Author: Anita

A Wellington feminist wondering how to make politics something real people can do.
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Women are paying for bankers’ excesses

The recession is spoken about as if it is universal: blind to gender, class and race it will hurt us all. Yet the reality is that groups which are already disadvantaged will pay the biggest price: not only are they they worst affected, but our government is providing them with the least support.

This is not the first time this pattern has occurred, the Asian recession in the 1990s forced women out of the workforce and back into the kitchen, or overseas, or into sex work. This recession is no different, early last year a US Senate committee investigated the impact of the growing recession and reported

These findings clearly demonstrate the severe and disproportionate impact of this recession on women and their families.

Analysis in the UK similarly predicts more severe effects on women. In New Zealand no-one seems to have done the research yet, but there’s every reason to expect the same outcome: women will experience redundancy, loss of hours, and reduced pay at greater rates than men.

So our government’s response? Well there are the tax cuts, which will disproportionately benefit men, there’s the economic stimulus package which appears targetted toward working men and, of course, Tony Ryall’s instructions to the public sector to suppress women’s pay.

National is determined to keep bankers in business, corporates afloat, construction workers busy, and boost the pay packets of the wealthy; women should expect no help as their jobs, hours and pay are cut.

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Three strikes: providing an incentive to kill

Chris has used up two strikes; a pub fight, and getting caught carrying a knife during a burglary. Back out of jail it’s hard to find work, money’s really tight, and old habits kick back in so late one night Chris opens a window in an dark house in an expensive street.

Part way through checking through the house for valuables, there is a noise, and a light turns on. Grabbing a knife Chris sees a woman standing in the doorway to her bedroom. Chris has two options:

  1. Run out the front door – knowing that if the woman picks Chris out of a line-up or the Police solve it with forensics it’ll be a life sentence for aggravated burglary; or
  2. Stab her – if she’s dead there’ll be no line up, so unless the Police can solve it with forensics there won’t even be a trial.
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National: cutting their way into the recession

At Pundit Nicky Hager has an article up about National’s “spending” plans. Based on leaked material he shows that, having started to realise the gravity of the recession, English has increased capital expenditure by no more than an additional $250 million of capital spending a year: in terms of government spending that’s nearly nothing. As Hager concludes:

As the country heads into the worst recession of our lifetimes, John Key and Bill English have decided against any significant economic stimulus package. As other countries acknowledge the magnitude of the crisis and spend, our Cabinet will be putting their energy into finding places to cut.

At the same time the National cabinet is taking a knife to operational spending: 10% here, at least 500 jobs there, 30 more over here. These cuts of operational cuts will very quickly add up to $250 million, not to mention poorer services for all New Zealanders,

So National’s plans to get us out of the recession are… exactly what their plans always were: cut, cut and cut. Less service, less support, and what money there is will be redirected to the private sector labelled “infrastructure investment” and “improved competition”.

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Progressive bills and freedom of information

No Right Turn is running a wiki for the development of Progressive bills, it’s a great opportunity to figure out some progressive possibilities and get them happening. So if there’s any way you’d like to make NZ more progressive, and you can imagine it being achieved through a private members bill this is the place for you! :)

I”m currently struggling with how to improve our freedom of information legislation, the Mexican model has some real possibilities, but it’s not as easy as one might hope.

My goal is two fold, firstly to extend the amount of information made available (extending it to Parliament and so on) and secondly to make it harder for agencies to game.

My experience with OIAs is that some agencies are lovely, when others require chasing, more chasing before they provide incomplete and overdue responses (at which point the Ombudsmen can sort it out), but it makes a mockery of the current rules, and is unreasonably time and energy intensive. I’m not sure whether legislative change would fix it, or whether a fundamental cultural change is required

The principle underpinning freedom of information is that it’s our information and our government; and that transparency increases justice, fairness and accountability, yet many agencies behave as if they have a right to secrecy and evasion. What would change the attitude?

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What does at mean that they’re “one of us”?

Over the last couple of weeks there’ve been a number of threads floating round blogs about what it means when “one of us” does something wrong.

Tane has a great post at The Standard about Bruce Emery’s conviction

Let’s not pretend for a second that Emery would have got off so lightly if he was an unemployed Maori and his victim a middle class Pakeha child, tagger or not.

Tim Selwyn and Deborah express similar sentiments. Being one of us has elicited public sympathy and a reduced sentence, as Deborah wrote

Being a white middle class man is a mitigating factor.

Luddite Journo takes the next step to look at the victim rather than the murderer, in a piece titled You can only be a victim if you own a house she writes

Much of New Zealand identifies with only one person in this case – and it’s not the boy who was killed. 

[As an update, Morgue has a great post in which he suggests that the issue is not the treatment of people-like-us, it’s our treatment of people who are not like us. Emery got appropriate empathy, but we don’t extend it to others]

On similar themes but different incidents Maia writes two posts about why we try to construct rapists as other, and all over the media and blogs people struggle with the way Paula Bennett is one of us but her grandchild’s father is not.

Why is it such a contentious issue? Because is all the bad things in the world are the fault of other people we can sit back and do nothing. This view is well illustrated by Stuart at StuRants:

I’ve now realised there are at least two New Zealands: the one I live in, and the one where all this stuff happens. As yet, the two have never intersected, but until they do (and may God spare me that misfortune!) I refuse to feel bad about it.

This is somewhat at odds with the prevailing politically correct argument that when a child is beaten to death or whatever we are all responsible. Sorry, but no. I can’t think of anything I could have done to cause these things, or anything I can do to stop it happening.

The reality is that people like us kill people, and those killings are just as wrong as the ones that are committed by criminals on benefits in state houses. The domestic violence, rapes and child abuse that is committed by the educated middle class is just as damaging as any other kind. It is only by accepting that these terrible things are done by people like us that we will learn to stop them.

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The revolution is handmade

Hand crafts have been woven into many forms of activism over the last few decades; as symbols o the rejection of mass produced consumer goods, as opportunities for individual expression, and as a way of challenging the sterile cities we live in. Rayna Fahey of the Radical Cross Stitch and the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle will be speaking in Wellington this Tuesday night about crafts and social justice.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a home where I learned to cook, sew, garden, embroider, knit and do origami. My extended family repertoire included pottery, batik, awesome cookery, and a variety of other fabric and craft arts. I remember the people who have shared new crafts with me over the years; the women who taught me to pour candles, the girl with whom I made incense, the woman who showed me how to reweave in threads to fix embroidery mistakes.

Every one of those people has left an imprint of caring on my life – that is a big part of what craftivism is, valuing each individual and each conversation, remembering our unique skills and talents. Without that we would be no more than cogs in a factory line.

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Act: selling its soul to the Devil

Some time in the last few years Act sold its soul to the vengeance-and-retribution lobby. I don’t know if the conversion arrived with Stephen Franks (who went on to the Sensible Sentencing Trust), or whether they held onto their principles until after Franks but the temptation of a monied populist lobby was just too great and the deal was done later.

They’ve tried to keep the detail of the deal quiet: they took Garrett from the Sensible Sentencing Trust but have tried to keep quiet his death penalty past, failing to mention his book on their website, they’ve also tried to paper over his bigotry and problematic interpersonal behaviour. 

The EPMU, however, has provided us with some good information about the price. When they released the evidence in the Shawn Tan case we got to see the inside view on the negotiations between the Asian Anti-Crime Group and Act, with the AAG pointing out Act’s low support and their own ability to mass mobilise the Asian community, followed by gems like

As with any serious investment, there has to be tangible and substantial returns. For the three of us to invest our time, energy and money into campaigning for the ACT Party, we need to have guaranteed returns – and that entails being ranked high enough for us to be assured places in Parliament

So Act, “the Liberal party”, became a vehicle for a punitive conservative authoritarian lobby.

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Preserving the loopholes – National’s approach to Electoral Finance

This week we look certain to see National repeal most of the Electoral Finance Act under urgency. While Simon Power is publicly stating they’re going to keep the disclosure rules, which sounds good but … as National well knows the disclosure rules have loopholes.

Like the old rules they allow organisations and individuals to wash large donations by cutting them into smaller donations which fit below the “anonymous” donations threshold. This is the same practice that was enabled by a similar loophole under the old electoral finance rules.

If National was committed to transparency it would be closing that loophole now, and publicly shaming any party that refused to support the action. In reality, of course, National is committed to the appearance of clean hands while maintaining funding routes for its large donors.

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NGO advocacy: it’s all right with me!

Idiot/Savant has been wading through OIAs in an attempt to figure out which government agencies joined SOE Solid Energy in paying for a report to undermine government climate change policies. Solid Energy has paid nearly a quarter of a million dollars of our money to lobby against the government addressing climate change.

Yet at the same time NGOs are rigourously banned from using any state funding to advocate for legislative or policy change. Small volunteer run organisations are forced to segregate their government funding from any funding used for advocacy.

This causes all kinds of administrative and compliance overhead – if a social worker’s salary is paid by a government contract for service, can they discuss difficulties caused by Housing NZ policy when they meet HNZ staff to organise emergency housing for clients? If someone producing information material’s salary is 60% funded how can we prove that the time they spent putting together material for the CE’s meeting with the incoming Minister was in their other 40%?

On the one hand we give the most ethically dubious state owned enterprise the right to use as much of our money as they like to lobby, hire spies, breach the Conservation Act and pay private investigators to summarise Indymedia.

On the other we load such compliance cost on small NGOs that using their own money to lobby becomes impractical.

As well as tightening the leash on Solid Energy, we need to give NGOs their freedom. NGOs provide richness and diversity, they advocate for people whose voices are lost in our majoritarian culture – a little government funding would be worth every dollar.

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The deserving poor

A few weeks ago I was reading about the way refugees are talked about and ran across an article by Vanessa Pupavac in which she talks about the way refugee advocacy groups have fought the negative xenophobic framing of refugees that has become so attractive to politicians across the world.

One of her findings is that advocates have built stories about exceptionally talented refugees and middle class professionals to build a picture of deservingness. Somehow we have come to believe that being a human being who is homeless due to persecution is not enough in itself to deserve help, we need to be told that they’re special.

The problem, of course, is that most refugees aren’t special, refugees are a mix of people just like our communities. To quote Pupavac

Asylum rights are thereby implicitly made conditional on qualifying as nice, talented, sensitive individuals. But where does this leave any unappealing, untalented, unskilled asylum seeker with culturally repellent views and habits? A well-founded fear of persecution is not confined to nice people.

This pattern of needing people to prove their deservingness before we give them basic human support and kindness is seen again and again in the rhetoric of the new right: there are deserving beneficiaries and the others that don’t deserve help, there are deserving families that deserve state help and those that don’t … .

When did we become a society where people have to prove that they deserve to be able to buy food for their children? Or live in a country where they won’t be killed?

Hat tip to Julie’s post at The Hand Mirror