Worker organised resistance

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Once again Indymedia is the only place providing coverage of worker organised resistance against the current government’s policies.

While the media, major political parties and even the left wing blogs have concentrated on  what was going on inside the Jobs Summit a good old fashioned protest was going on outside. Despite the great messages, the photo friendly images and reality of the protest the coverage we’ve seen has focussed only on the centre-left’s response.

Even the left wing commentary on the lack of men at the summit has been full of images of men (to show the absence of women) rather than images of strong women raising their own voices.

I also haven’t seen any mainstream coverage of the Christchurch picket against the 90 day sacking law which attracted a variety of workers groups and unions.

Sometime in the next few years the left needs to realise that we’re no longer part of the orthodoxy, it’s ok to protest (in fact it always was). We can take our banner and loudspeakers out on the street and tell the world that our voices and our rights are important.

Fear itself

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Chris Trotter seems to think I’m being culturally precious and pandering to Māori separatism with my post on the h issue. He misses the point, and fearmongers about vague Orewa-like shadows of a savage threat to the settler way of life.

While it did a lot of describing, the purpose of the post was not descriptive, (is) but normative (ought). The question was not whether Wanganui has become the de facto and de jure name of the town; it manifestly has, a fact I acknowledge by using that spelling throughout that post and this one.* The question was whether those who made it so had the right to make it so, and whether they have the right to keep it so against the will of those who retain rights to the name and its usage – rights granted in principle (but not necessarily enforceable in law) by the Treaty of Waitangi.

Chris seeks to derail this by reference to the changing nature of language, but his example hardly addresses the point, far from invalidating it. The `ought’ I’m arguing is that those with a legitimate historical, linguistic and cultural claim to a name – nobody disputes that they do – which forms a core aspect of their whakapapa and regional identity and who have been actively working to maintain that name for generations should not have that claim summarily invalidated by the whim of a majority whose sole attachment to the word is the ignorance of colonial hegemony – wanting to control whatever aspect of the local culture they can for fear of their own insecure identity. The Bowalley Road example, while interesting, is fundamentally different from the case in point for two reasons: first, it is a name which was attached to a place by individual fiat rather than from long-established common usage; and second, nobody seems to care that it has been changed. My argument rests firmly on both these considerations, and they lend it legitimacy: if it were a made-up name, and if nobody cared, my claim would clearly be invalid. The proponents of retaining the current spelling also appeal to both these grounds for legitimacy, so the question is not which of the two causes is legitimate – it is which of the two spellings should take primacy over the other. Who gets to exercise cultural control – rangatiratanga – over the name? Its originators, whose regional and whakapapa identity is tied to in it, at whose pleasure the original Pākehā settlement was founded, and who have since been systematically excluded from its affairs to the point where they are now outsiders on their own historical lands; or the settlers, whose cultural and linguistic dominance is already evident in myriad ways, who are responsible for the marginalisation of the tangata whenua, and who fight tooth and nail against every attempt at reconciliation or reparation unless it is on their terms and their terms alone. The two claims to primacy have the same grounds in principle – it’s just that the grounds of one are stronger than the grounds of the other.

The second part of Chris’ article is worse, though, because rather than misunderstanding the point and its arguments, he misstates the cause and repeats a divisive propaganda line about the dangers of allowing the natives to exercise any authority. Although Chris might not agree, this kite about the Māori radicals in the closet just waiting for their moment to disrupt the nice harmonious race relations we have in NZ is not too dissimilar from that flown by Don Brash five years ago at the Orewa Rotary Club. Let me deal with the two paragraphs in turn:

What’s more, Ken Mair’s demand that the pre-colonial appellation be restored is, I strongly suspect, part-and-parcel of a much more ambitious plan to reclaim his people’s sovereignty over the entire region. To do that, however, Ken and his people would have to fight the colonial wars of conquest all over again – this time emerging as the winners.

Why didn’t we see through their nefarious plan?

1. Change the name.
2. ?????
3. Declare the Mairist Republic of Whanganui.
4. Profit!

The assertion is beyond preposterous; comparing it to the Underpants Gnome business model almost does the model a disservice.

The goals of tino rangatiratanga ceased to be cession/secession, revolution and mass reoccupation by force generations ago. Tangata whenua – and particularly those of the Whanganui region – have embraced the legitimate governmental and judicial processes at their disposal, so much so that one of their daughters is a minister in the current government.

So perhaps the “grasping settlers” Lew condemns are smarter than he is willing to admit. Perhaps they see right through Ken’s seemingly harmless demand that the spelling of the city’s name be changed. Perhaps, by resisting this little challenge today, the Wanganui District Council and its Mayor can avoid resisting much more dangerous challenges tomorrow.

I never condemned the settlers as stupid – I freely admit that they’re not; they have very smartly and efficiently suppressed almost all Māori resistance, to their great advantage. I condemned their actions and attitudes as unjust and counterproductive in the long term. Chris’ whole argument here begs the question that there’s a race war on, and this is the fundamental assertion that the logic of Orewa and of the iwi/kiwi billboards and of the underclass and the warrior gene expects us to accept – for without it, the edifice crumbles. The entire assumption rises from that same grasping settler mentality I identified – fear of the other, fear of scarcity, fear of losing control, the constant feeling of being embattled and under siege and somehow insecure.

If one accepts – and there is copious evidence for this – that there is no intractable race war, and Māori no longer want to fight, but to retain rangatiratanga over the things they still have, and gain control – mostly symbolic, rather than material – over a tiny fraction of what they lost, there’s no argument to be had here. Work with them, rather than against them, treat in good faith and look to the future, and the future begins to look a whole lot brighter.

Today, 28 February, is the anniversary of the 1995 occupation of Pakaitore, the grounds upon which the Wanganui District Courthouse stands, known formerly as Moutoa Gardens in honour of the `loyal Māoris’ who defended the settlement against a Hauhau assault at Moutoa Island in 1864. The occupation lasted nearly three tense months during which the settlers thought their town had been invaded – my wife’s cousin phoned from London in the middle of the night to make sure she wasn’t in any danger; of course, she wasn’t because there was no violence beyond the usual which happened between the Rutland and Commercial Hotels. The occupation centred upon the claim that the land had been expropriated by the city, not sold by tangata whenua. On this same day in 2007, the Māori Land Court returned the block to iwi, who now receive a rental from the Ministry of Justice, whose courthouse continues to operate undisturbed. The land remains publicly accessible to all, although the statue of John Ballance no longer stands. Today, in the wind and rain, there were tents set up selling fry bread and hāngi and raw fish and home-grown veges and artwork; people standing around talking and kids playing. Ken Mair was there; he doesn’t know me and I’m just about as white as can be, but he greeted me warmly and bid me welcome and we chatted for a moment. There was a big tino rangatiratanga flag, but no chest-thumping or politicking or nationalistic fervour – it was a marketplace, on the site of a historical marketplace. The only problem was that there were hardly any white folk there, and those who were there looked guilty and suspicious, like they thought they were trespassing. The people selling the raw fish were embarrassed that they had trouble producing change for a $20 note. A girl of about seven wanted to know where I was from, and when I told her `Wellington, but I grew up here’, she asked `why don’t you live in Wanganui any more?’ What’s needed, and wanted, is more understanding, not the entrenchment of colonial ignorance or its endorsement as a valid way of life.

So, Chris, beyond the vague shadows of Orewa, what `dangerous challenges’ might the latter-day settlers of New Zealand face if they allow tangata whenua a bit of symbolic and linguistic authority over their own names and history?

L

* I use the spelling `Wanganui’ because this spelling currently has primacy. While I believe the spelling should be `Whanganui’, it’s not good enough to just have it become the de facto spelling. In order to recognise rangatiratanga, it must be made official – ariki ki te ariki, tangata ki te tangata.

Are FTAs OK?

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The Feb 27 announcement that NZ and Australia have signed a Free Trade Agreement (FTA)  with the ten member Southeast Asian regional grouping known as ASEAN has been hailed as another triumph for NZ’s economic openness, especially coming at a time when protectionist and nationalising policies have re-emerged in response to the global market crisis now ongoing. Although Trade Minister Tim Grosser signed the AANZ-FTA agreement at the 14th ASEAN summit in Thailand, it was MFAT officials working under instruction from the 5th Labour government who sealed the deal (after 4 years of negotiations), and it is these officials who are now beginning talks with India on a bilateral FTA similar to the one signed last year with the PRC. Yet, amid all the self-congratulation by government officials and business leaders, the nagging questions remains: are such FTA’s always good for the average Kiwi?

Pro-trade advocates will say yes on three counts. First, increased markets for NZ exports means more jobs in those sectors as well as their subsidiaries and ancillary industries. Second, increased foreign investment opportunities for NZ firms will eventually increase dividends for Kiwi shareholders. Third, access to a wider range of import markets means more competition and lower prices for Kiwi consumers. But there is more to the picture than this seemingly positive sum outlook.

The AANZ-FTA, like the FTA with the PRC and the P4 FTA signed earlier by NZ with Brunei, Singapore and Chile, is more properly seen as a tariff reduction scheme. In the case of the AANZ-FTA, the goal is to reduce common tariffs by 96% by 2020, thereby paving the way for the development of a a EU-style common market along the Western Pacific Rim that can compete with the EU, the US and emerging giants like the PRC, India and Brazil. NZ estimates are that it will eventually enjoy a 99% reduction in tariffs on its exports to ASEAN while ASEAN members will receive an 85% reduction on their imports to NZ. With US$ 31 billion is ASEAN exports to Australia and NZ  and US$16.8 billion of Australian and New Zealand exports to ASEAN members in 2007 (75% of that volume being between Australia and ASEAN, with NZ exporting US$4.6 billion to ASEAN members in 2008)), the objective is to raise the flow of goods and services ten fold over the next decade. Tariff reduction is seen as the key to achieving this goal, as it will lower transaction costs and remove fiscal impediments to investment within the partnership.

The problems with this arrangement stem from the asymmetries in the respective economies involved, from the lack of “after-entry” provisos, and from the dubious character of some of the regimes involved. With regard to the latter, the AANZ-FTA includes Myanmar and Brunei, two despotic regimes whose trade reliability and fiscal responsibility, much less human rights records, are open to question. It includes Thailand, which has the appearance of a politically failing state where sex tourism weirdness competes with highly exploitative labour-intensive low-cost production as the primary source of GDP, all amid grave ethnic conflict in its southern regions. It includes Laos and Cambodia, two states that barely meet the criteria for inclusion in a globalised trade regime. Its leading members, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, have issues of political and/or corporate governance (be it in a lack of corporate transparency and/or a lack of political accountability), and the remaining member, Viet Nam, is a one party authoritarian regime that, if not as retrograde as Myanmar, has yet to exhibit the developmental potential of some of its most proximate neighbours. ASEAN is, in other words, a polyglot of corruption, nepotism, economic underdevelopment and exploitation mixed with crass materialism and indifference towards basic human rights and civil liberties in a highly charged ethnically diverse and stratified demographic, with a profoundly unequal distribution of resources and reliability amongst its members. Is that what NZ wants in terms of preferential trading partners?

Not surprisingly, the AANZ-FTA, which is due to go into effect on July 1 2009, has no common labour standards, including provisions regarding collective bargaining, right to organise, female and child labour, occupational health and safety and quality control. It has no environmental clauses. All of those are left to the industries involved. The Fontera PRC subsidiary’s Melanin scandal gives an indication of what can happen when such is the case.

Then there is the issue of size asymmetries and economies of scale. Is it plausible to think that with Australia coupled to NZ on one side of the AANZ-FTA ledger, NZ is going to be an equal beneficiary of the new tariff regime? If Australia turns out to be the major focus of ASEAN trade, will that not accelerate worker exodus and capital flight from NZ to Aussie under the terms of the CEP? Is it plausible to believe that with the lack of labour and other standards, NZ businesses in a variety of value added or service sectors will not have an incentive to re-locate their workforce in ASEAN countries where wages and benefits are lower? Is it plausible to think that NZ, with an export base in relatively inelastic primary-good industries and their derivatives (say, milk powder or paper pulp) will enjoy an equitable balance of trade with more elastic value-added importers? Is it plausible to think that foreign investors will not use the opportunity provided by relaxed investment regulation to assert direct control over NZ productive assets (which is an issue that also is at play with regards to the FTA with the PRC)? What NEW productive activities will actually  be created in NZ that will help diversify the economy while providing new employment opportunities that require so-called “knowledge-based”  skills? (For an earlier discussion of the problems of asymmetric trade, with specific regard to the PRC FTA, see http://scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0803/S00263.htm).

These are the questions that need to be asked in the parliamentary debates leading up to the July 1, 2009 ratification date. It is important that the Greens and other groups with concerns about FTAs avoid the appearance of knee-jerk protectionism that they have been saddled with in the past (as was the case with NZ First). Instead, the emphasis must be on the hidden “F” in an FTA–the FAIR aspect of trade, which for a small democracy such as NZ is as important as its free aspect. After all, free trade is not necessarily synonymous with fair trade, and it behooves the political Left to make that point since no one else (to include Labour) will.

The department of made-up numbers

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This excellent article did the rounds in my department at work today, about the methodological rigour (or lack thereof) in ratings, on which I’ve been meaning to write a post for a while.

I refer almost daily to such demographic information – ratings, audience/circulation, readership and particularly advertising value equivalents – as `the department of made-up numbers’ because, basically, that’s what they are. At best, they are a set of figures which, while deeply flawed, are horizontally and vertically consistent, and well-enough understood that their failings can be accounted for (this approximates a definition of any useful long-term demographic data). At worst, they are the patina of officious statistical rigour over a set of numbers tuned to tell people whatever the media outlet, its owners, or its PR company want people to know – and that means they’re designed to fool. Most often, a given dataset lies in between – in the murky liminal zone where it’s impossible to tell whether it’s the former or the latter or something else entirely without access to the raw data and its provenance, which is nearly always impossible to get, and would entail phenomenal amounts of very specialised, expensive, time-consuming work to make sense of even if you could get it.

Despite these dire problems, demographic data, ratings, audience/circulation and advertising value equivalent data are the mainstay of the media and communications industry’s performance measurement infrastructure, for two simple reasons: First, it gives you nice clear figures to prove your department is doing its job; and second, nothing else does, because media demographics is the art of measuring the unmeasurable. So people who are otherwise cautious and crafty and suspicious just accept the numbers at face value and trust them implicitly because the alternative is no data, and with apologies to the Bard, nothing will come of nothing.

This reliance on demographic figures is highly detrimental to the health of the media industry, because the data can’t be verified, and there exists an inflation imperative. I dislike comparisons to communism as a rule, but there’s a parallel in this sort of reporting in the media/PR/comms industry as it presently is to the problems of productivity reporting seen in the 20s in the USSR and the 50s in China. When both producers and their supposedly independent auditors are ranked according to the quantity – not the quality – of the figures they produce, there inevitably emerges a tendency to inflate those figures.

In the USSR and China, wheat and rice yields were inflated in this way, because the producers would be punished if their yields fell, and the municipal authorities didn’t look too closely at the production figures because they would be punished if their municipality’s yields fell. Central government assumed these figures were correct, and based budgets and food allocations and projections and such upon them, planning more than they could realistically achieve because there was in fact less food than they thought in the granaries.

If we substitute `food’ for `ratings, I think the parallel is pretty clear: the media are relying on bad data to demonstrate that their product has value to advertisers first and journalistic merit second and to boost the egos of their stable of opinion leaders third; internal communications departments use it to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and initiatives; external PR firms use it to prove their worth to client companies; boards of directors rely on it to make decisions about what publicity campaigns to fund, which products to launch, and who to promote. All this is good money thrown after bad – frankly, it’s a miracle it hasn’t all come tumbling down sooner.

L

27 Feb 1951: Lest we forget

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On 27 February 1951 the government deployed the army onto the wharves in an attempt to break a union.

My summary of the Waterfront Dispute: the workers took action as part of a pay dispute by refusing to work over Finn, the ports locked them out, the government declared a state of emergency, rolled in the army and put in draconian regulations that, amongst other things, made it illegal to give food to the children of locked out wharfies.

Today I’m thinking of three things

  1. The courage of the wharfies and their families
  2. The strength and kindness of everyone who broke the law to make sure they had food and shelter
  3. That the “reforms” of the 80s and 90s broke the unions in a way the army never could.

What do we need to do to return power to workers?

The documentary produced for the strike’s 50th anniversary is available here, thanks IrishBill.

Pay equity faxathon

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Over at The Hand Mirror Julie is co-ordinating a pay equity faxathon.

This is a great way to mark International Working Women’s day by telling Tony Ryall that women deserve pay equity, and that National should uncancel the programmes that would have addressed the pay inequality affecting female social workers and school support staff.

So pop on over to The Hand Mirror, download the fax, collect some signatures, and tell National that women are worth it!

`H bombs’ and the grasping settler mentality

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I spent my school years growing up in Wanganui, and for the time being I’m back here, taking care of family matters. Having grown up here as a Pākehā with strong connections in Te Ao Māori, I can say with some authority that the region is mostly populated by unreformed Pākehā racists who loathe Māori out of fear bred from profound ignorance. I say mostly – but not entirely; there is an understandably large Māori population, and some more tolerant Pākehā. This fear and loathing is both the cause and the result of the fact that Māori in Wanganui are poorer, less-well educated and more likely to be involved in crime than non-Māori. Not so different from the general mentality of NZ as a whole, but stronger.

The Wanganui District Council yesterday voted against recommending to the NZ Geographic Board that the name be changed to its proper spelling – Whanganui, endorsing a 2006 referendum in which 82% of respondents favoured retaining the spelling. This post comprises two parts: first, an argument as to why retaining the name without the h is an absurd example of the grasping settler mentality; and second, an explication of how this morning’s front-page article on the topic frames the issue as a crisis, and promotes the same sort of fear and ignorance by marginalising and ridiculing the voices and opinions of those favouring the change.

Grasping settlers
Many will baulk at my referring to the 21st Century residents of Wanganui and its district as `settlers’, given that the settlement was one of the original four established by the New Zealand Company in 1840. Most of them would refer to themselves as `battlers’, and that’s almost as appropriate. What marks people out as settlers is the grasping siege mentality of scarcity – they came here with nothing, they have to get whatever they can get, and damned if they’ll let any of it go. Generations on, and even among those whose families weren’t settlers, this mentality remains. They live here, and they grasp, but generally they make few and feeble attempts to engage with tangata whenua, seeing them as outsiders, as enemies, and as competitors because on some level there is a recognition that they retain a moral claim to resources, discourse and authority. The settlers, despite this recognition, consider that it is their land, and their river and their town, and any arguments or evidence to the contrary are met with hostility and the rhetoric of assimilation.

Mayor Michael Laws:

Wanganui is not a Maori name. It has assumed an identity, a heritage, a history and a mana of its own.

You’ll go far to find a more convenient statement of revisionist ignorance in NZ identity politics. This forms the sole and entire argument in principle against the name change: it’s been that way for ages, so the word no longer means what it once meant – or more plainly, it’s an old mistake so it’s no longer a mistake. If this were to hold everywhere, then the mis-transliteration or misspelling of any word would necessarily destroy any connection to the original in every case: a patently idiotic idea. The fact is that Wanganui is a Māori word, misspelt by the original transliterators because the local dialect drops the `h’, pronouncing `Whanganui’ and `Wanganui’ practically the same, with a Wa sound, not a Fo sound. It’s not a new word – it’s the old word misspelt but pronounced correctly. This is a critically important example of the damn-fool ignorance I’m talking about: most of those against the change complain that they don’t want to have to pronounce it with a `F’, not realising despite mostly having lived here all their lives that nobody would. Hardly anyone pronounces the name of the river – which name is spelt with the h – as such; just ignorant but wanting-to-be-culturally-sensitive Pākehā, or other Māori wanting to make a point about the superiority of their dialect over the local one.

So, the argument in principle is invalid, and the argument of practicality is equally invalid. Why are people so opposed to the change? Because the local Māori want to exert their rangatiratanga by insisting the name of the settlement on the river be rendered correctly, as a symbolic matter, and the settlers are opposed to any assertion of rangatiratanga for fear that they might lose control over their identity and their community, or become hori-fied, as Dam Native put it. Spelling, pronunciation and other such matters are important symbolic markers of identity and authority, and the river and its surrounds physical manifestations of that. As local iwi say: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au – I am the river, the river is me. That such a central part of their identity may be grasped and mutilated and withheld as if it no longer belonged to them is almost as grave an insult as is possible.

This grasping settler mentality is the fundamental reason why Māori have to endure a decades-long, frightfully expensive and time-consuming judicial process under a foreign system weighted against them, generations after the fact and opposed every step of the way by the crown, business, the media and the settler public, in order to get a fraction of one per cent of the reparations to which they might otherwise be entitled. It’s the same principle which prompted the Iwi/Kiwi ignorance, and the same which recently led to the rhetorical backlash against the vesting of Ka Mate in Ngāti Toa Rangatira, about which I wrote recently. It grasps things of value, and then refuses to return them, or share them, or relinquish any control over them, no matter how slight, and even when such a gesture of goodwill would be the basis for more meaningful and harmonious engagement with the settled outsiders and a route to a more peaceful future, not the opening of the floodgates feared by the settler majority.

Village idiocy
Wanganui has a provincial village mentality, and this is quite strongly reflected in its media which are highly conservative, in the sense that they reflexively endorse the status quo and the opinions of the majority, to the exclusion of heretodox voices which are characterised as fringe radicals of one sort or another. The daily Wanganui Chronicle in particular is the local Pollyanna – its motto is `Love this place!’, and its news follows one of two forms: local-folks-done-good, or bad-things-threatening-our-way-of-life. This reinforces the settler mentality, and it’s not too harsh to call the Chron a settler paper.

The Wanganui Chronicle‘s lead story this morning was headlined `H bombs in crucial vote’, with the `H’ in red lettering, alongside a large photo of Māori protesters (although the secondary story `Protesters on the march’ notes that most protesters were Pākehā). The corresponding story on the Chron‘s website has the same photo, but the more sedate `Council split over ‘H’ in Wanganui’ headline. Message: locally, this is war. For the rest of the country, it’s just another bit of local government trivia. The headline both minimised the importance of this issue as a symbolic matter of rangatiratanga and amplified its importance as a site for dispute between settlers and outsiders. People know they have to fight against it, but don’t know why.

The story lead with the fact that the vote was closer than expected – five councillors (of thirteen, including Laws) would not vote for the existing name. Prominent share of voice was granted to those five councillors, mostly making the arguments above, that the change was the correction of a historical inaccuracy and not `bending to the whims of radicals’, but the highlighting of these five councillors as opposed to the 82% majority in the referendum clearly framed them as the radicals in council – outsiders, out-of-step with their electorate. This was reinforced by three other points: first, one councillor said he was `ashamed’ at the response to the referendum, being as it was based on ignorance, fear and misunderstanding – the message in the context of his decision was that he was ashamed of the electorate, directly at odds with the adjacent `Love this place!’ vox pop of a cute girl talking about why Wanganui is so great, a variation of which is repeated daily on the front page.

Second, other than Laws, only one councillor who voted in favour of the existing spelling was quoted on the matter, saying that she was elected to `represent the views of her community, as expressed during the referendum process’, almost identical wording to that used by Laws, and a strong statement of normative majoritarian orthodoxy.

Third, Laws said, with somewhat wolfish magnanimity, that `it was comforting to see elected officials take an unpopular stance’, echoing other councillors who `acknowledged they could lose votes’ for refusing to endorse the existing name. Not a principled stance; an unpopular one; which represents them, not us. Message: If you’re not with us, you’re against the community, and if you’re against the majority, you’re the enemy by definition.

Against this background, there sometimes seems no hope for race relations in Wanganui, or perhaps even for NZ at large. At ANZAC weekend, I will be attending the launch of a book by Canterbury University scholar John Newton, at Hiruharama up the Whanganui river, which I expect will argue the opposite: that the spirit of goodwill and compromise and understanding exemplified by the relationship between poet James K Baxter and his associates and local Māori during the 1960s and 70s provides a model for NZ race relations, opposed to the majoritarian settler orthodoxy which now dominates.

L

Getting to know National one marriage at a time

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I can’t work out if it’s a getting-to-know-your-new-Government strategy or a look-we’re-pro-family strategy, but I’m seeing an awful lot of National Party wives and kids right now. This is not an exhaustive list but:

  • John Key + wife:  to the extent that last weekend the media coverage was about how it makes her uncomfortable
  • Lockwood Smith + fiancée: for some reason this was covered by the SST twice a week apart
  • David Carter + family + chooks leapt out of the paper at me over the weekend.
  • Tony Ryall + wife on the telly tonight as part of a PlunketLine story

Any thoughts about the strategy?

What is it about the Christian Right?

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In my short time blogging I have discovered that posts which mention the Christian Right get some kind of kneejerk reaction: sometimes someone leaps to the defence of the CR despite the lack of attack in the post, sometimes people leap in to attack the lunacy of the CR despite my lack of opening for the attack.

It’s not just blogging either. When I argue for lowering the MMP threshold one of my arguments is that it will allow the CR representation in Parliament, often people’s immediate reaction is that they’re the kind of lunatics the threshold is intended to exclude. When I talk the history of the family values movement in New Zealand with conservative people (which, you’ll have to trust me, I do respectfully and with interest) someone often leaps in to defend the CR and tell me that they’ve been misrepresented and are far more moderate than they have been painted.

What is it about the Christian Right that polarises views and creates an attack-and-defence dynamic so quickly?

I know many at the socially liberal end of the spectrum will say that the CR is prejudiced and tells them what to do. But so do many other political, religious and community groups.

Many in the CR will say that they’re ridiculed for their religious and moral beliefs and they are, to at least some extent, right. Some of their knee jerk defensiveness is a response to that contempt, some is probably out of a sense of moral certainty.

What is it that makes it ok for the socially progressive to sneer at the CR? We would never allow it to be said of GLBTQ communities, or the disabled, or ethnic minorities, or women; why do we allow it to be said about this religious minority?