Male, pale, won’t fail

Karl du Fresne (Male, pale but not stale, May 31) makes some fine points, but misses the key one, which is that serious advantage existed and still does for the white male.

In December 1984 I left school and joined the NZ Post Office as a technician. Rotorua was, at that point, and possibly still is, about 50 per cent Ma¯ ori. Let’s assume it was also 50 per cent female. Of the approximately 50 technicians in Rotorua, one was Ma¯ ori and none were female. I’m sure some were gay but they certainly kept this to themselves.

There are only two ways to interpret this: either straight white guys are inherently better than other people, or the system of selection was inherently unfair.

I’m going with the second option. Which means that when I applied for the post office role 75 per cent of the population of Rotorua were not considered eligible, and thus I had a substantial hand-up. The environment was toxic to ‘‘nonstandard’’ people, and teemed with a self-satisfied sense of superiority constantly reinforced by a biased selection process.

Which is incredibly unfair to the others and this is, in part, what we are addressing through diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives.

Recently I heard some moaning about how D&I is biased against, or is ‘‘persecuting’’, older white guys. Seriously? I challenge you all to examine your career to date and accept you have had advantages, and accept you no longer have them. peddlers) showed their lack of integrity, wisdom and general common sense before the 2008 collapse, which domino-ed around the world, frightening governments so much that they paid out billions shoring up the system to avoid total mayhem. Some regulation tightening followed, although this never succeeded in changing the aforementioned peddler mentality.

It seems the US banks have persuaded their government it’s time to relax the regulations again, which tells me that governments generally have short memories, and forever bow to Big Money. It won’t be long before we see the debacle of 2008 repeated, but next time governments simply won’t have the money to repeat their rescue mission.

Perhaps I’m a prophet of doom, but we’ve been here before!