Ungrip

**oldrider** · 6th December 2013, 13:46

Might is, always has been and always will be, "right"!

Swimming upstream "alone" just makes it easier and inevitable for the self-proclaimed righteous to claim their "right"!

It's the natural law of the world we live in!

**scissorhands** · 6th December 2013, 16:42

from http://m.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/o...r-utopias-fade
CHRIS TROTTER
Last updated 13:50 23/07/2013

Just try to imagine this.

A New Zealand government that announces a scheme designed to, among other things: "assist people in becoming self-sufficient from the land"; "give people a chance to develop alternative social models"; "promote the virtues of a simpler life"; and "provide a place of healing for participants as well as for society as a whole".

Impossible? No - it happened!

Forty years on, the Kirk Labour government's "Ohu Scheme" (state-subsidised, self-sufficient communes on Crown land) still possesses the power to shock and surprise.

Taking their name from the Maori word for "working together", and their inspiration from the Israeli kibbutzim, Norman Kirk's communes represent what is indisputably the high-point of utopian policy formation in New Zealand.

The inspirational role played by the kibbutzim (radically egalitarian and self-supporting communities established by Jewish settlers in Palestine from the early 20th century) reflected the very close links that had grown up between the Israeli and New Zealand Labour parties since the birth of the State of Israel in 1948.

By the 1960s, spending a few weeks or months on a kibbutz had become a rite of passage for many young Kiwi socialists. The kibbutzim's role in entrenching the ideals of solidarity and co-operation within Israeli society was openly admired by Labour activists.

The 60s and 70s were also the decades in which powerful intellectual challenges were mounted against the individualism and materialism of what the American economist, J K Galbraith, called the "Affluent Society".

All over the Western World, young people were questioning the values of consumerism and loudly contesting the moral legitimacy of any "Establishment" willing to overlook the horrors of the Vietnam War.

The desire to withdraw from this brutally acquisitive society, and experiment with new forms of social organisation, was strong. Culturally, this longing manifested itself in the "hippy" movement, whose followers were invited to "turn on, tune in and drop out".

It was the confluence of these two intellectual streams - the powerful political model of the kibbutzim, and the so-called "counter-cultural" impulses of the hippies - that gave the Ohu Scheme's promoters a fighting chance of success.

Even so, it is unlikely that such a utopian project would have been given the go-ahead had New Zealand not, in the early 1970s, been caught up and swept along on a great wave of progressive activity.

In 1972, the Royal Commission on Social Security recommended that: "The community [be] responsible for giving dependent people a standard of living consistent with human dignity and approaching that enjoyed by the majority, irrespective of the cause of dependency."

The Kirk Government responded by introducing the Domestic Purposes Benefit.

In 1974 - the same year that the Ohu Scheme was officially launched - New Zealand's ground-breaking and world-beating Accident Compensation Corporation was given legislative life.

Kirk's attorney-general, the erudite and highly principled Dr Martyn Finlay, shocked conservative New Zealanders by observing that no prison should be made so secure that it destroyed all hope of escape in the minds of its inmates.

An "escape-proof" prison, he seemed to be suggesting, was an affront to the indomitability of the human spirit.

Like the Ohu Scheme itself, Finlay's comment simply does not compute in the grim context of the 21st century's second decade.

Can anyone imagine John Key's attorney-general, the coldly acerbic Chris Finlayson, suggesting that Her Majesty's prisons be deliberately designed to protect the indomitability of the human spirit?

And what awful punishment would the Justice Minister, Judith Collins, visit upon him if he did?

It would, of course, be very wrong to suggest that the whole of New Zealand suddenly turned into left-wing hippies in the 1970s. Because that simply isn't true.

I vividly recall the day Prime Minister Kirk announced the cancellation of the 1974 Springbok Tour.

I was walking down Fergusson Dr in Upper Hutt when an old fellow wearing an RSA badge accosted me - presumably for the offence of being young and having long hair - and berated me for several minutes on the undemocratic character of the PM's decision.

Noticing the plethora of badges attached to my waistcoat (it was 1973!) he scrutinised them carefully for the emblems of New Zealand's traitorous anti-apartheid movement.

Finding none, he grumpily sent me on my way. (He did not know how close I came that morning to pinning on my Halt All Racist Tours badge.)

But, if the progressivism and utopianism of the early 1970s was by no means universal, it was, nevertheless, entirely real.

New Zealand warships were dispatched to the waters around the French nuclear testing-site at Mururoa. Racist rugby tours were cancelled.

Pristine southern lakes were placed in the hands of environmental "guardians".

And, the government was prepared to set up rural communes.

We approach our utopias only by daring to dream. In disavowing their existence, we forget how to do even that.

also http://www.converge.org.nz/evcnz/resources/ohu.html

**Akzle** · 6th December 2013, 17:47

Originally Posted by scissorhands

from http://m.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/o...r-utopias-fade
CHRIS TROTTER
Last updated 13:50 23/07/2013

Just try to imagine this....
dot fucking dot dot dot...

you need to learn to sumarise shit nigga. might be okay to read that if you're ass burgers, but for a dyslexismistic, it's tl:dr.

**puddytat** · 6th December 2013, 20:43

For me, one of the defining moments or times in my life was meeting & living with the Ahu Ahu Ohu members from the Wanganui River.....& that has made all the difference.....I wonder whats happening there now.
I sold my pack saddle that I'd been using on my own "journey" to them ,(fuck I cant remember their names) as they used them to pack in supplies after they'd ferried them across the river in a row boat....

**mashman** · 6th December 2013, 20:55

Originally Posted by puddytat

For me, one of the defining moments or times in my life was meeting & living with the Ahu Ahu Ohu members from the Wanganui River.....& that has made all the difference.....I wonder whats happening there now.
I sold my pack saddle that I'd been using on my own "journey" to them ,(fuck I cant remember their names) as they used them to pack in supplies after they'd ferried them across the river in a row boat....

Not much from what I read.

**puddytat** · 6th December 2013, 21:03

Originally Posted by mashman

Not much from what I read.

Make a good squat for someone.....
they had an amazing barn cum community centre there back then but some WOOFER accidentally burnt it down, Ross & his beautiful wife made a living from possums if I remember correctly. It was fucking cool man...

**mashman** · 7th December 2013, 07:14

Originally Posted by puddytat

Make a good squat for someone.....
they had an amazing barn cum community centre there back then but some WOOFER accidentally burnt it down, Ross & his beautiful wife made a living from possums if I remember correctly. It was fucking cool man...

Bagga. They tear shit down man. It's a shame they don't/can't rebuild these communities using wind/solar/hydro etc...

**Tazz** · 7th December 2013, 16:35

Originally Posted by mashman

hydro etc...

Stepfather grew up on a farm on the coast with Hydro as there was no power. Eventually when the lines showed up they changed the law or something giving ownership of the water running through their land to the council, so they either had to pay a heap to keep generating their own power or (pay to) tap into the main grid and cough up to them monthly. Can't have people being too self sufficient eh

They'll have some shit like that on the wind in time no doubt (and if not already).

**mashman** · 7th December 2013, 21:01

Originally Posted by Tazz

Stepfather grew up on a farm on the coast with Hydro as there was no power. Eventually when the lines showed up they changed the law or something giving ownership of the water running through their land to the council, so they either had to pay a heap to keep generating their own power or (pay to) tap into the main grid and cough up to them monthly. Can't have people being too self sufficient eh

They'll have some shit like that on the wind in time no doubt (and if not already).

Didn't the Spanish recently put a tax on the sun because too many were going solar powered?

heh, if they put a tax on wind the polly's would need a clause to exempt them from the tax.

**Akzle** · 8th December 2013, 06:32

Originally Posted by mashman

Didn't the Spanish recently put a tax on the sun because too many were going solar powered?

heh, if they put a tax on wind the polly's would need a clause to exempt them from the tax.

it would probably be a statute, and sound a lot like:

The crown in right of new zealand claims all air movements not originating from their own asses, any person making productive use of the movement of air shall be required to hold a "wind license" as per section 504 clauses d, e and o and pay the appropriate fee as set out in schedule 1...

**mashman** · 8th December 2013, 07:54

Originally Posted by Akzle

it would probably be a statute, and sound a lot like:

The crown in right of new zealand claims all air movements not originating from their own asses, any person making productive use of the movement of air shall be required to hold a "wind license" as per section 504 clauses d, e and o and pay the appropriate fee as set out in schedule 1...

Implemented after the fact.