I was listening over the web today to this segment on Radio New Zealand. Searching through and trying to find the meat of the interaction, and the attitudes behind both the interviewer and the interviewees gave me some really intriguing food for thought.

I look for these kinds of controversies and for points of weakness in famous people's lives, because it offers a great opportunity to learn about the person's character, and about the culture that these things happen in.

To understand these interviews, you'll have to know a couple words from the New Zealand lingo. Paheka (emphasis on the first syllable) is "white people." The word that sounds like "Modee" is "Maori" (the native new zealand people). "MP" means "Member of Parliament."

Listen to the interviews streamed from the Radio New Zealand website:

• First interview (1.3mb mp3)
• Second interview (3.7mb mp3)

This has been a big to do over the last several days in the New Zealand mass media. There was this incident, and a similar incident where another minority party member - Rodney Hide - decided to use taxpayer money to fund several international trips for himself and his wife. Rodney Hide when he was found out immediately apologised publicly and committed to paying back the $10,000 he had spent. This mea culpa was applauded by someone on one of the Radio New Zealand's panels that day. It's fascinating to see a society which understands that mea culpas are good - and that they mean that a person with public responsibilities will be successful at reforming his actions. In the Usa, the attitude is the opposite. Public figures here (for instance George Bush the 43rd) never apologise. Because once you apologise, rancourous people latch onto the sin, and rub it in your face, and bring you down with it. It's prudent in the Usa to never ever admit to wrongdoing if you are in the public eye. So, in this regard, New Zealand is a much more mature and friendly society.

However, with this other incident with a member of parliament not adhering to what he said he would do... I see a less admirable side of New Zealand. It was surreal to figure out what was happening. The interviewer has a blind spot.

• He should be seeing that the Maori MP is pointing out a couple very important things - one is that a person needs to maintain a good work/life balance - this is important even in order to keep being effective at whatever tasks he is given to do on the job.

• He should be seeing that it's important to offer people some measure of flexibility with their work. I insist on this, myself, whenever I'm involved in some project at the behest of someone. Sometimes you can't keep your word, because of extraneous circumstances, or because what you had originally agreed to wasn't the best way to approach the project.

• Thirdly, the interviewer should be seeing that the Maori MP was making salient points in his reply - even if he was a bit rough around the edges in how he stated these things.

  • Using the phrase "puritanical bullshit" is a way of saying that there are differences between Maori culture and ethnic european culture. It's more important to be effective at what you do, than it is to do it in the manner you were told to do it in. The Maori apparently recognise this fact in a way that ethnic europeans in New Zealand do not.

  • Talking about the renegging on treaty obligations was not intended as a way of logically justifying the trip to Paris. Instead, it was a way of pointing out that there is a difference between substantive and non-substantive things. Taking care of business in Brussels by scheduling a meeting with an important person, and then being footloose and fancy-free by taking off to Paris the next day is relatively speaking a non substantive thing. I wasn't following the NZ news about the offshore rights thing which is brought up - but it sounds to me that it is an incredibly substantive thing. The europeans who settled in New Zealand have certain agreements with those people who were there first... and those have been ignored, and land and rights have been stolen - just like they were in Australia, Canada, and the Usa.

In his blindspot, the interviewer didn't see these things I speak of, but instead saw "bad character" - which to him, was a very palpable object in his world which he felt he could reach out and grasp. The thing that was so surreal to me when listening to these interviews was that I recognised that believing in "bad character" is the same sort of intellectual poison as the other similar conception, which is more common in the Usa - believing that someone is an irredeemable "bad person." It certainly is more benign to believe in "bad character" than it is to believe in "bad people."

Yet and still, it leads to grievous errors in judgement. Unlike the "bad people" idea, the belief in "bad character" would tend to allow for the fact that people are not static - they change and develop over time. However, as I have illustrated here, even the more tame belief tends to lead to blindspots - where you can't rightly assess motivation, and cultural differences, and differences in ways of thinking between two people.

I am adamant that it's proper to believe in "bad actions" - but to believe in "bad character" or "bad people," is only a manner of chasing after a mirage. Actions can be weighed against other actions, in a very reasoned way.

So today I learned that there are a couple things that New Zealanders really value - the idea of "a person's word is his bond" - and perhaps in certain cases, they also really expect obedience to authority.

I've heard that bullying at the workplace is a very big complaint of expats in New Zealand. I see how certain uncivilised bosses might have internalised this cultural value of "the word being the bond" - but they also might give slack to the expat, and when that employee seeks to use the flexibility he thinks he has, he might end up at the brunt of a lot of abuse. This is how things work with poor ethnically european people in the States anyway - they tend to internalise certain values from their society, but then they openly criticise other values - and then when they get drunk, they might end up acting in a way that doesn't make sense because of this "cognitive dissonance."

I am also beginning to recognise why the NZ immigration point system represents such a difficult set of hurdles in my estimation - because it only caters to those who have played by the rules their whole lives. It doesn't work for people who have lived unconventional lives. Thankfully, there is a back door where if you get permanent residency in Australia, you can also live and work in New Zealand.