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My parents grew up poor in third world countries (their term). They got lucky when fate was handing out brains, became doctors, and were cherry-picked as 1970s migrants to fill a skill-shortage in NZ. Some genuine thoughts on ‘the Kiwi way’ from the outside: 1/
It’s a cliché of self-criticism to point out the ‘she’ll be right’ attitude that pervades ‘Kiwi’ society. But it deserves analysis as an attitude that is born out of a small, close-knit and high-trust country. 2/
‘The Kiwi way’ is to set things up in a kind of half-assed way, or to plan things fairly poorly or not at all, because here, working assumptions are that people are good, and that the community will help us muddle through when we realised that we fucked it up. 3/
That’s why we think ‘the Kiwi way’ is egalitarianism, even as we’ve let our country slide into the highest inequality metrics in the OECD. 4/
That’s why we think ‘the Kiwi way’ is clean and green simply because of the high land:population ratio and our love of the outdoors, even though the environment is so badly managed that there’s too much poo in our waterways to swim in them. 5/
That’s why we think ‘the Kiwi way’ is to be super practical at coping with hardly any resources or infrastructure (No.8 wire!), because our planning is so bad that, for example, our biggest city has no subway and Piha has no plumbing. 6/
That’s why we think ‘the Kiwi way’ is to have a lack of corruption, but possibly less because our institutions & laws are particularly good at preventing it, than the fact that the country is small enough that people will remember your face when you fuck over too many of them. 7/
Dad was a classic boomer landlord, but would periodically shout from his armchair at the paper (being a newspaper-reading boomer), “we need a capital gains tax, you idiots!” (alternately, “we need a capital gains tax, you cowards!”) 8/
He was the kind of guy to have dying tax policy wishes, and his dying tax policy wish was for a fucking CGT. But he thought ‘the Kiwi Way’ of leaving things up to goodwill and half-assing it all the way, meant that it would never happen. 9/
Go on, prove the immigrant wrong, you cowards. FIN/
@threadreaderapp unroll pls
