Generalisations
The Herald reports:
Air New Zealand last night apologised for a crew manual which profiled passengers by nationality and suggested flight attendants watch Tongans who wanted to “drink the bar dry”.
The airline said the document, made public yesterday, was written in 2008 for flight crews. It had since been updated and did not now touch on alcohol or “cultural components”.
This is not surprising. Even if Air NZ has observed such drinking with some Tongan passengers, they could have made clear it was only a minority, and/or made it a general warning about all passengers.
Labour Party list MP Carmel Sepuloni, who is of Tongan descent, said the remarks were offensive, and she was considering lodging a complaint.
“I don’t know what Air New Zealand was thinking in putting something like that together,” she said. “They shouldn’t be making any generalisations of any ethnic group.”
I wonder whether that statement is going too far. I agree the Tongan alcohol reference causes offence, but taking another statement:
Staff were told not to be surprised “if you ask a Japanese female a question and a male customer answers on her behalf”.
I would argue that providing staff with this information can be helpful. If a staff member has not been warned, they might react with surprise and say something inappropriate the first time a male answers on behalf of his wife.
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:00 am
sensitive lot aren’t we.
apparently there was a section on arab customers, but it never made it to print
“arabs may attempt to blow themselves up while on board”
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:33 am
Haha, that’ me. I like to get wasted everytime I hop on a plane to travel. I don’t sleep on the plane even if it’s a long flight (20 hours or more) so drinking alcohol keeps me up. I always take something to read (usually I grab the latest scientific journals that come out on that week) plus drinking whiskey during flight keeps me busy. I have a personal reason for not wanting to go to sleep during flight on a plane, but I won’t share it with readers here.
There is nothing offensive here at all about this issue. Just move on.
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:33 am
Carmel should get off her high horse. Really.
Cabin crews will know a lot worse about different ethnic groups and yap amongst themselves about it. However they know that it is far to non-PC to every write in a manual.
Besides, if Tongans really do have a problem with the drink, then Carmel should make better efforts to address this. If Carmel honestly thinks that all Tongans do not, then she is either lying or naive. Such a statement would have been written into the manual with good reasoning. Fortunately for Air NZ, Tonga is only a 3 hour flight away.
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:38 am
Repulsion Camel claiming Tongan heritage is like me claiming Fijian. She is a born and raised naki girl, but boy does she like playing up the poor islander angle.
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:44 am
Good example of PC gone mad, they might want to rephrase it like this: “Over many years of taking sample observations, we have concluded that there is a statistically significant difference between alcohol intake for male passengers, where those from Tonga consume more than 30% alcohol more than the average male passenger.”
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:54 am
I’m surprised there wasn’t also a warning to flight crew staff to watch out for white colonialists with a guilt complex, and to ensure they received no alcoholic beverages in case they broke down in tears.
And if the staff member was of Maori descent you could just warn them to watch out for ‘greedy white MOFOs’.
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:59 am
Lets be honest, cabin staff fall into two catagories, fit for purpose and not.
Funny that so do passengers, either ok and arseholes for whatever reason.
I’m sure Tongan males who drink too much fall into one of them.
Personally as long as the drink is free I want the maximum I can get as then I’m getting some of my ticket money back.
I would love to get the bottles with the lids still on them!
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:00 am
“I’m surprised there wasn’t also a warning to flight crew staff to watch out for white colonialists with a guilt complex, and to ensure they received no alcoholic beverages in case they broke down in tears.”
BAHAHAHAHA
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:09 am
***“I don’t know what Air New Zealand was thinking in putting something like that together,” she said. “They shouldn’t be making any generalisations of any ethnic group.”***
It’s because of this sensitivity that sensible profiling at airports is avoided. Instead old japanese women have to take their shoes off on the off chance they are planning on blowing the plane up.
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:13 am
All the white colonialists were buried a long time ago.
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:15 am
The Samoan government got paid by TVNZ for a similar story, may be the Tongans can get some of it too. It only serves to remind people of their attitudes. Racial attitudes!
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:23 am
For the second time today, offensive or accurate?
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:26 am
Excuse me but around these parts (where there is a significant population of pacific island peoples) it is well known that many of these island races have a far lower tolerance of alcohol than do those of other racial origins.
It seems only commonsense therefore for AirNZ to acknowledge this very real issue and thus ensure that the supply of alcohol is tailored to accommodate any reduced tolerance.
There is a definite link between race and alcohol tolerance — to deny that simply because it’s political incorrect is sheer stupidity!
Are we now to play “head in the sand” and put passengers safety at risk simply because acknowledging a proven fact is taboo when race is involved?
What next, we’re not to provide Maori with more active diabetes testing because it’s known that they’re more predisposed to this disease?
Can we not acknowledge that African American are more predisposed to some forms of leukemia than others?
For Christ’s sake, let’s not ignore things just because they might cause offense!
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:39 am
Pete George 10:13 am,
Not according to my very bestest mate Hone.
You need to get up to date, Pete.
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:52 am
Bob R 10:09 am,
Imagine the safeguards we’d need to put in place if it was an ‘old Muslim woman’ – it wouldn’t be a matter of ensuring she just removes her shoes.
Perhaps we could suggest that all Muslims now be forced to travel naked – especially air travel – but I suppose the women could still wear their veils, though.
And don’t hold back on the cavity probes.
March 22nd, 2010 at 11:03 am
I’m surprised there wasn’t a stringent warning to all aircrew about politically conservative tracksuit-wearing Australians hitting the grog to excess.
March 22nd, 2010 at 11:04 am
No, it’s you and Hone that need to get up to date Kris.
NZ has long been post colonial, it is multi cultural but with widespread intolerance – especially intolerant seem to be whites born on NZ who seem to be afraid of others sharing what their ancestors came for.
March 22nd, 2010 at 11:20 am
Dime gets profiled at airports
every time I fly i get stopped for a random explosives test.
I guess for every blonde Dime, they can search 10 arabs?!
March 22nd, 2010 at 11:32 am
dime – my 87 year old father, with his RSA badge and King’s Empire Veteran pin on his blazer was searched when he went to Oz. Shoes off, that sort of thing. While I admit he is pretty dark from all those years in the North African desert but he doesn’t look that Arabic to me.
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Pete George @1104 am NZ is multi cultural………It is not multicultural, multi racial perhaps but culturally Anglo Saxon,and long may that last!
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:08 pm
I was once on a Malayasian Airlines flight during Ramadan and none of the Muslims on board could eat until the Pilot told them the sun had set, but we non-Muslims chomped happily away.
When the Captain later announced the sun had set, all the Muslims loudly demanded their meals and the staff were rushed off their feet delivery their food.
But about 5 minutes later the Captain announced he had got the time of sunset wrong because of some navigational issue and that the sun would not set at our current position for another 10 minutes! The look on the Muslims faces as the food dropped from their mouths onto their plates was priceless.
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Kowtow 12:01 pm,
Don’t confuse Pete with the facts – he’s not big on facts.
And for heaven’s sake, don’t mention that New Zealand was founded upon Christian values and heritage – that would really blow his mind!
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:20 pm
> If a staff member has not been warned, they might react with surprise and say something inappropriate the first time a male
> answers on behalf of his wife.
I’m sure that Japanese aren’t the only ones who do that – conservative christians and muslims could easily do the same thing. It would be better just to have a general policy for dealing with situations like that. Likewise, having a general policy for dealing with people who are drinking too much. Manuals tell crew what to do – and if the manual treats people on a race-by-race basis, then implicitly, it is telling crew to treat people differently based on the colour of their skin. There is a word for that – racism.
The last paragraph (“Mr Gaskin said a new standards manual no longer contained a “cultural component” as the “varying expectations” of Air NZ customers were now highlighted in presentations to new international cabin crew when they joined the airline”) seems to imply that they are still training staff to be racist, it is just that they no longer write it down.
Air New Zealand is majority government owned, and the government should be showing leadership, and letting the board know that they will lose their board positions unless they put in place effective policies to ensure that human rights abuses by Air NZ come to an end.
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Don’t worry about the booze, it’s the BBQ dog in the aisles you sould be worried about.
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:37 pm
> It’s because of this sensitivity that sensible profiling at airports is avoided. Instead old japanese women have to take their shoes
> off on the off chance they are planning on blowing the plane up.
There are two things wrong with your logic. Firstly, security experts such as Bruce Scheiner refer to airport ‘security’ as ‘security theatre’, because it is all about making people feel safer and detering the dumber terrorists, rather than actually making anyone safer. It is always focused on what worked in the past in a knee-jerk fashion, and not on what might happen in the future. If the general public didn’t have to jump through hoops for ‘security’ because only ‘real terrorists’ had to, they would feel the government was doing nothing.
Secondly, it is ideology and not skin colour that drives terrorism. Not everyone who might consider perpetrating a terrorist act is a young Arab male. You cannot determine one’s ideology by looking at them – especially if they are trying to hide it. On top of that, for the cost of a few flights, you can find out if you get a free pass or are selected for profiling – and if you are only doing a trial run, the authorities will treat the person testing the system as a ‘false positive’. So someone setting up a terrorist cell would get their members to go on a few flights, see who isn’t selected for screening, and then send them with the bomb. That is why random screening is actually more secure than any form of profiling, and even less secure for transparent forms of profiling like racial profiling.
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:31 pm
I’d love to know what the crew manual advice was for gay Labour MP’s;
Frequent flyers,
excess baggage,
may hail you to divert to another port..
.. oh – and hate kids”
March 22nd, 2010 at 3:56 pm
IMHO in a couple of years the flight regime will lot like this.
Ariive at airport 5 hours before flight.
Strip off all clothing in a booth and be issued with one size fits all all in one body suit.
Clothes taken away for Xray and other detection along with all luggage.
Board aircraft one hour before flight in body suit. NO carry on luggage If taking medication this will have to be sent by doctor to airport in advnace for screening.
Korans or Bibles only reading material issues on board.
On arrivial at destination luggage re examined and then clothes returned to change into but at a location well away from terminal where passengers are bussed to.
Think Im joking.
Well those of you who recall travel to OZ before we had to use our passports think how that compared to today and then think again
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:13 pm
When I answer on behalf of my wife I am corrected by my wife.
When I answer on behalf of myself I am corrected by my wife.
As Rumpole put it so succinctly; “She who must be obeyed”.
March 23rd, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Grizz posted at 9.33am 22nd March of Carmel Sepuloni:
If she’s so fond of her Tongan heritage perhaps she’ll cook and eat the bloody horse.