein. Kiwis have problems with vowels, though not with rugby.  They reckon it’s Godzone but half-a-million prefer life across The Ditch where the weather and wages are hotter and higher. There are seven sheep for every human in one place, and fewer than three in the other.

The hard rock has always been equality.  No longer. The top ten per cent of the NZ population holds 60 per cent of the wealth while the bottom half has four per cent. How to fix? Look north for an idea.

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Seeking a house? Don’t venture across the Tasman.  While values in Australia are tumbling, those in NZ are whooshing ever upwards.

In Auckland, the nation’s biggest city, prices have doubled since 2010.  Other North Island centres are not far behind.  The government is now pondering a rare move, importing a policy from next door: A capital gains tax on windfalls from trading property. 

CGT came to Australia in 1985 via a Labor government; to widespread astonishment the nation didn’t turn into the Venezuela of the Pacific. However that’s what will happen if NZ follows suit, according to doom-mongers.

Opposition Leader Simon Bridges heads National – NZ’s tamer version of Australia’s Liberal Party. His concern is for ‘people who work hard, who save, who invest, who take risks deserve the fruits of their labour …there is nothing fair about a CGT that fundamentally gets in the way of that.’ He has four houses.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson urged Bridges ‘to turn the hyperbole volume down a little bit … I think the Kiwi way of life is about giving people a fair go, I think it's about making sure that everyone is treated fairly ... that's what New Zealanders look for.’
Maybe, for their politics are as exhilarating as a warm beer on a hot day. Compared with its giant neighbour’s fire-and-flood rhetoric on issues like asylum seekers, NZ is a high-country lake of tranquillity. 

Listeners knew they were in totally 100 per cent pure und fentestic jandal (thong) and judder bar (speed bump) territory when they tuned into Radio National NZ in February.

Suddenly a breaking news-alert:  Stop everything:  Trump shot?  Brexit solved? Morrison seeking asylum?  Just the discovery of one fruit fly. From Queensland. Shock, horror. The furious search for his mates lit up bulletins for a week.

Rental cars carry a dashboard sticker reading KEEP LEFT – which isn’t just about road use. Although Labour leads the present coalition, its National predecessor, which lasted three 3-year terms, was so close to the centre it would put Bill Shorten and Tony Abbott comfy on the same bench. 

Led by the jovial John Key, National was hard to hate.  He even ran a flag-change referendum; though the people said no, the millionaire former banker’s reputation didn’t, well, flag. When he found the job boring he quit.

His perpetually smiling Labour successor Jacinda Ardern, 38, is using the same ‘box of fluffies’ (Kiwispeak for ‘stay calm and carry on’) approach to crises. In many countries being a young unmarried agnostic Mum would make her unacceptable - in NZ it adds to her lustre.

The lunar right seldom gets treated seriously.  NZ is usually ranked as the world’s least corrupt state according to Transparency International. (Australia is 13^th). The left has found discipline. It could all turn to custard tomorrow, but these facts are on the menu today.

There are plenty of silly decisions and stupid statements.  There’s been an eruption of committees and working parties examining every problem, including house prices.  Much is more talk than walk.

Overall public debates seldom get to the gladiatorial contests staged in the Canberra colosseum. For this thank some smart decisions made long ago that Australia might consider.

NZ has a Bill of Rights (1990) – Australia is still hesitating. Aotearoa isn’t cursed with a federal system. No State governments thwarting change.  Since 1951 there’s been no upper house to revise / stuff up lower house legislation. 

NZ has the mixed-member proportional (MMP) system also used in Germany and Scotland. MPs are either elected by their constituency, or appointed from the party list. It’s complex, but two years ago 80 per cent of registered electors voluntarily voted. Seven seats are reserved for Maori on a separate roll.

Australia is still chewing over a treaty with its indigenous citizens.  NZ’s was signed in 1840 and although friction over interpretations sometimes sparks scrub fires, most seem proud of the document, preserved as a national icon in Wellington.

There’s no contest that Waitangi Day (6 February) marks the nation’s foundation.  It’s an elaborate, drawn-out event involving Maori custom, religion, pakeha (European) rituals and fun on the treaty grounds. It’s sometimes been a forum for Maori rotten tomato protests, but this year Ardern was treated with respect and given the breakfast tomato sauce duty.

Like most leaders she uses Te Reo (Maori); scores of words are being stirred into English and used in the mainstream media confusing or delighting visitors. 

So some Australians are going to find it even more difficult to understand what’s going on next door.  If they can they might reckon there’s a thung or two to learn from Kiwis in exchange for the CGT.

Australasian journalist Duncan Graham, who usually reports from Indonesia, is briefly back in NZ.

(First published in Pearls and Irritations 12 March 2019: http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-could-kiwi-values-fly-north/

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AUSTRALIANS ALL CANNOT REJOICE

Imagine if the Makassans had stayed                                                                                                                 

They’re geographically adjacent, regionally together and economically married. 

Historically both were British colonies. They share the same founding father, an adventurous naval officer prone to take long sea voyages.

Today (26 Jan) Australians remember the arrival of what they call the First Fleet in 1788.  Eleven ships brought about 1,000 British settlers and convicts to start the New South Wales penal colony.

No-one asked the Aboriginal inhabitants for permission to land, though they’d enjoyed exclusive possession of Terra Australis Incognita [the unknown South Land] for around 50,000 years.  Their descendants call this Invasion Day, a time for tears not cheers.

For most Australia Day is a chance to swap desks for beach.  They’ll barbecue lamb chops, hear rock concerts, watch fireworks and wave plastic flags made in China. 

It’s no slander to say the event is more frivolity than formality; tomorrow’s news will include police statistics about arrests for alcohol-fuelled violence.

Eleven days later and just across the Tasman Sea, sardonically known as The Ditch, New Zealanders will recognise their national day - the 6 February 1840 signing of the Waitangi Treaty between Maori chiefs and the British Crown.

Waitangi is in the Bay of Islands on the east coast of the North Island.  The name means ‘weeping waters’.  Appropriate because the treaty, revered as the founding document of the South Pacific nation, didn’t stop the later outbreak of racial wars.

British explorer Captain James Cook landed in Botany Bay [now in Sydney] 18 years before the First Fleet furled its sails.  At the time perhaps half a million Aboriginal people were living off the land in several hundred small scattered tribes speaking different languages.

The official British policy was assimilation, but the land-hungry settlers had packed contempt with their firearms and Bibles.

Before Cook northern tribes had regular contact with Sulawesi fishers.  They had mastered deep-sea navigation, metalwork and pottery.  They carried guns introduced by the Dutch and Portuguese.

Had the Makassans been more interested in territory than trepang, the ‘sea cucumbers’  gathered for the Chinese food trade, then Australia might now be called Jawa Raya [Greater Java].

But the arid Australian interior probably looked too uninviting and the natives’ culture too strange - though that didn’t stop the fishers taking women back home.

The first Australians island-hopped through the Indonesian Archipelago when the seas were lower. They were nomadic, following seasons because much of the land was infertile. 

They had sophisticated hunting weapons like the boomerang and woomera spear thrower but no wheel.  Nor did they have natural protection against sicknesses unknown on the island continent.

The British brought smallpox, flu, measles and sexual diseases which had a devastating impact. So did the introduction of alcohol.

Skirmishes between settlers and residents were an unequal contest.  There was no war, just widespread dispossession. Now Aborigines form just 2.4 per cent of the national population.

Different in NZ; when Cook called in 1769 the Maori had occupied Aotearoa for about 600 years; they’d navigated south from Eastern Polynesia, so are not related to Australian Aborigines. 

Grouped in iwi or tribes and often fighting each other, the Maori had long settled in fortified villages called pa and spoke much the same language. They had vegetable gardens, reared pigs and lived well in a land of fertility.

Through trading with European and American whalers they got firearms. Consequently the easy British takeover of Australia was not duplicated in NZ – and that’s reflected in today’s events and Waitangi Day. 

In the mid 19^th century 20,000 British troops battled 4,000 Maori opposing European settlement. Though outnumbered they fought ferociously and cleverly, using guerrilla tactics.

The New Zealand Wars took around 3,000 lives.  Though radical Maori sometimes use the event to air grievances, Waitangi Day celebrations are now more solemn, religious and rich in protocol than those for Australia Day.

Maori form 15 per cent of the national population and hold powerful positions in business, the public service and Parliament with 25 of the 121 seats.  [There are only three Aborigines in Australia’s 226 member national legislature].

Te Reo Maori is an official language and used in the national anthem. However the position of Maori as the second largest ethnic group after Europeans may soon be overtaken by Asian immigrants.

Though English dominates vocabularies and accents are diverging, just as they are between Indonesia and Malaysia.

Unlike Indonesia and the US the people of Australia and NZ did not fight their colonial masters for freedom.  On 1 January 1901 Australia became a self-governing Federation and a Constitutional monarchy through an act of the British Parliament. 

On Waitangi Day there’ll be banner waving, though this may be the last time the NZ ensign with the Union Jack is used officially. 

Indonesians, so totally engaged with the Merah Putih [Red and White] find it weird that a nation would want to change its most potent international symbol. 

But in March a binding referendum will decide whether the old flag – often confused with the Australian ensign and suggesting control by the Mother Country - should be hauled down in place of a silver fern and Southern Cross design.

Australians are nowhere near getting a treaty, a new flag or even a Bill of Rights. When NZ refused to join the Australian Commonwealth last century, the tiny nation set its own course, distinctly different from its giant neighbor, and socially more progressive, particularly with race issues

Sydney organizers have pledged ‘greater focus’ on indigenous events today, which says much about past functions; the focus of Waitangi Day has always been a celebration of  inclusivity and respect.

(The author is a journalist with a Masters degree in Australian Studies. He lives in East Java.)

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An edited version was published on 27 January 2016 in The Jakarta Post.