The Weekend: The illusion of choice
Over the past two years, The Spinoff has published more than 130 entries in our Cost of Being series. We got off to a shaky start, with a number of readers believing that presenting poor people's spending habits was glamourising poverty (bad) and presenting rich people's spending habits was celebrating wealth (even worse).
Thankfully, as more and more New Zealanders – and yes, they are all written by real people – shared their financial realities, the real reason for the Cost of Being's popularity has revealed itself. We are all nosy and we are all judgy.
What a joy it is to get such a peek into a stranger's life, and then to be able to quietly judge all of their financial decisions. We all make so many decisions every day that it can be equal parts comforting and aspirational to see how others choose differently.
And that's the key part: choices. We aren't judging people, we're judging their choices. As if all choices happen in the same reality.
This week's Cover Story was Alex Casey's excellent deep-dive into why so many New Zealand women get botox. She spoke to dozens of women who got the treatment and was surprised by how positively they spoke about its effects. But even those who had no regrets and were happy to keeping doing it questioned whether or not this choice they had made was really a choice at all. Did they really want to have a smooth forehead or had societal conditioning, ageism and sexism all combined to give the impression that this just had to be done?
The judgement and shame around 'cosmetic' spending is perhaps only rivalled by judgement about alcohol. If you used the Cost of Being as a sample of the population, you'd think New Zealanders are all sober. This is obviously not true but I suspect no one really wants to reveal how much they spend on something as 'non-essential' as alcohol lest they be judged, albeit anonymously, for it.
Two days ago, while launching Rotorua's first ever 'beat team' to patrol the city, police minister Mark Mitchell questioned how many of the city's rough sleepers were really homeless. 'From my own experience many of the rough sleepers have got somewhere to go,' he said. 'It's more a lifestyle choice for them.'
He's probably right. Many rough sleepers technically have other places they could go. But I wonder if Mitchell has considered what sort of choices are out there if the preferred one is to sleep on the street in the middle of winter.
I love reading every Cost of Being entry and, yes, I love to scratch my head at some of the random choices people make. But every once in a while I have to remind myself that no choice is made in a vacuum, and sometimes a 'choice' is just a means of survival.
Want to contribute to the Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here.
The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week
Feedback of the week
'I'm in my late 30s and feel really similarly about all the points in the article. I'm really fucking vain and I want to look my best, but I also feel really strongly this is yet another patriarchal and capitalist pressure on feminine-coded bodies.
I'm also a high school teacher very aware of all the shit that is pouring through the sponsored social media posts peppering my girl students' algorithms and I am rebelling by allowing my age to see seen on my face – side note, my frown lines are hard won and can be weaponized against a class of unruly year 9s or 10s.'
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The Weekend: The illusion of choice
Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was. Over the past two years, The Spinoff has published more than 130 entries in our Cost of Being series. We got off to a shaky start, with a number of readers believing that presenting poor people's spending habits was glamourising poverty (bad) and presenting rich people's spending habits was celebrating wealth (even worse). Thankfully, as more and more New Zealanders – and yes, they are all written by real people – shared their financial realities, the real reason for the Cost of Being's popularity has revealed itself. We are all nosy and we are all judgy. What a joy it is to get such a peek into a stranger's life, and then to be able to quietly judge all of their financial decisions. We all make so many decisions every day that it can be equal parts comforting and aspirational to see how others choose differently. And that's the key part: choices. We aren't judging people, we're judging their choices. As if all choices happen in the same reality. This week's Cover Story was Alex Casey's excellent deep-dive into why so many New Zealand women get botox. She spoke to dozens of women who got the treatment and was surprised by how positively they spoke about its effects. But even those who had no regrets and were happy to keeping doing it questioned whether or not this choice they had made was really a choice at all. Did they really want to have a smooth forehead or had societal conditioning, ageism and sexism all combined to give the impression that this just had to be done? The judgement and shame around 'cosmetic' spending is perhaps only rivalled by judgement about alcohol. If you used the Cost of Being as a sample of the population, you'd think New Zealanders are all sober. This is obviously not true but I suspect no one really wants to reveal how much they spend on something as 'non-essential' as alcohol lest they be judged, albeit anonymously, for it. Two days ago, while launching Rotorua's first ever 'beat team' to patrol the city, police minister Mark Mitchell questioned how many of the city's rough sleepers were really homeless. 'From my own experience many of the rough sleepers have got somewhere to go,' he said. 'It's more a lifestyle choice for them.' He's probably right. Many rough sleepers technically have other places they could go. But I wonder if Mitchell has considered what sort of choices are out there if the preferred one is to sleep on the street in the middle of winter. I love reading every Cost of Being entry and, yes, I love to scratch my head at some of the random choices people make. But every once in a while I have to remind myself that no choice is made in a vacuum, and sometimes a 'choice' is just a means of survival. Want to contribute to the Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here. The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week Feedback of the week 'I'm in my late 30s and feel really similarly about all the points in the article. I'm really fucking vain and I want to look my best, but I also feel really strongly this is yet another patriarchal and capitalist pressure on feminine-coded bodies. I'm also a high school teacher very aware of all the shit that is pouring through the sponsored social media posts peppering my girl students' algorithms and I am rebelling by allowing my age to see seen on my face – side note, my frown lines are hard won and can be weaponized against a class of unruly year 9s or 10s.'
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Coffee coloured people by the score: Aotearoa music and the melting pot myth
How did New Zealanders fall so hard for a musical celebration of multiculturalism that they made it a Top 10 hit – twice? In their song 'Melting Pot', the English songwriters Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway propose a simple solution to racial conflict. Take a giant industrial vat, fill it with body parts of assorted ethnic origin, simmer for a century, and presto! 'Coffee-coloured people by the score'! The utopian idea of an homogenous monoculture had already been kicking around for a while by the time Cook and Greenaway made the first recording of 'Melting Pot' with their band Blue Mink in 1969. The melting pot metaphor for an assimilation of races into one uniform people crops up in American literature as far back as the 19th century. But even if the songwriters' intentions – 'a recipe for a get-along scene', as the lyric giddily puts it – were noble in an age-of-Aquarius, peace-and-love kind of way, the casual inclusion of such ethnic slurs as 'Red Indian' and 'Yellow Chinkee' betrays an underlying colonial worldview. Blue Mink's record was a big hit in half a dozen countries, and nowhere was it bigger than in New Zealand where it reached number two in early 1970. For a long time it hadn't been too hard for Pākehā to convince themselves that such a monoculture was inevitable and that everyone was happy about it. Before World War Two, Māori society had been mostly rural and somewhat invisible to urban Pākehā. The mantra that New Zealand had the 'best race relations in the world' was solemnly intoned by politicians and recycled in national publicity. But by the early '60s, with almost three-quarters of the Māori population now living in urban areas, disparities between the economic status of Māori and Pākehā were staring government in the face. So the government commissioned the Hunn Report, a set of recommendations for assisting Māori to acquire parity with Pākehā – an urgent matter if the country was to continue to boast about racial harmony. While the report may have been motivated by ideals of equality, it essentially concluded that social advancement for Māori would be achieved through integration into the world of the Pākehā. But over the next two decades the widening gap in employment and income, the rise of activist groups such as Nga Tamatoa, and such high-profile actions as the Māori Land March of 1975 and Bastion Point occupation of 1977-1978 all indicated that 'a great big melting pot' was going to be neither the answer nor the reality. Still the song wouldn't go away. Nearly 20 years after Blue Mink's original hit, 'Melting Pot' was a hit once again, this time in a local cover version by When the Cat's Away. Formed and fronted by five powerful women singers as a riposte to a male-dominated music industry, the Cats were a highly successful touring act with a repertoire comprised mostly of cover songs that audiences recognised and that the singers could have fun with on stage. 'Melting Pot' was one of these old favourites and, when they released it as a single, it became a national number one. What did New Zealanders like so much about this song that it was even more successful on its second orbit, when its recipe for social reform was so clearly out of date? For some, it was familiarity. It pushed the nostalgia button, which is wired in most humans to override normal critical functions. For others, including those who might not have heard it first time around, the lyric was superseded by the performance itself: five New Zealand women of Māori, Pākehā and Rarotongan descent, all vocal virtuosi, demonstrating their musical unity in a blend that was more powerful than the song's simplistic plea for cultural fusion. The song might be silly, still there was some ideal represented in the Cats' performance that a lot of New Zealanders evidently responded to. Whatever the conflicts and upheavals of the previous two decades, it at least sounded like things were going to be alright. And all this was combined with – and perhaps ultimately subsumed by – the Cats' overall message of female empowerment. Now, more than 50 years after it was written, it still pops up regularly in classic hits playlists, and when four of the Cats reunited in October 2023 for a concert in memory of one of their number, the late Margaret Urlich, it was a crowd-pleaser all over again. A summer-themed version of the Gregg's 'Different Faces' ad, 1970. When the Cat's Away were not the first singers to present an idealised view of New Zealand's race relations. In the same year that Blue Mink's original version of 'Melting Pot' hit the charts, nightly ad breaks on the country's sole television network began to feature a 50-second jingle for Gregg's coffee and would remain in rotation for much of the decade. It opened with the lines: 'Different faces, many races, living in the sun / good times to remember where all may live as one.' Sung with soulful conviction by former Sounds Unlimited frontman Alan Galbraith, this pop ballad-in-miniature plays over a fast-cut visual collage. A pipe-smoking, coffee-sipping Pākehā man stands on a city balcony, looking on as a cross-section of New Zealanders go about their daily routines, 'living in a place where each is free to go his way…' There are elderly couples, signwriters, students, hippie protesters, children, plus a couple of gratuitous rear-view shots of a woman in a miniskirt, cropped to show her only from below the waist. Among the predominantly Pākehā faces are several Asian and Māori ones. It is claimed to be the first non-animated television commercial in which Māori appear. But 'Different Faces' had echoes of an earlier song. Back in 1963, two years after the Hunn report, the Kini Quartet, a Māori vocal group from Gisborne, enjoyed a moment in the national spotlight with a record that delicately and poignantly illuminated both the hopes and hypocrisies of New Zealand's so-called race relations. 'Under the Sun' opens with a long chord and a solemn proclamation. It has been written in the Book for Man That all men are equal under the sun… Martin Kini's Biblical baritone is soon joined by a guitar playing a familiar jinga-jick rhythm – the classic Māori strum – while the voices of Joe Williams and Esther and Barney Taihuka slide into harmony behind him as he imagines a land, free from war, inequality, poverty or any of the other ills of the world. There is no war and so no pain All are as one Under the sun In the land of the free in our own country Where our babies are taught as one… For many Māori, there was a marked contrast between the song and lived experience. In a town such as Pukekohe, there had been recent cases of barber's shops, picture theatres, swimming pools and hotels imposing their own colour bans. Elsewhere Māori children were still being punished for speaking te reo in school. Babies 'taught as one'? Only if they conformed to the monoculture. Whose country was it, and free for who? Like the Kini Quartet, the song's author, Margaret Raggett, came from Gisborne, born at the height of the Depression. Her mother was Irish Pākehā, her father part-Māori, but the pair never married, and Margaret – who was always known as Tiny – was brought up by her solo mother. Life was tough and music was her refuge. She taught herself piano and guitar and began writing songs, even before she was at secondary school. Tiny married her childhood sweetheart, Bill Raggett, and the pair set up home not far from Te Poho o Rawiri marae. The marae was the hub of the local community and a hotbed of musical activity, and Tiny and Bill, who was Pākehā, spent much time there. It was here that she first encountered the Kini Quartet, a group of musical cousins who had caught the ear of Auckland record label manager Eldred Stebbing and were looking for original material to record. She wrote both sides of their first single, released in 1962. On the A-side was 'Hard Times Are Coming', a wry reflection on Pākehā economic anxiety. (The song suggested that while Pākehā panicked, Māori would easily survive a new depression because they would grow their own vegetables and catch kaimoana.) On the B-side was an early version of the song that would soon become known as 'Under the Sun', this version sung in te reo and titled 'Te Kotahitanga', which can be translated as 'The Unity' or 'Oneness'. The song shared its name with an organisation set up around the same time to teach cultural roots and self-worth to young Māori returning to the East Coast after spending time in the cities, where many had experienced homesickness and racism. 'Under the Sun' is a protest song of the subtlest kind. It doesn't bother to point out the injustices that are the reason for its being written in the first place. In the manner of John Lennon's 'Imagine' (composed nearly a decade later) it goes straight to the utopian alternative, depicting a perfect land, with a gentle optimism that flows from its lyric to its hopeful melody. The effect is bittersweet. The song became a local standard. Auckland folkies the Convairs covered it on a 1966 EP and, as 'Te Kotahitanga', it appeared on Maoriland Favourites, sung by Daphne Walker, Buddy Wilson and Morgan Clarke. Though the Kini Quartet would carry on through various line-up changes for another decade and record several more of Tiny Raggett's songs, 'Under The Sun' remains their biggest hit. I thought of The Kini Quartet, Tiny Raggett and 'Under the Sun' the first time I heard Te Whare Tiwekaweka, Marlon Williams' latest album, his first written and sung entirely in te reo Māori. Seeing Marlon perform these songs in concert, I was particularly struck by the segment when he and his band gathered together in one small area of the stage with acoustic instruments, all strumming and singing together on his beautiful song 'Whakameatia Mai'. In that moment they seemed to have transformed into the Kini Quartet. Though the album is, in one sense, a departure for Marlon, it can also be heard as a natural development of the music he has been making for the past decade or so. It still leans towards country, for which his mellifluous voice is the perfect instrument. But it is clear that he has also been thinking about the ways in which Māori – from the days of the Kini Quartet and earlier – have played their country music with a kapa haka twist. Driven by voices and acoustic guitars, with other instruments used only sparingly, it could almost be Gisborne in 1963. While the songs do not address political issues directly, to make an album in te reo at a time when Māori language and culture are being subjected to political attacks is a statement in itself. But it was also a practical way for Marlon to get past a writer's block. 'Te reo Māori allowed me to be more candid,' he says. 'If I tried to write those words in English, that'd be a really hard job.' Drawing metaphors from the land, the ocean and the elements – a common device in Māori oratory and song – he found he was able to poetically address such subjects as loneliness, parting, and the inner turmoil that comes from being an artist who, by necessity, is always on the move. But if the album leans heavily on sad love songs – which are, after all, country music's stock in trade – the total effect is optimistic and uplifting. For Māori it is a celebration of their musical heritage, their language and its poetic powers. For Pākehā it shows that te reo is not going to go away, nor need it be feared. It is something uniquely of this place that can contribute to everyone's sense of belonging. The title Te Whare Tiwekaweka – which can be translated as The Messy House – suggests neither a melting pot monoculture nor a utopian dream, but rather a work in progress. A home that is untidy yet alive.
