Signs

The storm in an ethnic melting pot that was the foreign language sign debate remained a spark last week and like so many other media-feulled incindiaries has failed to ignite into the racial blaze the media may have hoped for. Usually these issues need a visible and vocal central point of crisis if the flames are to be stoked - and none have come about.  So instead of one clash point we merely have statistics and opinion polling which never cross the visceral threshold.

This is a hot issue - despite the lack of a cause celebre - and it is deserving of a discussion. The main reason it is not and why it is derided as a sensible topic by the commentariat - especially the left - is partly the blind faith in mass immigration and unintegrated multiculturalism that most middle class people have and also the fact that most of the people doing all the opinion writing in the media are from the well-to-do suburbs where they remain quaratined in Pakeha zones and are thus largely unaffected by the rise of ethnic precincts. The other reason discussion never seems to get very far is that the oxygen in the debate is absorbed rapidly by Winston Peters and other reactionary conservatives.  It becomes a normal response just to ignore the entire issue because once a divisive race-baiter like Peters is involved no one wants to be on whatever side of the argument he is on.

NZ Herald:

Massey University researchers Robin Peace and Ian Goodwin studied 500 "linguistic landscape" photographs taken in five Auckland locations - Northcote, Dominion Rd, Meadowlands, Auckland CBD and Papatoetoe - for their study, "The Cosmopolitics of Linguistic Landscapes".
Many of the signs were for migrant businesses and featured languages other than English.
[...]
Some New Zealanders responded with "annoyance" or "repugnance" when faced with a space that did not make immediate, translatable sense, she said.
That was backed by nzherald.co.nz poll findings showing 39 per cent of people thought all immigrants should use English on their business signs.
A further 40 per cent of respondents said English translations should be offered beside ethnic scripts on business signs and 21 per cent said the signs should be accepted as New Zealand was a diverse society.
The findings were based on a sample size of about 8100 people.

I listened to RNZ last week where Jim Mora and Brian Edwards had their chat with whoever the female middle class Pakeha lady was and they were mystified by the sign issue. Dr Edwards gave a typical precis of the scene for the Pakeha upper middle class: Foreign signs are a bit of colour, ethnic neighbourhoods are great to visit, great food etc., I'm comfortable with foreign language signage.

He's comfy because all that stuff is occuring in someone else's neighbourhood. He only visits these places where these quaint and eclectic ethnic people dwell as an act of tourism. If half the shops along Jervious Road in the leafy coastal inner city suburb of Herne Bay had turned Chinese in the last 10-15 years as they have done along Dominion Road - for example - then I wager his reaction would most definitely not be the same. So too with David Slack (to pick a random "liberal" - no offence) and everyone else living in Devonport - their comments should be put into context: they live in a white enclave where the immigrants are usually white too: South Africans and Europeans. These people still live in the areas most closely resembling the old NZ and are the least exposed to the consequences of large-scale non-white, non-English speaking immigration.  That is why this class of person is so dismissive of concerns over ethnic ghettoisation and why they think nothing is wrong - they simply have not experienced living there.

The people who have paid big bucks to live in their exclusive white enclaves regard their "villages" as heritage areas, protected places where they have rules that tell you what sort of veranda ballustrade one must have to maintain the look of the place. They like these rules because they preserve what they have and keep the place looking the way they prefer it.  And yet these same people think nothing of having entire shopping centres  - in someone else's suburb of course - turning radically, within a very short space of time, into unrecognisable ethnic ghettoes swamped with foreign language signage.  Why aren't they capable of retaining heritage in the same way that the wealthy suburbs are?

If half the places of business in Devonport had Chinese language out front and even a quarter of the population of dear old Devo was non-white and non-English speaking do you really expect the liberal intelligensia of that burg to be so nonplussed? I lived in Devonport when there were still working class people and the Naval families living there, and they've all been pushed out, so it is now more exclusivist and snotty than it ever was before.

When I lived in Mount Eden just off the top of Dominion Road in the early 1990s I can recall only one local Chinese shop, Steve's. Steve and his wife were Chinese and had a takeaways on the corner. And Steve and his missus could speak English quite well.  Last time I went down Dominion Road maybe half the shops had non-English signage and one even had massive Chinese national flags flying all over it. It is a completely different place to what it was. Some would say this is all varying shades of racism of course.
The problem does stem from the immigration policy.  It is an obvious fault that many people the government lets into the country to live just don't speak English and therefore cannot communicate with the rest of society. From that policy flows the demand for foreign language services; a demand that just simply should not exist.  This demand puts added pressure on government and other service providers and it also creates internal demand. 

And the problem? The greatest issue is that English speakers not only cannot use whatever services are provided (as the service person cannot communicate) but it is the knowledge that they are not welcome in those shops. They are not for the public as such but for the other. They might as well have "You are not welcome" on it as the only thing in English for what it amounts to. And the finite nature of one's local shops - so important to local identity it would be undeniable to say - is the rub: for every new non-English speaking shop that opens it usually means that an English speaking one has been replaced. Less and less service for the old type of people, more and more services for the new type of people.

And with critical mass achieved in many areas of Auckland the linguistic community becomes self-supporting and notions of integrating immigrant communities into the culture already here becomes more distant.