The Personal Debt Industry: Racist Debt Practices and Pasifika Peoples in New Zealand

Abstract

This chapter is based on an analysis of the working poor as flawed consumers. We begin by recognising the generalised and the local/racialised aspects of this concept:

[The] poor of a consumer society are socially defined, and self-defined, first and foremost as blemished, defective, faulty and deficient — in other words, inadequate — consumers.

(Bauman, 1998, p. 38)

In Pacific families, in particular, we notice that a number of the mums come in carrying other people’s debt. I don’t think they do it by choice, they have to, there is an expectation and that’s so ingrained that there is no choice…

(Anglican Trust for Women and Children staff member, cited in Families Commission, 2012, p. 15)

In mid — we were fortunate to spend time in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain as part of research and study leave that was sponsored by our respective universities.¹ During this time, while we enjoyed the privilege of a fully funded sabbatical and worked on our writing projects, including racist debt practices and Pasifika peoples in New Zealand, we were challenged by manifestations of what Bauman has called “flawed consumers”. Almost at every corner and certainly in the safest, stereotypical holiday destinations we were confronted by homelessness and begging. Fortunately the happy snaps that we posted on Facebook excise the ammonia tang of urine from a lumpen proletariat living cheek by jowl with transnational tourists. The point here, of course, is that this proximity now occurs in the heart of empire. For us, at least, the beggar in Lyons, whose wares were suppurating wounds, seemed surreal. Regardless, we were forced to acknowledge both our privilege and that — despite New Zealand’s 30-year track record as a neoliberal experiment (Kelsey, 1995, 1999) — we had lived sheltered lives after all.