Tag Archives: Participation

Allowing people a voice

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Sam speaks out publicly about the fact that ACC payments for counselling do not cover the full cost of each counselling session and victims of crime like Sam are left to scrape together the difference. What information should Nick Smith be able to release about Sam’s circumstances? Should that include that Sam, who was sexually abused by a female caregiver when he was a child, insists on seeing a male counsellor, and in his small town there is only one appropriately qualified male counsellor and his rates are higher than average?

Chris is on the sickness benefit and speaks out publicly about the fact MSD won’t help with the high transport costs of getting to specialist appointments. What information should Paula Bennett be able to release about Chris? Should that include the fact that since Chris’ last psychotic episode, in which she threatened to stab her nieces and nephew, she has moved out of her sister’s home near the specialist and back to her parents who live in a semi-rural area with no public transport?

Moana, who has a full time job, speaks to the select committee considering leave provisions about the hardship that compulsory christmas closedowns cause non-custodial parents and talks about her employer requiring a three week closedown. What information should Moana’s employer be able to release? Should that include the fact that Moana’s leave situation is atypical in that workplace and is due her taking extended leave earlier in the year to attend a residential alcohol programme and using annual leave to have supervised contact with her children whose father moved them out of town when her violence and drinking became dangerous?

Sam, Chris and Moana should feel safe speaking publicly about those issues of government policy. None are lying, none are misrepresenting their own situation, each is raising a genuine issue of policy. For each the disclosure of their personal circumstances could cause significant shame, damage to relationships and support networks, and provide a huge disincentive to speaking publicly.

Being a democracy is about more than giving everyone a vote, it’s about allowing everyone a voice.

[This post was originally a comment in reply to jcuknz in this thread.]

Just do it! The Auckland referendum

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If a political party, or combination of political parties, truly wanted a referendum they could just run one. It wouldn’t be governed by any legislation, but who cares? It would be just as powerful as a CIR (which relies on expressing public opinion and is not binding).

Political parties have access to electoral rolls, parliamentary service funding for material and postage, and free mail for people returning material to parliamentary addresses.

The parties would probably want  to find some eminent people for a panel to oversee the decision on the question and the rules under which the referendum will be run. They’d also benefit from maximum transparency: invite in all the media who want to be there, ensure all meetings are open, all agendas and minutes are public, and so on.

Figuring out the question’s gonna be tough; that’s the key to a referendum and worth putting time and effort into consultation and getting it right.

But, seriously, just do it!

It doesn’t matter that National and Act don’t want one, run it anyway!

It doesn’t matter that National and Act will say it’s not binding, would they ignore the outcome?

Just do it!

The Second Job of Citizenry

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During last year’s election campaign I was struck by just how few people actually care; the cynicism and distrust of politicians, no-one expects honesty. More and more often I hear people talking about just not bothering — “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, it’s always a politician who wins.” The reality is that if you don’t vote the politicians win too.

Overseas negative and attack campaigning to suppress the vote is a common tactic. It may not be possible to persuade your opposition’s supporters to vote for you, but you might be able to put them off voting altogether. In our context, National may not be able to get many working class women to vote for them, but if they can stop them voting at all, that’s nearly as good.

In a fascinating public lecture Therese Arseneau talks about what she learned from the use of consultants in US elections

their aim is to actually to suppress the vote. The aim of negative campaigning was to keep particular people away from the polls.

A study of US Senate races shows just how effective this tactic is at suppressing not only the targeted voters but the electorate as a whole. They found that in largely negative races turnouts were 4.5 percentage points lowers than in ones that were largely positive. In New Zealand a 4.5 percentage point drop is about 130,000 people.

Both major parties publicly stated they ran positive campaigns, yet the tenor was negative all the way. This is true of political parties, the media, the net and the whispering campaigns.

There has always been some negativity from the two main political parties, but volumes seems to have increased over the last two campaigns. From the National Party we see the increase in the build up to the 2005 election, with the Crosby/Textor strategy of targeting Helen Clark — arrogant, out of touch, childless — along with divisive rhetoric against traditionally Labour supporting segments of society. Labour’s negativity showed in some of the 2005 campaign — for example their anti-National mocked-up eviction notices. This time we saw attacks on Key, which didn’t looked well co-ordinated or thought through, but sure were negative. Continue reading →