Dr Liz Gordon: The Parliamentary cesspit
In the mid-1980s I carried out a research project about women in Parliament. Although I looked at or interviewed all women who had been MPs up to that stage (this was not difficult as there was little more than a handful until 1984), the focus was on the 1984 intake that were swept in on the Labour landslide. Ten women MPs were elected for Labour and one National (Katherine O’Regan, who replaced Marilyn Waring). Seven of the Labour women were new MPs. Suddenly, more than 10% of MPs were women! It seemed like a huge step forward.
Today I have been searching for the huge manuscript, “A Place in the Sun”, that I wrote (but never tried to publish) at the time, but it must be stashed in the garage, and it is cold outside, so my memories may be a little inaccurate. No, I can’t look it up on a hard drive because it was painstakingly typed on a typewriter.
But in light of this week’s report on bullying and harassment in Parliament, it is worth putting the treatment of women in that place into some kind of perspective. Marilyn Waring, who was elected to Parliament in 1975, often commented on the lack of toilets for women in the Member’s areas. In those days, Parliament was very obviously a boy’s club, with the billiard tables, the after-dinner whisky and goodness knows what else.
I remember from my research that when the 1984 women MPs went to be sworn in, the National front benchers (now relegated to opposition and no doubt smarting from it) scored the Labour women out of ten on their looks as they went up to take the oath. As far as I know, this never led to a formal complaint. Women just sucked it up.
Many people thought that women MPs would act to improve the atmosphere in Parliament, and to an extent that has happened. The obvious culture of excessive drinking has certainly reduced over the years. It is just as well, as we have certainly had our share of alcohol dependent Prime Ministers in our time.
But there is still an undertone of laddishness about the place. This is mostly easily seen in the Parliamentary chamber itself, where bullying is not only condoned but is practically compulsory. It is always interesting to get the views of people who witness question time for the first time, who are always shocked at the shoutin’ and hollerin’, the boos and cries of derision as a Minister makes an answer to a question.
This is the heart of our politics, which is not really a contest of ideas but a game of one-upmanship often conducted at quite a personal level. The aim is not so much to deride a policy but to bring a Minister to his or her knees. It may not be gendered (although it sometimes is) but it is definitely bullying and harassment.
Looking back at the Jami Lee Ross incident last year, it is easy to see there is a collusion between Parliament and the media, unwritten and unstated though it may be, that the ritual destruction of persons is OK as long as one does not mention personal and family relationships, in particular the affairs MPs may be having. I wonder in whose interests this rule works? Not the public, I am thinking. Members of the Press Gallery have been known from time to time to develop close personal relationships with MPs. Whatever the reason, the existence of secret lives inside the House provides the basis for rumour, distrust, bullying and worse.
Women MPs may well have cleaned up Parliament to an extent, even though I don’t mean to suggest for one minute that this is their role. They now constitute 41% of all MPs, which is the highest proportion ever. Although it seems to have been a long time coming, 50% is now within reach.
So now is the time, I think, for further inroads to be made into what is still, after all these years, a toxic environment which spawned all those claims of bullying, harassment and sexual assault. This won’t be easy at all. The autonomy of MPs in their practice, the exercise of the privilege of parties over their MPs, the strong hierarchies and the highly public arena make change difficult.
It is worth fighting for. The ability of power to control people, ruin relationships and produce victims is considerable, even without (generally speaking) the high levels of positional and economic corruption seen in other jurisdictions. Start in the chamber and work from there.
Dr Liz Gordon is a researcher and a barrister, with interests in destroying neo-liberalism in all its forms and moving towards a socially just society. She usually blogs on justice, social welfare and education topics.
Parliament is disgusting now and hurtful to watch as it also was during John Key’s era as Keys speaker of the house ‘David Carter’ was another obsinate ‘agressive type’ also.
The Jami-Lee Ross event dragged Parliament down to a new low, thanks, ironically, to the fat lady singing like a guttersnipe, and deservedly earning contempt for exposing personal matters to the media – and revealing more about herself than she may ever be aware of. That sort never do.
If we dared view Parliament as a microcosm of contemporary NZ, the reality is too dismal to accept. Small wonder we are world leaders in abusing and killing women.
There are good men out there, and the aberrations who we see performing like gin-soused apes at question time get away with it because the media consistently fails to call them to account for it – it titillates their dreary lives, they gorge themselves on grubby gossip. I think I knew about David Lange’s affair with Margaret Pope before his wife did, and that was via press gallery personnel who seem to be the first to know when somebody’s parliamentary pass is withdrawn.
Rating women on their looks is facile, but it neatly illustrates the adolescent mentality and the intellectual void in which these Nat dimwits thrive. But if they think they are impressing anybody other than each other, then once again, they’ve got it wrong.
Last week’s pictures of Alfred Ngaro, flanked by Todd McClay and that idiot police dog handler, solemnly proclaiming that if a woman finds herself to be pregnant, they should have a say in whether she continues with the pregnancy, shows patriarchy – oh how I loathe that word – at its ugliest and most bullying. I expected better of McClay, but he’s only a Nat man after all.
Well done to our smart Kiwi women, Liz, who have tolerated these dopey drongos with class and style, and I hope they have not paid too big a personal price for it, and I respect their fortitude.
Rather than worrying about how women are being treated in parliament, look at how women are treated for maternity services in this country.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12234604
We are a joke!
From kicking women and newborns out of hospitals after a few hours of giving birth to save money at Auckland hospital (great for baby to be put into a carseat and driven off to other facilities under our restructured maternity services, sarc.) to having women deliver babies on the side of the road in Southland because “the town’s maternity centre was downgraded as part of a regionwide overhaul of maternity services by the Southern District Health Board, but critics have said the promised maternity services meant to replace the clinic have not been delivered.” https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12234604
Then there is the penny pinching of making a women choose between a midwife and and obstetrician and pretty much driving obstetricians out of being available for women if any thing goes wrong or doctors monitoring a pregnancy in partnership with a midwife.
The there is the amount of poor outcomes for children in NZ – which starts off by how poorly they are treated from pregnancy to primary school. State house waiting list is over 10,000 as the government thinks the answer lies in people on $120k salaries buying $650k housing and giving compass social housing 3.3 million ontop of the rents.
Apparently 10% of NZ workforce are care givers! Maybe having a bit more ‘care’ during the early years in NZ, starting at pregnancy and while children are children, might stop children being born or becoming injured with preventable conditions.
Plunket is a charity, not government run and relies on donations. It is up to parents to do all the work with regarding trying to make sure baby is doing well. This is great for well organised parents with resources, less so for the children of parents who are not well themselves and have issues, and whose baby falls through the gaps!
Population growth including foreign workers or students having babies in NZ has never been higher. Even if non citizens are not eligible for free health care (although many are just needs one family member to get a 2 year work visa and then everyone else can access free health and disability services for free). Even if the tourists and overseas residents are paying then our medical system and maternity system is still relying on the public service to take care of Mum and baby along with all the other babies and children and everyone else from the elderly to the middle aged, whose care has been squeezed further and further by demand.
For example the other day a foreign student was in the news complaining how she is trying to get back into NZ to continue her educational studies with her newborn baby. Even if baby and Mum are not eligible for free services they will still obviously need baby and maternity services from NZ. It is not just about money and who is paying, there needs to be a stop of rampant profiteering and taking from one department (health) and giving to another (education) until they actually have enough money/hospitals/doctors/midwives/dentists/services available to give a decent service.
When if looked at overall it would show that NZ practises towards women are not sustainable and is more akin to a Ponzi that is about to burst and actually probably has for many suffering – from health care to housing – but still our government and advisors celebrate more demand for services as being great for the economy, with funny money accounting!
NZ is more interested in taking foreign money than actually ensuring that the standards in NZ for parents and NZ children and everyone else already living here, is adequate.
Judging from the timetables where economy is the most important lobby point and meeting for government than poverty. https://www.rnz.co.nz/stories/2018696150/diaries-reveal-how-government-ministers-spend-their-days
Sadly governments are getting more and more out of touch with ordinary people as they meet and greet the same lobbying people and organisations who give them a self interested assessment of reality and what the issues are.
Then politicians are astonished when the polls they believe in don’t give them the results they expect aka Australian election, NZ election 2014, US election, Brexit, etc
People don’t just want hyperbole about women, jobs and poverty and well being, they actually want government policy to support the nationals in the country to succeed and our taxes to go to health care and education and well being of those who are NZ citizens who have been paying taxes and living in NZ for years.
Instead politicians attention seem to be more driven to ‘caring’ and having ‘well being’ to the 5 million tourists and hundreds of thousands of people who have paid to access NZ services and live here through study, low paid work and billionaires – not to mention the middle class foreign swindlers like Sroubek and Joanne Harrison who get to inflict drugs and make other workers redundant to cover up their crimes.
It is wonderful to have sustainable immigration and diversity of students, less so if it is a Ponzi with allegedly 50% of foreign students cheating while universities minimise it so they can get the money. Sad, as now local academic students are being locked out and competing for jobs in a situation which does not have a winner for the betterment of society aka if someone has cheated and gets into the workforce they don’t tend to be that good at their job!
I don’t buy into the ‘poor me’ of MP’s being bullied in parliament as just being women. Russel Norman, David Cunliffe, Graham Kennedy, were also bullied out, sometimes by their own party.
The only thing I agree with is, that parliament needs to grow up and put in place more to serve their ordinary constituents not themselves and taking giving people the right to vote here a bit more seriously. From Thiel to Tarrent they had the right to vote in NZ when you would not be able to do that in their respective countries.
Maybe if they concentrated on ordinary voters, there would be less time for bullying and petty disputes amongst each other and they might gain some reality of short and long term effects of their current strategy.
Russel Norman was not bullied out of his job at all. I don’t know where you got that from – headhunted by Greenpeace.
I was pleased to see the back of Graham Kennedy, he is a big boy I expect he coped with the emails asking the executive to keep him out of the party. His actions were disgraceful and caused the Greens to lose a hugely competent long term MP who should now be a minister, shame on him.
Cunliffe like anyone who works there knows how tough it is in there and the silly ganging up etc that goes on.
Meanwhile, over on Newshub, the campaign manager for the Tamaki’s Christian/Non Christian Party, says Labour’s Maori MP’s, “need to watch out.” He singles out Kelvin Davis as a target – and is amusingly vague about what exactly Davis does in Parliament.
If he had said that Pakeha or Irish or Pacifica MP’s, “need to watch out,” it would construed as racism, and so therefore is that.
Quote, “Māori like fierce leaders, and there’s no doubt Coalition NZ has some fierce Māori leaders in it already.”
He’s not talking about a rugby team or a haka party or a street fight here, he is talking about the NZ Parliament, and fierceness is not necessarily indicative of any useful constructive political skills whatsoever. Abrasiveness is great for cleaning spuds and getting rust off rooftops, but it is no substitute for tact or diplomacy or negotiation or compromise – it is primitive bullying war talk.
There’s a certain dichotomy in this Christain/Non Christian Party claiming to represent the silent majority by being fierce, and a decided lack of collegiality if their primary aim is to get into Parliament and screw other Maori along the way.
How do they know what the silent majority want if they are silent anyway ? Divine revelation ? A visit from the Holy Ghost ? Is there a message in the roar of the big shiny motorbikes that I’m somehow missing ?