Anita

March 4, 2009March 4, 2009

National & the tobacco industry

Tony Ryall has, once again, taken the moral low road and is refusing to ban cigarette displays in shops despite evidence that cigarette displays increase teenage smoking. This in a week that a similar ban was announced in Northern Ireland, joining bans in Ireland, Canada, England, Wales, much of Australiaâ€¦ oh shall I just call it “most of the developed world”?

Why does this matter? (Other than caring about the lives and health of New Zealanders)

National is, once again, picking the tobacco industry over people’s lives and health
National is, once again, choosing the moral wrong for the employers and owners’ benefit
National is, once again, showing the signs of a party financially entangled with the tobacco industry.

In case you don’t have a copy of The Hollow Men to hand, I offer you some highlights:

Matthew Hooton, long time National mouthpiece, ex-National staffer and National lobbyist has done private pro-tobacco PR work and lobbying. His work was used by Rodney Hide to attempt to stall anti-tobacco legislation.
British American Tobacco’s chief lobbyist is a significant National Party donor and has been invited to caucus parties.
Key’s political advisors, Crosby|Textor, name British American Tobacco as a client of Mark Textor.

Sweet eh, politicians and industry working hand-in-hand â€“ that must be the “pragmatism” John Key talks about.

March 2, 2009March 2, 2009

Nurses and Police Officers

Which have trained for longer?

Which are at more day-to-day risk?

Which get paid more?

In the pay equity debates we tend to focus on the argument about the effect and value of child raising, perhaps because it’s a handy dead end. In fact, however, the gender pay gap exists between whole professions: why are police officers paid so much more than nurses? There are plenty of other examples of pairs of equally trained equally skilled professions where female dominated one is paid significantly less than the male dominated one.

There’s a straight forward gender pay equity issue, but also questions of how we value women (why is the kinds of things women do worth less than the things men do?). By extension there is a question about why we value professions which care for people lower than professions that care for things, as that tends to be the gender split in professions as well.

But to come back to original question, is it right that we pay nurses significantly less than police officers and, if so, why?

[For a broader discussion of pay equity, try Julie’s Pay Equity Hub at The Hand Mirror or Queen of Thorns who’s hosting the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival]

March 1, 2009March 1, 2009

Worker organised resistance

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 onÂ 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.

February 27, 2009February 28, 2009

27 Feb 1951: Lest we forget

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 Iâ€™m thinking of three things

The courage of the wharfies and their families
The strength and kindness of everyone who broke the law to make sure they had food and shelter
That the â€œreformsâ€ 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 strikeâ€™s 50th anniversary is available here, thanks IrishBill.

February 26, 2009

A rhetorical Bermuda triangle

I love the description of the political strategy of turning an accusation about an action into a defence from a personal attack.

February 25, 2009February 25, 2009

Pay equity faxathon

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!

February 24, 2009February 24, 2009

Getting to know National one marriage at a time

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:Â to the extent that last weekend the media coverage was about how it makes her uncomfortable
Lockwood Smith + fiancÃ©e: 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?

February 24, 2009February 24, 2009

What is it about the Christian Right?

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?

February 23, 2009February 23, 2009

Family values: a code for anti-welfare rhetoric?

I have recently been reading about the rhetoric of family values, starting with the assumption that it is simply a dogwhistle for conservative Christians. Yet the more I read about the origin of the phrase in US politics the more I saw analysis saying it was initially a neo-liberal anti-welfare construction. It’s original intent was to aid the transfer of responsibility for poverty from the state to the the poor (Dana Cloud’s article is quite a good read, but there are lots of others out there).

Marion Maddox’ analysis of John Howard’s Australia is very similar; family values provided both a call to arms for the Christian right, and a rhetorical device to soften the fear-inspiring free market:

[The Market God] has proved too dynamic and unsettling. It sabotages family and community life and tears away safety nets. It has had to make Olympian room for another deity, one would brings “Us” a renewed sense of the security the Market God took away. They repressive God of racism, authoritarian “family values” andÂ exclusion tries to make “Us” feel secure by turning our anxieties upon “Them”, corralling Australian tolerance and generosity behind an unbreachable white picket fence.

So, what’s the story in New Zealand, is it also the bridging point of the neo-liberalism and conservative Christianity? The original users of “family values” in recent NZ politics were United Future which was formed from the neoliberal refugees of the fourth Labour government and quickly joined by the evangelical and conservative Christian right.

Nowadays “family values” is most often heard from Family First, an organisation which uses classic anti-welfare rhetoric like:

welfare should not reward dysfunction or be a motivation for dysfunctional behaviour

long-term welfare dependency can be demoralising and is linked with poverty. Work can bring dignity and a level of independence

The Sensible Sentencing Trust, another “family values” organisation holds welfare provision like the DPB responsible for having

destroyed the tried-and-proven values of accountability, responsibility, respect and discipline from young peoples lives; the result a catastrophic disastrous escalation in violent crime and prison population

So it appears that family values, like private schooling, is a carefully crafted concept providing a common cause for both the neoliberal economic right, and the morally conservative Christian Right.