Just Left

The Government Administration Ctte and #MarriageEquality

I said my piece this morning before the Select Committee hearing submissions on Louisa Wall's Marriage Equality legislation.

I started with a story about my brother's wedding and reception, a hot balmy beautiful day in November 2005. The feedback from relatives there about how sad it was that I wouldn't be getting married - and from other relatives that 'oh well, there is always a civil union right?'

(Separate but equal has a long lineage but not in New Zealand. It belongs in the past.)

Moved on then to do a thought experiment - I asked MPs against to consider two possible scenarios.

What if they lived in a world where most people were in same-sex relationships and the law supported those, but not different-sex relationships? How would they feel?

Alternatively, what if they themselves fell in love with someone of the same gender, but found that the State denied them access to a critical social, family and community institution like marriage?

After that I just reiterated the points in my written submission and awaited questions.

The only one came from Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, who asked me (I think) what would happen to future growth of the population if everyone was in same-sex relationships. I explained to him that this was not ever likely to happen. He got confused. So did I.

I love that in our democracy, you can face up to Parliament, have a say, be treated with respect (or at least, in this case, bemusement) and do your part to make the world a better place.

#MarriageEquality is going to happen next year. Can't wait.

Inflation is not the problem

This morning, we learned that consumer price inflation in the year to 30 September was 0.8%, the lowest in thirteen years.

Inflation is not the problem. Growth and exports are.

David Parker is right: the country's monetary policy is busy fighting the last war. It's a classic example of limited thinking, focusing on the past. We do it all the time, but sometimes we also have the imagination and wit to start working on the problems the future poses.

Hundreds of thousands of us are without enough work. Our incomes are too low. Our export economy is stuttering. Our economy wastes resources and abuses our environment.

Those are the challenges we need to be solving. Consumer price inflation isn't. We've beaten it. We need to keep an eye on it, but it isn't the central problem we face.

Our institutions and our policies should focus on the things that matter most. Jobs, development, progress.

Looks like a change of government will be required to bring that about.

Should your ISP have to hold your hand?

In the security session at the Australian Internet Governance Forum this morning (see www.igf.org.au for info), an interesting dilemma about security responses by ISPs came up.

There is the prospect that ISPs could use a range of more or less reliable technologies (from deep packet inspection to usage metering) to identify users whose accounts are creating a threat -- for instance, compromised computers being part of a botnet attack.

The dilemma is, should they?

It's easy to see an upside from such a step. If you were compromised, or thought to be, your computer could be put inside a walled garden (off the open Internet) so you see a website identifying the problem and suggesting remedial responses. Since most people have no idea about computers this would respond to a key problem -- user ignorance.

What about downsides?

Do we want ISPs monitoring all use of their networks and obliged to act based on what they find?

What about privacy?

Would ISPs be found liable if they failed?

Would security by hackers just leap ahead?

Good arguments were put either way.

I have long had the view that ISPs are, and should remain, simple conduits to the Internet. They should have no content role. They are not copyright police, security police, good taste police, gambling tsars or any of that. They just provide the connection, and are only responsible for doing that. (Unless you buy more services of course.)

Doesn't solve the security problem -- but keeps ISP sticky beaks at bay, and minimises the cost of ISP operations, to the benefit of us all.

What is your view?

Responding to the New Zealand doldrums

It just keeps on getting worse.

Today's reactionary announcement by the Government that it wants to cut the incomes of vulnerable young people comes at the same time as NZIER reports lowering business confidence and expectations about next year. Unemployment remains too high, manufacturing jobs are flooding out of the economy, and citizens are flooding across the Tasman to the land of milk and honey - or jobs and higher wages, at any rate.

How the hell did it all go so wrong for National? Why are ordinary New Zealanders getting quickly grumpier with the gang in charge, sensing (not before time) that the Nats are not on the side of most of us?

Values. Values and purpose.

The National Party was set up in the 30s with no better reason than to oppose Labour's social democratic ambitions. Explicitly founded to oppose a fair distribution of incomes. To oppose policies for full employment. To oppose policies that built a New Zealand economy that would deliver for New Zealanders. A dog eat dog value set guides everything they do. For them, cooperation is and always has been a joke. Savagery and competition are the only things that matter, and climbing over the top of everyone else to grab your winnings is the only path to the light.

Nothing's really changed. The plutocrats remain in charge of National. The smokescreens of distraction are still artfully deployed. Beneficiaries get bashed whenever things are looking rough. Vast seas of public debt are run up to shelter the slow erosion of the tax base and of the public services we all need. Job losses are simply lied about, with 170,0o0 new ones promised each budget but never actually coming into being.

People are losing out. Tempers are fraying. People don't like the idea that the only hope they can have is by leaving Aotearoa.

Labour is stepping up its criticism. That's good. The mood has well and truly started to shift. But with the criticism has to come more detail about the plan. Jobs, growth, sustainability, transformation, hope.

We have been through a weird experiment the past thirty years. 2008 was its intellectual death-knell. In 2012 we are watching the zombie start to stumble. New ideas are needed. Not just ideas but concrete proposals as to what difference they'll make on the ground.

The job of thinking through the policies that deliver a better kind of country is well underway in the Labour Party and the Green Party has its own perspective on what to do differently. The biggest risk that Labour faces is being too nervous to really drive change - fearful of orthodoxy, not certain that the public will back the depth of change needed to turn the country around.

Tweaks won't do it. It is not a time for the odd policy nip-n-tuck. Triangulating towards National or trying to fly into their slipstream could only guarantee failure. A big bold case for change is what we owe the country now.

David Shearer's education speech last month got a few solid ideas out. The work two more Labour Davids are doing on the economy is starting to show through. Our Conference, coming up in a few weeks, is another chance to showcase an agenda for change.

As long as we acknowledge these three things, we'll be fine:

• The experiment of the last thirty years has not delivered the kind of country, the sort of society, or the type of economy that New Zealanders want.
• Only Labour's values about equality, guardianship and opportunity can drive a really different programme that can turn things around.
• We have to set out our ideas and argue for them in order to get the public on side - voters aren't going to arrive at support for a new approach without us having, and winning, the debate about what to do differently.

I have some confidence that that is where we're headed.

The depoliticisation of economics

I was having a discussion on Facebook last night, sparked by my previous post, about why it is that there is so much more passion among parts of the left for marriage equality than more bread-and-butter issues such as, say, a living wage (as evidenced by the gallery people-flows last week).

Allow me to suggest a reason why.

Think about civil rights.

For the past thirty years, decisions by our Parliament have been central to expanding the realm of human rights and freedoms. Homosexual law reform, the Human Rights Act, prostitution law reform, Civil Unions and now marriage equality (as a non-exhaustive list) drew direct connections between the political process and real changes in people's lives.

The public discourse on these issues was about the centrality of Parliament and the decisions that politicians would make on these issues. Politics was central. Debates were substantive. Change could result.

So now, think about economic issues.

For the past thirty years, decisions by our Parliament have been marginal to the economic progress of the nation - and deliberately so. Government has withdrawn itself in so many ways from economic life. In pursuit of an ideology now proved false in the only testing ground that counts (the real world), the state got out of the way.

The public ideology of and debates around economic policy have been about the primacy of the market, and subordination of politics. The market, a cold abstraction nobody could see or argue with, would make the calls. It was our job as people to do what its highly paid messengers and managers would say.

Think about that.

Is it any wonder that most people don't think political action can make a difference on so-called "bread and butter" issues - when for so many years they've been told just that?

Is it any wonder that most people think political action can make a difference in civil rights, when they evidence that it can is before their eyes every time such an issue comes up?

This isn't to discount different explanations such as the changing class composition of Labour and left activists more broadly. Just to suggest a different way to think about the problem.

The implications of this are, I think, quite wide-ranging. I personally have never made this connection before. If most people don't think politicians can help when it comes to economic concerns, the political left is in a tricky spot given its entire programme of reform is based on changing the economy.

Perhaps our campaigns need to focus on repoliticising economic questions. Perhaps they already do and I'm just not conscious of it. Perhaps we need more even-handed media institutions that don't privilege the depoliticising agenda of the right when it comes to economic issues.

Food for thought!

Equality matters to us all

Equality is one of the most interesting values and principles of the labour movement, at least in part because we live in the Era of Freedom in so many ways. Individual choices and the right to be left alone are dominant in policy, politics and the media -- though of course not among citizens or in the way people actually live their lives.

I was reminded of the importance of the principle in the somewhat strange debate that sees the occasional Labour person saying that marriage equality isn't an important issue.

Of course it is.

If your social or family circle includes no people from LGBT people (which is unlikely), you are less directly affected. Sure. I get that. But even so, you benefit from a society characterised by a high degree of fairness for everyone. Direct or not, equality in the realm of marraige matters just as it does in the workplace, or anywhere else.

Grant Robertson's weekend post on Red Alert summed up nicely why:

As the excited crowd left the public gallery of Parliament on Wednesday evening, the Speaker had to pause the business of the House. There was a buzz in the air following the vote on Louisa Wall’s marriage equality bill. It was a great night for fairness, equality and courage. The journey New Zealand has been on since the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill in the 80s, through Civil Unions in 00s took another important step in giving all New Zealanders a fair go. We saw some courageous testimonies in the days leading up to the vote and some courageous speeches and voting on the night.

When the crowd had dispersed, and the gallery was deserted, my friend and colleague David Clark got up to introduce his private members bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour in line with Labour’s 2011 manifesto commitment. The crowd should have stayed. He gave a great speech. So did Darien Fenton who followed on from him focusing on the plight of the cleaners in Parliament. Have a look at the speeches, they are thoughtful and heartfelt pleas for a fair wage for all workers. The response from the government speakers was as predictable as it was out of touch.

...

I would have loved the crowd who so enthusiastically supported marriage equality to have stayed and cheered on a fair go for our lowest paid workers. The issues come from the same well-spring. Its all part of the agenda of a fair go for all New Zealanders and a society where we reject exclusion and unfairness and embrace and value the contribution that all Kiwis can make to our society.

Fairness, equality, is deep in the DNA of New Zealanders. We instinctively knowthat a system stacked against the weak and powerless is wrong. That is why our history is littered with progressive reforms based on the principle of equality: votes for women, votes for Maori, human rights law affecting all, anti-racism campaigns, the Halt All Racist Tours movement, striving for ecological justice, the human rights improvements for LGBT New Zealanders, fair workplace laws, egalitarian social security arrangements, a non-discriminatory state pension.... on and on it goes.

The phrase "equality" summons up some of the worst. That's why most of us, most of the time, talk about fairness. Equality isn't about forcing conformity, or lowest common denominatorism, or turning people into stalinist clones.

It's precisely the opposite.

You cannot have a free society which is disfigured by divides between the insiders and the outsiders.

You cannot have democracy when the voices of a few with power drown out those of the many who don't.

You cannot have economic success for all when working men and women are treated as a cost to be minimised.

You cannot honour the Treaty when the trappings of colonialism still lie all around, powerful and alive and well despite the progress of the past forty years.

You cannot have social justice when you treat those on benefits as second class citizens, somehow less than the rest of us.

You cannot have dignity when some are treated as a little less equal than others when it comes to social rights and customs that are at the heart of our society.

Honouring the diverse circumstances we all have is why the Labour movement believes in equality. Fairness is justice and justice & fairness are all about equality: that is the core of social democratic politics and ideology today. Not just to those living but to those who are yet to come (which is why environmental stewardship is becoming more pronounced in social democratic and Labour politics).

So I have a piece of advice to my friends in the Labour movement who try to charactise the Living Wage campaign, or Marriage Equality, as sideshows. (I've heard both, to my surprise.)

They aren't. Relate them back to our core beliefs. If you are in an audience skeptical about one aspect of this journey we are all on, towards fairness & equality, then tell another part of the story.

For those who aren't interested in marriage equality, relate the issue back to core issues of fairness at work.

For those who can't get their heads around why a strong trade union movement and fair industrial laws are good for us all, relate it back to suffrage or marriage equality, or the universal pension.

These things are all related. The more clearly we link them together the more likely it is our message can cut through, and the stronger our movement becomes. The more voters will get the message that equality affects everyone and is worthy of the support of all, regardless of their circumstances.

Let's not play divide and rule. Let's not engage in reverse wedge politics against ourselves.

Instead, let's celebrate the founding and distinctive principle that motivates our movement, and that is more relevant to New Zealand's future prospects than it has been for many years.

Political Leadership and #MarriageEquality

Change is a tough thing sometimes.

This post is about political change, its history in New Zealand, and why Labour MPs need to grasp the nettle and support Marriage Equality, as a core part of Labour's vision for a country where everybody belongs.

Political parties and movements that are progressive secure change by changing people's minds about issues. They do not ride with the grain of current opinion in those issues where change is demanded: they challenge it, they confront and cajole and persuade, and change people's minds.

New Zealand has a long history of such persuasion. It's a give and take process between movements and the broader electorate. You have the debate, you shift a bit more towards where the public are, and they have shifted a ways in your direction too. You keep pushing, and keep shifting opinion.

That's how the welfare state was founded. Labour's vision for the Social Security Act in 1938 would have been impossible in 1928. It was the experience of the Depression, and the constant campaigning by Labour party politicians and activists all around the country, that changed the public's view. From villages in the south Waikato to hamlets in central Otago to mining towns on the West Coast to Queen Street: Labour made the case and changed views.

Change always happens that way.

Look at the attitudes of Pakeha New Zealand towards Pacific migrants that were exposed by the ugly campaign Rob Muldoon ran in 1975. Dawn raids, attacks on overstayers, blatant racism and fearmongering about interracial marriage, crime, jobs and more were all exposed.

Today such views are held by many fewer people.

Politicians and campaigners made the case for equality and justice and inclusion, and those views have spread. New Zealand today takes great pride in Pacific communities and the diversity they bring to the country, and the links back to the Pacific Islands that they represent. I do not believe there would be many, if any, New Zealanders around today who have a fundamental problem with Pacific migrants and the Pacific communities of this country.

Those campaigns were underpinned by the core values the Labour Party stands for: the moral and legal equality of all people, a respect for and celebration of diversity, a championing of the personal freedoms we all need to thrive and flourish, and an abiding sense of fairness that said it simply did not make sense to treat people from the Pacific as second class citizens in our own country.

Of course, Pacific peoples are only one example. The direction has been consistent for women (suffrage onwards), for Maori, for people with disabilities and for homosexuals.

The direction is the direction of justice for all. It isn't perfect: there is still sexism and racism and homophobia and colonialism and fear of those who are different. But we have made this country a better place through the exercise of values, argued for and expressed through a democratic system.

In every one of these cases, the message has been profound. It has been a message of love. It has been a message of respect. It has said to people:

"You too are one of us. We share our fears, our hopes, our dreams. Come into our house. Be with us. Together we are one."

It is impossible, I think, to overstate the importance of that reality.

Our country is the country it is today because love has trumped fear in all of these stories.

Today, in a legal sense, we are near the end of that progression for equality for LGBT+ New Zealanders. Civil Unions were a step along the way, and they were important. They came only 18 years after homosexuality itself was decriminalised. But they are not the answer.

It all comes back to love and respect. Does our community include all of us? Or are we, those of us who are gay, to be told that we are second class citizens?

My own view is of course on the side of justice and equality. It would be regardless of the fact I am gay. To me, the struggles for fairness and equality are all linked. I take seriously the notion, expressed among other places in the Bible, that we are each other's keepers.

To me, the fight to end sexism and racism is the same as the fight to end homophobia.

It's the same as the fight against fear of those with disabilities.

It's about making the case that WE ARE ALL EQUAL. Not the same: we are gloriously diverse. But equal.

Equally worthy of respect and honour.

Equally worthy of the justice of the land being ours in the law.

Equally open to love.

Equally deserving to be treated as fully human.

These values are what unites the Labour Party and the Labour movement.

It is why a blokey as hell tradesman from Te Atatu, a Samoan minister in Mangere, a shearer in Te Awamutu, a lecturer in Dunedin and a nurse in Christchurch are all on the same side, why people like that all vote for Labour.

They know, and I know, that the promise of a better land and a better future requires us all to be on each other's side, fighting against those who would tell us we don't belong, don't deserve a fair go.

Labour MPs know in their hearts the values their party is founded on. They know that parts of their communities are on a journey to finding those values congenial. They know that some people will be opposed to Marriage Equality, just as some are opposed to Equal Pay for Equal Work, and some are opposed to migration to these islands.

They know they have, in their role, a special responsibility: to bend their energies to the widest possible spread of those Labour values that make New Zealand better for everyone.

So I expect Labour MPs to be out there talking about this issue, and making the case in favour of equality, and explaining to all why it's just a part of a bigger picture:

Building a country where we all belong.

That's what Labour is for. That's what leadership is about: making a difference and bringing about a better future.

#EQNZ - the graphic

The ETS changes... and the bigger picture

I'm not surprised that National would continue to hand out a huge subsidy to farmers.

The thing that gets me is the irrationality of it.

We as a country chose an ETS because we thought that the market should be free to work out how best to reduce carbon emissions. The logic was that it would be better for firms and producers to face a price and allocate resources, rather than trying to regulate their specific behaviours.

It's very public that GHG emissions from agriculture can easily be reduced. Tweaks to farming methods, grass choices and so on can make a significant impact.

Thing is, farmers aren't going to do them without facing a price that induces them to move. They just aren't. What kind of business would make changes because it's the nice thing to do? Not many, if any, to snaffle Scribe's words.

So by keeping farming out of the ETS, National is blocking innovation -- or, worse, telling New Zealand farmers they aren't capable of innovating.

Both are poor logic, to put it politely. Townies like me will keep paying to subsidise wealthy farmers, and that's somehow presented as good for us.

There's a simple word for that: bullshit.

The same word applies to National's broader track record on the environment.

Like most of us, I suspect, I gave Key and co the benefit of the doubt when they came to office. I hoped that under the GreenWash of Blue-Green National, and the rhetoric about "balance", some things would change.

I was wrong.

1. Oil, gas and coal are the enegy priorities. Renewable energy is on the back burner.
2. ETS weakened for the second time, and agriculture left out.
3. Monstrously bad legislation to regulate the Exclusive Economic Zone, weaker than the already weak Resource Management Act
4. Continued mineral prospecting in protected areas.
5. Support for Solid Energy's insane lignite plans in Southland.

You will have your own list of things that matter to you.

The greenwash has rubbed off the eyes of all but the most dedicated cheerleader of the government.

National's balance is between environmental exploitation and public opinion. They will do whatever you let them get away with. At the moment, that's pretty much anything.

Not Yours To Sell

A nice example of "Democracy Says 'No', But National Says 'Yes, and STFU'". The campaign is at www.notyourstosell.co.nz.