FORTY YEARS AGO, we were in the early days of a fundamental economic transformation. Most community workers here in New Zealand were worried about unemployment, but we hadn’t yet really understood the brutal economic agenda of Rogernomics, Reaganomics or of Margaret Thatcher. We had yet to put our minds and tongues around the doctrines that we would later name as Neoliberalism. But here, within our youth and naivety, we felt we still had the space to dream and imagine what economic change could look like if it followed our best intentions: perhaps even a “New Economic Agenda” that spoke of the common good.

So I was working for the Salvation Army and trying to gain a vocabulary in my head for what I could see happening in the streets around me. I jumped on a plane and ended up in Scotland at an unusual community and conference venue called Findhorn that seemed to be specialising in talking to angels and growing enormous cabbages. But this conference was talking about Economics ... and it was clear that we were all on a much bigger learning curve than we imagined.

Nevertheless, Lance Girling Butcher, the editor at our local paper The Daily News, agreed to publish my report on the conference when I returned home to New Zealand. It became a series of one-page articles spread over four days in March 1985. The ideas and strategies I learned and thought about at that Scottish conference, and the community projects I visited afterwards, helped set the direction of the new Taranaki Work Trust that a few of us were just setting up to be a focus for our own community action on unemployment. It is interesting to re-read (four decades later ...) the mixture of innocence, practicality and the hopefulness of a 29-year old community activist on his first visit to Europe.

A Buddhist teacher once told me that Economics was the “science of choice ... governed by desire.” That stopped me in my tracks. Yet it put me on a path to try to keep alive and feed the notion of what that “science of choice” would look like if it was governed by the conviction that people and the earth really mattered ...

— vivian Hutchinson (September 2024)

 

 

By Whose Authority

— some thoughts for the Citizenship Conversation

by vivian Hutchinson

October 2019 30 min read download as PDF

This paper is based on vivian Hutchinson’s keynote speech given at the first of a series of open Community Conversations based on the themes of the Taranaki Masterclass for Active Citizenship — Tū Tangata Whenua, held at Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki, New Plymouth, on 10th October 2019.

I WOULD BEGIN with a prayer or a karakia ... but you need to know that it would not be an appeal to the Gods – largely because I am an atheist.

I am not anti-religion, and I do pray in my own way. But my prayers these days are full of the appeals we need to be making to the best in each other.

I’m not a very good atheist. That’s because every now and then some spirit jumps up out of nowhere and grabs me by the throat. But it took a lot of curiosity for me to finally end up with realising that I had become an atheist. 

It wasn’t always this way. For nearly thirty years I was an organiser and a steward and trustee of a conference centre in Taupo that had a policy of welcoming and hosting all varieties of religions and spiritual practices. I think the original founders had hoped that if they got all these different religions together they might end up realizing that they are all talking about the same thing.

So, during that time I got to meet the entire diversity of the human spiritual quest. We hosted Anglicans, local Tuwharetoa tribal groups, Bahais, Sufis, Tibetan Buddhists, every Indian guru you can imagine, yoga groups, natural healers, circle dancers, New Age visionaries, and New Age hucksters ... and we also had gatherings of witches and of people investigating UFOs.

I loved it. But that’s my nature. I enjoy the company of odd people. And while I was regularly visiting Taupo I was never at a loss for something to be curious about.

But the end result of all of this is that I was entirely convinced by Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins that this planet is astonishing enough without us having to invent invisible friends, or father-figures on clouds, or to be anything other than entertained by the magic tricks and supernatural explanations for the things we don’t yet fully understand.

In my early teens, I did join the congregation of Holy Trinity – a modest colonial-era church tucked away in a side-street in Fitzroy. I went right through to confirmation as an Anglican.

I’m sure that a big part of the attraction for me was the music and the dress-ups. I joined the church choir and sang songs in Latin. And I learned that Jesus and the Queen were the two pillars of my culture.

But then I turned 16, and I discovered sex, drugs and rock and roll ... and that was the end of it.

✽ ✽ ✽

I WAS STILL at High School in my later teenage years, and I was spending a lot of time out at Parihaka marae with Aunty Marj (kuia Matarena Raumati Rau Kupa). I was giving her a hand on the final stages of her restoration of the old dining room called Te Niho o Te Atiawa which was being transformed into a new meeting house and, as far as she was determined, a new mission.

Aunty Marj had been a friend of my mother’s family during the 1930s and the 1940s. She told me that she had baby-sitted my mother and her identical twin sister when they were children.

Later on during the War our families had worked together when the local Scottish cultural groups and Māori cultural groups had joined together to do patriotic fundraising for the troops.

When I met Marj she was in her early 60s and she was just starting to be called Aunty Marj as she was taking her place as an elder and a leader within Māori culture. But she was also a committed Anglican and a Royalist.

When I was out at Parihaka I noticed something that got me thinking. Almost every male Māori speaker that I was listening to started their speech with the karakia

He kororia ki te atua i runga rawa

He maungarongo ki runga i te whenua

He whakaaro pai ki nga tangata katoa

which is interpreted as ...

Glory to God on High

Peace on Earth

and Goodwill to all Mankind

Aunty Marj would point out that this karakia is the Christmas message. It was sung by angels at the birth of Christ. It was also written there, in the heart of Parihaka, on the tombstone of Te Whiti o Rongomai who was one of the two Parihaka prophets of peace. And this message of peace and goodwill is the meaning behind the white feathers, Te Raukura, worn on the head of Taranaki Māori.

As I came to learn more about the history of Parihaka and the history of war and land confiscations in our province I came to appreciate that Te Raukura was not a sentimental message.

But first I needed to really understand the almost incredible transformation of a people under the leadership of the Parihaka prophets. In just 20 years, they had transformed from being the same warriors of the battles at Te Kohia, and up the Waitara valley ... to becoming complete innovators in the art of non-violence and passive resistance.

That was no small miracle of leadership and guidance, and I’m full of admiration for it.

Let’s face it: the people of Parihaka paid dearly for their stand. The miracle was that there was no massacre in Coastal Taranaki as had happened to the Lakota at Wounded Knee at around the same time. But all of Taranaki was confiscated. The wealth generated by the dairy farms and lifestyle blocks around our mountain over the next few generations was based on that theft.

The families and children of Parihaka have continued to pay dearly for the commitment and struggle and the generosity they have kept on extending so that there could be peace in Taranaki.

And that commitment is not a matter of history. This meeting today stands on the shoulders of that generosity.

I am now at the age that Aunty Marj was when I first met her. More recently I have been asking myself, How does an atheist in his 60s interpret the Christmas message? How would I personally interpret it so that it has meaning for me at this moment? And I realised I was already carrying that prayer:

Let there be peace in Taranaki.

Let this peace be based on the goodwill between us.

Let us remember there are things that matter that are beyond ourselves.

 

✽ ✽ ✽

WHEN I BECAME an adult, it was nature and music that became my religion.

My priests were the Beatles and Bowie and Elton John, and my avatars were Bob Dylan and Van Morrison and Nina Simone. There was also Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks and Aretha Franklin.

Here in New Zealand we have had lots of great musicians all working their trade in the big booze barns of their day. And not the least of these have been the Finn brothers.

All these artists sang about falling in and out of love, and they told the stories of what it was like to be an everyday human being who is trying to make ends meet.

But these musicians also sang of the things that matter that are beyond ourselves.

They reminded me that when it comes to getting over ourselves, even atheists have soul work to do.

 

I was watching Bruce Springsteen on Netflix the other day, where they had made a movie of his long-running and very successful one-man stage show on Broadway.

Springsteen is probably better known as someone who fills huge stadiums playing with the E-Street Band. But this remarkable Broadway show is something else. It is much more than a one-man show. He’s not just doing covers of his back-catalogue. The show is part confessional, part whaikorero, part dissent and part preach.

He doesn’t step back from the fact that these are dark and challenging days to be a public American. He is calling us not to become the ghosts of a difficult present, but the ancestors of a time to come.

He's taken his stadium anthems and stripped them back to the personal and the connected. He also strips them back to what he describes as his own "magic trick". Because this is what he understands to be his real job-description: to provide 

“... proof-of-life ... to that ever-elusive, never completely believable: Us.”

If you go elsewhere on Netflix you may well come across another of the great musical performances of our time. I’m talking here about the modern diva Beyoncé, and her live performance at the 2018 Coachella music festival.

 

She’s on a special pyramid-shaped stage with more than 200 performers, many of them drawn from High School bands. It’s loud and it’s all over the show, and it’s not like anything that most of us have ever seen before. It’s just brilliant.

And Beyoncé not only wrote and performed and pulled the whole thing together ... she also produced the movie of what was only ever going to be two live shows.

In that movie she pays homage to her forebears. You get to hear Nina Simone talking about her own job description:

“ What I really want to do is be a representative of my race ... of the human race. I have a chance to show how kind we can be, how intelligent and generous we can be. I have a chance to teach, and to love and to laugh...”

Beyoncé also quotes the American writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, from a speech that she gave forty years ago where she said that:

“ Without community, there is no liberation.” 

Beyoncé is already a wise woman. I do hope she gets to grow old in just such a community, with a great many grand-children of her own.

Meanwhile, many of the musicians from my own generation are already grand-parents, many in their 70s – and they are still touring. They are much like the itinerant priests or the labour organisers of another era who travelled from town to town to deliver their popular sermons.

These great musicians are taking their turn at the Spark Arena in Auckland or here at the Bowl of Brooklands, performing as their own tribute band. Some of them are still quite good.

The best of them remember that it takes a real artist to reach beyond the envelope of your own cliché and sing your sermon into the moment.

✽ ✽ ✽

LAST MONTH I was at the Spark Arena in Auckland to see the latest version of Fleetwood Mac. I was there with my brother and sister-in-law, and it was a packed arena with many of the people seated up the walls.

Actually, when they are performing in New Zealand, I think we should call the group Fleetwood Finn, because Neil Finn has now joined them and is doing a stellar turn at paying tribute to their enormous back-catalogue. (I didn’t know that they wrote Black Magic Woman!)

I was one of the people seated halfway up a side wall and had a great view. I looked around and just saw a sea of different people of different ages and cultures.

Many of them had already had too much to drink. Some of them were having real trouble as they tried to negotiate their way up to their precarious seats.

But to me this was also a thing that seemed weirdly appropriate. The members of Fleetwood Mac who have survived into their 70s have been a very public cautionary tale of what happens to a life of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

So why do these elder artists keep on touring and turning up? Well ... there was joy on that stage. And consequently, there was Joy in that arena.

Stevie Nicks knew her job description. Neil Finn has always known it. They weren’t just there to sing the old songs that everyone knew by heart. They were also there to provide “proof-of-life ... to that ever-elusive, never completely believable: Us."

 

OF COURSE Neil Finn was doing Fleetwood Mac a favour. And it was a favour of friendship. Neil Finn is a wonderful example of a kiwi family man who has genuine friendships around the world and he turns up for them. They do the same for him.

But we know he’s ours. He may not yet be knighted by the Queen, but he is our champion. How many weddings and funerals have you been to where his songs have accompanied those significant moments of “We”. 

He doesn’t just write the tunes. Sometimes it’s his lyrics that grab you by the throat.

I sang a piece from one of his songs at our first session in this room, seven years ago when Tū Tama Wahine and Community Taranaki first started to work together to deliver our version of the Masterclass.

In time you’ll see that some things

Travel faster than light

In time you’ll recognise

that Love is larger than Life

And praise will come to those whose kindness

leaves you without debt

and bends the shape of things

that haven’t happened yet.

 

✽ ✽ ✽

NONE OF THIS is originally what I planned to come here to say today. But then I sat down with my notebook on Sunday morning and realised that something else entirely was waiting to be said.

I was originally going to speak to the two papers I had written for this morning. You will find them on the Key Card we gave you as you came in the door.

Those papers are my songs. One day I might have enough for an album. They are best read while sitting in your favourite chair, with a cup of tea, and time to think.

Anyway, I realised on Sunday morning that over half of you had been to a Masterclass before and you’ve already heard me prattle on. I know you are here for the conversation, not the performance.

 

FOR THOSE OF YOU who have not been to a Masterclass before, I will give a very quick summary of the two papers.

The first is about the consequences of us just carrying on with business-as-usual.

This isn’t in the paper, but I am mindful of the Extinction Rebellion protests in Wellington earlier this week, and there were several active citizens from previous Masterclasses there on the streets.

I was pleased that they were protesting outside MBIE ... the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, the same people who are still awarding new oil drilling permits in Taranaki while our planet is in a state of climate emergency.

The message of the protesters is that you can’t just carry on with business-as-usual. 

And while we are at it, we have to address the colonisation by business thinking that has taken over all our public institutions.

I say this because the public sphere in the Western world has changed more in the last 20 years than it has changed in the last 200 years. And it is still happening in 1001 different ways that too many of us seem to be refusing to notice. 

You probably don’t need to be told all the details of what’s happening in this country with the gap between rich and poor, or the state of our children, or what’s happening to young people and jobs, or the future of our welfare state — but I do my best to lay it out in this first paper anyway.

My argument is that there are things that matter that are fundamentally broken. And one of the things that is most broken is the “We”.

And this broken-ness has also brought too many of us – drunk and disorderly – to the Edge of the Roof  (... which is what the article is called).

 

The second paper is about how communities awaken. This happens when you awaken yourself as a citizen. So this is a paper that is about citizen-based community development, and it is called The Feathers We Need to Fly. It is about the need to grow the skills we require in order to create, or change or take care of the communities we want to live in.

Along the way, I do a bit of a rave about the Mulgan family – who have brought both gifts and their own cautionary tales to our nation. 

And I talk about the importance of real peace and reconciliation with Māori, and what this means to the communities we are living in together.

It’s a paper about how we step up to our citizenship. Doing this is the work of our lives. It is what our elders should have been preparing us for.

Every generation thinks they are a unique generation. But perhaps in these days of the climate emergency and species collapse this is a notion that is finally becoming true. Climate and biodiversity are the issues that will be changing everything. And the decisions we make and the actions we take in this generation will be determining the quality of life and well-being for many generations to come.

And the same culture that taught us about Jesus and the Queen has not prepared us for these important decisions and actions.

We still need to find the ways in which we can prepare each another.

The point of the Masterclass and these Community Conversations is that we are re-building an infrastructure of public intelligence so that we can get on with the work of creating, changing or taking care of the things that matter.

Our conversations on gifts, commitment, dissent, ownership, possibilities and invitation ... these are all about stepping into a shared language of how to make things happen. We have to learn this language. Every generation has always had to learn this language.

We can’t just turn up as citizens and expect it is all going to be OK now because we have finally decided to turn up!

Yes, we do have to turn up ... but we also have to grow up. And that’s not a conversation that we have been used to having.

 

MY MAIN CONTRIBUTION to the citizenship conversation is to be a person who keeps pointing out why this conversation matters.

Citizenship is that part of ourselves that we step into when we choose to serve the things that are beyond ourselves.  And our citizenship is all the authority we need to get on with this job.

Fifteen years ago, I was honoured by the Queen for my contributions to New Zealand as a social entrepreneur. I was awarded a Queens Service Medal in recognition of my work in race relations, in social justice, and job creation.

One of the many projects I had started was called the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs. At the time I was working with my friend Garry Moore who was the Mayor of Christchurch. In 1999, he had asked me to come to Christchurch to a a meeting of district councils and local authorities on governance issues. At this meeting I asked the Mayors to come together and form a Taskforce for Jobs. I was proposing that our country set itself a national goal: that all young people in our communities will have the opportunity of paid work, or to be in training or education.

To everyone’s surprise, seven Mayors immediately stood up and said: “Yes, we are going to do it!” Several months later, the first meeting of this Taskforce attracted over half the Mayors in New Zealand and, before long, over 95% of the Mayors in our country were participating members.

Nothing like this had ever happened before in the history of our local government where so many Mayors had come together on a social and economic issue.

And I think it is significant that the call to form the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs did not come from existing policy advisers, or from the local government organisations or institutions.

It came from someone who didn’t want to live in a country that has no use for such a large number of its young people.

Five years after this, I was helping to organise the annual general meeting of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs, which is held at the same time as the Local Government conference.

I found myself standing in the foyer of the Aotea Centre in Auckland during one of the coffee breaks of the conference, and there was a man walking around who was a senior partner at a prominent legal firm which had one of the city councils as a client. The law firm was sponsoring the coffee break.

This leading lawyer was talking with a group of Mayors ... and he stood engrossed as they told him stories about starting up cadetships and apprenticeship schemes in their councils to employ young people, creating schemes to track young people once they leave school, holding graduation ceremonies for apprentices in order to boost the profile of the trades at a time of skill shortages ... and also meeting with government departments and government ministers in order to create plans that would ensure that every young person in New Zealand is either in work or education.

And then these Mayors pointed over in my direction. The lawyer made a bee-line for me and he asked: “How did you get the Mayors to do this? and, By whose authority do you do this work?”

I replied: “My citizenship.”

 

THE CITIZENSHIP CONVERSATION is the work of all generations, and every generation needs to find a way of making it their own.

If we look at our communities and the world at the moment, we can see that there’s a lot of work to do. It can all get a little overwhelming.

But if we are indeed going to become worthy ancestors, then we better start facing the challenges in front of us right now.

We start by turning up ... even if we’ve still got a lot of growing up to do.

Turn up. That’s the simplest job description we have for an active citizen. It is also the best way to describe a friend.

Turn up. That’s how we are given the chance “... to bend the shape of things that haven’t happened yet.”

 

vivian Hutchinson
October 2019

Notes and Links

This paper is based on vivian Hutchinson’s keynote speech given at the first of a series of open Community Conversations based on the themes of the Taranaki Masterclass for Active Citizenship — Tū Tangata Whenua, held at Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki, New Plymouth, on 10th October 2019

First published online in December 2023 at https://www.taranaki.gen.nz/bywhoseauthority

vivian Hutchinson QSM is a community activist and social entrepreneur who has worked mainly on issues of race relations, social justice, job creation and philanthropy. He is a co-founder of Community Taranaki www.taranaki.gen.nz, and author of How Communities Heal — stories of social innovation and social change (2012) and How Communities Awaken — some conversations for active citizens (2021). He is also one of the creators of Tū Tangata Whenua - a Masterclass for Active Citizenship which is run in partnership with Tu Tama Wahine o Taranaki www.tutamawahine.org.nz. For more, visit www.taranaki.gen.nz/vivian

More information on the series of essays by vivian Hutchinson called How Communities Awaken, see www.taranaki.gen.nz/hca

Ngaropi Cameron video series of 'stretch' sessions called Te Kai o Te Rangatira, see www.tutamawahine.org.nz/tkr

Tū Tama Wahine o Taranaki and Community Taranaki were awarded the ACE (Adult and Community Education Aotearoa) 2020 Award for Community Programme of the Year for the Masterclass for Active Citizenship. See www.tutamawahine.org.nz/masterclassguide

Conversations on gifts, commitment, dissent, ownership, possibilities and invitation ... the topics of these six conversations were first suggested by US author Peter Block in his ground-breaking 2008 book Community: The Structure of Belonging

Bruce Springsteen at Broadway. For trailer see https://youtu.be/M1xDzgob1JI

Beyonce at Coachella. For trailer see https://youtu.be/fB8qvx0HOlI

This paper is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nz/deed.en

Citizens

— why the key to fixing everything is all of us

by Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad

with foreword by Brian Eno

published by Canbury Press (2022)

 

reviewed by vivian Hutchinson

 

This book is not just about the importance and urgency of active citizenship amidst today's challenges. The book itself acts as a window through which to look at our world and those challenges.

What we see through this window is how the shift to a citizen perspective changes everything ... and it point us towards both age-old and some completely fresh tools with which to transform our most stuck issues and regenerate our environment and our communities.

As Brian Eno says in his foreword to this book, when you see the world through this window, you might well notice that there is a “revolution in progress”.

 

There is no doubt that this book is going to be a useful resource to us on many fronts. It is refreshingly and practically relevant right now to our activist networks and community development groups. As such, it will naturally become part of the conversations that matter within many of our organisations.

But this book also stretches our understanding of the role of public service organisations, trusts and foundations, councils and local authorities, government departments, businesses and political parties when looked at from the viewpoint of genuinely engaging citizens. You may be surprised at the stories in this book that describe new approaches emerging in each of these areas as they also find themselves coming to grips with a “revolution in progress”.

 

The book can be ordered online from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Citizens-Why-Key-Fixing-Everything/dp/191245484X where there are hard cover, paperback, Kindle and Audiobook versions.

Citizens is superbly written. Jon Alexander, who used to work in the advertising industry, is a gifted communicator. And he gives a lot of credit for the wordcraft in this book to his co-author Ariane Conrad, who has been behind several bestsellers.

Central to the framing of the book is the concept of the meta-stories we tell ourselves about our place in the world and our responsibilities.

Alexander describes a continuum where for centuries we have considered ourselves “Subjects” under Kings and Queens, and then, more recently, “Consumers” under corporate capitalism. He suggests we are now being invited to awaken as “Citizens” who are the key to healing our adverse impact on the world and are the real creators of the communities we wish to live in.

 

Alexander has a 15-min TEDx talk which dives deeper into these ideas.

 

If you want to immediately dive deeper into the ideas behind Citizens, take a look at some of the following links: 

 

Brian Eno: The Citizenship of this book is not about the passport we hold, and it goes far beyond the duty to vote in elections. It’s a state of engagement, more verb than noun.

https://www.jonalexander.net/the-foreword

 

Jon Alexander: It’s not us humans that are broken, it’s the stories.

https://worldoftopia.com/jon-alexander-citizens-interview/

 

Jon Alexander: New Local Lightning Talk on Being Citizens, not consumers. Local councils have massive agency at this important time.

https://youtu.be/b8ibA5usPDo

 

Playing ‘spot the story’ is a great way to retune your radar and reboot your faith in humanity.

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-be-an-engaged-citizen-and-make-meaningful-social-change

 

Jon Alexander visited New Zealand in November 2022 to speak at an event at Massey University in Wellington. Here's the Newsroom report:

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/proposal-to-break-central-local-deadlock-on-three-waters-and-climate

 

And former Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel writes about her own reactions to reading Citizens, and what it may mean for the current New Zealand political landscape: 

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/lianne-dalziel-people-have-lost-trust-in-their-governments-now-governments-dont-trust-the-people

The Planetary Pakeha

by vivian Hutchinson

published 1991 25 min read download as PDF

 

1.

I am vivian Hutchinson. Born and brought up in Taranaki, where I still live and work. I love my mountain and can't imagine being away from it for too long.

I'm a fifth-generation Pakeha New Zealander, my great-great-forebear with the Hutchinson name having come to this country with the 18th Royal Irish Regiment. His wife was from an English coal-mining community. On my mother's side my male ancestors derived from poor Scottish farming immigrants of the McIntyre name, who brought up big families and worked the soil here. As family reunions have shown me, my ancestors' blood has well and truly mixed with that of the tangata whenua of these islands and I have many Maori distant cousins.

I'm from a family of four brothers scattered over this country. My father worked during his life as an engineer and a manager of a wire firm servicing farms in Taranaki. He died when I was eighteen. My mother has married again and is retired to the harbour's edge near Whangarei.

One of my brothers fought in Vietnam and was a leader in the South Island Territorials, but now grows carnations in a thriving business. Another has worked for years in soil and water conservation issues for various authorities in the South Island, and farms goats. The third has worked in surveying and also for himself, and more recently has spent many years on the dole happily raising his kids. I am a gay man and presently live with my love and partner in life, Tony Hansen, in the Westown suburb of New Plymouth.

My vocation is trying to make a difference. I used to think I was a community worker. Now I think of myself as a social-change worker. I won't pretend to be very successful in my vocation, but I believe I have persistence.

I am particularly interested in making a difference to unemployment and the future of work. I see how this also relates to poverty and deprivation in New Zealand and questions of the future of the welfare state. I am also interested in bringing more love into economics. And I have been working on these issues in one way or another since I left secondary school in 1973.

In doing something about these things, I have helped the Salvation Army run its work schemes in Taranaki, and I now work as community adviser to the Taranaki Work Trust, helping manage a variety of projects aimed at the unemployed. I help people to start up their own businesses, and teach the skills of enterprise. I write.

I am fatter than most people, weighing in at nineteen stone. I have my front teeth missing. I love swimming at Back Beach near our Sugarloaf Islands. I particularly enjoy watching music on television, and every now and then I'll learn a song for myself. I read the Dominion and especially like the Doonesbury cartoons on page two.

I am a friend and keen supporter of the Tauhara Centre in Taupo and go there quite often. I try to contribute to its mission of creating a place where people of differing viewpoints and methods of working can come together in a search for truth, goodwill and understanding.

I am writing this chapter while taking a break in the Tauhara chalet, overlooking a clear and blue summer's lake.

 

2.

I call myself a Pakeha just because it feels right. I like it as a superficial label. It tells me I am primarily of European descent but have a special relationship with these islands. I am also wary of the label. I have never felt good about fences, particularly fences of identity. I seem to contain too many impulses that shout otherwise.

I have also never felt good about people making assumptions about me just because I am wearing a cultural label. I have been hurt by assumptions made of me . . . and know I have hurt others by the assumptions I have made about them. Labels don't help.

But thinking of myself as Pakeha certainly means something to me.

It means all the things I have learnt about being a human being from attending kindergarten, primary, intermediate and secondary schools, the Anglican Church . . . being brought up in a fairly middle-class family, watching lots of television, playing sport as a youngster, watching my brother go to war and my uncle have a beer at the RSA, discovering how things worked through inventions and new technology, learning the ins and outs of family businesses, observing the festivals of the year at Easter, Christmas and on Anzac Day.

These things are the inheritance of my parents, my family and the context that I grew up in. And when I was growing up, these things all gave me an identity map which I never really had the capacity to question.

I sure as hell did start to question things as soon as I left home, however. To some extent it was the fashion of the day. I remember at age eighteen reading James K. Baxter when he summarised the Calvinist doctrines behind our Pakeha way of life with four commandments: Work Is Good, Sex Is Bad, Do as You Are Told and It Will Be All Right, and Don't Look Too Deeply into Yourself.

Sure, from the distance of now being thirtysomething, it's very much an oversimplified condemnation . . . but in my teenage years it seemed a pretty good summary of what I was rebelling against.

Fortunately at the time, I quickly realised that part of being Pakeha also meant the freedom to say 'stuff you' to all of this. In the early seventies there seemed to be an entire youth culture saying exactly that. So when I left home I got on with my own journey, which led me to discover the gifts of many of the different ways of living on these islands and on this planet at this time. Even though I have ended up with a lifestyle and view of who I am that is very different from my parents' and the way of life they handed on to me, I still call myself Pakeha. It is a label of preference. And I hope that when I meet people we can both greet our preferred labels . . . and somehow also get beyond them.

 

3.

I don't deny the gifts I receive from being Pakeha. They are many and varied. It's just that I'm the sort of person who is going to pick and choose the gifts I want to hold close to myself. Some of the gifts I can indeed treasure. Others I have some trouble with.

Some of the things about being Pakeha that I am proud of include our love for this land, our links with Britain, Jesus and the Christian teachings, symphony orchestras, musicians like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Sting, composers like Mozart and Bach, reading John Mortimer, art galleries, shopping, mystery serials on television, Woolworths supermarkets, Ford Falcon stationwagons, Footrot Flats, Prince Charles, hippies, the New Age, the circus, being in business, camping at the beach, and the Labour Party.

Some of the things about being Pakeha that I don't feel so good about include the continuing legacy of injustice between Pakeha and Maori, the way we gay people get treated, two world wars, Korea, Vietnam and now the Gulf, bureaucracy, unemployment, the cutting down of native trees and the pollution of our rivers, and the Labour Party.

 

4.

I used to think culture was to do with what we believed in and what we did with each other, and who we celebrated and valued: rugby, Jesus, the Queen, Labour Day, the Concert Programme, pavlovas, Mark Todd, a good beer, patchwork quilts, KZ7 and the Bank of New Zealand.

It's like we pull all these things around us like a cloak and they somehow define who we are. Our leading writers and television ad people use all these images to describe us, and politicians use the prevailing concepts to define policies that will suit us and keep us voting for them.

But lately I have been wanting to take a few steps back from this and ask myself: What's the purpose of culture anyway? Do I belong to my culture, or does it belong to me? Who decides the rules of what's right and wrong? Are articles and books like this part of some insidious process of defining and therefore later controlling our images of who we think we are?

 

5.

We've all been talking about this culture and identity stuff quite a bit lately, haven't we? I put it down to '1990' and celebrating the hundred and fifty years of the Treaty of Waitangi, as well as other various anniversaries. It just kept on bringing things up for us all to chew over. And not before time, either.

The 1990 concert at Bastion Point, grand opening ceremonies at the Commonwealth Games, the Queen at Waitangi, the waka, Gallipoli Anzac celebrations, Kiri in the park, the ANZ 'Magic Minutes' on television . . . it's all been a real mixed bag, struggling for that elusive consensus on who we think we are.

As I write, it was only just last year. And, looking back, we seemed to be having two discussions at once on what it was to be a New Zealander.

First there was the official and polite discussion, which was full of television propaganda: images and music of the victory of the New Zealand identity, and how Maori and Pakeha were getting on so well.

But behind all this there was this tentative, almost embarrassed exploration I seemed to be witnessing almost everywhere else whenever the subject of 1990 came up. Here people talked about just what Kiwi identity at this hundred-and-fifty-year report card point is bringing up for them. And it has brought up some unsettling pictures of challenge and change.

Treaty issues, one in nine people officially out of work, the widening gap between rich and poor, the knife going into our visions of the welfare state, the GATT talks in Brussels breaking up, overcrowded prisons, a man in Aramoana going berserk with a gun, war in the Gulf . . . these are the images many of us carried with us into 1991.

 

6.

I don't know about you, but I seemed to be surrounded by people who found that 1990 didn't reflect who they felt they were. Perhaps the television picture-streams and accompanying sound-tracks were more a picture of who we thought we should be rather than the reality of who we are. If you just think for a while about all the different people you know who are also New Zealanders and share your life and never appeared in those video-montages of self-identity, you'll have a sense of what an impossible job it is to get a picture of our wholeness anyway.

And that's okay!

In fact I think that that is the point.

The point being that our vision of what it is to be a New Zealander is leading to more and more diversity as the years go on.

And this brings with it its own struggle . . . the struggle to develop an image of ourselves that holds together and honours all these scattered pieces.

 

7.

Difference. That's the terror of all this culture stuff.

And it seems to be the constant challenge to human beings everywhere . . . how on earth do we grow up enough inside ourselves to really cope with the difference within and between cultural labels?

I for one have always been fascinated with discovering the variations on how to be a human being. When I was nineteen I took out a weekly subscription on one of those Marshall Cavendish build-your-own-encyclopaedia magazines called The Family of Man. I wished it was called The Family of People, but I still bought it and loved it.

Every week there was a profile of at least a dozen different racial groups or cultures . . . their history, their lives today, their customs and attitudes. It was superficial but fascinating. And for me it was a little humbling to start to get a sense of humanity on its fuller diversity.

But while collecting the information on difference is one thing, having to live with it is another.

Difference is the thing that can bring up our greatest fears, vulnerability and insecurity . . . the deep gut feelings of Other that can arise when we are confronted with another culture, or a hidden subculture within our shared life. It's a feeling that can strike you unawares . . . can make you do the most regrettable things. Hasn't the longest part of human conflict been fed from this raw place?

It would be easier to have a unity . . . easier to have consensus . . . easier to have an assimilation that can absorb all those rough-edges that make people different from one another. But I don't think we ever really did have a time like that . . . nor do I think the future holds such a time for us.

The challenge has always been obvious to me. We are just going to have to transform our attitude towards difference. I think it starts with esteeming our own unique qualities personally and then seriously thinking about how to treasure the difference in others.

More than this.

I think we can learn to accept the differences we see out there as something that may contain important information for ourselves . . . information for our own journeys and choices ahead . . . information that has yet to be discovered through our present cultural forms.

 

8.

Perhaps the first time many Pakeha people have to face their own sense of difference, is when they start to interact with the Maori people of these islands. In fact I'd offer the opinion that it is unlikely that many Pakeha people in this country can define themselves without the First People appearing in the wings of that definition somewhere. Not that I think there is anything wrong with that. There's many a time I've sat on the marae and heard an orator define his Maoritanga in terms of how it differed from Pakeha New Zealanders.

There's an essential truth in there somewhere. That it's very much easier to define your identity when you are faced with a striking difference in attitudes, beliefs and protocols such as we find between the two dominant races here in Aotearoa.

And like it or not, Pakeha identity is woven into these differences. Despite all the rhetoric about us all being New Zealanders and tatou tatou, Maori people are not Pakeha. And there are differences there that cannot and should not be put into the common pot.

 

9.

Perhaps I should just speak for myself.

I am certain my own experiences with Maori people have led me more than anything else to re-examine my identity and look again at my notions of just what culture is. And these experiences are a little different from what my family upbringing would have led me to expect.

It was James K. Baxter who opened the door for me (and many like me) through his poetry and articles, which reflected a synthesis of the two main cultures here in New Zealand. I was reading his stuff while still at school, but I just knew that he was writing something that was deep within me as well.

As soon as I left school I decided to find out more about Maori things, which took me to meeting Matarena Raumati Rau-Kupa, a local Taranaki Maori elder also known as Aunty Marj. She invited me to nearby Parihaka, where together with her husband Pepe Rau she was leading the rebuilding of one of the famous Parihaka meeting houses, Te Niho o Te Atiawa. I loved Marj as soon as I met her, and we found it easy to be good friends, despite our obvious distance in age as well as culture.

What followed for me was a social and spiritual re-education over the next few years, which took place almost fully within a Maori context. Considering the powerful history of non-violent struggle at Parihaka against the government (in the 1880s), it was a compassionate re-education on what it was to be a New Zealander and how to come to grips with some of the darker chapters in our history of race relations.

I moved to Auckland to train as a journalist, and in something of an informal social-worker apprenticeship, I also worked on the streets of the inner city with Maori community workers Betty Wark and Fred Ellis. Betty and I worked on many issues together, some of which led to setting up the Arohanui hostels for street people.

My education in things Maori continued with meeting Whina Cooper and working closely with her whanau in the preparations, staging and strategy of the Maori Land March of 1975. I did much writing and research into Maori Land claims, particularly Bastion Point and the Raglan golf course case.

When I shifted back to Taranaki in 1978, Marj and I organised a seven-year cycle of annual gatherings at Parihaka designed to introduce other Pakeha people to things Maori and explore their own cultural boundaries.

More recently, as someone who now works primarily in the employment and job creation arena, I have naturally continued to have a good deal to do with Maori people, particularly on economic issues and developing self-help initiatives for the unemployed.

With all this behind me, I used to think that because I have had lots of special experiences in a Maori context, I understood Maori people very well. Not true. I am constantly surprised at the ingenuity of many of these people, the fertility of the way the culture absorbs and re-invents itself in so many ways. And that very present difference in attitude that always has been a challenge to me as well as a delight.

I think it's more than this, though.

The more I have had to do with Maori people, I have realised that I wasn't so much finding out about them — I was finding out much more about myself.

This is the identity thing again. Much of my awareness of this was just lying dormant there within me until I ran into a situation of difference, which brought things up to the surface for me to look at.

When faced with things Maori — some of which entranced me, some of which I found I didn't agree with — I certainly had to get my head together on who I thought I was . . . and get clear about those things that were within me. And this brings me back again . . . to culture, and the frames we put around these pictures of our identity.

 

10.

Culture has never been a static thing. It is an organic dynamic changing pulling pushing collection of bits and pieces that tell us how we are getting on with being human. And these days I am starting to see culture as a strategy for awareness.

I imagine somewhere in our collective history we have discovered things that have worked: an Anglican communion service, the rules of rugby, how to cook steak on a barbie, decorating a Christmas tree, handing out the prizes at a school athletics meet.

They are processes on how to get a job done. They contain all the opinions and beliefs and discussions that have created those processes in the first place. If we continue to do it the same way, it becomes culture. If we pass it on to others or our kids, it becomes tradition. Stick at it long enough and these processes seem to grow into the bones of a people and become incredibly binding and defining of who we think we are.

I say a 'strategy for awareness', because that's what I reckon is behind all this: developing our human awareness . . . finding out what it is to be a human being . . . telling us how to get on with our own stories.

Culture is a way that we have packaged up bits of the collective software on how to do all this, whether it is in questions of sport, spirituality, restaurant etiquette, or in annual festivals. Different people, different times, different places; they have all given rise to different strategies. And these strategies are all a part of the performance of their truth . . . as best as they can be aware of it at the time.

What's happening today is that we are becoming very aware of how other people are creating quite different strategies for getting the same jobs done. And within the broad bands of cultural and subcultural identity labels — Pakeha, American, Maori, country music buffs, lesbian, whatever — there's an enormous diversity. That's the point. This drive for difference. An evolution of human beings based on difference.

It's like the equal drive in the natural kingdom of plants and insects and animals . . . creating more and more diverse species as the march of time progresses over billions of years. What we have ended up with in nature today is an incredibly fragile and irreplaceable bank of genetic information scattered throughout the planet, much of which we are only beginning to understand: a plant in the Amazon holds a genetic treasure that will solve leukaemia, perhaps a weed near Invercargill holds part of the solution to the AIDS virus.

Now it's the same with culture. The different cultures on the planet are driven towards greater diversity, a drive from within each of them. And each of these diverse groups contains valuable information for the human journey — information we are also only now starting to really learn how to understand.

 

11.

My present map of all this is a keyboard like that on a piano. I like to think of it as the keyboard of potential of how to be a human being.

Different cultures come and seem to dance over certain notes on this keyboard. They keep to certain tunes. They may leave whole sections of the keyboard completely untouched.

When cultures come in dialogue to one another, they share parts of the keyboard they know. They sing the songs they have discovered within them that have grown in response to this keyboard.

Now I don't think there is any such thing as cultural property rights on this keyboard. You may choose to dispute this point of view, but I believe this human keyboard is an instrument that's there within all of us and has all sorts of sounds waiting dormant to be struck and discovered for use.

I was once on the marae with a group of Americans when one of the aunts called out her karanga in that way many of us have heard that makes the air chill and the sound penetrate every bone in your body. The woman next to me said, 'Wow. My gut has just hit the ground. Those Maoris have got something very special here!'

I looked at her and remarked, 'Yes. But it was also your gut that hit the ground. You may not have known it before, but I'll bet you have much the same stuff within you. You may not have struck that note on your keyboard before. But it is there, waiting.'

 

12.

What's tugging at all this . . . is change.

Rapid change. More change than many other generations of the human race have had to face. Whether it's in the economic, social, spiritual, technological landscapes surrounding us, they are all shifting sands at this time. And it's bringing out both the best and the worst in us.

This constant change makes an equally constant assault on our identities, on our security of who we think we are. That's not comfortable. One of the popular views of culture is that it gives us something solid to hang onto — that way we don't have to constantly think up solutions to our lives. We don't have to constantly question our ways of doing things. Culture can provide a refuge against all these changes around us.

My theory is that it is this desire for a safe place from change, that can quickly throw up the cultural dogmas and fundamentalism that are also very much part of these times. But that's always the problem with refuges. The mobile electric fences that graze the edges of our identities can quickly turn into brick walls.

 

13.

Dogma — that's the other terror I feel in all this. And I'm sure the change and uncertainties of the 1980s and 1990s are a very fertile breeding ground for all sorts of intolerances.

I have seen it in many old mates who, like me, grew up in a youth culture of rock music, sexual experimentation and regular dosings of marijuana to the brain . . . generally pushing at the edges of who they thought they were. Today many of these friends are also thirtysomething and are committed members of some rather rigid born-again Christian congregations.

I myself have an Anglican background and really appreciate the things I have learned about Jesus and the Christian approach to being a person. But I certainly stop short of agreeing that Jesus is the only way to look at the world and get on with your life. I have seen too many worthwhile bits of wisdom and life-affirming practices from within other religions and spiritual paths to ever accept an attitude that says that one spiritual truth is better than the other.

Not that my born-again Christian friends have a monopoly on dogma and fundamentalism. I think these intolerances are attitudes that can breed in any group of people trying to define themselves . . . and let their electric borders turn to stone. I have certainly seen it amongst the born-again Maori (many of them actually European in blood) who have gone around the social change groups over the last five years trying to promote a version of right and wrong thinking about Treaty issues, and how to be a New Zealander. I also watched in the seventies as whole groups of people started meditating and chanting and some quite rigidly defining who they were in terms of Eastern religions.

I also witness, in the gay and lesbian subculture I am a part of, how some groups here have turned their need for gay visibility and the redress of bigotry almost into a religion in itself, one that dominates and permeates everything they choose to do. And I feel just as uncomfortable about that as I did with the bigotry in the first place.

I'm sure it's to do with fear. Fear of what is outside those fences that define our identity for us. Fear of what it takes within us to patiently build bridges of tolerance and understanding towards those who are somehow different from us. And yes, a heartfelt fear of change and the uncertainty of these times.

One of my dreams for this country is that we as New Zealanders can really work on this one. We are small enough as a country to do it differently . . . to keep a conversation going between all the groupings we have within us . . . build the hard loving that is required to get beyond the dogmatic positions that could be taken on almost everything . . . discover the forgiveness that is essential to moving forward beyond the history of hurts that people of difference have consistently done to one another.

If we get this right, we may indeed grow some treasures here for the world.

 

14.

Back to the keyboard.

I believe that just as there is a drive for diversity within us, there is also an equal drive for synthesis. When people speak or perform their truths to each other, some of it always sticks. This is a process that today is leading people to make interesting individual choices about who they think they are and want to be seen as in the world.

I think in the recent past the majority of people have just unconsciously followed the expectations of their cultural groupings and walked their familiar keyboard of identity. A man on the marae will say, 'I am a Maori, therefore I think this way about land and the Treaty.' A woman at the Assembly of God church will tell me her Christianity tells her all she needs to know about family life. My Indian friends tell me they feel differently about death because of what their culture teaches them about karma.

Well that's changing. We now have the opportunity to choose these things for ourselves. Actually it's been going on for quite a long time amongst the more individual and eccentric among us, and I think we are going to see very much more of it.

People are gathering into themselves all sorts of experiences from travel, from weekend workshops with overseas speakers, from television and the movies, from the rhythm of world music or whatever. And when they find something within themselves emerging, resonating and meeting with these experiences, they start to realise that this too is them.

 

15.

I believe the process of synthesis of all this takes place first at the level of the individual. But then it quite quickly moves into a cultural synthesis between groups. And when that happens, some real delights can emerge. We can certainly see this in the present dance between Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand.

What I've been witnessing since the mid-seventies is that many European-based organisations, from schools to churches and political and social change groups, have started to look at the Maori culture for strategies of how to get on with their business. The use of ceremonial welcomes and its accompanying oratory and music are popping up everywhere around New Zealand to begin meetings and conferences, many of which may not even contain a Maori person, but at least salute with respect the tangata whenua of the region where the conference is being held.

This began with people trying to create partnership protocols in national organisations that could obviously include Maori ways of doing things. But more recently I am seeing that many Pakeha people are just preferring to do things this way anyway . . . because it works better for them!

 

16.

One of the cross-cultural acts of synthesis I have really treasured is the use of whaikorero — an immensely valuable Maori protocol for getting people to talk deeply to one another in a group sharing. I say this because I feel the world is very much in need of ways it can get people to talk deeply to one another, to resolve conflicts, to speak to matters of our collective spirit, to heal.

Whaikorero does this very well. In the meeting house on a marae, after a prayer to begin the night's work, people stand to speak, they usually only speak once, their sharing is seldom interrupted or debated, they'll finish their speech with a song, and someone else will follow them and the whole process can go on all night. When precedence and hierarchy (which are also part of Maori culture) can take a back seat, the quality of whaikorero oratory and the listening that surrounds it certainly puts to shame the turbulent, arrogant and divisive protocols you see at Pakeha meetings with chairmen and secretaries and points of order.

The use of whaikorero has been jumping cultural fences for many years now. When the people of the Tauhara Centre in Taupo were creating a form of talking to each other during their festivals, they were looking for a method of sharing that would encompass and honour the wide diversity of individuals, spiritual paths and cultural groups that come to their meetings. At the time, they looked to the gatherings that Aunty Marj and I were holding at Parihaka and to the whaikorero that took place there. What has followed in Taupo has been a decade of gatherings which have contained evening circle sharings when the friends of Tauhara get together. It is not classic whaikorero but an organic evolution of our own form. And for myself, I can honestly say these evenings have yielded times of dignity, heart talk, stories, wisdom, music and fun that have been some of the most moving times in my life.

This is a synthesis to be treasured . . . the organic growing of future culture. And I think it's time this sort of cross-fertilisation was valued more.

 

17.

Not that this sort of synthesis doesn't come without its critics. And I have heard them consistently and quite vociferously. Some of my friends have been at pains to point out to me that Pakeha people shouldn't use another culture's way of doing things without their direct permission and their participation. It's a rip-off, they feel, a steal on intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels equivalent to the theft of the Maori land in the last century.

Others are critical that the synthesis they see is just a variety of the Pakeha triumph of individualism, and our consumer passions devouring cultural traditions — like shopping for identity in the mall of human experience.

I can understand where this criticism is coming from, particularly when so many injustices are still outstanding between Pakeha and Maori in this country and are our responsibility to address. I also know how arrogance and superficial understanding can rush very quickly over cultural bridges. It irks me.

But I know what I also see and feel to be good things in this synthesis between peoples. I do not fear the changes this process makes in our visions of who we think we are.

Looking back at our own history, there was a synthesis between the Maori and Pakeha that certainly went both ways even a hundred and fifty years ago. I am very aware from my years at Parihaka that Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi were Christian prophets. Te Whiti's dedication on his tombstone is the Christmas message written in Maori. And I for one have certainly learnt a great deal more about compassionate social action and forgiveness from Te Whiti and his legacy within the elders at Te Niho o Te Atiawa than I ever did from my ministers in the Holy Trinity Church in New Plymouth's suburb of Fitzroy.

 

18.

New Zealand has always played on a global stage: sending butter and meat to Britain a hundred years ago, Gallipoli itself, the Maori Battalion in the Mediterranean, our athletes at the Olympics or the All Blacks winning the rugby World Cup, the frigate with a Cabinet Minister at Moruroa, the nuclear break with ANZUS — these are the contribution of a small nation to global questions.

And I think that in the 1990s we are going to be asked to reach out much more as we realise that most of the problems in the world are interconnected; and asked for solutions that build bridges between nations, religions, cultures and ideologies. As small as we are, we are perhaps more flexible than most to contribute to this important process.

I think this generation is the first to really feel at a popular level that the planet is one interdependent entity . . . and that the task of this season's human beings on the planet is to get our act together in ways well beyond our national boundaries defined by our backgrounds and history.

Not that we should deny our history or the special things we have grown to believe in and treasure. It's just that we have to get clear about these things so they can be brought into right relationship with planetary needs.

 

19.

How do we stop war? How do we create enough employment for people? How do we end hunger and deprivation, and house everyone? How do we manage scarce resources? How do we look after the environment or the planet itself? How do we create a way of life that can enable people to get on with their diverse visions for themselves? These are some of the questions that feature in that part of my mind and heart that belongs to a planetary citizen at this time. And they are not just Kiwi challenges. They are challenges facing all citizens of the world in the 1990s.

Our contribution to these questions will be made primarily by a shift in our awareness of who we think we are. That's the importance of all this talk about what it is to be Pakeha, be a New Zealander or whatever.

I would like you to consider that the gifts we think we have as a culture may be part of the developing software of the human race, and could well be our contribution to whatever global fix-it package is required for the 1990s. And because of this global agenda, if we are trying to get clear about what it is to be Pakeha, then we are also going to have to get clear about being planetary Pakeha.

We have already done this to some extent on the peace and nuclear issues. But what are we learning that has planetary importance on the race relations issues? What are we learning on economic and welfare issues? Have we learnt anything special about business? Have we treasures to share about the human spirit?

I suspect we do.

 

20.

Perhaps this is a journey of self-discovery that is going to have to be taken by every cultural group on the earth at this time. Perhaps now is the time to more formally ask of other cultures: What is your unique contribution to these questions? What are the comparative advantages you carry within the genetic dances of your culture? What is your difference that will make a difference?

These solutions are then to be shared. That's the importance of cultural exchange and feedback . . . travelling to other cultures' marae to find out the truths that they are carrying on behalf of all of us.

If culture is a strategy for awareness, then the earth sorely needs these strategies right now and humanity needs all the awareness it can get to solve the bigger questions of our time.

I am really hopeful about the future of this country. We've got too many opportunities here to get despairing about our lot. And I'm looking forward to the next fifty years, and with it much more of the diversity and the synthesis that will be part of us growing our Pakeha identities.

It's going to be interesting.

 

____________________________________________

VIVIAN HUTCHINSON, born 1955, is a speaker, writer and consultant on employment issues. Formerly a journalist, he has spent much time in the past fifteen years creating community-based employment and training projects.

 

 

A Citizen in Waitara

by vivian Hutchinson

June 2023 35 min read download PDF for print

1.

FOR MYSELF, it also started at Waitara.

I was a teenage Pākehā boy, still at High School, and was often dragged into helping out Kuia Matarena, or Aunty Marj, as she prepared the carved meeting house at Waitara for a coming meeting.

If it was a weekend or the school holidays I would not be surprised to get a call. Aunty Marj would have organised someone to drive us out from New Plymouth to Owae Marae, and the car would arrive full of cut flowers, food, and various sewing projects.

Sometimes Aunty Marj would turn up at the marae a full week before the particular event started, and she would be the only one there. I think she liked it that way. She had plenty of conversation for her elders who had long since passed yet still had a role in determining the jobs that needed to be done.

Many of which involved ordering me around. I would find myself carrying mattresses, dusting cobwebs, scrubbing bathrooms, sweeping out and washing floors and porches, and reaching for things on higher shelves that needed to be put to use somewhere else.

I wasn’t really being dragged into this role. I was an odd-enough teenager who enjoyed Aunty Marj’s company, and I easily loved her. Ours was a cross-generational friendship that would go on to last for another four decades.

This was the early 1970s, and Matarena Marjorie Raumati Rau had not long turned sixty. She had always worked hard and, for most of her adult life, she seemed to be continuously helping prepare different marae for visitors. I was simply the latest in a long line of family members and friends, and people she vaguely knew, whom she had intimidated, flattered and cajoled into giving her a hand.

You quickly found out that there was a “right way” to do things, which was also usually Aunty Marj’s own way. It was not arbitrary. There would also be a story attached to each job that kept you lined up with the best way to do it. And once you accepted that this was the process, then there would really be no end of the things that could be achieved.

I first met Aunty Marj at a “Community Unity” public conversation held at the New Plymouth Girl’s High School. She had a connection to my mother’s family dating from the 1930s and 1940s, and she would often remind me that she had looked after my mother, and her twin sister, when they were children. During the War, our families had worked together when the local Scottish cultural groups and Māori cultural groups had joined to do patriotic fundraising for the troops.

One time, in the middle of dragging mattresses around the marae, Aunty Marj seemed delighted to find out that my own birthday, the 27th June, was the same day that her uncle, Māui Pōmare, had died. I was somewhat confused at the significance she saw in this seemingly random connection. I was enlightened later on when I found out that the event that we had been preparing for, Te Rā o Māui Pōmare, was scheduled every year on the Saturday closest to the date of his death.

Māui Pōmare was the first Māori medical doctor, and a politician, who became renowned for his work to improve Māori health and living conditions. His statue dominates the forecourt of Owae Marae.

Māui Pōmare was a half-brother to Aunty Marj’s grandmother, Ngaropi Damon. Ngaropi herself was prominent in the life of Parihaka marae, where she had married Nohomairangi Te Whiti, the son of one of the prophets of Peace.

So Aunty Marj’s family connections spanned the Taranaki coast, and they also gave her responsibilities and plenty of work to do at marae throughout the province.

In the 1970s, Aunty Marj was also leading a major restoration project at Parihaka where the locals were turning an old dining room, Te Niho o te Atiawa, into a new meeting space. I was also regularly going out to the pā – which was then largely a ghost town – to help her out with various projects involved in this restoration, or the hosting of people who were visiting the marae.

2.

MY SCHOOLING HAD taught me nothing of the land wars, or the later non-violent resistance campaign led by the Parihaka prophets Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi. So being with Aunty Marj at Waitara and at Parihaka was something of an alternative education for me. I was being given an introduction to an entirely different view of what it was to live and belong in Taranaki.

I learned about how war broke out at Waitara in March 1860, and then quickly spread to elsewhere in the province. This was followed by the legislative confiscation of Taranaki land. I heard about the doubletalk of politicians and land speculators, many of whom are still remembered with their names on the street signs of Waitara.

I also heard stories of a surprising resistance. Women pulling up survey pegs. Fencing being erected across disputed roads. Confiscated lands being ploughed as a statement that the true ownership was never going to be forgotten.

And I heard the accounts of State violence and coercive power. Hundreds of ploughmen and fencers were arrested and spent years in prison in South Island jails. The “Village of Peace” at Parihaka grew to become one of the largest Māori settlements of its time. But it was sacked by the settler government in 1881 and endured many years of military occupation while its very name was removed from maps.

Māui Pōmare himself had a very personal connection to the invasion of Parihaka. He had been one of the children who greeted the soldiers as they marched onto the marae. The story is that he had lost a toe when he had got caught up under the cavalry horses.

Every Māori family in Taranaki has had some connection to these acts of resistance that stretched over many decades. The history of these acts are memorialised in the titles of meeting houses, and in the names given to grandchildren.

But by the 1970s, the average Pākehā family in Taranaki was oblivious to this history, and to their own role as perpetrators or beneficiaries of this dispossession. It just wasn’t talked about. 

For myself, an interesting thing happened when I started to share some of what I had been learning with my mates at school at the New Plymouth Boys High. I was surprised that quite a few of them just refused to believe me. Some of them told me that I was just getting too carried away with the Parihaka stuff and that “Mrs Rau” was filling my head with some very far-fetched stories.

I remember one response from a school friend who was from a prominent Taranaki farming family and therefore a direct inheritor of the benefits of the land wars and the confiscations that I was talking about.  He said to me: “It can’t have happened, or else we would have been told about it already.” 

Which, I suppose, had its own circular logic.

 

3.

IN MANY WAYS it is a privilege of Pākehā people not to know our own histories, or even our own family participation in events that have led to historical trauma.

Forget-and-move-on is a deep part of European culture. It can both be a strategy for survivors, and a smokescreen for victors and perpetrators. The vagueness becomes another way of hiding from the consequences.

I should point out that I was as woven into this forgetting as anyone else. My family had told me no stories of the early years of their migration and settlement into New Zealand, even though my father’s family had arrived with the British Army in the 1860s.

The forgetting in my family had reached back before their migration. In the 1850s, my mother’s family had been forcibly cleared from their homes on the Western Isles of Scotland. But we had inherited no stories about this either.

I have come to think that amnesia may well be one of the main organising principles of colonisation. A selective forgetting is an important part of how power maintains its privileges.

And, over time, our collective amnesia means that the blood and dishonor and injustice in our history just becomes part of the structural architecture of the next normal.

I started to understand this better when I was invited to go for a walk one day in the grounds of St Mary’s Anglican Church in central New Plymouth. The woman who wanted to talk to me was one of the elder parishioners — I had known her for years, and I was friends with her children.

She wanted to tell me that the Parihaka stories that I had been talking about were things that should be left in the past. Actually she looked me straight in the eye and told me that these things were Māori affairs, and not something that I as a Pākehā should be getting involved with.

So I learned something there. The amnesia is not a mistake. It is not a by-product of something else. It is a living thing and it is a defended space.

And awakening to our history means interrupting the current stories that you might be telling yourself, and interrupting the privileges that come on the back of those stories.

The awakening can also disrupt your current sense of identity – because you are being invited to take ownership of the things that many people in your community have been determined not to remember.

 

4.

IN 1981, the Parihaka community was preparing to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the soldiers marching on the “Village of Peace”.

I decided to seize the opportunity to try and address the forgetting, and ensure that a much wider group of people would be told about these important aspects of Taranaki history. I worked with Aunty Marj, and also Ron Lambert and others from the Taranaki Museum, to put together what amounted to be the first audio-visual presentation of the history of Parihaka.

It is important to recognise that this was a community initiative, and it was not commissioned by any academic or civic authority. We didn’t have access to video resources at a community level, so it was a slide show of historical photographs and drawings with a half-hour commentary recorded by Aunty Marj and myself. Our narrative had been based on the oral history of Parihaka that Aunty Marj had been presenting in Te Niho o Te Atiawa, as well as the documentary research of historians such as Dick Scott and Michael King.

The slide-show documentary had its unveiling at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery on 29th October 1981 as part of the “Parihaka Centennial Exhibition and Art Auction”. The curators seized upon this new resource as a way to quickly explain to people what their exhibition was all about.

The presentation was successful and, as an instrument of our remembering, it has held its value. It has since been digitised and you can still see it today at Puke Ariki as part of the ongoing Ko Taku Poi Te Manu exhibition on the first floor of the museum. You can also look at it on YouTube.

At that time, back in 1981, I got some funding which enabled me to take the slideshow around all high schools in Taranaki. In some ways I was addressing the myself of 1971, the same boy who had sat in his Boys High history class wondering why we were not being told about these local historical events which had occurred only half an hour from our classroom. 

What was interesting for me was the continuing moments of denial of this history that I experienced while doing these presentations. I even heard from couple of the teachers the same circular logic that had been given to me from my school-friend a decade earlier. They told me that if my presentation was actually true, they would already know about it.

 

5.

IN 1975 I had left school and moved to Auckland to study journalism and take a job in a small inner-city newspaper. It was through this work that I got to meet Whina Cooper.

Meeting Whina was like encountering a force of nature. She was already nearly 80 years of age at this stage, and had been a catalyst for social change over several generations. I was young and very naïve and completely in awe of her. So it was a surprise and honour to be asked to help out with what would become her most famous act of public protest – the 1975 Māori Land March on Parliament.

Whina explained to me that this was not a project that was going to focus on historical grievances, however unresolved they might be. Her new group would be protesting about the ongoing alienation of Māori land that was still taking place in the 1970s – through the many reinventions of land-grab legislation like the Rating Act, and the Public Works Act, and the Town and Country Planning Act. Her purpose would be summarised in the cry of “Not One More Acre!”

It turned out that I was the only Pākehā on her organising group, which she had called Te Roopu o te Matakite, a title which can be interpreted as, “The people who can see ahead”.

The Māori Land March has since come to be regarded as a pivotal moment in modern New Zealand history. But it is important to point out that the march itself wasn’t just an idea or an event. It was a strategy.

It was a strategy to address the forgetting. And it was a strategy for awakening. The important thing wasn’t the marching in itself, but what the marching hoped to produce in the minds of all New Zealanders. By walking through the rohe and lands of so many hapu and iwi, and by stopping each night at different marae, it was a strategy that said: Wake Up! We need to work together and address these issues.

And by having a sustained walk that took it beyond a one or two-day media event, it was also a strategy to awaken the Pākehā mind. By the time the march got to Wellington 30 days later, all eyes would be on the largely forgotten issue of Māori land. Pākehā would be awakened from our organised and defended amnesia.

We would be awakened from all those fairy tales that told us we had the best race relations in the world, and that all the land rights issues were dead and buried in the past.

For the six months before the Matakite March started, I threw myself into the campaign to garner support for the idea, and to attract other organisers and participants. This meant every weekend campaigning with Whina Cooper and a bus-load of family and supporters while we visited different marae and meeting venues.

One of Whina’s first decisions was to take the Matakite organisers to Waitara to hear about the Taranaki history of land grievances and their persistent struggle for justice.  Whina had whakapapa links to Taranaki through her mother, and she had also been mentored by Te Rangi Hīroa (Sir Peter Buck) who was a close friend of her father. She was well aware of the Te Atiawa struggle to have their confiscated lands returned.

She also knew that Waitara had a special place in the history of our nation, as it was the place where the first shots were fired in the Taranaki Land Wars which then spread to many other areas of the country.  Even though the Land March itself was not planning to walk through Taranaki lands, Whina saw her modern campaign as being definitely connected to the passive resistance stand taken by Taranaki Maori in the 1870s and 1880s.

The photo by John Miller (above) captures Whina in full flight speaking from the porch of Owae Marae during the 1975 Māui Pōmare celebrations. The following day, we all traveled out the coast to Parihaka, where we were hosted by Aunty Marj and other Taranaki elders, before the Matakite visitors traveled back to Auckland.

There were only about 40 marchers there at Te Hapua near Cape Reinga on that first Spring morning of the March. Despite traveling around the North Island and campaigning for the six months before the march started, it was almost impossible to gauge the level of real support beforehand. Those 40 marchers leaving the Te Hapua marae seemed a very modest contribution to a national debate.

But there was a photo of Whina and her grand-daughter taken on the first day which became our most significant instrument of awakening. The now-iconic picture had been taken by Michael Tubberty of the New Zealand Herald. When it was published, it had an immediate impact on the public awareness of our protest.

In effect, Whina was telling everyone who looked at that image: We haven’t gone away. I’m still here. There’s still work to do. And while I am at it, I am passing on this kaupapa, this mission, to a new generation.

And by the time the marchers reached Auckland City, there were thousands of us walking over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. And, a month later when it arrived on Parliament Grounds in Wellington, you could sense a definite shift in the New Zealand mind – for Māori and Pākehā.

For Māori, many of the key lands rights activists met each other or deepened their existing friendships in what was essentially a month-long wānanga of awakening.

And, for us as Pākehā, we now had to definitely rewrite the stories we had been telling ourselves about our past, about race relations, and about the ongoing theft of Māori land.

After the Land March, the Waitangi Tribunal was soon established, and the political will to address land issues gradually grew stronger. Over the succeeding decades, we have seen definite progress in terms of formal apologies to iwi, financial settlements, the return of some assets, and co-governance arrangements between Maori and the Crown and local authorities.

For myself, I went on to further contribute to the land rights campaigns at Raglan/Whāingaroa and at Bastion Point/Takaparawhā. And then I returned home to Taranaki to explore other aspects of my active citizenship.

6.

IT WAS FORTY YEARS later that I found myself as one of the organisers of another march.  This was the Parihaka Peace Walk – a three-day hikoi to Parihaka Marae to support the New Plymouth Mayor Andrew Judd in his campaign to get better Maori representation on council decision-making.

Andrew Judd had received a major backlash on his council’s decision to establish a Maori Ward for voting in local body elections – with a citizen’s petition forcing a referendum on the issue. 

The vote for a Maori Ward was lost by a landslide, and the controversy exposed a nasty underbelly of continuing racism and white supremacy in the Taranaki community, with Andrew Judd becoming a particular target in media debates and in the streets. (He was the subject of derision by TV commentators, removed as the patron of a New Plymouth club, abused while walking down the main street in the Santa Parade, and spat at in front of his family while shopping at a local supermarket).

Andrew Judd’s response was to describe himself as a “recovering racist”, and he embarked on the three-day walk to Parihaka in order to highlight the state of race relations in Taranaki, and to be a demonstration of a shared commitment to peace and reconciliation. This initiative also attracted hundreds of people from throughout New Zealand who wanted to join in on the journey to Parihaka and affirm the New Plymouth Mayor in his stand.

The Peace Walk started on 15th June 2016, which was paradoxically also the same day that public hearings had been scheduled over a new Waitara Lands Bill being sponsored by the New Plymouth District Council. This Bill was designed to sell the NPDC leasehold lands in Waitara which were still an unresolved issue dating from the confiscation of these lands in the 1860s.

Judd’s own council was essentially carrying on with business-as-usual, while he was off on what some of his critics described as “virtue signaling” about racism.

When I first read about the Waitara Lands Bill, I was astounded by the Council’s resolve to sell this land in the face of an almost universal acknowledgement that this was stolen property. I wondered how it could be, after forty years of real progress with apologies and settlements and reparations following the Maori Land March, that the Taranaki councils and our government were still planning to sell the very lands over which the wars of the 1860s were fought over ... and were doing so in the face of continuing protests from the original owners?

But I was not dis-illusioned. I already knew that they were relying on a widespread amnesia in which to seal the deal.

 

7.

DURING THE PEACE WALK to Parihaka, at the end of each day’s journey, the participants gathered at a local hall in order to have wider community conversations about the issues that we were walking about.

In my own conversations, I thought that this would be a good chance to ask people about what they knew about the Waitara Lands Bill. It was no real surprise perhaps, but most of the people I spoke to knew very little about the history of the Waitara confiscations, nor did they understand what the latest Waitara Lands Bill was trying to achieve.

I realised then that any struggle over these confiscated lands was still going to be an ongoing fight against the forgetting ... especially in the face of the power and privileges that still flow from this historic amnesia.

So after the Peace Walk, I came back home to New Plymouth and wrote up my first paper about the Waitara Lands Bill. I also talked with my fellow trustees of Community Taranaki to see how we could use our organisation to help educate other Pakeha about the issues, and to actively collaborate with the local Waitara hapu, the Taranaki Māori Women’s Network, and what would later be known as the Peace for Pekapeka initiative.

During the campaign that followed, I was interviewed by a reporter on Radio New Zealand about the nature of collective amnesia and how our selective forgetting has consequences for modern-day settlements and negotiations, such as what we were trying to see happen in Waitara.

My belief is that we would have a completely different outcome in the Waitara case if there were more Pākehā people who knew and cared about this history and the responsibilities that they still had in the context of that history. In other words, if there were enough Pākehā who gave a damn.

Actually, it has been my experience that Pākehā are very good at giving a damn — once they have woken up to the facts of what had taken place, and could see how it might be connected to choices being made in the current day.

Pākehā culture is steeped in the notion of a fair go. It is a characteristic that is deeply woven into our national culture. This is one of the reasons a great many of our ancestors came right across the world to live in New Zealand ... because they weren’t getting a fair go in Cornwall, or Devon, or in Scotland or Ireland or wherever else they were emigrating from.

I have found that whenever I have been able to explain to my relations the history and circumstances of a particular issue, they usually end up on the side of trying to give people a fair go. Or at least they become much more determined to treat someone else as they themselves would like to be treated.

But I also found it that, during this particular Waitara Lands campaign, it was almost impossible to try and get someone in the mainstream media to print my own articles on the issue. Almost every submission to the local newspaper, the Taranaki Daily News, was refused ... except for a letter which they ended up publishing on the day the Waitara Lands legislation was passed.

8.

BY THE END OF 2018, it was clear that we were not going to achieve the goal of the New Plymouth District Council giving back this land to the Waitara hapu of Manukorihi and Otaraua.

Yes, the final Waitara Lands deal ended up being much better than when this legislation started. It certainly needed to be. The dial on the negotiations had shifted a little way, but not to the extent of real justice being delivered to the people who most deserved it.

The Waitara Lands Bill was signed into law on 12th December 2018, and it remains a missed opportunity that needed much more political courage than it got.

The NPDC officers would often say that it was the best deal that they could offer, because their hands were tied by financial and legal obligations. But every child of Taranaki will eventually come to understand that the ideas of fiduciary responsibility and perpetual leases are the legal constructions of coercive power and privilege that should not apply at all to stolen property.

That the complete return of these historic lands was never seriously on the negotiating table will be the ongoing shame of this transaction – and the reason why the Council and the Crown are still left with an unresolved grievance for yet another generation.

So this is a story that is not over. As I edit this introduction, it is June 2023 and the Taranaki Daily News has just published a front-page feature on the Waitara Lands.

Without irony, it proclaims that “Not everyone a winner”, as though that in itself is news. While the article doesn't shy away from describing the land as stolen property, it basically goes on to detail what a continuing land grab in the 21st century looks like in practice. 

According to the paper, a significant number of Waitara citizens are feeling hurt and “locked out from ever owning the land they live on”. And to compound the situation, all residents are now facing “astronomical” jumps in land valuations, amidst the worst housing crisis in several generations.

Meanwhile, the NPDC has confirmed that five years after the passage of the Waitara Lands Bill, nearly 60% of the leasehold properties have been converted to freehold. Nearly a quarter of these new freeholds have gone on to have a change of ownership. And amidst all this, there's still a tangle of differing agreements on how the final pots of money generated by the land sales should be spent.

So not over at all. 

Nevertheless, I do suggest that we would be making a mistake to think that this is a justice issue only about land and who-owns-what. The longer story here is that this controversy is as much about the decency of our relationships with one another, and the communities we want to create and bring our children into. And this is a much wider story that asks us to have a very different conversation.

What started at Waitara — all those years ago — has always been a constant invitation for us to raise our gaze beyond the deals and dodgy transactions, and pay attention to the things that will continue to matter for generations to come.

 

9.

IT WILL BE people like Kuia Matarena, or Aunty Marj, who will have the last word. 

Today, she is buried in the Tautara Tuhi Urupa at Urenui Marae and, not unexpectedly, her gravestone includes an inscription about the jobs yet to be done:

Kua oma ahau i te omanga roa.
E te Iwi, e te whanau, e ngaa mokopuna
Kia kaha, kia manawanui, kia uu, kia maia, kia matara!
Kahore ano i mutu te omanga;
Ko koutou ngaa urupa waihotanga o matou.

This has been interpreted as:

I have run the long race. To all my tribal groups, families, grandchildren and those yet to come: 
Be strong, be big hearted, be brave, hold fast, do not give in, be alert and wake up!  
The race is not over!  It is for you, the living graveyards of those who have gone before you, to complete.

 

vivian Hutchinson
June 2023

 

A four-part series first published in THE DAILY NEWS New Plymouth, New Zealand on March 7-14, 1985

4. Britain in Change

by vivian Hutchinson

March 14, 1985 8 min read download newspaper clipping

GREAT BRITAIN GAVE the world the first Industrial Revolution.

The very colonisation of New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the Americas was a direct result of the huge cultural and political transformations that followed.

Today it is Britain that is on the receiving end of a second Industrial Revolution ... the economic and technological revolution of the Information Age.

The impact on the British people is proving no less dramatic ... perhaps it is even more so, as we are watching this transition occur at a much faster rate than the first big shift of 150 years ago.

In a two-month journey throughout the United Kingdom attending the New Economic Agenda conference, I was able to look at many radical changes in the British landscape.

There were positive and inspiring stories of how British spirit was responding to the new opportunities of the "next economy".

But there was also widespread fear, tragedy and division as people became victims of a system that wasn't working for them anymore.

The very week I arrived in England, the papers announced a record 2.2 million people out of work.

That's one in seven.

The picture was much worse for British youth . . . if you were under 25 you had a one in four chance of being on the dole.

There seemed a tremendous fight to hang on to the last vestiges of an Industrial Age that was once the power and guiding spirit of British prestige.

Daily newspapers Were full of campaigns to save local industries, be it shipyards or car factories.

The coal strike was the main talking point of British political life ... and every street corner held a couple of striking miners chanting for funds to fill their buckets.

Their fight was for the survival of their pits and villages and a way of life now deemed uneconomic by the National Coal Board.

Perhaps it is the deepening sense of division that surprised me most while travelling the United Kingdom.

This division is perhaps epitomised in the public dog-fight between Mrs Thatcher and miners' leader Arthur Scargill.

There is also a bitter fight raging between the Government and the Labour-led Greater London Council. The GLC faces the complete chop by the Conservative Government and replacement by appointed public servants.

The divisions have almost a geographical separation as the blighted industrial heartland of the North seems almost a completely different country from the more affluent and Tory-voting South.

To many of the Britons I spoke to, this sense of division in their country was only of fairly recent significance.

Two world wars had given the United Kingdom at least a veneer of national unity and civility.

But the dramatic industrial changes of the past decade have wrought huge cracks in this veneer of unity. And political events over the last three years have served not to heal division ... but to accentuate it.

Britain is under the stress of change.

It is a stress certainly created by the immediate terrorist groups, employment and welfare policies, racial and class prejudice and generational intolerance.

But the deeper background to this stress is the economic and technological transformation from an Industrial Age to an Information Society.

If the speakers at the New Economic Agenda conference are correct then we need to start to redefine our cultural landscape and develop new policies to suit.

British political leadership — be it Mrs Thatcher or Arthur Scargill — seems unable to grasp this initiative.

Their attitudes and fierce debate seem so tightly fixed on a world-view whole reality is clearly slipping from them.

Again, it was within the field of jobs that gave me my personal view to those changes in Britain.

It's clear that there is a lot to do to meet the new entrepreneural needs of the "next economy" ... and many new jobs will be created in the Information Society.

But the economic advisers to the Findhorn conference were in consensus on one major point: There will never be full employment — as we've known it — again.

The place of work in our lives and culture has begun to fundamentally change ... and it is a change that challenges us to explore a variety of responses to the question of jobs.

Britain, of course, has a diverse array of initiatives over its unemployment question. Most of them are reactions to the changing conditions rather than projects that try to address the wider questions before us.

Nevertheless, there was much to explore and learn from . . . perhaps giving us indications for our own efforts here in New Zealand.

I was already familiar with the type of work schemes run by the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) of the British Government. They ran along vaguely similar line to our own Work Skills Programmes here in New Zealand.

Many of the young people were working on community projects, or on council or local body schemes which were in fact subsidising ratepayers with their cheap labour.

Many of the young people I spoke to were cynical of the schemes they were on, and bitter at their prospects ahead

"We're doing men's work on this council scheme," complained one Glaswegian youth to me, "but we are being paid as children . . ."

The Youth Training Schemes (YTS) seemed to be responsible for a major devastation of the British apprenticeship system. Employers in their own uncertainty were not willing to commit themselves to young people over a period of time. They opted for the subsidised one-year scheme rather than creating apprenticeships.

The irony of the situation is that YTS schemes are thus creating a greater skills-gap between the employed and unemployed.

There were, however, many positive programmes being run through the Government schemes. In Northampton I visited an Information Technology (IT) Centre set up to teach young unemployed skills in handling the new information technologies. This centre was part of a MSC-sponsored network around the United Kingdom which has sprung up to fill the skills-gap amongst the unemployed who missed out on computer education at school.

The supervisor who showed me around his scheme remarked that many of the young people who have failed academically seemed to readily respond to computer instruction.

They showed a fascination for computer technology and were learning at a rate not possible before in a school environment.

Graduates from IT centres found ready access to a labour market hungry for such skills.

Of particular interest to me were the MSC schemes set up to encourage the enterprise of the unemployed themselves. These programmes provided a minimum income for the unemployed while they set up in business ideas of their own.

Many local groups also offered support in business and marketing skills.

These programmes followed from surveys which showed that there has been a significant change in the labour market towards part-time work. and self-employment.

Many schools have started to educate students in business skills through establishing Youth Enterprise Schemes. They actually set up model companies owned and operated by the students themselves with teachers and industry leaders acting in an advisory role.

There is a big drive to mobilise business leaders to get involved in creating new jobs in depressed areas.

Industry leaders throughout the United Kingdom have started to shift their entrepreneurial skills out into the local community by seconding staff to regional development agencies and giving advice to new start-ups, or businesses in difficulty.

My own interest in establishing worker co-operatives here in New Zealand, naturally led me to search out elements of the 200-year-old British Co-operative Movement.

Workers' co-operatives add a different perspective to the drive for jobs in Britain as there has been a virtual explosion of new co-operatives being established.

Over the last five years the number of new co-ops has increased at 20% per annum. It is predicted that worker co-ops will offer as many as 25,000 jobs by 1990.

And their success rate is encouraging. More than half the regular small businesses that start-up never make it through the first two years. By contrast, only about 6% of all new co-operatives fail.
The co-operative movement in the United Kingdom is supported by a thriving network of Co-operative Development Agencies (CDA), particularly the ICOM network (Industrial Common Ownership Movement) and its financial wing, ICOF (Industrial Common Ownership Fund).

ICOM is the largest agency and its aims are closely associated with 19th century Christian Socialist ideals. Its model rules are those most often adopted by new worker co-ops, with their emphasis on democratic control by workers of their own enterprises.

London is the home of more than a quarter of all Britain's worker co-ops. It is also the home of the Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB) which has a formal strategy to promote worker co-ops in London.

GLEB offers funding for new start-ups, and helps in "rescue" co-ops ... formed when workers take over an existing, but ailing business. It also supports a structure of training schemes for the local CDA's.

Nick Sharman, GLEB director, sees worker co-operatives as part of the tradition of the Labour movement and a valuable means of democratising London's economy.

"We are keen to encourage co-ops because their flexibility also opens up employment opportunities for women with children, for members of London's ethnic minorities, and for the unemployed ..."

Despite these initiatives in creating new work, it's clear that it's not going to fully meet the job needs of the coming decades.

Some British observers are predicting a leveling out of the unemployment rate at 20% ... or one in five ... at the end of this century.

British unemployment activist Guy Dauncey suggests that we look at future job contracts that encourage people to take one year in five out of the work force, to devote to the parts of our lives not tied to an employed job ... study, family interests, travel, spiritual pursuits ...

This approach would, in effect, redistribute the positive effects of unemployment — time to spare and flexibility for personal and family affairs.

Not only are we having to redefine the place of work in our lives, we are also being challenged to look anew at how we redistribute the wealth of the society. Up until now, "working" has been the major way wealth has been distributed ... enabling people to feed, clothe and house themselves.

Now, with fewer jobs, this whole process is being challenged, and brings us to firmly look at the future of the welfare state.

In Britain, the number of claimants to social security has increased 400% over the last 40 years ... today they have more than 12 million. The range of means-tested benefits has also increased as well — to a present total of about 45 different kinds.

The British system was based on the Beveridge Plan of 1942 which assumed that society would be able to provide full employment for all.

In the "next economy" such a promise cannot still hold true.

The British organisation Basic Income Research Group, is campaigning that all social benefits be replaced by a basic income for all United Kingdom residents, irrespective of their work and marital status.

Such a scheme introduces a hornets' nest into the debate over social welfare.

It would provide a fundamental approach to poverty, greater equality for women and more flexible patterns of work and learning.

It would redefine the whole employment debate by giving people the opportunity to choose not to work at different times through their lives.

It's obvious that a lot more thought and research need to go into it ... but if proven viable, the basic income scheme could provide the basis for social security policies in the 21st century.

* * *

This personal journey throughout Britain left me with a diversity of conclusions. It certainly opened my eyes to the variety of possibilities — good and bad before all of us.

Britain was in a stressful change, and certainly in need of an inspirational leadership that could show its people how to move with the transitions before them.

The prophetic voice I found was not in the halls of Westminster or at the picket-lines of a Welsh village.

I began to hear it on the conference floor at Findhorn ... and then discovered its echo among the community workers establishing co-operatives, supervisors on scattered work schemes, and business leaders in unlikely multinationals.

These were people helping others understand the process of change we are within. Their call was for us to learn new practical and personal skills to cope with these transition times. And their work was to consciously shape a new economic agenda . . . an economics "as if people mattered".

* * *

VIVIAN HUTCHINSON, is the regional manager of the Salvation Army Work Schemes in Taranaki. He has been active over the past six years in local initiatives surrounding unemployment. He was recently selected as a Taranaki delegate to this week's Employment Promotion Conference, representing Taranaki work schemes and community groups.
Last year Mr Hutchinson was invited to join The New Economic Agenda conference in Northern Scotland, and he travelled for two months throughout Britain looking at unemployment projects and co-operative development agencies. 
This is the final of four articles giving a background to the conference and sharing some of the fruits of his journey.

 

by vivian Hutchinson

March 7-14, 1985 45 min read 

“FORTY YEARS AGO, I jumped on a plane and ended up in Scotland at an unusual community and conference venue called Findhorn that seemed to be specialising in talking to angels and growing enormous cabbages. But this conference was talking about Economics.” [...more]  — from 2024 Commentary by vivian Hutchinson

 

A four-part series first published in THE DAILY NEWS New Plymouth, New Zealand on March 7-14, 1985

1. The Party is Over

March 7, 1985 8 min read download newspaper clipping

WE ARE IN the midst of a huge cultural transformation .. . one that is being led by deep economic and technological changes.

I call this a cultural transformation because the economic and technological changes are also having deep effects on our families, our political lives, our spiritual awareness, the arts, and the environment.

It's a peculiar transformation, because despite its deep implication for all of us, you rarely read an in-depth debate of the issues in our daily newspapers . . . and I have yet to see a major TV series investigate its full implications to us as a people.

My own field is employment . . . helping people make a living in the world.

As an administrator for The Salvation Army's Taranaki Work Schemes, I have a particular concern for young people — as half the unemployed in this country are under the age of 21.

Perhaps from the view-point of employment we can begin to view one of the more prominent faces of the transformation we are within.

When I first started with The Salvation Army Work Schemes six years ago, I assumed that the unemployment we were experiencing would be a temporary thing. When the economy looked up (like in the great Depression of the 1930's) people would get plenty of jobs again.

I no longer feel that way.

In fact, as the jobs haven't come and as the economic situation world-wide has got considerably worse . . . I can no longer accept that unemployment today is a re-run of the 1930's.

I think it would be fair to say that many people running Work Schemes around New , Zealand have begun to share this disillusionment. Some of us are getting some very good and encouraging results in our work. But unemployment itself isn't going away.

It's as if we are merely organising the bulk of our unemployed out of sight and out of harms way .. . but we are not as yet working to heal the basic nature of unemployment in our society.

Because I was directly involved in trying to mop up this whole mess, I began to see it as my duty to try and look into just what was going on.

I began to ask myself: Do we really need to be victims of a changing economic system? Or is there something tangible that we as community-based groups can do to contribute to the healing of unemployment in our society?

Several years ago, I began to search out the writings of several international economists who seemed to be putting together a very challenging picture of what really was going on.

Many of these economists had very traditional backgrounds in business or economics . . . but their message was very un-conventional.

These economists were comparing our present economic and technological transformations with what it must have been like living in the midst of the first Industrial Revolution 150 years ago.

At the time, James Watt's peculiar invention of the steam engine rapidly ushered in a whole new wave of technological change that just as quickly had political, cultural, spiritual and ecological ramifications.

Western culture at the time was largely organised around agriculture and the job of feeding people .. . something like 90% of us were employed on the land.

This all changed radically as machines moved on to the land and people were thrust into the cities and colonies to feed the new industrial economic system.

This transformation took the best part of a century to complete. But it became very clear early on that most people had joined the Industrial Society as the
main source of earning a living. We were left with 5% of the people on the land . . . feeding the rest of us.

Today we are participating in what is becoming known as the Second great Industrial Revolution. It is led by a tiny technological insurgent .. . the silicon microprocessor (or chip). And as well as its very evident economic effects, the silicon chip will be responsible for as many political, cultural, spiritual and ecological transformations in the very near future.

One of the major differences between this industrial revolution and the first, is the speed at which things are happening.

The change from agriculture to industry as the basis of our economy took about 100 years to complete.

The change from industry to "the next economy" has actually happened today in little over 20 years.

The major upsetting issue of the last decade has been that (whether our politicians admit it or not) it's clear the old economic rules are no longer working.

It's almost as a concert pianist has returned to his piano after the interval to find his instrument has been completely retuned. His favourite melodies have become cacophanies.

So it is with our sense of economic reality.

The silicon chip has completely retuned our system. And it is only in the past five years that we have begun to piece together a sense of what actually are the emerging ground rules of a new economic agenda.

Perhaps that most famous of these economists that I began to read several years ago, was Dr Fritz Schumacher, a native German who for many years was economic advisor to the British Coal Board.

Schumacher wrote prophetically throughout the sixties and early seventies of an economic system he saw in dynamic change.

In one memorable article he proclaimed that "the party was over".

The party he referred to was the huge consumer and industrial expansion of the fifties and sixties.

The main herald of change for Schumacher was the rising price of energy, particularly oil, meaning a rapid decline in the economic feasibility of our industrial giants.

Schumacher was also one of the first to clearly articulate the impact of new technology of jobs and our way of life generally.

Schumacher's book "Small Is Beautiful" (pub Abacus 1974) steadily became a best-seller around the western world.

In it he called for an economics ". . . as if people mattered" — an economics steeped in the traditional wisdom of mankind . . . an economics that served community development rather than exploiting people.

He also advocated a technology ". . . as if people mattered", and was the founder of the Intermediate Technology Development Group an organisation famous for its work in developing countries.

Schumacher died in September 1977.

We can now look back, however, and see that he was simply the first wave of a whole new tide of economic awareness and analysis.

Towards the end of the Seventies, many leading journals were headlining articles, new books were appearing on sale, and speakers appeared at conferences — all proclaiming that the Industrial Age of the western economic was over and that we were on the brink of something completely different.

In 1982 a new book was released and immediately became an international best-seller. It was "Megatrends" (pub MacDonald and Co 1982) and was written by John Naisbitt, an American corporate consultant and former speechwriter to Lyndon Johnson.

This book was a landmark for me in that it started to piece together the outlines of our next economy.

Naisbitt clearly explains in his book that what we were recognising to be a post-Industrial society emerging around us will come to be called the Information Society. The new economic system will be an economics based on information.

There has been a lot of resistance to this notion. Hard pragmatic business-men haven't taken too kindly to the thought that the exploitation of very solid raw materials will not be the basis of wealth in the future.

Naisbitt's book describes the current transformation with particular reference to employment.

The real increase in work since the 1950s has been in the information jobs.

More than 65% of Americans now work with information as programmers. teachers, clerks, secretaries, accountants, stockbrokers, managers, insurance people. bureaucrats, lawyers, bankers and technicians.

And many more hold information jobs within manufacturing industries.

Of the 19 million new jobs created in the US in the 1970s, only 11% were in the manufacturing or goods producing sector. So nearly 90% of the new jobs were being created fully within the new economy of information.

One commentator has remarked that we have clearly worked ourselves out of the manufacturing business and into the thinking business.

New York City — the leading light of industrial America — has lost half the manufacturing jobs it had in 1947. The city lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs between 1977 and 1980 alone.

It's a picture very reminiscent of the agricultural job losses in the first Industrial Revolution. And its not just an American phenomenon . . . if you look at the New Zealand newspapers over the past five years you'll see a very similar and sorry story.

This revolution isn't only in employment.

The information economy is turning most of our preconceived notions of economics on its head.

The new wealth of the future is know-how.

Says Naisbitt: "In the Industrial Society the strategic resource was Capital. A lot of people may have known how to build a steel plant, but not many people could get the money to build one . . ."

"But in our new economy, the strategic resource is information. And the new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many..."

"And knowledge is not subject to the same laws of conservation. It can be created, destroyed, and through communication regenerates itself.

"In the Agricultural period, man's livelihood was pit against nature. In industrial society man was pit against the tools and raw resources he could fabricate.

"But today in the information society, man's economic system is based on getting in touch with himself and communicating with each other . . ."

This transformation from industrial to information age is not theory. It's been very much a fact-of-life for us for the past 10 years.

But this new economic theory is just that — very new. And were still searching out and developing answers to the question of what is the new economic agenda?

How in the midst of this great period of change can we truly develop an economics as if people mattered?

And what do we do with the massive casualties of this transformation ... particularly the unemployed and our most immediate concern for the future of our younger people?

Last October, as a result of my own work with employment, I was asked to join an international gathering in Northern Scotland to discuss just what were the elements of our next economy.

The conference was entitled "The New Economic Agenda" and was attended by 200 leading economists, entrepreneurs, business consultants and community organisers. It's aim was to explore our new economic landscape in the 1980s and 1990s from a perspective of both local and global change.

Part two: The next economy — some of the streams of thought that led to the New Economics conference.

* * *

VIVIAN HUTCHINSON, is the regional manager of the Salvation Army Work Schemes in Taranaki. He has been active over the past six years in local initiatives surrounding unemployment. He was recently selected as a Taranaki delegate to this week's Employment Promotion Conference, representing Taranaki work schemes and community groups.
Last year Mr Hutchinson was invited to join The New Economic Agenda conference in Northern Scotland, and he travelled for two months throughout Britain looking at unemployment projects and co-operative development agencies. 
This is the first of four articles giving a background to the conference and sharing some of the fruits of his journey.

 

 

A four-part series first published in THE DAILY NEWS New Plymouth, New Zealand on March 7-14, 1985

2. The Next Economy

by vivian Hutchinson

March 12, 1985 8 min read download newspaper clipping

LAST OCTOBER, a conference on The New Economic Agenda was hosted in a magnificent lecture hall overlooking the Findhorn Bay in Northern Scotland. It was convened by the Findhorn Foundation, an international educational community who, over the last 10 years, has hosted many major gatherings on international affairs.

This gathering brought together several streams of thought and activity that has been part of the ongoing work to make sense of our new economic landscape.

It was perhaps largely inspired by a former member of the Findhorn Community ... American entrepreneur Paul Hawken. Hawken was the founder of Erewhon a now famous American mail-order supplier of natural foods. Today he runs a successful tool company and writes for many journals as a freelance contributor.

It was in an obscure journal called Coevolution Quarterly that Hawken began contributing his articles on the present economic transformation.

His own perspective on our economic changes developed the earlier ideas of Dr Fritz Schumacher .. . and were equally as challenging: "We have not been through a decade of inflation, but through a decade when we refused to deal with the inherent limitations of the industrial economy.

"We do not have high unemployment, but off-employment, millions of people working at jobs which make no sense, which accomplish little in the way of common good.

"We do not have high interest rates, but rather a culture that has borrowed too long and cannot pay its debt to itself.

"We have an economy that is no longer economical because it is part of a living system, and like any living system, it is bound by growth, development and decay . . ."

Hawken's articles began to attract attention throughout America and he began to be beseiged by publishers encouraging him to write a book, which finally went on sale late last year. Entitled The Next Economy it gives practical and pragmatic advice on the transformation from the Industrial to Information Age.

Hawken argues that we actually have two economic systems around at the moment. One, the Industrial Economy, is on its way out. The other, the Information Economy, is still emerging.

"The current economic crisis," says Hawken, "only exists in institutions of the large scale Industrial economies. Their time is up.

"People in their everyday lives are intuitively, or by experience, finding out how to avoid being victims and discover the new opportunities.

"Economic life is moving to a more mature stage than the Industrial Age it was in .. ."

Hawken's analysis is challenging to the depressing forecasts quoted to us daily in our newspapers.

One major reason for these depressing forecasts is that most of the economic indicators are linked to a way of life that is in its twilight years.

It's a bit like gauging the health of a family by only taking the bloodpressure of the grandparents.

The book The Next Economy takes a backward look at how we got to where we are today.

The basis for the development of the Industrial Economy for most of this century was the continuing decline in the price of energy (especially oil) relative to labour costs.

Technology embodied the energy and saved labour. Because energy costs declined while energy consumption rose, the economy expanded. It produced goods more cheaply, wages rose, prices of goods declined, the demand for goods increased.

In the Fifties and Sixties we had what is now referred to as the "party" years on the Industrial Economy. It was the party of its last hours.

There was an unprecedented cheap-energy-based upsurge in the value of labour and the standard of living soared.

There was also a shadow side to this rapid expansion ... the goods produced were often shoddy, the work was boring for many people, the environment was desecrated in ways never before thought possible.

Meanwhile these concerns were hardly within the attention of our political, economic and business leaders who were caught up in these "party" times.

The "Next Economy" was ushered in by the price of oil. From 1973 its cost has risen 500%. The real price of oil is back where it was in 1910.

The value of labour has also declined. In the USA real wages have dropped 16% in the last 10 years.

Schumacher was one of the first to say that the "party" was over back in 1973. But it has taken many of our cultural leaders 10 years to get over that hangover and wake up to the fact that the whole context of our economic system has changed.

And the new economic landscape before us includes some surprising anomalies ...

Bankruptcies are at a record high while also new business start-ups are also at a record level.

As full-time jobs disappear, we are seeing an upsurge in more flexible part-time employment and self-employment.

Large-scale institutions from governments to multinationals are effectively downscaling to a more feasible size.

Workers are being increasingly offered ownership in business.

While Paul Hawken argues that the new economics will be based on information, he defines this information in much wider terms than just the production and distribution of "data".

In his view, human imagination, intelligence, design, utility, craftsmanship, service and durability are all components of the new Informational economy, and the basis of new wealth in the future.

Quality, service, openness and responsiveness to customers and their needs are what will enable businesses to prosper in the "Next Economy".

When I joined the conference last October, I found that there had already been several other major gatherings which sought to bring together the scattered threads of this new economic theory. Two such gatherings deserve special mention here.

Last June the heads of government of the western world were meeting at their economic summit at London's Lancaster House. Around the corner at the Royal Overseas League ... another economic summit was in full swing.

It was dubbed TOES — the acronym for "The Other Economic Summit" and was a historic gathering for advocates of the "New Economic" agenda.

It cost $NZ52,000 to mount and participants came from as far afield as Chile, India and the United States.

Like their heavyweight political counterparts they also issued a communique at the end of the conference. But this press release called for more small-scale, conservationist technologies, greater local self-reliance and participation in economic planning, more popular access to land and writing off of the Third World debt.

Many such proposals were simply laughed at by the political heavyweights who called them "utopianism and "... a return to the Stone Age".

But a closer look at the papers presented at the conference showed that the speakers could definitely back up their claims and proposals in clearly pragmatic terms.

Dutch Government projections presented at the conference gave one such instance.

They indicate that giving priority to environmental and energy saving measures would produce GNP growth of 27% between 1980 and the year 2000 ... only 2% less than that produced by conventional economic policies.

Hot on the heels of TOES conference was an equally unusual conference convened at the London School of Economics.

This gathering contributed a different face to the debate on the "next economy" as it brought together several London leaders at the top of "big business" circles.

Hosting the conference were members of a London-based group called "The Business Network". Last year, Francis Kinsman, a member of the network, interviewed 30 senior managers on what they saw is the main issues ahead for big business in the 1980's.

His interview list included such figures as John Harvey-Jones ( chairman of ICI), Sir Peter Parker (ex British Rail), Sir Jeremy Morse (chairman of Lloyds Bank) and Clive Thornton (formerly of Abbey National Building Society).

Kinsman found amongst these managers a remarkable call for a "new initiative" in their business affairs ... one that stresses the very same human and social requirements listed by Paul Hawken in his analysis of the "next economy".

"These people have to think in the long-term," says Kinsman, "... they are entrepreneurs who have grasped the essence of what the informational economy of the future will mean for their companies.

"Their fundamental message could be written on the back of a postage stamp: people matter most. The high unemployment rate has obviously had its effect on the thinking of those I interviewed. There is much comment along the lines of humanising British business ...".

The Business Network were co-sponsors of the October Findhorn conference. It seemed perfectly timed for a ripening of the debate-in-process on new economics. It also brought together a surprising range of people from all sections of society and from many countries in the world.

For me, there were some challenging conclusions, which, if true, will certainly transform the way most of us think and act in the next few years.

Part three: The Findhorn Conference ... some challenging conclusions.

* * *

VIVIAN HUTCHINSON, is the regional manager of the Salvation Army Work Schemes in Taranaki. He has been active over the past six years in local initiatives surrounding unemployment. He was recently selected as a Taranaki delegate to this week's Employment Promotion Conference, representing Taranaki work schemes and community groups.
Last year Mr Hutchinson was invited to join The New Economic Agenda conference in Northern Scotland, and he travelled for two months throughout Britain looking at unemployment projects and co-operative development agencies. 
This is the second of four articles giving a background to the conference and sharing some of the fruits of his journey.

 

A four-part series first published in THE DAILY NEWS New Plymouth, New Zealand on March 7-14, 1985

3. Findhorn Conference

by vivian Hutchinson

March 13, 1985 8 min read download newspaper clipping

THE TRANSITION FROM an Industrial Society to an Information Society represents the most major reconstitution of our way of life that we have known outside wartime.

It was against these rapidly changing times that the New Economic Agenda conference was convened last October at Findhorn in Northern Scotland.

It was attended by 200 leading economists, entrepreneurs, business consultants and community organisers. Its aim was to explore our new economic landscape in the 1980s and 90s from a perspective of both local and global change.

My own contribution to the gathering was from a local perspective. I gave workshops on community-based initiatives surrounding unemployment in New Zealand and also spoke on the emerging worker co-operative movement in this country.

It was intriguing for me to put our local experience against the international landscape and the tapestry of economic theory being woven by the economists at the conference.

It was encouraging to find that our local experience was very much in resonance with events happening everywhere in the western world at this time.

The logo for the conference was an Apple computer surrounded by the Christian symbols of bread, wine and fishes. The keynote of this image was that our rapid economic transformation needs to be matched with positive cultural and spiritual values.

Dr Fritz Schumacher summed this up when he called for an economics" . as if people mattered".

The conference in no way sought to dogmatically define what is still an ongoing debate. The 200 participants met throughout the week in lectures, workshops and audiovisual presentations which each gave a different perspective and viewpoint to our current economic transformation.

Every day had a different theme: The Next Economy, People Matter Most, The New Local Economic Order, Business As Service, The Role of Multinationals and The Economics of Ecology and Development.

Charles Handy, a former oil executive and professor at the London School of Economics, began the conference with a talk on "The Future of Work", which was also the title of his new book exploring the rapid changes to our working lives.

Handy predicts that the "next economy" will force us to take a whole new approach to shaping our workstyles.

The standard 40-hour week, one job workstyle was a dying way of life. In the future we will be gaining a livelihood from a mixture of areas. There will be a greater emphasis on part-time and flexible work contracts More people will be paid in fees rather than through wages.

And, as Handy cautions, our political and community leaders will have to start taking the lead in creating new attitudes towards the place of work in our future culture.

Guy Dauncey (of the British Unemployment Resource Network) warns that we shouldn't kid ourselves that there's going to be one magic answer to unemployment.

Dauncey sees a "new local economic order" emerging which will be discovering quite a variety of answers to unemployment, each matched to an equal variety of circumstances.

Dauncey has been lecturing for the past five years on the transformative potential within the unemployment crisis.

He sees enterprise trusts and boards being set up with local community backing, co-operative development agencies, community businesses and workshops, science parks and a host of related developments. His talk to the conference was illustrated with current exploratory examples in the United Kingdom.

It is in locally-based initiatives that Dauncey sees the key to healing unemployment. New jobs in the future won't come from retraining people in the ways of the old Industrial Age. They will spring up out of the cracks of our twilight economic structure.

Our best efforts at present are to spread the attitudes and skills of enterprise and self-help amongst the unemployed and local groups so that they respond to their own changing situation.

Jonathon Porritt of Friends Of The Earth spoke of the political implications of the new economics.

Porritt believes the "next economy" is also forcing a whole new ball-game for our western political system as well.

We are moving beyond the classical left-right paradigm of the political spectrum. The future debate will rage between those who have a separatistic view of economic and cultural life, and those who see our culture in more wholistic terms.

Porritt gave an eloquent call at the conference for us to redefine our conventional view of wealth.

"At an individual level today, wealth means possessing the symbols of affluence - consumer durables and credit cards, and being rich enough to have a huge overdraft.

"In the new economic agenda, the wealthy will be those who have the independence and education to enhance the real quality of their lives.

"The poor will be those who look back to an age when money might have, but never quite did, buy happiness ..."

Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef talked of his own experiences as a "barefoot" economist and also called for a fresh cultural definition of wealth ... one that focusses on human needs than material gains.

"It is these very needs that will have to be built into the basic formulas that constitute such things as GNP (Gross National Product) ..."

Max-Neef was the 1983 recipient of the Right Livelihood Award which is known by many as "The Alternative Nobel Prize". This annual award is presented by a Swedish group who feel that Nobel's original intentions for humanity were no longer being fulfilled.

Says Max-Neef: "I worked for a number of years as an economist for several international organisations. I was engaged in efforts to diagnose poverty, to measure it and devise indicators which might reveal the magnitude of the extremely poor.

"After costly seminars and even costlier conferences called to communicate the findings ... they always seemed to recommend that the most urgent work to be done was to allocate more funds for further research!

"At a certain point I began to feel I was participating in a rather obscene ritual.

"So it happened that I severed my ties with the economic establishment and 'stepped into the mud'. I became, and still remain, a 'barefoot economist'."

There was quite a large Swedish delegation to the conference, including a prominent Swedish Parliamentarian. They held a special evening presentation on how the next economy was affecting their way of life.

They also chose the conference as the occasion to announce the 1984 recipients of the Right Livelihood Award. The recipients were all women active in community projects in the Third World.

Peter Schwartz, the chief planning officer of Royal Dutch Shell, spoke on how multi-national companies are being forced to change their structures and policies in the face of the new economic agenda.

"Their organisations are too big, unweildy and not responsive to the changing landscape around them", says Schwartz.

"I have often wondered what the last dinosaur must have felt standing in the swamps as the mud slowly turned to ice around its legs ... looking around and rather stupidly wondering: 'When are things going to get back to normal?"

Schwartz asserts that economics follows the same sort of evolutionary course of long periods of relative expansion and growth marked by transitions — phases in which we have sharp changes and shocks. And these phases are very important because the rules differ for each of them.

The rapid transition from Industrial to Information Age is just such a sharp shock to the whole system.

"...And if multinationals don't quickly begin to change. they will find themselves with their legs slowly also turning to ice."

Maureen Smith was one of the most interesting speakers at the conference. She had been a resident of the Findhorn Community for three years, but was also maintaining her occupation as a stockbroker with 10 years experience on the London Stock Exchange.

She gave a workshop on "Socially Responsible Investment on the Stock Exchange" with practical examples of how she acts as agent for a considerable fund, investing particularly in local body stocks.

Her own philosophy was particularly challenging.

"Money comes to all of us marked; marked with the soul struggle of others. It does not come clean, but bloodied in the enormous battles of anothers soul.

"The inner life of money must be its transformative potential and I feel that as such I experience something of the possibility of transformation in myself.

"Of itself, money is sterile, empty and meaningless. But with the love energy behind its doors to many peoples hearts are opened.

"Thinking globally and acting locally" was definitely one of the guiding principles of the Findhorn conference, whether in business, community or personal affairs.

Findhorn stressed this local connection by inviting several Scottish speakers who described their local initiatives.

There were speakers from the Scottish Highlands and Islands Development Board, and Scottish Co-operative Development Agency and representatives from community business.

Chns Elphick related his experiences as a community worker in the depressed welfare housing district of Easterhouse (in Glasgow).

This area of 50,000 people were cleared from the infamous Gorbals slums of Glasgow during the 1960s and re-housed in huge sterile estates with little local employment, entertainment facilities or even a shopping centre.

The result was widespread vandalism and crime as despair and alienation overtook the town planners dream of a new start for the slum dwellers.

Chris Elphick is employed by the Easterhouse Festival Society whose aim is to try and find ways through which the community could celebrate itself despite its depressing circumstances.

Much of their work is centred in promoting the arts, and job creation through developing the local economy of Easterhouse itself.

Says Elphick "Our work is concerned with providing opportunities for people to explore their creative potential to unlock their innermost hopes and aspirations and help people open doors which replace despair and dereliction with hope and dignity.

"We want our area to flourish ... and that cannot be done without a vision."

This is very much a potted portrait of a diverse conference.

There were many other speakers and workshops ranging from "the economics of ecology" to the corporate philosophy of the Scandanavian airline SAS.

For me, the conference raised perhaps as many questions as it began to answer. But as it began to close, I was left with a deep conviction that is still with me.

That there is no need for us to be passive victims of the economic transformation that surrounds us ... in fact, the reverse is the case.

We are very much needed as active participants taking personal and local initiatives to get to grips with our new economic agenda.

Being my first trip to the United Kingdom, I took the opportunity over the next two months of travelling around the Isles, taking time to investigate just how the "next economy.' was taking shape among British people ... and how they were responding to the rapid changes of the last decade.

I naturally navigated towards my own interests of unemployment projects and worker co-operative development centres.

The trip for me was a picture of Britain in dramatic change a change which we in New Zealand are rapidly on the heels of.

Part four: Britain in change -- notes from a personal journey.

* * *

VIVIAN HUTCHINSON, is the regional manager of the Salvation Army Work Schemes in Taranaki. He has been active over the past six years in local initiatives surrounding unemployment. He was recently selected as a Taranaki delegate to this week's Employment Promotion Conference, representing Taranaki work schemes and community groups.
Last year Mr Hutchinson was invited to join The New Economic Agenda conference in Northern Scotland, and he travelled for two months throughout Britain looking at unemployment projects and co-operative development agencies. 
This is the third of four articles giving a background to the conference and sharing some of the fruits of his journey.