In Reply to: Europeans in NZ have not exactly... posted by MargaritaMan on Friday, 7. December 2007 at 13:50 Bali Time:
had the pleasure of spending an extended period of time in New Zealand but from what my family has told me over the years prejudice & discrimination has certainly happened there (the same as everywhere)
Back in the early 1900's if you were an immigrant to New Zealand & were Irish Catholic or of Irish descent & Catholic,life certainly wasn't easy,in fact it was close to impossible.
These days I have many family members living in New Zealand they are all descended from a Great Uncle of mine who as a young single man decided to leave his family & home in Australia & explore the world.It was considered a pretty brave & bold thing to do back then.He decided to stop & make New Zealand his new homeland but he didn't know he would be so unwelcome.
He immigrated to New Zealand from Australia in the early 1900's.He had what was considered a very obvious Irish Catholic name & upon arrival in New Zealand he was ostracized by the local community.He found it hard to get a job or even to find a place to live,simply because of the fact that his name gave his heritage away.He had to go to the drastic measures of actually changing his surname in order to be able to get a job & live as a new immigrant in New Zealand.
It's a sad fact of life that many people are discriminated against these days because of the colour of their skin,their religion,their country of origin,their disabilities & other ridiculous reasons but this is not something new & it is certainly not something exclusive to Bali,Indonesia or South East Asia !
We don't live in an ideal world & I don't think any of us or future generations ever will.I think that there will sadly always be prejudice,discrimination or persecution happening in one way or another.There will always be small minded,bigoted people who want to pick on others & feel superior.
I don't think any of us can make major changes to this personally but we can all strive to change our little corner of the globe & teach our children/grandchildren to show tolerance,understanding & acceptance of other people who may in some small way be different.
At the same time I will also say that I would like to think any immigrants to any other country will without any discrimination will either accept or respect the cultures & customs of their adopted country that they choose to live in.For example if my family & I lived in Bali on a long term basis,even as a Christian family I would consider it would be the right thing to do to engage in religious functions in our local community & respect the religious beliefs of anyone that worked for us,looked after our kids etc,as well as learn the local language to a descent level of proficiently.
Personally I am sick to death of political correctness gone mad from the bureaucrats in Australia.Back when my kids where in primary school myself & the majority of the school community found it very offensive that the school cancelled our annual Christmas Carol family night because a number of families from a different country & religion had become part of our school community - who the principal automatically presumed would think that the idea of celebrating a Christian festival might be offensive !
The weirdest thing was that the school Principal just assumed these families would be offended & never consulted them.After all of the parents on the governing council (myself included) had so many complaints from parents about "PC gone mad " that we took it on ourselves without the principals approval to speak to the potentially offended families Mum's in the school yard. Only one of the families said that they would have been upset or said that their child could not have attended this whole of school event.Because what had always been a big outdoor Christmas Carol event for the families was changed to an indoor Multicultural night singing American Christmas Carols & other " Holiday songs" about snow & ice (absolutely nothing to do with Australian Christmas) without any mention of religion,less than 40 % of the school community attended what was supposed to be a compulsory night.In previous years we had BBQ's,fundraising stalls etc but most families refused to participate in any way so none of this happened.Basically the night was boycotted by families & the Principal ended up with egg on her face.Strangely enough none of the kids who didn't go were ever asked why their families didn't attend.I expect it was a rather embarrassing experince for the Principal.
As far as I am concerned acceptance,tolerance & appreciating & embracing our differences is what it should all be about but we need to remember that it's a 2 way street.