BLUE COLLAR, OR BLUE
RINSE?
A couple of weeks ago, the
Dominion Post’s Saturday magazine, Your Weekend, published an article of mine
about Lower Hutt. You can read it here:
Towards the end of the
article I quoted Hutt South Labour MP Trevor Mallard and mentioned that he was raised
in Wainuiomata. During my interview with him I had asked whether
he grew up in Lower Hutt and he had replied: “I grew up in Wainuiomata”.
Someone I know subsequently
contacted me to say that this was untrue: Mallard had grown up in Khandallah. She
understood his father had been a stockbroker. This informant put me in touch
with another person, also known to me, who confirmed that he’d been at primary school
with Mallard in Khandallah and played sport with him there. He said Mallard had
later attended nearby Onslow College – a decile 10 school, and a long bus ride from Wainui. I was able
to confirm this by checking the MP’s entry in the New Zealand Who’s Who. What’s
more, a Google search revealed that Mallard had frequently been described in
the past as a Wainuiomata boy; no mention of Khandallah. Similarly, his website
during the 2011 election had him saying he’d lived in Wainui “for the majority
[sic] of my life”.
The significance of this, for
those unfamiliar with the sociology of Greater Wellington, is that Wainuiomata is
about as working-class as you can get in New Zealand, whereas Khandallah is at
the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum: a leafy suburb of lawyers, doctors,
company directors and suchlike. The obvious implication was that Mallard was
being less than honest about his background in order to bolster his blue-collar
cred with Labour supporters.
Well, I contacted Mallard
today and put this discrepancy to him. He seemed unfazed, explaining that he’d attended
Wainuiomata Primary School, been a foundation pupil at Wainui’s Wood Hatton School
(a school, ironically, that he closed
down when he was Minister of Education) and had shifted to Khandallah during his
Form I year. He came back to Wainuiomata later, he said. “And you also went to
Onslow College?” I asked. “Yes I did.” He added that he had relatives in
Wainuiomata and a long family history there.
So where does this leave us? Since
his school attendance is a matter of public record (and I can’t imagine he
would risk telling fibs about something so easily checked), we can only conclude that
he has been rather selective in highlighting his Wainuiomata background while
playing down his more privileged antecedents. While you could take the
moral high ground and argue that this isn’t 100 percent honest, from a pragmatic
point of view I suppose it’s simply smart politics.
3 comments:
Isn't this just typical of the utterly negative, anti-aspirational approach of Labour and their supporters!
If you come from a slum like Wainui, that is "something to be proud of".
If you come from a nice suburb like Remuera, Khandallah or Karori, it is something to be hidden at all costs.
@thor42
A "slum"? What an arrogant, privileged, elitist, snobbish perspective. The difference between me (who grew up in Wainuiomata, is proud of it, and whose parents still live there) is that I'm not sufficiently naive to ascribe those attributes to everyone who happens to vote for the same party as yourself.
Clearly you believe working in a factory, as my father did all his life - aside from a brief period fighting a war so as to defend your right to behave like an ass - intrinsically less worthy than being a lawyer, doctor, or company director from Khandallah.
In fact of course, all make a positive contribution to the commonweal - what's been yours?
Trevor lived just a few houses away from me in Harbour Park, Khandallah. He was a Scout in the Troop where I was also an Assistant Scoutmaster in the late 1970's. Even then he was a pugnacious and questioning boy and did make a good Patrol Leader. He also attended a Jamboree in Christchurch (?1978) with the rest of us 'Khandallah Toffs'.
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