Sex

Whoever would have predicted that the definition of ‘male’ and ‘female’ could ever become a matter of contention? My professional life has been in political economy, which includes social science and humanities: philosophy, economics, history, statistics, demography, and geography. Demography in particular, requires a biological definition.

The objective science of sex is simple, and genetic. Males have a Y-sex-chromosome as well as an X-sex-chromosome; females instead have two X-sex-chromosomes. To get around the fact that some people want to play-down this observation, commentators and politicians often refer to sex as ‘biological sex’ or ‘sex assigned at birth’. Some organisations refer to ‘gender’ when they mean ‘sex’. Statistics New Zealand doesn’t have any of these problems; for example, the first set of data in the New Zealand cohort life tables: March 2023 update is simply labelled ‘Estimated births, deaths, net migration by sex‘.

Confusion exists because there is a different concept, ‘gender’, which also uses male-female categorisation. When it is necessary to avoid confusion, a person’s sex may be characterised as their ‘genetic sex’ (or ‘reproductive sex’) rather than their biological sex; this is because ‘gender’ may also have a biological basis, and some people whose gender differs from their sex may gave gained this gender variation at conception, in the womb before birth, or even in the birth process itself.

Gender

Gender differs from sex in that it is subjective. A sense of divergent identity from within may arise from any mix of biological or cultural influences. On the biological side, possible influences include aspects of the species genome other than the Y-chromosome, environmental influences within the mother’s uterus, and the birth process itself (eg caesarean birth versus natural birth). Endocrinological and neurological variation can occur before, during, or after birth. One important driver of this gender variability is most likely the microbiome: the changing bacteria and other microbes which inhabit especially the gut, the brain, and the birth canal.

Unlike sex, a binary concept, gender is a spectral concept. And gender is not fixed for all time, it’s fluid. The microbiome is mutable; cultural memes amplify, deamplify and reamplify over time.

It seems to me that a good way for demographers to document gender is through a scale from one to nine. One through to three could be characterised as ‘female gender’, four-to-six as ‘non-binary gender’, and seven-to-nine as ‘male gender’. So a somewhat ‘macho’ male might be described as ‘male sex, male (9) gender. And some ‘trans’ women might be best described as ‘male sex, female (3) gender. For short, for data-coding purposes, these two example people could be listed as ‘m9’ and ‘m3’. F1 through to f3 would translate to ‘cis-female’ in the jargon now used by many as gender identifiers. The mere use of this new jargon is of itself a cultural self-identifier.

It is important to note that the prefixes ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ do indicate that the gender-diverse community does in fact make the distinction between sex and gender, and therefore does not fully deny the reality of genetic sex; the issue is deemphasis, not denial. The issue that impassions that community seems to be to render the concept of sex as unimportant, even unnecessary. But, in the sciences of biology, demography and epidemiology, sex can never be redundant.

Demography

The ‘bread and butter’ of demography is reproduction, migration and death. In this context, ‘age’ and ‘location’ are the most important statistical characteristics of people.

‘Sex’ is in the next tranche of important demographic variables, because genetic sex is an important determinant of the reproduction of populations. Sex should be an easy identifier, because sex is an objective attribute; a person’s genetic sex is a matter of observation, just as whether a person has died is a matter of observation.

Another second-tranche demographic variable is ‘ethnicity’, although to be objective it needs to be ‘ancestry’, and ancestry is often not fully-known. (Many people not know who both of their biological parents are, let-alone their great grand-parents; some people do not know that they do not know this information.) In early United States censuses, the description of a person as ‘black’ or ‘white’ was regarded as central to their demographic identity as whether they were male or female. There certainly is an argument, nowadays with most people having multiple ethnicities of different proportions, that ethnicity should be treated as a subjective ‘third-tranche’ demographic variable. Likewise, religion. (The counterargument is that people who are substantially of a single ethnicity, or who were born into particular religions, do have life outcomes – maybe health outcomes or culturally-determined food choices – which reflect in part the ethnic genetics or religious faiths of their parents.) The important thing is that persons’ designated ancestries or religions should never become the basis for differences in their democratic rights. Demographic attributes should be kept separate from democratic attributes (with the exception of the designation of a young person as a ‘minor’).

Gender, a subjective attribute, distinct from sex, may nevertheless be important in a number of social studies. From a demographic viewpoint, gender may be classed as a third-tranche variable. It may be an interesting scientific question to compare and contrast the life experiences of genetic females (ie people without a Y-chromosome) who are gender-female, gender male, or gender non-binary. Likewise, the gender-diverse life-outcomes of genetic males.

Demography is a very important, though underappreciated, social science; a sibling discipline to epidemiology, and also to human geography. Optimal public health outcomes depend on good-quality demographic research. (Demography provides the all-important denominators needed to make sense of public health data.) Further, like all social-science disciplines, demography is intrinsically historical. Demography is closely intertwined with the disciplines of economic history and economics.

Identity Documentation

Sex or gender are widely used in identity documents; too widely, perhaps. For important demographic purposes, sex is necessary in birth certificates, death certificates, and documents used for travelling between countries (especially passports, now the basis for statistics of international migration). Demographers need to know the age and sex distributions of countries’ populations to be able to make population projections. (I congratulate Statistics New Zealand for well-crafted questions on sex and gender in the recent 2023 New Zealand census.)

Additionally, some kind of reliable documentation should be available for persons using spaces which are reserved for specific demographic subgroups. (We should note that women should not be too precious about ‘their spaces’. Those of us old enough remember the racially segregated toilets that used to exist in South Africa and parts of the USA; many white women and white men did not like their spaces to be transgressed by black women and men. Nevertheless, there is no argument at present for the removal of remaining reserved spaces.)

Does a person need to declare their sex or gender if, say, buying a flight ticket, or enrolling at an educational establishment? (How do the recipients of this information use it? Do they use it?) Sex may be useful on a document used to determine entry into restricted spaces. It may be worthwhile to have a bespoke identity document – a voluntary document – that helps people who need to inform others of their sex, gender or age.

The gender-diverse community wishes to play down excessive gendering in our administrative lives, and, for the most part, prefers to have access to unisex toilets rather than have to use sex-exclusive facilities. (Ask any parent with a young child of the ‘opposite’ sex about gauntlets they have had to run re public toilets. Unisex toilets, much more common today than last century, represent commonsense progress.) If, when buying an airline ticket, does the airline really want to know a person’s sex or gender? Yes, maybe; knowledge of their passengers’ sexes (but not genders) could help an airline to estimate the take-off weight of an aircraft.

Finally, in this section on documentation, we probably should not be using birth documents as general identity documents. While a passport should refer to birth documentation (which should designate ‘sex’), I see no reason why other identification documents – eg documents used by banks – need such information. Thankfully, we do not require a person’s ‘race’ on a drivers’ licence or an airline ticket.

Cultural Wars I

In noting that ‘gender’ is very much a subjective attribute of people (and not only people), that is not saying  there are no biological aspects to gender. Nevertheless, to use modern parlance, the confrontations about sex and gender which we are seeing at present are taking place very much in the human ‘cultural space’.

I was intrigued to read Bryce Edwards’ The ugly stoking of a culture war in election year(Evening Report and others, 27 march 2023). It’s a good non-partisan piece of writing. I was intrigued to see that an academic source to whom Edwards referred was a lawyer called Thomas Cranmer.

Much of my time this year has been spent in reading about the historical origins of modernity. It turns out that the culture wars of the sixteenth century in Europe – otherwise known as the protestant Reformation and the catholic Counterreformation – represent central events that created the global modernity which (for worse and for better) we now take for granted today.

The first true battles of that culture war took place in Tudor England, in particular in the years 1547 and 1558, during the short reigns of the young King Edward VI and then his older sister Queen Mary. (In the kinds of dramas about the Tudor period seen on television and in the movies, this critical and difficult period is rarely touched on. Instead we see various reruns of the 1530s’ story about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and, in the later Tudor period, about the contested lives of Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots.)

A central figure of the mid-sixteenth century cultural war in England was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. In New Zealand, his role in that cultural war is commemorated through the name of Cranmer Square in Christchurch, alongside that of another protestant martyr, Hugh Latimer, who is commemorated in the same city through Latimer Square. This cultural conflict, ostensibly a war of religion but really about much more, lasted a very long time. (Port Chalmers in Otago is named after Thomas Chalmers, a central figure in the Scottish religious schism in the 1840s.) In my historical judgement, this particularly nasty war only ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, Northern Ireland. If we start with Martin Luther in 1517 and end in 1998, we may call this the 481-years-war.

(And a piece of historical trivia that does foreshadow the events in England from the 1530s to the 1550s. So many of the prominent people in England in those days had the given name ‘Thomas’. This is because it became fashionable from the 1470s and 1480s to undertake pilgrimages to the then magnificent shrine of Thomas Becket, archbishop and martyr, who was killed in 1170 at the behest of King Henry II. See the reference to this in Chris Trotter assesses what happened on Saturday at Auckland’s Albert Park and what it means, interest.co.nz, 27 March 2023. Becket won fame for standing up to his king, speaking for the separation of church and state as institutions of authority. Indeed, a number of the later Thomases also met their ends through displeasing their monarchs. It’s too late to visit the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury; King Henry VIII looted it to destruction in 1538.)

It is also important to note that the culture war referred to here peaked in Europe in the period from the 1560s to the 1640s; the military component being the ‘Eighty Years War’ between the Spanish Empire and the ‘rebels’ of the Dutch United Provinces (the forerunner of the modern Netherlands), with the last part of the Eighty Years War also being the descent into near-perpetual violence in central Europe known as the Thirty Years War.

While the Reformation is correctly attributed, more than anyone else, to Marty Luther from 1517, the most important figure in the ensuing culture war was Jean Calvin (cis-male), in Geneva, whose principal publication was in 1539 (the second edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion). Calvin’s disciples became evangelists for his more direct and more strident protestant variant of Christianity, becoming a direct and immediate threat to the established (Catholic) Church as well as to the Lutheran reforms. Much of the British ‘intelligentsia’ quickly became attracted to Calvin’s message. But they had to bide their time as King Henry’s administration of the Church in England became very conservative in his last years.

The evangelicals got their chance when the nine-year-old King Edward ascended the throne. They ‘came out’ and basically ran the country. The rhetorical wars commenced and much of the language was inflammatory and belligerent. The Pope who had hitherto been the leader of the Church was now routinely lambasted as the Anti-Christ, the Devil if you will, and Catholics were rhetorically condemned as ‘papists’. (The result was the creation of a climate of rumour whereby the Devil could be anywhere and in any disguise.)

Much of the conservative Establishment bit their tongues and bid their time. Many clerics had been able to go along with King Henry’s sacrilege of the Church’s property (and many of its clergy) so long as the overall doctrine remained substantially unchanged. Others of the Henrician establishment – mainly the ones who would have been seen as ‘progressive’ but who did not naturally take to belligerence – merged into the world of the radicals after 1547. Thomas Cranmer was prominent among this decreasingly ‘moderate’ group. He wrote the new Church prayerbook to fit the new prevailing culture.

Everything changed again when Edward died, aged 15, in 1553. With no male contenders for the throne, the Edwardine radicals tried to install a cousin – Jane Grey – as Queen. But the peasants – the ordinary folk – would have none of that; and for the most part the people were unconcerned about the escalating culture war. They knew very well that the next in line for the throne was Edward’s older half-sister Mary; they wanted their country’s leaders to abide by the rules (of succession), even when those rules were inconvenient. Basically, 1553 was a case of coup and counter-coup. Jane Grey’s key supporters were dispatched by her opponents, and soon enough she was executed too.

Mary was what we might call a ‘cultural conservative’ and she surrounded herself with those former establishment conservatives who had been biding their time. With the ensuing reinstatement of the ‘Heresy Laws’, things heated up, literally. I will say no more, other than to note that Thomas Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury) became the most renowned victim of this Marian prelude to the Counterreformation. There were many other evangelicals, artisans as well as intellectuals, who chose to die; rather than rejoin the catholic Church, rather than breaking with what they understood as their direct relationship with God. Passions prevailed over pragmatism.

Queen Mary and the ensuing Archbishop of Canterbury (Reginal Pole) both died on 17 November 1558, victims of a pandemic that had all the hallmarks of a coronavirus much like the Covid19 virus. The culture war in England subsequently defused, under the new Elizabethan administration. That defusal in England was facilitated by the self-exile of culture radicals and counter-radicals to Europe, especially to the lands we now call Belgium. And it was there in the 1560s that the religious massacres in Europe really got underway.

Culture Wars 2

I tell the above story as a cautionary warning about how matters can escalate in a culture war when the participants are intentionally inflammatory, belligerent, provocative, and intolerant of people who see certain issues differently. And for too many of the people who could be debating the issues to be intimidated into silence instead. Inflammatory speech, which overlaps with the contemporary concept of ‘hate-speech’, is a form of violence that can have profound consequences. (In the Nazi context, an important consequence was the Holocaust.) Inflammatory speech includes comments – especially comments about groups of people – that are true, but which are said for the purposes of initiating or exacerbating a cultural conflict.

The principal issue in today’s culture war, as I see it, is the determination of a small group of people to eradicate the demographic concept of sex – of genetic sex, of XY sex – as an identity marker.

The most poignant moment that I saw in the television coverage of the events in Auckland on Saturday (refer to Bryce Edwards and Chris Trotter above) was of an older (though not elderly) woman – probably dismissed by the cultural radicals as a TERF – with a placard which simply read:

• XX = female
• XY = male

Completely and incontestably true. The foundation facts of reproductive biology. And not in any way inflammatory.

Yet this placard-holder was crowded out, disrespectfully, by others a generation-and-a-half younger than her. Few people with access to the news media that most people see or hear have spoken-up to support her message. “Bad things happen when good people remain silent.”

And to those who unknowingly or knowingly aggravate the problems which they claim to be addressing, remember the first law of holes: ‘Stop digging’. Like other wars, culture wars drag on because few protagonists of these conflicts have a vision for what success actually looks like. If you must instigate or perpetuate a culture war, then please at least lay out your vision of your utopia. In particular, how should your cultural enemies live and behave? Should your cultural enemies live?

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Following the completion of the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan, I heard Helen Clark on the radio news say, among other things, that the Taliban are a “medieval theocracy”. While she’s literally correct, ‘medieval’ has unfortunately become one of those problem derogatory words of casual historical racism; words like ‘neanderthal’, ‘philistine’, cretin’, and ‘slave’. (The latter word, of course, references the Slavic people, and – while not usually used today as a term of derogation – it certainly has been used that way. ‘Cretin’ is believed to be a Swiss-French derivative of ‘Christian’, and not a reference to Crete.)

‘Medieval’ is a bit different, because it is used mainly to cover a period of time rather than a group of people; a period which most of us know too little about. Most of what most people think they know about the medieval period is wrong. People use the expression ‘positively medieval’ to evoke an imagined time in history dominated by plague, torture, and filth.

The Medieval Period in Context

It is useful in macrohistory – ie history in the very large – to divide historical time into quarter-millenniums. I will do this to place the medieval period in context. Out of some necessity, and a need here for simplicity, a Eurocentric approach (and with somewhat imperial nomenclature) cannot be avoided; however the ‘old world’, of classical and medieval times, relates to most of Eurasia, and about half of Africa.

The Ten (Eleven?) quarter-millenniums from BCE 500:

• BCE 500-250: Greek classical period.
• BCE 250-0: Roman republican classical period.
• CE 0-250: Roman imperial classical period.
• CE 250-500: Period of classical decline.
• CE 500-750: Emergent medieval period (pejoratively known in English as ‘The Dark Ages’)
• CE 750-1000: Early medieval period.
• CE 1000-1250: Late medieval period.
• CE 1250-1500: Period of medieval decline.
• CE 1500-1750: Early modern period (period of mercantile capitalism, and the ‘Little Ice Age’).
• CE 1750-2000: Late modern period.
• CE 2000-2250 (?): Period of modern decline.

So the medieval period, in its fruition as one of history’s more stable periods – represents about half a millennium, from about 750 to about 1250. In its entirety, however, the medieval period can be thought of as a whole millennium, from about 500 to 1500. Our main images that evoke the words ‘positively medieval’ relate mainly to the period of medieval decline (which in Europe did not begin until around the year 1300, though in Asia began more like 1200). We, of English ancestry, also suffer from the widespread perception that English history began in the year, 1066, in which England was conquered and became, in its upper social echelons, a French-speaking realm. (An example of this problem is that we think of Edward I as a cruel king who ruled from 1272 to 1307, when in fact the first King Edward to reign over all of England ruled from 1042 to 1065; Edward the Confessor founded, in 1065, that most English of places, Westminster Abbey, as England’s ‘coronation church’.)

To understand the word ‘medieval’, in its proper historical context, we need to focus on the half-millennium from 750 to 1250. Europe as a political entity, largely as we still know it, was created by Charlemagne at the beginning of this period; he founded the quintessentially medieval Holy Roman Empire. Thus we understand that the most important binding force in Europe for this whole period was Catholic Christianity. The other important cultural force in the period was Islam, the main rival of (in particular Catholic) Christianity. In a sense, that rivalry facilitated the overall stability of the period (much as the Cold War facilitated a kind of stability from 1950 to 1975), and Islam provided (especially via Spain) the knowledge bridge from the classical epochs. That bridge eventually proved critical to the emergence in Europe of the modern period. The medieval half-millennium was characterised by its schoolmen (Christian and Islamic) – its ‘scholars’ in the historical sense of that word – and its text-based learning and teaching. It was a period of learning and scholarship, but (especially in the Christian world) not of science. It was science, the Christian reformation, and mercantilism which eventually defined the post-medieval modern epochs.

The teachings of Islam and Christianity were not that different, indeed unsurprisingly similar given that Islam was, in its initial context, a progressive derivative of Christianity. Both religions regarded all moneylending as the ‘sin of usury’ and both had prescriptive teachings about the roles of women in society; Islam’s teachings being a little more progressive (for example, in the sense of defining independent women’s property rights), but also a little more prescriptive. The problem of Islam today is that it was (compared to Christianity) over-prescriptive (ie too readily taken too literally) and over-coherent (ie making it too hard for Islam, as a cultural force, to mutate and evolve).

In addition to this medieval Christian-Islam culture-scape (with Judaism also playing a significant independent role, especially in emergent finance), there were two very important features of the physical and biological environment. This half-millennium roughly coincides with the climatic ‘medieval warm period’. And, of particular interest to us today, this was the healthiest epoch in history, in particular healthy for its relative lack of epidemic disease – for its ‘lack of plagues’.

So, the irony is that the medieval period that is characterised in our present collective mindframe as one of plague, was in fact a period that was comparatively free of ‘pestilence’. And it’s a period, regarded as climatically benign, that provides nuance to our present concerns around climate change.

Plague, Cruelty and Filth

It is true that the early medieval period began with a pandemic, and ended with a pandemic; in both cases, Plague (capitalised here to indicate a specific disease), probably more pneumonic (airborne) rather than bubonic (flee-borne). The Plague pandemic (sourced in Africa) which began around 550 substantially depopulated the Mediterranean region, and created the context for the emergence in Arabia of Islam as a popular scholarly religion, for the military conquest (Jihad) of much of that depopulated region, and the subsequent demographic spread of Moslems and Moslem culture through much of the Mediterranean landscape. This quarter-millennium (500-750) is known as the ‘Dark Ages’ in Europe, and in an important sense, especially to emergent post-Roman Christendom, the rapid spread of a militarised rival to Christianity through much of the former Roman Empire represented very much a sense of encroaching ‘darkness’.

Our main modern images of ‘medieval’ however relate to the difficult quarter-millennium of medieval decline (c.1250 to 1500). In Asia around 1200, periods of famine arising mainly from overpopulation, overfarming and environmental degradation led to the aggressive invasions from the ‘far east’; think Genghis Khan the ‘Mongol Hordes‘.

Then the decline of the medieval warm period set in around the year 1300. Overpopulation in Europe led to a number of famines – and increased political instability – from around this time. Cruel punishments became more prevalent. Then, in the 1340s, a new Plague pandemic travelled along the Silk Road, from China to the ports of the Mediterranean Sea. This became the Black Death – the Second Plague Pandemic – that not only depopulated Europe, but also retrospectively created the idea that medieval Europe was unusually filthy and rat-infested. (Most of the research about rats derives from the Third Plague Pandemic which became significant in the 1890s, which seriously impacted Sydney in 1900, and which, arriving in Auckland from Sydney, was quickly eliminated in New Zealand.)

The severity of the Black Death of the 1340s and 1350s was most likely due to pneumonic – airborne – Plague, with also the possibility of anthrax thrown into the mix. The most significant outbreaks of pneumonic Plague in the last 100 years were the Los Angeles outbreak of 1924 and the Gujarat (India) outbreak of 1994.

My main point here is that this plague period represents the decline of the medieval era, and not the (comparatively benign) medieval era itself.

Medieval today

The Taliban is both a ‘medieval theocracy’ (literally ‘teachers’) and ‘positively medieval’; but principally in the best senses of those expressions. Its teachings represent the generally theocratic scholarship that defines the medieval period as ‘scholarly’; indeed prevailing ‘academic dress’ today directly reflects that important way we should understand the medieval period, as a period of teaching if not of learning. There is much of contemporary modern culture around education, hospitals and bureaucracy that has direct links back to the medieval period.

With this understanding, it is important that we be ‘kind’ to the Taliban, and promote for them the very best support for creating political stability and relative tolerance in the fraught lands which they now rule over.

From our current western modern secular viewpoint, the Taliban represents much that is problematic in terms of human rights, and is certainly politically incorrect. The alternatives to Taliban rule in Afghanistan are worse, in these regards. One is the perpetuation of instability arising from non-Islamic cultural and military invasions; before the Americans were the Russians in 1980, and before that was the American CIA meddling during 1977-79. Before that were the Russians in the 1880s (event in Afghanistan inspired the building of large gun emplacements in strategic locations in New Zealand, such as North Head and Dunedin’s Taiaroa Head), and before that was the destruction in the 1840s of battalions of Queen Victoria’s army. There are signs that the Taliban will have little choice but to turn to China, if appropriate support from the west does not materialise (and inappropriate rhetoric – and drone attacks – do materialise in abundance).

It is important that we understand that ISIS – a modern movement that operates under the cloak of Islam – is much more of the threat to both Afghanistan and to the West than the Taliban need be. We should aim our rhetorical bullets accordingly.

Conclusion

Understanding the past helps us to understand the present. While the future is never a rerun of the past, we do know that developments in ongoing historical time are strongly influenced by our prevailing assumptions, and also by more-enlightened thought patterns. Humankind is presently at a particularly scary historical conjuncture. We need more enlightened thought patterns, and fewer presumptions, as we set the stage for the transition from what we call the ‘modern’ era, to the next era in historical time. Whatever that era may prove to be.

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Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

contact: keith at rankin dot nz

by Dr Bryce Edwards

2019’s Waitangi commemorations will be mostly remembered for two debates – whether the Prime Minister should be able to recite the detail of the Treaty of Waitangi, and whether the teaching of the Treaty and colonial history in New Zealand should be compulsory.

PM’s unawareness of the Treaty Articles

Jacinda Ardern’s awkward answers about the Treaty of Waitangi were uncomfortable watching, not just for supporters of the Government and a more Treaty-driven politics, but also for anyone wary of being put on the spot about contentious issues. You can watch the encounter here, where TVNZ’s Maiki Sherman asks the PM what the articles of the Treaty say – see: Jacinda Ardern fumbles over what Treaty of Waitangi articles say – ‘Article One? On the spot?’

The Leader of the Opposition was also quizzed but had the great advantage of taking the test after the Prime Minister – see 1News’ Bridges has quick refresher to pass Treaty of Waitangi quiz after Ardern’s fumble yesterday.

So, was the PM’s ignorance of the Treaty something she should be criticised for? Definitely, according to Heather du Plessis-Allan. She says, “the country’s leaders have headed up to Waitangi to try to look woke around race relations. But, if you are aiming to look woke, you better be woke” – see: Jacinda Ardern should have been able to recite the Treaty.

Du Plessis-Allan expresses sympathy for Ardern but explains why we should take her failure seriously: “She is the country’s leader after all. She is the one who celebrated the launch of the Crown-Māori Relations Portfolio by saying, ‘My vision is that we as a country realise the promise of the Treaty.’ How can you deliver on the promise of the Treaty if you don’t know the promise of the Treaty? And she’s also the one using Waitangi Day as a PR opportunity.”

The unfortunate incident, in which “the PM’s lack of knowledge was exposed” also raises bigger questions for du Plessis-Allan about Ardern’s abilities: “It’s also a substance problem. This is a recurring theme with the Prime Minister. There’s a lot of style, especially on the international stage, but questions remain over substance back home.”

Similarly, former Act MP Rodney Hide writes today that the episode brings into focus the contrast between Ardern’s strengths and weaknesses: “She is wonderful wowing the people at Waitangi. She is great on the world stage. She exudes compassion. She makes a great celebrity. She would be tremendous addition to the Royal Family. But she’s Prime Minister. She’s responsible for the entire apparatus of government. She also needs to show depth. Her failure to know Article One reinforces a sense of shallowness that goes hand-in-hand with celebrity status” – see: Jacinda Ardern’s failure to recite Article One ‘inexcusable’.

For Hide, not all “gotcha questions” merit being taken seriously, but anything about the Treaty says a lot about an MP, because the “Treaty is a big deal politically, legally, constitutionally, and historically. It has a big impact” on government. He says that it’s “a basic expectation of being an MP” to be able “to rattle off the three Articles”. And he adds, “Don Brash could rattle it off in his sleep. Bill English could do so in Maori.”

Newstalk ZB political editor Barry Soper also argues that the Treaty question put to the PM was fair: “The question was asked for a reason, as the leader of the nation, attending what she’s turned into a personal five day event for her, she should have known the articles of the Treaty – there are only three of them. Forget the te reo version that she parroted, the English would have done. She was there after all, to commemorate the signing of the Treaty and should have been fully across its contents” – see: Our future generations need to understand the content of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Soper does, however, add a guess at how John Key would have dealt with the question: “his face would have broken into a wide smile but he more than likely wouldn’t have even attempted to answer.”

Some Māori leaders took Ardern to task for her inadequate response. Sonny Tau of Ngāpuhi chose to say the following in his Waitangi Day speech in front of Ardern: “Only one thing I’ve got to say this morning and that is: If we’re going to lead a country, we need to learn the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi… There are some of us, leaders, who have slipped up on that, and all I ask is by this time next year that we all know the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi” – see Zane Small and Jamie Ensor’s Ngāpuhi’s Sonny Tau takes jab at Jacinda Ardern’s Treaty knowledge in Waitangi speech.

Yesterday, Hinemoa Elder raised the bar even further, saying that it’s not “sufficient” to be able to just recite the words of the Treaty, but it’s important to also have a relatively sophisticated analysis of them. She puts forward this challenge: “How many can recall these in Te Reo Māori, and English, and talk about the differences in interpretation and the inherent cultural clashes?” – see: We should all be familiar with the Treaty of Waitangi, here’s a 101.

Teaching the Treaty in schools

In her column, Elder concludes: “If we learnt them at school wouldn’t that make things easier? What a radical idea! Then from a young age we can debate the very ideas that underpin our national sense of who we are. Is that really so hard to put into practice?”

Many other commentators have made a similar connection between Ardern’s lack of knowledge and the need to have much more colonial history taught in New Zealand schools.

For example, Liam Hehir has responded to the incident by arguing “When even the ‘woke’ are ignorant about Te Tiriti o Waitangi, it’s clear we need to make teaching its history compulsory in schools” – see: If Jacinda doesn’t know the Treaty, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Hehir, who has a strong understanding of colonial history from his Palmerston North schooling, says he asked around amongst friends and family and found a similar level of unawareness of Treaty details: “I did not expect this. What was also unexpected was the fact that relative wokeness seemed to have little bearing on knowledge or ignorance about what is, whether you like it or not, the foundational basis for the existence of the country. I had expected those who make a point of being sensitive to the Treaty to have a working knowledge of what was actually in it. If that sounds like a snarky point, it’s not supposed to. It genuinely surprised me.”

There’s a petition underway, asking that a law be passed to make the teaching of the Treaty and colonial New Zealand history compulsory – see Adele Redmond’s article, Petition reignites debate over teaching New Zealand’s colonial history in schools.

According to this, the New Zealand History Teachers’ Association wants to see the “coherent teaching” of colonial history, with chairperson Graeme Ball being reported as saying “New Zealand’s colonial history was taught in an ‘ad hoc’ fashion, and students were ‘lucky’ if they learned about Parihaka, the New Zealand Land Wars, or the Waitangi Tribunal.”

Bell says “New Zealand was experiencing a ‘zeitgeist moment’, with more Kiwis willing to engage with te reo and New Zealand’s colonial history”, and the Government should therefore seize the chance to introduce compulsory courses.

The response has been generally positive. The New Zealand Herald responded with an editorial pointing out that an understanding of New Zealand’s history is vital, and because the phase of Treaty settlements is nearing an end, “it ought now to be possible to find a balanced history for teaching in schools” – see: Our history is contentious, that is all the more reason to teach it.

The Dominion Post has shown even more enthusiasm, saying the government has an opportunity it must seize: “History is often considered boring because of the tyranny of distance and time. Imagine history delivered at a very local level, as an engaging, exciting introduction to a wider context; how issues and incidents in your town, on your street, played a role in the bigger story; one that culminated in a historic day 179 years ago. It just needs a little imagination and some effort” – see: Let’s go back to the future.

Politicians respond to calls for colonial history in schools

Politicians are always fearful of being on “the wrong side of history”, but initially the Government poured cold water on the idea of compulsory courses in colonial history.

Kelvin Davis, who is Labour’s Deputy leader, associate minister of education, minister of Crown Māori relations, and a former teacher, was reported as rejecting the idea, saying: “In terms of the teaching of Te Tiriti in schools, remember that schools are self-governing, self-managing. It’s inappropriate for governments to come along and dictate specifics of what’s taught in schools” – see John Gerritsen’s History teachers decry ‘shameful’ ignorance of colonial, Māori history.

The Prime Minister is also reported as deflecting questions about proposal for schools to teach colonial history. She said: “My first question would be how many aren’t? I would be surprised if it wasn’t being taught universally.”

The same article also reports that “New Zealand First MP Shane Jones said it was up to schools to decide what they taught but he expected most, if not all, would teach students about the Treaty of Waitangi.”

But it wasn’t long before the Government warmed up to the idea, especially because opposition politicians were embracing the proposal. Audrey Young reported that: “There seems to be a consensus across the political spectrum about the need for schools to actively teach the Treaty of Waitangi in the context of New Zealand history, but with caveats. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, National leader Simon Bridges and Hobson’s Pledge spokesman Don Brash all supported education on the Treaty of Waitangi for New Zealand children” – see: Broad political agreement to teach NZ history and Treaty of Waitangi in schools, with caveats.

On Māori TV, some further details of what politicians thought were covered in Talisa Kupenga’s item, MPs at Waitangi talk colonial history in schools. For instance, Kelvin Davis says, “It’s right to give the Māori version and other versions [of colonial history] but I am of the opinion that the Māori version is the correct version.” And Youth Minister Peeni Henare asserts: “I want a unified standard. It is ad-hoc when it comes to how and what is taught in each area but we are all wanting the same thing; to teach children our history.”

Difficult questions about teaching political history

There is no doubt that any moves to establish greater teaching of New Zealand history would raise big questions about ideological and political impacts. After all, such compulsory lessons would amount to a version of “civics education” being introduced by proxy.

This is the concern of economics blogger Michael Reddell who says he is highly supportive of the principle of teaching New Zealand colonial history in schools but also highly sceptical about what it might mean in practice – see: Yes, but…. In this, Reddell argues that the prospect of political indoctrination is always a factor when government seek to introduce civics lessons.

Reddell explains that despite his enthusiasm for the study of New Zealand history, “what leaves me rather more ambivalent (‘yes, but….’)  is the sort of people who would be teaching our history, and/or designing any curriculum. Few of them seem to see New Zealand history as something to celebrate (I’m going to be fascinated to see how our Prime Minister treats the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s first visit), and there is a strong theme of shame –  the ‘black armband’ approach to history –  combined with some agenda for how these people think society should be organised now or what role (say) the Treaty of Waitangi should play.”

Similarly, talkback radio host Sean Plunket believes there’s “a lot of BS in history”, and he “says it’s the version we learn that is important” – see Scott Palmer’s ‘Propaganda’: Sean Plunket slams ‘biased’ compulsory Māori history calls . He argues for a greater diversity of subject matter in the teaching of history.

Coming from a very different perspective, columnist Tom O’Connor says that a current lack of history in schools is leading to bigotry: “It is no wonder we hear such ill-informed and ignorant commentary every time the details of a Waitangi Tribunal hearing are announced. How can anyone be expected to understand the complexities of the issue if the underlying history is not known? In a vacuum of reliable and fact-based knowledge, mis-information and bigotry grow like mushrooms in a dark place” – see: Unacceptable not to teach children ‘complete’ NZ history.

O’Connor argues that New Zealand students learn their history too late, and contrasts this with other English-speaking countries: “American school kids begin learning their history from day one as do children in English and Irish schools. Some of us were taught selected parts of English history only, which had little if any relevance to us, but nothing of our own.”

In his opinion piece, Liam Hehir warns that it would be mistake to just replace English history with New Zealand history: “What happened in the United Kingdom – particularly during the period of the English Civil War – is also important for anybody who wants to understand the nature of our institutions and how they work. Anybody who has a good grasp of events of 17th century England and 19th century New Zealand will have a working knowledge of who we are and how we got here.”

As to the question of compulsion, University of Auckland history lecturer and Waitangi Tribunal member Aroha Harris takes on such questions, saying that compulsion is only necessary because a voluntary approach has failed – see: Don’t get me started on compulsion.

Harris lists other “compulsions” that she says Maori have had to put up with: “compulsory taking of Māori land, compulsory denial of te reo, compulsory restrictions on whāngai practices, on hapū fisheries, on customary resource management systems. Really. Just don’t get me started.”

And on the issue of what in the current school curriculum might be replaced by compulsory colonial lessons, Harris says: “(a) it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, and (b), shall we reflect a little on what we’ve already lost by remaining ignorant of our past and acting like it doesn’t matter?”

Finally, for his take on what is wrong with the supposed “conservative” version of New Zealand colonial history, see David Slack’s liberal parody: A brief impartial history of New Zealand.

By Dr Amanda Watson

In Papua New Guinea, the Post-Courier featured a front-page story with the headline “PNG tops world in ‘porn’ search” on January 17. In previous years, there have also been similar stories asserting that PNG beats all other countries when it comes to internet searches for pornography.

For any nation, this accolade would be unwelcome. As PNG prides itself on being a Christian country with strong traditional cultures and values, coupled with tough laws banning importation of pornographic magazines and movies, the headline has produced consternation.

The ruling political party in PNG has released a statement and the competing newspaper has also published a response. Both reactions argue that the Post-Courier’s front page story is inaccurate.

The front-page article included the assertion that 100 percent of all internet searches in Western Highlands Province are for the term ‘porn’. Clearly, not every internet search in that province includes this term.

So, what is going on? My blog will examine the source of the newspaper story and assess its credibility. It will also discuss internet access trends in PNG.

The source of the media reports is Google Trends. This is an interactive website run by Google, probably the world’s most popular internet search engine, which presents information about the searches that are conducted through Google.

For instance, a user can type in the word “car” and see information about how popular the search term is over time and also where it is popular, comparing regions, countries and cities.

First glance
At first glance, the site appears to suggest that 100 percent of all searches conducted using Google in the United Kingdom feature the word “car”. But this is not possible. There’s no way that all of the people in Wales, Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom only ever use Google when they want to find out information about different kinds of motor vehicles.

Instead, the way it works is that the figures represent rankings, not percentages. The Post-Courier’s story was misleading in that it included percentage symbols alongside bar graphs. As Google Trends explains: “100 is the location with the most popularity as a fraction of total searches in that location”.

In other words, the United Kingdom had more searches during the time period for the word “car” compared to other countries, as a percentage of the total number of searches, which would also have included many other words, including “weather”, “news”, “school”, “restaurant”, “bank” and more.

Another example is the term “Highlands”. When inserted into Google Trends, bar graphs appear showing 75 for PNG. Again, this does not mean that 75 percent of the Google searches conducted by people in PNG are for this word.

Instead, it means that compared to other countries – where, for example, the term “mountains” might be more commonly used – the term “Highlands” is searched for fairly frequently in PNG.

Now, turning to the term “porn”, when looking at trends over the past five years, PNG is not listed in the top 25 countries. In fact, when the author visited the Google Trends website shortly after the Post-Courier story was published, it proved difficult to replicate the Post-Courier’s results.

I changed the time period to the past 12 months and the results revealed that once again PNG did not feature in the top 25 nations. I generated similar results for other time periods, as is shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Country rankings: Google Trends enquiries on 26 January 2017 using the term ‘porn’

Difficult to check
It’s important to note that the Post-Courier’s findings were not easy to duplicate and that in fact PNG does not feature in the top 25 listing for most time periods. Google Trends results are constantly being updated in real time and therefore it is very difficult to check or verify the Post-Courier’s story.

In addition, the tool only presents the top 25 countries – therefore it is not possible to determine a country’s actual ranking if it does not appear in the top 25.

It’s also helpful to point out that the size of a country’s population does not impact upon the ranking, as the ranking refers to the frequency of use of a word, for instance “porn”, as compared to all other words inserted into Google in that place, including “school”, “highway”, “buai”, “election”, “Highlands”, “Australia”, etc.

In other words, the word “Highlands” is used in PNG more often as a percentage of all searches, compared to the word “mountains”. It’s also worth noting that some users may have blocked their location, meaning that Google cannot tell where they are based, and this would of course make any data regarding locations of searches somewhat inaccurate.

Western Highlanders might also be curious to know how their province rates. While the Post-Courier showed a graph suggesting that the Western Highlands is the province with the most searches for the term “porn” versus other words used, compared to other provinces of PNG, the results are inconsistent.

As is shown in Table 2, Western Highlands Province (WHP) moves around the rankings a great deal, depending on the time period in question. For instance, in the past 7 days, WHP didn’t feature at all in the top ten provinces, whereas it’s in the top position when looking at the last 5 years.

When focusing on other provinces, their positions also move around a great deal. In short, the author feels that the rankings vary so much when comparing provinces in PNG as to be meaningless.

Table 2: Western Highlands Province (WHP): Google Trends enquiries on 26 January 2017 using the term ‘porn’

Note: Google Trends results are only showing for the first four provinces in the “past 30 days” time period, for the first eight provinces in the ‘past 4 hours’ category and for the first five provinces in the “past hour” time period.

Significant improvement
In the last couple of years there has been a significant improvement in the accessibility of the internet in PNG, due to mobile network upgrades and expansions, as well as availability of cheap smartphone handsets.

While most people in PNG still do not have access to electricity, many do now live within mobile network coverage. The majority of this coverage is second generation (2G) which is suitable only for voice calls and text messaging.

But around urban centres, both Digicel and bmobile Vodafone now offer third generation (3G) service, which can be used to surf the internet, correspond through email and use social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp.

In Port Moresby and Lae, Digicel offers 4G service. Telikom PNG is in the process of launching a new, digital mobile phone service which will aim to compete with the other players.

All these changes have meant that a growing number of people in PNG are accessing the internet for the first time. In particular, the number of Facebook users based in PNG continues to rise. Interest in and use of Facebook is fuelled by mobile phone companies offering special promotions through which Facebook use is either free or very cheap.

Nonetheless, many people in PNG still use basic handsets and rarely access the internet, if ever.

In short, this context means that many of the internet users in PNG have only had internet access for a year or two. As people in PNG are among the latest in the world to gain access to the internet, they may be unaware of the range of activities or kinds of searches that they could undertake through this medium.

Alarmist reports not helpful
Publication of alarmist, misleading reports suggesting that online porn consumption is sky-high in PNG is not going to help to strengthen understanding about the medium or how to use it.

Having examined the recent Post-Courier article and the Google Trends website, it’s now clear that the Post-Courier article was incorrect and that PNG does not necessarily rank highly for internet porn searches.

The assertion in the newspaper’s sub-heading that “almost all Papua New Guineans look up the word ‘porn’” is not supported by the evidence. It also seems plain that any comparison of provinces within PNG is unhelpful.

Even if patterns could be determined in the Google Trends material, given limited internet access and use by most people across PNG, it would be unwise to draw conclusions regarding how provinces compare to one another.

Further research will be required to unpack whether Google Trends does convey some useful data. Academic research would also be valuable in order to learn about the internet use of groups of people in PNG.

Amanda H A Watson is a lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), based in Port Moresby under the UPNG-ANU partnership. She is also a visiting fellow with the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Program at the Australian National University (ANU). This article was first published on the Development Policy Centre’s blog DevNet and is republished here with permission.

Comment from Vanuatu Daily Digest

Knee-jerk resentment of someone else’s success, as elsewhere, is sadly a feature of Vanuatu life, so the kind of comment seen below, prompted by the feature film Tanna‘s global success  — and now Oscar nomination, is not unexpected:

Thanks and good tumas blo save’ but my comments is, I think my people have been exploited and although the film is making its name to the top, how are these custom village people, the film actors, the island and the country been compensated for what they have to go through to produce this film including any protocol in this country? Can some one reply to this comments with some evidence?

Exploitation is a serious claim to make, however, so we are taking this opportunity to set the record straight.

Protecting kastom mo kalja is taken very seriously in Vanuatu. The Vanuatu Cultural Centre — as the commentor may already know — has stringent protocols in place to prevent exploitation of communities.

Filmcrews must get prior approval to work in Vanuatu, are carefully monitored while working in the country, and must give a copy of their unedited footage to the Cultural Centre when they leave.

On Tanna, the Tafea Cultural Centre supervises all cultural protocols.

In the film Tanna‘s case, The filmmakers went a step further – they opened a kastom rod (a relationship built on mutual respect and kastom) between themselves, the chiefs and the community. This connection is arguably a major reason why audiences have responded so well to Tanna – the genuine, heartfelt connection between the filmmakers, the cast and the community is apparent.

Vanuatu Daily Digest reached out to the filmmakers for clarification, and Janita Suter, wife of co-director Bentley Dean and location producer for the film had this to say:

“The film was only possible through the auspices of the Vanuatu Culture Centre at a national and local level, who insist and ensure that all people involved in the productions of films in Vanuatu are dealt with fairly and respectfully — including representation and payment during production (both traditional and financial).

“Beyond this The Vanuatu Culture Centre and community of Yakel are in charge of DVD sales for all of Vanuatu, including how the film is distributed and profits. Our aim is that people should continue to benefit from their cultural output.

“We’re regularly in contact with the community, in fact one was recently staying with us! The film continues to give back to the community and the chiefs have been happy with this arrangement right from the beginning. The chiefs maintain there is a strong kastom road between us.

“It is good to clarify this sort of commentary. There were very deliberate safeguards to ensure no ‘exploitation’ occurred and that the correct ‘monetary compensation’ was made for those involved in the film. This was all arranged through the official relevant Vanuatu institutions described above, as is the correct process for filming in Vanuatu, as well as the traditional chiefs of the villages involved.

“If people have queries on this they can speak with the chiefs of Yakel or Jacob Kapere from the Cultural Centre, or the cultural director of Tanna, JJ Nako (if you can find him!).”