Nats’ list: when diversity isn’t

National’s house organ the Herald gives its party list a great big sloppy kiss this morning (hat-tip: kiwiblog). The editorial opens with great fanfare:

“When the National Party published its candidate list on Sunday a greater ethnic diversity was immediately apparent. Six Maori, three Asians and a Pacific Islander have been placed high enough on the list to get into Parliament if National polls as well as it expects.”

Note that last little qualification.

But the saddest bit of the editorial is where the continuing exclusion of women is swept under the carpet with a single sentence:

“National’s list, incidentally, still looks light on women; only four rank in the top 24, from which a cabinet would be likely to be drawn.”

Farrar’s apologia is instructive:

“There is still some way to go. It looks like women will comprise 26% to 28% of National’s caucus, much the same as is currently the case. This is more than double the international average for female parliamentary representation. The problem is not so much where women are placed on the list, but that not enough stand to be a candidate.”

Farrar also says that it’s “very foolish to assume that the top 24 are automatically the Ministerial pool.” True, but it would be very foolish to assume that the vast majority of Cabinet don’t come from that almost exclusively male pool. And only two of the top ten, all guaranteed to be in Cabinet, are women (and they’re at 7th and 10th).

One wonders whether National’s problem recruiting (and retaining — remember Katherine Rich — women is in some way related to the way they treat their women.

So, it’s “incidental” that there are hardly any women in the top 24. Sorry, but in gender terms, National’s list is about where Labour was in 1980. Come on Granny, even Blind Freddy can see that the Nats have a woman problem!

National’s trust deficit

Turns out that Colmar Brunton drilled a little deeper (as 08wire puts it: hat-tip) in their last poll. And they found that Labour’s campaign to question National’s borrow-to-build strategy and make its hidden agendas a defining issue is working.

Half of Kiwis doubt National’s honesty about its policies. This includes some of its own supporters:

“ONE News asked voters in the poll whether National is being open about its plans. Fifty per cent say “no”, while 37% think they are. And a quarter of National’s own supporters say they are not being honest.”

When asked about National’s plan to borrow more to fund new infrastructure, 52% say they disagree while 39% agree.

John Key says he intends, “to campaign on trust. I intend to be a prime minister that earns the trust of New Zealanders and I’m going to keep that trust.”

Finance Minister Michael Cullen says, “People know where Helen Clark stands. They don’t know where John Key stands. So if this election is about trust, we’re very much back in the running”.

08 wire say that “…trust is an emotion that rises and falls slowly, and which morphs into partisan preference slowly, too.” Thus:

“First, it will be hard for National to turn this trust deficit around within the next three months. And second, the trust deficit’s transformation into “Labour plus” voters turning their backs on National is probably incomplete.”

Exactly the point that I made about the results of the latest batch of polls. Any bounce for Labour may have been slight (although a continued substantial recovery from the depths of June), but the long-term and more deep-seated damage done by the loose lips debacle may have been hidden.

John Armstrong also says “Right now, National has both a debt problem and a trust problem”. He interprets the poll as showing that National’s “soft” vote “amounts to around a quarter of its current support.”

With a little under three months to go to the election, Labour’s challenge is to exploit these doubts and prise the wavering National-leaning punters away from National. Then the whole picture changes.

[Update: AndrewE asks why Labour should be preceived as more trustworthy. Labour's pledge cards may have been paid for by the taxpayer, but the promises were kept, is the answer.]

Proving consent

The Ministry of Justice is now seeking comment on the idea that those charged with rape should have to prove consent as well as on proposals to create a legal definition of consent to remove ambiguity and to ban questioning complainants about their sexual history with the alleged attacker. (Discussion document here, or here for the 672KB pdf file).

I posted last month on the Law Commission’s comments on the need to reform court processes in sexual offence trials. As retired Appeal Court Justice Ted Thomas rightly put it:

“the nature and impact of the trial in sexual cases on complainants is a brutalising and distressing experience in which the complainant is effectively put on trial.”

Something needs to be done to ensure that justice is done and that sexual violence is taken seriously and some of the proposals in the Ministry’s paper look promising on the face of it.

But doing away with the presumption of innocence and requiring a higher standard of proof from defendants is another matter. There are flaws with “innocent until proven guilty”, but it is generally thought that it is better to let a few guilty go unpunished then to punish the innocent. Last month Inventory2 condemned the idea as “a piece of liberal lunacy”, saying “(it) goes too far, and should be quickly condemned to the dusbin.”

How about we look at all the other alternatives, implement those that look like they will make a difference, and then revisit the issue of proving consent if we consider this necessary. There is a great deal to gain, but also a great deal to lose.

[Update: MacDoc makes some constructive suggestions about how to improve the trial process.

And in his typically thoughtful way, Bomber at TUMEKE! crows that, "... gone are the days a rape suspect could claim consent from the sparkle in the victims eye." Some will be surprised to hear that this is what rape suspects argue.]

The state of democracy in NZ

Speaking of the state of democracy, Colin James’s thoughtful piece in yesterday’s Granny deserves more attention on the blogosphere.

James suggests:

“Here’s a democratic promise John Key could make: that if Prime Minister he will promote a fixed term for Parliament. Republican Helen Clark has clung to the vestige of monarchical power that allows her in effect to set the election date.”

Good point. The setting of the election date to gain (perceived) electoral advantage is in no way democratic. Also, there are arguments for and against a longer term, but I think that the benefits for economic management are compelling. It’s worth serious consideration.”

More interesting are James’s musings on the “self-interested” promise of a binding referendum on the voting system:

“Any less proportional alternative [to MMP] - certainly the supplementary member system he favours - would advantage the two big old parties. In this election it would have smoothed National’s bid for power.”

James does the math to demonstrate this. In particular, the smaller parties miss out. But — and here’s a point that is often overlooked — the voters have been busy adapting MMP “without waiting for the politicians.” James calls this a “two-phase clean-up.”

“First, (the electorate) has been steadily whittling down the ‘wasted’ vote for parties which get party votes but not seats: from 7.5 per cent in 1996 to 6 per cent in 1999, 4.9 per cent in 2002 and 1.3 per cent in 2005.”

In phase 2 the voters will start whittling down the number of small parties represented in Parliament. Peters, Dunne and Anderton are all really relics of the old FFP system. When they go, their parties go too, most likely. James even speculates that when Hide goes, so too does ACT.

And I’d argue that NZ voters have demonstrated a very sharp sense of how to operate MMP to reflect the popular will. In 1999 and 2002, they wanted fairness and moderation, but they weren’t prepared to give Labour unfettered power. The precision with which they achieved this outcome was remarkable.

I agree with James. If Key is serious about democracy, then he could look at giving up the opportunistic use of election date setting and an extended term. Leave the voting system to the “punters”, we’re already fine-tuning it.

USA is a truly free and open society. Yeah right.

Over at kiwiblog, Farrar promotes a new website “formed by some Londoners to fight anti-Americanism. It must be important to some people that the whole world has the same ill-informed, brain-washed view of the greatness of the USA that your average flag-worshipping Jefferson County Hoosier entertains.

Farrar, for whom ridding the world of this terrible scourge — anti-Americanism, not the Bush-voting rednecks — seems urgent, tells us that the new website has, “a useful myths page, including:

• Myth: America is not a truly free and open society”

What myth?

A very few of you will recall a discussion about the lack of freedom in the USA on my very second post. In it I recounted how:

“I once pointed out to some Americans who were crowing but how “free” they were compared to me (!) that I was planning to visit Cuba, but that their government wouldn’t allow them this freedom of travel. Not well received. I stopped myself from adding a few more freedoms that they are denied when I saw the trouble they were having with the cognitive dissonance this example caused.”

Challenged to add a few more I came up with:

• Laws governing what people could get up to in the privacy of their own bedrooms were still on the books in a number of states in 2003, when the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas ruled laws criminalizing private, non-commercial sexual activity to be unconstitutional. The “Land of the Free” stopped at the bedroom door.
• Gays can get married in NZ, but only in Califonia, I think.
• Straight or gay, we can legally pay for sex in NZ. (Spitzer was in the wrong place at the wrong time, clearly.)
• I checked on the rules surrounding “patriotic customs”, an area where the USA has been noted for its stringent controls on its citizens’ freedom to express themselves, and see that the penalties for desecrating the flag, etc, have been removed, at least from the Federal Code. So now its just strong societal pressure that keeps people in line. Or perhaps the states have moved to fill this gap.

Things have got worse since the 1990s, of course, with the wholesale phone tapping, monitoring of citizens’ bank accounts (Spitzer wouldn’t have been caught in NZ), and so on.

For an authoritative and thorough account read the Freedom House report “Today’s American: How Free?” on the state of freedom in the United States.

From the review in the Economist “Land of the free? Liberty in America is not quite as revered as its leaders pretend“:

““How Free?” not only details and condemns the administration’s familiar sins, from Guantánamo to extraordinary rendition to warrantless wiretapping. It reminds readers of its aversion to open government. The number of documents classified as secret has jumped from 8.7m in 2001 to 14.2m in 2005—a 60% increase over three years. Decade-old information has been reclassified. Researchers report that it is much more difficult and time-consuming to obtain information under the Freedom of Information Act.”

That latter point is a gross understatement. Read Jimmy Carter’s recent piece on the FOI Act in the Washington Post. Carter notes that according to the National Security Archives 2003 report, median response times (mandated by law at 20 days) may be as long under the Republicans as 905 working days at the Department of Agriculture and 1,113 working days at the Environmental Protection Agency.

So, Farrar, there are some suggestions for your summer reading.

The Tui are back. Yeah Right!

It would be selfish of me not to share one of Mt Eden’s best kept secrets. For a few weeks every year, Fairview Rd is resplendent in blossom and the Tui flock to feast on it by the dozen.

We went for a walk this morning down Fairview Rd, as the blossom on some trees is already out, and is threatening to bloom on the others.

The Tui have started to return for their annual extended picnic. Even at this point we counted getting on to twenty birds and could hear their happy song and deep-throated gurgling all around.

By the weekend it should be possible to stand under a single pink cloud of blossom and glory in the sight and song of upwards a dozen birds. On a fine day it makes for a special spring spectacle, and can be combined with a coffee at Altar, just a few steps up Mt Eden Rd.

Jane’s Slips

Jane Clifton ruminates in the Listener on the fast-changing nature of journalism (hat-tip: Russell Brown). Clifton is threatened. Indeed, she pines for a good, old-fashioned demarcation dispute:

“… political activists are doing journalists’ work for them by blogging and commentating as though they were professional journalists, and being taken increasingly seriously as such – including by professional journalists, who routinely cite them as authorities in news stories.”

True. Inexorably, we are following developments in the US. There Arianna Huffington’s website, for example, retails news, breaks news and carries blogs. Huffington herself is Clifton’s worst nightmare. She describes herself as, “one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet.”

As I argued in response to Vernon Small’s confusion, the boundaries between blogging and journalism are blurred because of the false, value-laden, image of “journalism” and “news” to which journalists still cling in order to claim some legitimacy (and, in my experience, often to justify to themselves what it is that they do).

Once one dispenses with the fallacy that journalists are reporting objective news for some higher purpose, there is little to distinguish many bloggers from journalists and vice versa.

Take, for example, “professional journalist” Anthony Hubbard’s “profile” in Sunday’s SST of Tony Veitch’s PR person. Hubbard uncritically accepts the spin doctor’s picture of, “the honest PR agent, helping the client towards clarity, and their intelligent conversation with a well-meaning reporter who in turn conveys a complex truth to the world”, commenting, “It’s certainly a great picture.” In whose interests is this piece of puffery served up? If you’re unsure, read a “blogger’s” commentary. It’s clear which is the more honest.

Inevitably, then, Clifton gets it wrong:

“And, as we’ve found with Dead Fish-gate, some activists are even turning unwary journalists into political activists by selectively leaking them choice tidbits of covertly taped conversations. Unable to resist, journalists are effectively running party spin holus-bolus.”

Apart from the fact that she can’t know who dunnit, and therefore whether it was “party spin”, journalists have been using covertly leaked material — for whatever purposes — for a long time. Most recently, generations of journalists have been inspired by the example of Woodward and Bernstein.

“We’re in a new era where what’s generally taken as journalism has been democratised by the internet, and as with old-fashioned radio talkback, it’s hard to tell whether the information providers are accurate, biased or simply malicious.”

Is Clifton really unaware of the rise of “opinion news” in the US? Perhaps when she watches the most-viewed cable “news” service in the US, Faux News, she thinks that it’s accurate, unbiased and not designed to promote any particular party?

“I can’t even decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, this job-poaching. First up, best dressed, let the market decide, and all that. But morally and practically, it’s now the Wild West out there, because we can no longer easily tell where journalism ends and politics begins. We used to be separate species, but now we’re hybridising.”

And a good thing too, if it brings into the open the bias that has always been there. Those venturing onto the internet in search of information must know — confronted as they are by the enormous range of views — that everything they read is biased in some way. This was not the case when, not so long ago, we (in Auckland) depended on Granny for our daily news, and most people believed that it was serving up unbiased, objective fact.

That Clifton apparently still believes this the case is the biggest surprise.

Maori Party options open?

An interesting insight into the possibility of the Maori Party propping up a National-led government in the not-so-distant future is provided by Tim Donoghue’s Inside the Beltway post, “Sheep the casualty in battle for Maori seats“. (Earlier posts here and here.)

The Maori Party ended a tour of the Ikaroa-Rawhiti seat with a dinner at the Wainuiomata RSA in Wellington last Thursday. Donoghue reports:

“Significantly, one of the attendees at this dinner was Hutt South National Party candidate Paul Quinn who, on current polling, looks like entering Parliament at number 48 on the Nats’ list later this year.

“Even Maori Party firebrand Hone Harawira has said in recent weeks he could work with a John Key National-led Government so Quinn’s presence at the meeting was far from coincidental. Indeed, it was an indication Labour’s 2005 slogan that a vote for the Maori Party is a vote for National might be more true this time around.”

Presumably, Quinn was invited.

This follows Hone Harawira’s recent revelation on Alt TV that Labour was not listening to Maori Party overtures, and is pursuing an unrealistic hard line on an electoral accommodation. Discussions with Labour, he said,  were “pretty forced” while “conversations with National are a lot more relaxed.”

Here’s what Harawira said, when asked whether the Maori Party could form a coalition with National (courtesy of TUMEKE!):

“I don’t see why not. I mean our role as the Maori party is to defend Maori rights and advance Maori interests for the benefit of the whole nation. It doesn’t matter who the government’s going to be - as long as we are there to ensure those things happen. Why not? Now people say to me, ‘How on Earth could you think of going into - of jumping in bed with - National?’ and I answer the question: And what’s Labour done for Maori in the last nine years?”

Now, we mustn’t forget that the Maori Party normally determines its post-election strategy in a series of hui. But they learnt last time that it doesn’t pay to be “last cab off the rank”, as Helen Clark put it dismissively.

On yer bikes, boobs?

As expected, Auckland City Council’s attempt to get an injunction preventing the “Boobs on Bikes” parade was unscussessful.

The Herald report states that the Judge, “said although some councillors may deem the parade to be offensive, she did not agree, even if it was tacky.” Further:

“Females walking down the street bare-breasted was not unlawful. But she added her decision was made by considering the law not morals.”

It sounds as though the Judge missed the point. The reason why many of us find the parade “offensive” is because it celebrates the exploitation of women as sexual objects.

It is not about whether or not it is immoral per se for women to bare their breasts in public. I personally would be very pleased if women could, for instance, breast-feed their babies in public without anybody giving it a second thought.

The christian right may be offended by the public display of women’s breasts, but that’s their problem.

That the pornographer organising the event thought that the decision was “incredibly balanced and well thought out and complete” says it all.

Clod plod goads cad

As if yesterday’s efforts in the rehabilitate Veitch campaign weren’t enough, there’s even more hugely sympathetic reportage this morning.

Turns out that a cop accidentally left a tactless and none too sympathetic remark on Veitch’s answerphone. As Bomber at TUMEKE! points out, it was probably accidental — certainly sounded like it.

Cue another blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion:

“Veitch’s wife, Zoe Halford, … claims the remark left her wanting “to vomit”, and worried about possible police bias against her husband. It made me feel as if there was unprofessionalism and bias.”

Yes, that poor man Veitch, victim of his obssessed and grasping ex, the incompetent and biased police, the ‘trial by media’, and so on. Not his own brutish and violent behaviour. Never.

[Updates:

Seven charges have been laid against Veitch, spanning 2002 to 2006.

Paul at The Fundy Post posts to great effect on this.]