Despite some fears, the opposition to the TPPA (sorry, the CPTPPTPACACCZ) is not going away. The It’s Our Future campaign has set up a series of public meetings starting next week in Auckland.
TPPA public meetings next week
Has Labour kept its promise on the TPPA?
There’s a question I haven’t seen answered in the most recent coverage of the abysmally-renamed Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership: how does it line up with the five principles then-Labour leader Andrew Little announced in July 2015?
– Pharmac must be protected
– Corporations cannot successfully sue the Government for regulating in the public interest
– New Zealand maintains the right to restrict sales of farm land and housing to non-resident foreign buyers
– The Treaty of Waitangi must be upheld
– Meaningful gains are made for our farmers in tariff reductions and market access.
(Are we even allowed to know? Wasn’t the TPPA’s secrecy another major sticking point for a lot of people?)
Professor Jane Kelsey suggests that, besides a token attempt to address the issue of investor/state disputes, we’ve achieved none of those points. The best that free trade fanboy Stephen Jacobi can say today is:
“I wouldn’t expect the dairy farmer to be jumping all over the place, but it’s better than it would have been otherwise.”
… which could be interpreted as “meaningful gains are made for our farmers” if one were feeling extremely generous. One is not.
On the Pharmac issue – maybe? Those of us who aren’t Stephen Jacobi are still having to read between the lines here – Stuff reports:
Fully 22 provisions of the original TPP agreement have been suspended, up from 20 frozen in November last year. These provisions include controversial pharmaceutical changes and would only be reactivated after renegotiations and if the United States re-entered the pact.
Does that mean Pharmac is protected … until the US enters the deal? If we sign this and a new President comes along in 2020 and says “Yup, we’re in” do we even get to discuss what happens, or is it gone by lunchtime?
Tens of thousands of people marched against the TPPA, and expected Labour, especially Labour-in-government-with-the-Greens-and-New-Zealand-First, to actually be different to the last lot. But I don’t know if Labour really understood this. If you go back to the July announcement, Labour declared:
Labour will carefully consider the impact of the draft TPP agreement on New Zealand’s interests, and we will not support the TPP unless it protects New Zealand’s sovereignty and is in the best interests of New Zealanders.
… in the last paragraph. The first four words of the announcement, though, are:
Labour supports free trade.
So it has been: at every opportunity, as New Zealanders protested and organised and challenged the very idea that “free trade” is good for all of us, you couldn’t get a statement out of a Labour spokesperson which didn’t begin with, “Well of course Labour has always supported free trade agreements, however.”
Labour has been unable to detach itself from the idea that trade agreements are Good Proper Governance. They’re what you do when you’re in power, and while of course there are some domestic issues to work through like basic human rights and the ongoing legacy of unilaterally self-immolating our manufacturing sector, y’know, Trade Agreements Are Good. They must be, or we wouldn’t keep signing up to them, and those nice men in suits from the big banks and think-tanks wouldn’t keep saying how great they are.
Even when New Zealanders took to the streets saying, this secrecy is undemocratic. This provision for companies to sue our government over lost profits is obscene. Pharmac is too precious to give up for undefined economic gain, Labour dithered, giving Phil Goff leave to cross the floor over it and looking not entirely cohesive when David Shearer wanted to do the same.
I don’t think Labour have ever understood that those specific complaints (which they haven’t actually fixed!) about a specific agreement weren’t the whole of the argument. That people weren’t blockading motorways just because of one particular instance of investor/state dispute resolution clauses.
The world is changing. More and more people are starting to think, maybe “free trade agreements” aren’t the universal good they’ve been sold as. Reconsidering what “free trade” means: who gets to be “free”? Free from what – job security? Affordable housing and healthcare? The power of their own elected governments to pass legislation for the public good? Things that matter more than profit margins?
And maybe, after thirty years of this being the status quo, we’re ready for an alternative. A genuine change in direction. We see a new government formed of parties who (more or less) said that the TPPA was not OK, who promised a new way of doing things. It’s the old organising model of Anger, Hope, Action. People are angry. Jacinda Ardern gave them hope. Action?
Apparently not. And I don’t know how thrilled people are going to be about that – or the government’s message that actually they should be happy because that’s the way the world works.
I could be wrong. It could be as my comrade Giovanni suggested:
Maybe they won’t face a backlash over this. But either way, this will be a massive lost opportunity for Labour. And I worry it won’t be the last.
What I read on my holidays
We’re still in that quiet time of year where not a lot is happening unless you’re into cricket. Here are a few longer reads I’ve been enjoying over the downtime.
New York Times: How tough is it to change a culture of harassment? Ask women at Ford
The jobs were the best they would ever have: collecting union wages while working at Ford, one of America’s most storied companies. But inside two Chicago plants, the women found menace.
Bosses and fellow laborers treated them as property or prey. Men crudely commented on their breasts and buttocks; graffiti of penises was carved into tables, spray-painted onto floors and scribbled onto walls. They groped women, pressed against them, simulated sex acts or masturbated in front of them. Supervisors traded better assignments for sex and punished those who refused.
That was a quarter-century ago. Today, women at those plants say they have been subjected to many of the same abuses. And like those who complained before them, they say they were mocked, dismissed, threatened and ostracized. One described being called “snitch bitch,” while another was accused of “raping the company.” Many of the men who they say hounded them kept their jobs.
Al Jazeera: Why is the West praising Malala, but ignoring Ahed?
Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl, was recently arrested in a night-time raid on her home. The Israeli authorities accuse her of “assaulting” an Israeli soldier and an officer. A day earlier she had confronted Israeli soldiers who had entered her family’s backyard. The incident happened shortly after a soldier shot her 14-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber bullet, and fired tear-gas canisters directly at their home, breaking windows.
Her mother and cousin were arrested later as well. All three remain in detention.
There has been a curious lack of support for Ahed from Western feminist groups, human rights advocates and state officials who otherwise present themselves as the purveyors of human rights and champions of girls’ empowerment.
Giovanni Tiso: On polite Nazis and the violence of speech
The error in believing that fascism can be defeated through debate stems partly from the failure to see violence in speech, and in the exercise of speech. Few would fail to recognise that violence when watching the 90-second video, and the fixed stares of those fifteen men, whose every gesture signified: ‘We could hurt you, but choose not to. For now.’
Graham Cameron: Māori health and education models can work for everyone
We need to move past the assumption prevalent in our public services that if it was written by a Māori academic, has Māori words and concepts, and Māori people are using it, then it is only aimed at Māori. These models are aimed beyond the individual to building functional communities and whānau; ethnicity has very little to do with it.
2017 rewind: The immigration “debate”
Boy, this issue never goes away. Wait, am I talking about toxic immigration narratives, or mainstream media pundit-dudes making prats of themselves?
Originally published 8 October 2017
There were a few drafts of this post, as I struggled with how to address Duncan Garner’s blatantly, deliberately, openly, provocatively racist column (no one makes that much effort saying how not-racist they are if they aren’t about to be super-racist). Deconstruct line-by-line? Parody (unnecessary given this excellent piece)? Flowchart showing all this has happened before and all of it will happen again (everything’s better with a Battlestar Galactica reference)?
I settled on a bingo board.
Because I am tired. I am so very tired of this little dance we go on, every single time a Pākehā dude (usually) opens his mouth to complain about “floods” or “waves” of immigrants or wants to start off “an important conversation” about immigration by observing that the queue at KMart made him feel like he was in South East Asia. I am tired of the disingenuous defenders insisting that we stop talking about the actual words the grown man who works in a communication-based job actually wrote. I am tired of the expectation to buy into the charade that he just doesn’t understand the basic implications of his words, to soothe the troubled brows of people who think being called racist is the literal worst thing that can happen to a living being.
I am tired of having to explain incredibly basic concepts like “referring to groups of people in animalistic terms is dehumanizing” or “criticising racist rhetoric does not mean I believe in a fully open borders policy and what the hell are you smoking to suggest that I am, you obvious deflection tactic?”
I am tired of the constant threat: actually I’m one of the good ones and if you alienate me I might not support good things any more.
And I am afraid. Haven’t we seen this happen already? Don’t we know what direction normalising this kind of rhetoric, and shutting down of criticism of it, takes us in? Haven’t we all watched what’s happening in the United States and retweeted Sarah Kendzior enough to read the signs? Didn’t we just learn that pandering to the “less-bad” agitators – saying “oh sure Milo’s transphobic but at least he’s not an actual Nazi” – is part of the problem?
Weren’t we all guilty of laughing at Trump’s buffoonery and assuming he was harmless, and just coincidentally aren’t we all waiting to see which way Winston Peters will go, gosh isn’t it funny how he mocked that journalist for being Australian?
And I’m rolling my eyes at myself right now because come on, Stephanie, this is just one silly Duncan Garner column, it’s not an impending seachange in NZ politics towards the openly white-supremacist authoritarianism of Trump and Breitbart, be reasonable.
But being reasonable and giving people an endless supply of second changes or infinite benefit of the doubt is how people like me – people who aren’t directly threatened by this rhetoric – end up saying “I woke up one day and realised I was living in a dystopia” – while those who faced genuine harm from all those “poor choices of words” or “unintended implications” are screaming we told you so, why didn’t you listen?
This is how hatred and hate-filled politics becomes normal: not because there are people deliberately pushing a racist agenda, but because a much wider group of people ignore it, or reinforce it by parroting its tropes without thinking about it. And when they’re called out, they’re outraged, because they’re not racist and how dare you say so you basement-dwelling loser, and their indignation is another piece of the puzzle, because now the conversation is about whether those stupid social justice types on Twitter are just too sensitive to have mature conversations about serious issues facing our nation.
And I’m tired. But I had to say something. Because you can never see where it all started to go wrong until it’s too late.
The immigration “debate”
There were a few drafts of this post, as I struggled with how to address Duncan Garner’s blatantly, deliberately, openly, provocatively racist column (no one makes that much effort saying how not-racist they are if they aren’t about to be super-racist). Deconstruct line-by-line? Parody (unnecessary given this excellent piece)? Flowchart showing all this has happened before and all of it will happen again (everything’s better with a Battlestar Galactica reference)?
I settled on a bingo board.
Because I am tired. I am so very tired of this little dance we go on, every single time a Pākehā dude (usually) opens his mouth to complain about “floods” or “waves” of immigrants or wants to start off “an important conversation” about immigration by observing that the queue at KMart made him feel like he was in South East Asia. I am tired of the disingenuous defenders insisting that we stop talking about the actual words the grown man who works in a communication-based job actually wrote. I am tired of the expectation to buy into the charade that he just doesn’t understand the basic implications of his words, to soothe the troubled brows of people who think being called racist is the literal worst thing that can happen to a living being.
I am tired of having to explain incredibly basic concepts like “referring to groups of people in animalistic terms is dehumanizing” or “criticising racist rhetoric does not mean I believe in a fully open borders policy and what the hell are you smoking to suggest that I am, you obvious deflection tactic?”
I am tired of the constant threat: actually I’m one of the good ones and if you alienate me I might not support good things any more.
And I am afraid. Haven’t we seen this happen already? Don’t we know what direction normalising this kind of rhetoric, and shutting down of criticism of it, takes us in? Haven’t we all watched what’s happening in the United States and retweeted Sarah Kendzior enough to read the signs? Didn’t we just learn that pandering to the “less-bad” agitators – saying “oh sure Milo’s transphobic but at least he’s not an actual Nazi” – is part of the problem?
Weren’t we all guilty of laughing at Trump’s buffoonery and assuming he was harmless, and just coincidentally aren’t we all waiting to see which way Winston Peters will go, gosh isn’t it funny how he mocked that journalist for being Australian?
And I’m rolling my eyes at myself right now because come on, Stephanie, this is just one silly Duncan Garner column, it’s not an impending seachange in NZ politics towards the openly white-supremacist authoritarianism of Trump and Breitbart, be reasonable.
But being reasonable and giving people an endless supply of second changes or infinite benefit of the doubt is how people like me – people who aren’t directly threatened by this rhetoric – end up saying “I woke up one day and realised I was living in a dystopia” – while those who faced genuine harm from all those “poor choices of words” or “unintended implications” are screaming we told you so, why didn’t you listen?
This is how hatred and hate-filled politics becomes normal: not because there are people deliberately pushing a racist agenda, but because a much wider group of people ignore it, or reinforce it by parroting its tropes without thinking about it. And when they’re called out, they’re outraged, because they’re not racist and how dare you say so you basement-dwelling loser, and their indignation is another piece of the puzzle, because now the conversation is about whether those stupid social justice types on Twitter are just too sensitive to have mature conversations about serious issues facing our nation.
And I’m tired. But I had to say something. Because you can never see where it all started to go wrong until it’s too late.
Stephanie Rodgers 