Dr Liz Gordon – The planets align

I last voted for Labour in 1987. I do vote for my local electorate MP, Megan Woods, who is competent and may even be innovative in Government. Her decisive action on shonky (and non-existent) earthquake repairs is exciting.  It appears that EQC processes may at last come under the spotlight. I think the appointment of Annette King, whom I have known since well before Chloe Swarbrick was born, is inspired.  She is very focussed and able to work with everyone.

Avid readers of this blog (such as there are) should know that my three current topmost concerns are gender equality, education and justice. And, just for once, real political progress has begun (perhaps just a stake in the ground) on all three this week.  I probably won’t make many political friends for my enthusiasm, but I don’t care.  It has been a good week.  A smidgeon of hope is a beacon of light after years of the grey landscape of neo-liberalism.

These are the things that have got me excited: The potential for criminal justice reform and a significant reduction in the numbers in prisons. A review of Tomorrow’s Schools. And, while painful, the revelations of sexual misconduct against women out of Russell McVeagh, arguably until this week New Zealand’s most prestigious law firm, has galvanised people into action.

In the mid-1980s a report by Sir Clinton Roper expressed horror at the numbers in prison, arguing that we had become too punitive with 2,000 people now in prison.  Too punitive!  Thirty years later, with rates more than five times higher, the previous government proposed to build another prison.  With imprisonment rates more than a third higher than Australia, and higher again than England and Canada, with much lower rates of crime than those countries, our propensity to chuck people into prison has become an embarrassment.

Imprisonment damages communities, whanau/families and the whole society. We tend to believe that the people who are locked up are all dangerous criminals, but by far the majority are not. Half of all remand prisoners, held nowadays for longer and longer periods, never spend a single day extra in prison after they eventually get to court, either because they are found no guilty or because the sentence imposed by the courts is less than the time already served.

Minister Andrew Little’s announcement last week that the government is looking at significant penal reform is very welcome indeed. Every bit of his statement – lower numbers, treatment rather than imprisonment, alternatives to incarceration hit a good note for me. As the editor of a new book on the effects of parental imprisonment on children, I see these policies, if successful, as changing the future for so many children.  And there must be no room for failure.

Then there is the announced review of Tomorrow’s Schools, which I have been calling for for 20 years.  The last Labour-led government under Helen Clark would not countenance it, but this new government understands the need.  

There is strong research evidence that the parent-led system of school choice is not working for children.  There is simply not one jot of research evidence that shipping a child off to beyond the local school provides any additional achievement for them.  There is certainly very clear empirical evidence that New Zealand, along with other ‘choice’ countries, has been slipping down the international rankings of school achievement for 30 years.  From first to the middle of the OECD league – so much for school choice!

Some people are of the view that getting rid of school choice is political suicide, but I suspect that most parents are completely exhausted by the mind-numbing daily school runs.  I can see that the removal of choice alone would be frightening and of concern to people.  What is needed is something to fill the vacuum – a service that works to overcome barriers to learning in local schools, so that, to quote a once-popular maxim, every school is a good school offering good opportunities for learners. And just think how the congestion would reduce on Auckland’s highways.

So I want to congratulate the government for these initiatives, and say that as a non-Labour voter since 1987 I am pretty impressed.  Now what I am looking for, of course, is good policy followed by good legislation and finally excellent outcomes.  Then we can celebrate the money and time saved in moving towards sensible and effective systems.

Oh, yes, and to the accelerating #MeToo movement in New Zealand, where women are shaking off the shackles of subordination at work. Kia kaha!