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Some of the things you need to know to be a Good Citizen™.
Some of the things you need to know to be a Good Citizen™.

Pop CultureApril 19, 2020

Robbie Nicol: How I learned to become a good citizen

Some of the things you need to know to be a Good Citizen™.
Some of the things you need to know to be a Good Citizen™.

Robbie Nicol, aka White Man Behind a Desk, has just launched The Citizen’s Handbook, a webseries dedicated to teaching New Zealanders how their country actually works. Here’s five things he learned while making it.

It’s probably a failing of our education system that I left high school without knowing how New Zealand’s political system works. It’s definitely a failing of my work ethic that I left university with a bachelor’s degree in politics still not knowing how New Zealand’s political system works.

To be honest, I still don’t know most of it. If you asked me the difference between the attorney general and the solicitor general, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. (Please don’t tweet me.) But thanks to a bunch of experts like Dr Rawiri Taonui, Dr Tze Ming Mok, and Gone By Lunchtime‘s very own Ben Thomas, I was able to learn enough to co-write the webseries and podcast, The Citizen’s Handbook.

It’s been a wild journey, and I think I’m a better citizen because of it. I certainly know more than I did. So, in the spirit of the series, here are five things I learned about New Zealand while making The Citizen’s Handbook:

The guy who invented how to colonise New Zealand was arrested for marrying a child

Edward Gibbon Wakefield was a rich Englishman with the spirit of a con artist and little regard for anyone but himself. In 1826 he tricked the 15-year-old schoolgirl Ellen Turner into marrying him by telling her that her dad was going broke (he wasn’t).

Eventually he was caught and sent to prison, and it was while he was in prison that he wrote ‘A Letter From Sydney’. In the hopes of re-entering high society, he wrote a book about how to colonise better, arguing that you should charge rich people for the land they’re colonising so that you can afford to bring poor people over to work for them. He went on to run the New Zealand Company, putting his theory into practice. He died in Wellington, sad and alone with his two dogs.

The settler government (also known as ‘the government’) was not secretive about how much it hated non-European immigrants

In 1953 a memo was sent from the Department of External Affairs that explicitly stated how racist it was:

“Our immigration is based firmly on the principle that we are and intend to remain a country of European development. It is inevitably discriminatory against Asians — indeed against all persons who are not wholly of European race and colour. Whereas we have done much to encourage immigration from Europe, we do everything to discourage it from Asia.”

They actually wrote that down. It wasn’t unconscious bias; it was overt policy. My ancestors arrived, decided they should be in charge, and then stopped people arriving if they looked different. I always knew it was bad – I just didn’t think it would be so explicit.

I now know what the Official Cash Rate is

OK, let’s see if I can do this… the OCR is the rate at which the Reserve Bank lends money to the other banks. The Reserve Bank magics money into existence to lend to the normal banks. If there’s a recession, then they lend money out at a low rate – to encourage banks to lower their rate, so that you can get a low-interest loan and buy that house or start that business! If there’s too much inflation, they can raise the OCR so that people don’t get loans. So people buy less stuff and prices go down. That’s what the OCR is for! Sort of half get it? Me too!

If you want to get the government to do something, act like an old person

If you want to get the government to do something, act like an old person. All of the best strategies for getting your representatives to do stuff are things millennials and Generation Z hate to do. Politicians know how easy it is for you to sign that online petition, so online petitions are less effective than writing a letter or making a phone call or going to meet them at their electorate office.

According to Ben Thomas, during the marriage equality debate in 2013 lots of MPs just put a filter on their emails for “marriage”, so the thousands of emails generated by activist websites just went straight to junk. But MPs can’t do that with letters! They don’t know what a letter says until they’ve opened it! Unless you write extra stuff on the envelope. Don’t write extra stuff on the envelope.

New Zealand can change really, really fast

New Zealand doesn’t have a written constitution where we put all the rules about how to run New Zealand. One bad thing about that is it means that people can change our constitution really fast. In the 1980s, when Robert Muldoon lost a snap election, he refused to devalue the dollar. Our constitution includes a convention that he shouldn’t do that, but because it was just a convention – it was basically only public pressure and a good deputy prime minister, Jim McLay, that got him to back down. That probably wouldn’t have happened if our constitution was all written down in one place.

On the other hand, one good thing about not having a written constitution is it means that our constitution can change really fast. The current system of government is only in place because my ancestors used the might of the entire British Empire against the Māori people to install a system of economics, law, and culture. And if that system isn’t working for you, or people around you, you can change it.

New Zealand has drastically changed time and time again. We cut the top tax rate in half in the 80s, we changed our entire voting system in the 90s, and a few weeks ago we closed almost every business for a month and gave away billions of dollars. You can change New Zealand in any way, if you want to – the tricky part is deciding what that is.

You can watch The Citizen’s Handbook on RNZ right here

Keep going!
Too Hot to Handle gives you your expected ten horned-up singles, with an all-too relatable twist.
Too Hot to Handle gives you your expected ten horned-up singles, with an all-too relatable twist.

Pop CultureApril 18, 2020

Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle is the horniest social distancing you’ll ever watch

Too Hot to Handle gives you your expected ten horned-up singles, with an all-too relatable twist.
Too Hot to Handle gives you your expected ten horned-up singles, with an all-too relatable twist.

Imagine Love Island without… the touching? Netflix’s new reality show Too Hot to Handle hits a little bit close to our distanced homes, writes Sam Brooks.

When it starts, Too Hot to Handle seems like another escapist log on the reality show pyre, upon which many an attractive, abominably-blessed human has been set alight. Waves crashing on rocks, bottom halves of people running along the sand, an idyllic but carefully non-culturally appropriative island resort. For a few blissful minutes, this show could be any reality show with the word “island” in the title. But then… it all changes.

Too Hot to Handle has a twist, and this isn’t a spoiler – I guarantee it’s why you’ve heard of the show. Because it isn’t Love/Heartbreak/Temptation Island at all. It’s the exact opposite. Ten singles, perfectly cast from the crossroads of physical attractiveness and low inhibitions, have been put on this island not to screw their way to a prize, but form meaningful connections. Gross! And to twist the knife, they’re also not even allowed to touch. No kissing, no sex, nothing in the grey area between the two. And if they do? Money gets deducted off the juicy $100,000 prize, bit by bit. 

To enforce these rule, a speaking computer that everybody somehow (likely contractually) believes to be an AI called Lana watches our contestants, snitching on them for things like “heavy petting” and “self-gratification”. Our other commentator is comedian Desiree Burch, stepping into the snarky role that Love Island’s narrator Iain Stirling essayed. Burch is more savage than Stirling but is also more deeply invested in the contestants. She wants them to win as much as she’s very aware that these people are acting ridiculously and constantly breaking the rules. Because of course they’re breaking the rules – this isn’t an island full of nuns, y’all (though I would watch that reality show).

A bunch of hot people sit around a speaker. Photo: Getty.

Which brings us to the contestants. Too to Handle has promised us the “hottest, horniest, commitment-phobic swipesters” from across the world, and by our Netflix overlord, it delivers ten Tinder-tested swipesters. There’s Haley, the contestant who has a tattoo on her back in a language that she can’t identify and describes a sorority party in the most terrifying deadpan I’ve ever heard (“A girl’s, like, broken her neck before, like, falling off the roof, but other than that, it’s fun”). There’s also Matthew, the White Jesus resemblant who leads off by saying he’s a deep thinker, as all deep thinkers tend to do. And oh, yes, there’s Sharron, which is not said how you just read it in your head. He declares himself a feminist early on and then later clarifies: “I studied women and gender studies in college. If you pay attention, you learn the trick on how to pick up women.” Move over, Kate Sheppard! We’ve got a real one here.

Part of the genuine genius of Too Hot to Handle is how they play with our affections for this cast. These aren’t inherently sympathetic people. Even watching in a country where we currently have a narking hotline for people not being far away enough from each other, it’s hard to empathise with people who just can’t not fuck people they’ve just met. But, thankfully, we’re lead down the path to genuinely start to feel for a few people. My personal favourite was Chloe, who is introduced with the killer line, “I’m not the brightest spark in the book” and then apologize for having her phone go off in her talking head interview. There’s a lack of guile there that reads as charm, and more than a few of the cast strike this balance well.

There seem to be two stars which the show hitches its wagon to and never lets them go – Francesca, who ‘works for Instagram’ (which is like me saying I ‘work for Glengarrys’) and Harry (who you might recognise from our very own Heartbreak Island). The pair have eyes for each other pretty early on, with Harry spouting romantic poetry like “These beds are gonna be sweet for what carnage I wanna do to Francesca”. Harry probably did not attend the same gender studies classes as Sharron.

The show quickly makes stars of these two, Francesca and Harry. Photo: Netflix.

Francesca is pure Instagram id, acting with no regard for her fellow competitors, the rules of the game, or even the end goal. She doesn’t even appear interested in being a sympathetic contestant to those watching; she’s there to get laid, in the most unapologetic and aspirational way. When things don’t go quite well for her, thanks to the genital-blocking Lana, she acts like a petulant child and sulks. I wouldn’t want to run into Francesca in a strobing club at 3AM, but she makes for good TV.

Harry is no better but is presented as more of a bumbling idiot. He seems to have the hardest time withholding from his particular love language (fucking) and the least restraint when it comes to his talking heads. He even, well, acts like an absolute dick for half of his run towards everyone around him, and tries to get out of any consequences. But hey, if anything, he’s proof that we’ll forgive any guy with a twinkling eye who’s over 6’2. 

Men, mud, and feelings. Photo: Netflix.

But there’s a nice side to this dystopic, low-level, gaslighting show. These contestants aren’t expected to just form meaningful connections by virtue of being together and not being allowed to touch – workshops are run on the island intended to allow them to grow as people, whether they be shibari classes or the more straight-up female empowerment class. While these workshops, personally, would make me run screaming into the nearest rip, it’s nice to see these breathing swimsuit ads feint towards growth and start to understand their self-worth. It’s enough to make you wish the show was a bit longer – it’s an uncharacteristically swift eight episodes – so we can explore more of these people. I could do with seeing a lot more of Haley who, in reality show villain fashion, sums her experiences up with: “I still don’t like any of these people.”

For a lot of reality shows, sex is treated like a great revelation. It’s a second act twist or the climax. Where Too Hot to Handle earns its stripes – beyond being disconcertingly well-timed to drop during a time when most of the world will be able to empathise with not touching strangers – is that it treats sex as a given. We know these people are well-equipped to have sex with each other and indeed, I’ve never seen a reality show so frankly talk about dick size before.

But where the show feels special is that it tries to get beyond that into what makes people connect or fail to connect with each other. A working relationship is a jigsaw puzzle where some of the pieces might be missing or others might not fit because somebody broke them a couple of years ago. Maybe you have to blow the dust off before you can see them properly. 

Too Hot to Handle isn’t at its best when it addresses the fact that a relationship is made up of two fleshy blobs with their own experiences, memories and flaws – it’s at its best when it’s showing us the ridiculous acts of ridiculous people. But there are a billion hours of a million shows where you can watch that. To see something dig a little deeper, even if its playground sandbox deep, feels a bit more substantial. By the end of the eight episodes, I found myself caring about these people, even Harry who called himself a cockatoo – truly the most cursed of the birds.  If stupid attractive people can find a way to connect with each other beyond their looks, can’t we all? Probably not, but at least we’ve got eight episodes to distract us from that.

You can watch Too Hot to Handle on Netflix right here.

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