Category: Democracy

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RMA – National’s changes will go to Select Committee

Well the broad outline of the changes has been announced, and it’s looks pretty ugly for both sustainability and community involvement, so no surprises there.

On the plus side, firstly and this is a huge plus given National’s behaviour last year, the changes will go to Select Committee. Last year’s arrogant undemocratic practice of major changes without public consultation might, hopefully, be over. That said whether the committee will listen to the public remains a pretty big question.

Second good news, again genuinely good, according to the Greens’ analysis the ludicrous loophole allowing the Crown to breach consent conditions and preventing Councils from stopping them looks like it will go.

Other than that… it looks like we’re trading community voices and a sustainable future for a chance to pave our way out of a global recession.

P.S. As usual the best analysis is over at No Right Turn

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The Second Job of Citizenry

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 “The Second Job of Citizenry”

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Electoral finance: the principles II – Democracy is for Voters

One of the right’s many complaints about Owen Glenn’s contribution to Peters’ legal fees was that Glenn’s not resident in New Zealand; he’s not even eligible to vote here. Like Glenn’s donations to Peters fees and the Labour party, the controversial Vela donations were from a source unable to vote: the donations were from companies not people.

Donations from not-voters are common in New Zealand; a quick read of the 2005 donation return shows that far more money was donated by things than by people. That doesn’t include the corporate donations carefully crafted to avoid disclosure (e.g. British American Tobacco’s donation to the Nats).

It begs the question – why, if we let anyone and anything buy influence, don’t we let them vote as well? If Sky City can fund political parties, shouldn’t they get to vote too? And the pharmaceutical companies? And the banks? And the tobacco lobby? While we’re at it, they’re bigger than the average person, shouldn’t they get more votes?

It’s obviously ridiculous, as is allowing anyone or anything which cannot vote in our elections to buy political influence.

Principle II: Democracy is for voters – if you can’t vote, or won’t be able to when you turn 18, you shouldn’t get to buy political influence, end of story.

[edited to clarify the first para – Anita]

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Electoral finance: the principles I – Transparency

In the run up to the election there was massive hypocrisy in the right complaining about the Electoral Finance Act while simultaneously amping up the fuss around New Zealand First finances; complaining about the exploitation of loopholes that the EFA they so hate was supposed to close. So I thought I’d use this as a an opportunity to look at the principles that should underpin our electoral finance rule one by one.

One of the most serious issue raised by Jones, Glenn, the Velas, and the Spencer Trust (not to mention National’s Waitemata Trust, Ruahine Trust, and so on) is transparency. People voted for NZF (and National and Labour) without knowing who was paying their bills, without being able to assess what the funders might be expecting in return.

Would the same people have voted for NZ First in 2005 if they’d known it was being funded by Bob Jones and the racing lobby? Perhaps, but they didn’t in 2008 once they knew. National if they’d known about funding from the tobacco, pharmaceutical and insurance industries? Perhaps.

But perhaps they would have looked closer at the policies and made a decision about whose financial interests they were voting for.

What would NZ First do for the racing lobby? We have an answer.

What will National do for tobacco and pharmaceutical companies now they have the cabinet benches? We’ve already got a pretty clear idea about what they’re offering the insurance industry: profit from a privatised workplace accident compensation model, and the Herceptin decision is positioning for politicians making decisions on drug funding.

Perhaps knowing who’s bought influence would help us weigh up what to do with our votes, and it sure would help us keep the bastards honest! 

Principle I: Transparency – it is vital for democracy that we, the voters, know who is behind the candidates, who is paying their bills, who is pulling their strings.

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Section 59: How did the politics get so murky?

By early 2005 section 59’s days were clearly numbered. The campaign to remove it had been going over 25 years, the big family service provision organisations were backing the campaign, as were the big churches, MPs from both National and NZ First had put forward measures to repeal or limit, the government had been running a publicity campaign against physical discipline for a number of years with the intention of repeal once more change in behaviour had occurred, and the judiciary had been gradually limiting the scope of the existing section. 

The final vote to replace section 59 was won 113 votes to eight. A simple clean story on paper.

The reality was very different, sometime after the 9th of June 2005 the political wheels fell off; section 59 was replaced, but the cost was huge. 

I could (and will :) write a lot about the social forces, but today this is about the political forces. How and why did the politics become so ugly? I have a handful of theories, I’m sure there are other possibilities:

  1. It was a Green bill – that made it easier to paint as extremist. 
  2. Labour dithered – which made it appear that this was an area of potential weakness
  3. National  has been building links to conservative Christian churches – for example Brash spoke to a large conservative congregation (with no media present) in July 2005 about “values” and “morals” and pledged National would fight the bill.
  4. The “Nanny State” meme – it was an incredibly well developed attack theme against the Labour led government, and had been successful against similar governments overseas, and this issue fit perfectly.
  5. Cynicism – I already noted that a National MP had tried to limit s59 (Bob Simcock way back in 2001) and National voted unanimously for the bill’s third reading. But it proved such a good stick to beat Labour with, perhaps for a while their principles were traded against a chance at the cabinet benches. 
  6. Poor communications strategies by both the Greens and Labour – something went badly wrong here, there was no comms, then too much inconsistency, and little co-ordination between the Greens and Labour. [Thanks Danyl for reminding me, I’ve updated this now :]
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Representational democracy is fundamentally flawed

Representational democracy in New Zealand necessarily fails entirely to live up to its name. With a hundred and twenty people representing four million or so, this should be obvious. It is a system that forces each voter to make a choice using only at most a few of their views. Which party, or which individual, represents the person who wants to ban genetically modified organisms and privatise the health system? 

Even if the party you vote for is elected, they will hold different views from you and they will vote in ways you would not wish them to. In short they are not representing you.

This not only makes the choice a futile one, but also impoverishes any sort of debate or conversation, because the debates are led by politicians who work within blocks, and are covered by a media which is unable to tease out the individual issues.

This futility, and the requirement to give your vote to a package of policies, means we end up giving far too much power to politicians, and keeping far too little for ourselves. Indeed giving this power to politicians is a mistake. We give people whose motivation is largely to gain power the ability to say they are representing us although they have no desire to listen to our individual opinions, and there is no framework to force them to. Three yearly elections do not allow us to hold politicians to account on individual issues, or even individual actions. 

The problem is not the frequency of our elections or the parties we are able to vote for, it is that the system itself does not allow for all of an individuals views to be represented. Every single one of us is effectively silenced on the majority of our views, and forced to listen politicians claiming to speak on our behalf.

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Zaoui: the lessons

We’ve had comments around the Zaoui debacle on a couple of threads, so I thought I would try to pull together some things I think the government (public servants and politicians) should have learned from it:

  • “National security interests” must be publicly defined and open to public debate and influence
  • Secret evidence is unacceptable in all but the most unusual situations, when it absolutely must be used genuine checks and balances must be in place
  • Refugees should never be housed in prisons, and should be in secure facilities only in the most unusual situations (and that must be open to judicial review)
  • The immediate families of refugees should be allowed to join them as soon as possible.

What have I missed?

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Does New Zealand have Political Prisoners?

Anita’s thread on the failures of the 5th Labour government got me to thinking about the criminalisation of political dissent during its tenure. That in turn got me to wonder about whether there have been politically-motivated incarcerations in recent (since 1995) times. I can think of three, but since I am a relatively new immigrant (currently in economic exile of sorts) and new to the intimacies of New Zealand political life, I am not sure if there have been others.

Ahmed Zaoui was clearly a political prisoner. He posed no threat to anyone, much less the security of NZ. Yet he was incarcerated for over two years, including one year in solitary, because of what he represented–the face of political Islam that was not a lapdog of Western (read in this case French) interests. Right wing troglodytes and bigots may not like it, but he committed no crime in NZ and he never committed an act of violence against anyone, anywhere. Yet the Labour government saw fit to violate his civil rights in order to curry favour with the French and look good in the war on terror (at least in the eyes of the US, Australia and the UK). Shame on Richard Woods (SIS director general at the time), Lianne Dalziel (Immigration Minister at the time), and Helen Clark for orchestrating this farce–remember “lie in unision?” Praise Allah for Deborah Manning, Rodney Harrison and Richard McLeod for speaking truth to that abuse of power.(Note to retrogrades: Allah means God so chill on the pro-terrorist accusations).

Tim Selwyn spent more than year in stir having been found guilty of sedition. Continue reading “Does New Zealand have Political Prisoners?”

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The case for increasing NZDF presence in Afghanistan

If not already, within the next few weeks NZ will be asked by the US and NATO to increase its NZDF contribution to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan. NZDF are currently serving in their 13th rotation as a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Bamyan Province in Central Afghanistan (under US regional command). They also have officers deployed as liaison elements at Bagram Air Force Base, bringing the total to approximately 150. In its contribution to the ISAF mission NZ is comparable with other small states such as Estonia (130), Latvia (70), Albania (120) and Slovakia (130) and Macedonia (140), but falls short of most of the other members of the 41 nation ISAF coalition (Australia, for example, has. 1100 soldiers deployed in that theater). The questions are whether NZ should contribute more troops, in what role, and can it afford to do so both politically and economically? Most progressives would say no to all three. I beg to differ.

The answers should be yes, combat and combat support as well as PRT and yes. The reason is that rather than a (neo) imperialist intervention, the mission in Afghanistan is a multinational nation-building effort in the wake of state failure. That state failure was brought about by the medieval theocratic Taliban regime, whose record on human rights and support for external terrorism made it arguably the most oppressive regime of the late 20th century.  Under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine elaborated by the UN in the wake of Rwandan and Serbian ethnic cleansing in the 1990s, the international community has a duty to protect populations from the depredations of their rulers as well as from others. As a supporter of the UN mandate, NZ subscribes to this philosophy. It is thus obligated to be involved in Afghanistan and the NZ progressive community should welcome its involvement. Continue reading “The case for increasing NZDF presence in Afghanistan”

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Tonight I will light a candle for a journalist

Last Friday Lasantha Wickrematunge – an outspoken Sri Lankan journalist, husband and father – was stabbed and shot to death, his state-sanctioned killing will never be prosecuted.

I could write a list of journalists who have been killed, tortured, arrested or deported by governments around the world, but the list would be too long. I could write a list of all the courageous journalists out there still speaking truth to power. I could try to explain why journalists matter, but instead I will light a candle by water and be thankful.

Instead I will leave it to him, to the piece titled And then they came for me published in his paper on Sunday

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

…

People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted.Â