ACT should make abolition of the Human Rights Commission a bottom line

The Human Rights Commission says it’s “very disappointing” that the government isn’t going ahead with law changes that would curb New Zealanders’ right to free speech.

Let me repeat that, just in case you didn’t get the irony. An agency ostensibly set up to protect our rights is upset that the government isn’t introducing new laws that would restrict them. What better evidence could there be of the commission’s highly selective interpretation – you might say perversion – of its own name?

The commission says it’s frustrated that planned amendments to the Human Rights Act won’t go as far as it would like. As it stands, the law quite properly makes it unlawful to incite ill-will or hostility against people on the basis of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origins. The commission wanted these protections extended to “other groups who are vulnerable to harmful speech, such as women, disabled people, and the rainbow community”.

Women? Really?? They make up half the population. There are now more of them in Parliament than there are men. They occupy the three most powerful positions in the country. Does the HRC really expect us to believe they are so vulnerable to “harmful” speech that they warrant special statutory protection? Come to that, couldn’t the same argument be made in respect of men – especially those who feel picked on by being disparaged as male, stale and pale? If so, don’t the two cancel each other out?

And note the “such as” in the commission’s statement. This leaves room for other groups – transgender people, for argument’s sake, though for the life of me I can’t imagine why I would choose them as an example – to also be protected against statements that might offend them. Who knows where the list of protected groups could end? It could be extended ad infinitum as political whim dictates. But Justice Minister Kiri Allan, pulling back from Labour’s original sweeping but vaguely defined proposals (and no doubt taking note of mounting public opposition), now says protection will be extended only to religious groups.

This is a nod to the royal commission that investigated the Christchurch mosque massacres and recommended tougher hate speech laws, no doubt with a view to protecting Muslims – a worthy aim but an ineffectual one, given there’s no evidence that the absence of such laws was a factor in the atrocity.

The government’s retreat from its original intention is clearly a blow and a setback to the HRC, which is so obsessed with identity politics and the supposed menace of hate speech that it completely ignores its bigger responsibility to protect New Zealanders’ freedom of expression. The commission is silent on this most crucial of democratic rights, despite it being enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified by New Zealand in 1978) and our own Bill of Rights Act. 

You’d think the commission’s own name was a bit of a giveaway, but no; its interpretation of the phrase “human rights” is selective, self-serving and unfailingly woke. Rather than concern itself with upholding and promoting New Zealanders’ rights generally, it directs its energies toward protecting us from racism, islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia and white supremacy. These endanger all of us, according to chief human rights pooh-bah Paul Hunt, arguably the most useless bureaucrat on the government’s payroll (in fact worse than useless, since the effect of his job, if not its purpose, is to promote a sense of division and drive wedges into the community).

To put it another way, the commission thinks it’s okay in a democracy to sacrifice the free-speech rights of the majority in order to protect supposedly vulnerable minority groups. It justifies this by arguing that restrictions on speech are needed to counter “violent extremism”. This is worryingly similar to the spurious pretexts – such as public order and public safety – routinely cited by authoritarian regimes that want to control what people think and say. Iran and Xi Jinping’s China come to mind.

Reconciling free speech with the interests of minority groups calls for a balancing act, but the commission doesn’t even attempt it. It solves the problem by simply ignoring the free speech side of the equation altogether.

All this adds up to a compelling case for abolishing the commission, as urged last year by David Seymour. It has been captured by ideologues and morphed into an extravagant travesty, endlessly haranguing and seeking to shame the public that funds it. Even Meng Foon, who as mayor of Gisborne seemed sensible and grounded, comes across as a tiresome, shouty nag in his role as Race Relations Commissioner.

The commission is a $13 million-plus per annum deadweight on the economy – money that could be redirected to any number of more worthy projects. Teaching dogs to ride bikes, for example. 

Seymour called for the commission's abolition after it was revealed that Hunt, a refugee from the barmy socialist Corbynista wing of the British Labour Party, made a $200 donation to the Waikato chapter of the Mongrel Mob as koha for his attendance at a gang hui.

The ACT leader should now go further and insist that the axing of the HRC will be a bottom line in any coalition negotiations with National after next year’s elections. It would be better still if National decided for itself that the HRC has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had, but the party of Christopher Luxon would run in fright from anything so bold and radical.

National, after all, is the party that signed us up to the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and was in the process of appointing an Indigenous Rights Commissioner when the Labour-NZ First coalition took office in 2017. Far from resisting the advance of wokery, it has enabled the process.

In any case, half-baked, rinse-and-repeat policies bereft of imagination or political courage (army boot camps for teenage offenders come to mind) are more National’s style.

Feeling sorry for Australia? Yeah, right

(First published in The Dominion Post, March 7.)

 

IT MUST BE tough being Australian right now.

Think about it. They’re shutting down the factories that produce the Holden and the Ford Falcon – cars that, for generations, have helped define what it meant to be Australian.

The Holden and the Falcon are Australia on wheels, but the country’s guilty secret was that the two automotive brands were able to survive only with massive taxpayer handouts. Economically speaking, they were crocks.

Australian governments spent an estimated $30 billion over the past 16 years propping up the car industry and the workforce it employed. Now Tony Abbott’s government has decided the subsidies must end – a bold move, given the Holden’s sacred status in Australian culture.

It’s worth pointing out that New Zealand went through this painful process more than two decades ago, when our politicians realised it made more sense for cars to be built in their country of origin.

The phasing out of protection for the domestic vehicle industry is one reason why a new car in New Zealand now costs the equivalent of 30 weeks’ salary rather than 90 weeks’, as was the case in the 1980s.

In this, we were ahead of the Australians – but then we often are, though the average Aussie would sooner undergo multiple limb amputations than admit it.

Arguably even more traumatic for patriotic Australians than the collapse of the car industry is the crisis engulfing Qantas – Australia’s best-known brand internationally, and hence an even more potent nationalist symbol than the Holden.

Last week, on the same day as Air New Zealand celebrated a record half-year profit, Qantas was announcing a $271 million first-half loss and the shedding of 5000 jobs.

This was accompanied by renewed wailing from Qantas about the unfairness of competition. It seems the first instinct of the Australian carrier when it’s in trouble is to run to Mummy government complaining that the playing field isn’t even.

Australians are famous for their swaggering self-confidence, but you have to wonder whether, underneath that tough veneer, they are actually fearful and insecure. Just look at how they fought to keep New Zealand apples out of the Australian market on spurious pretexts, and how they recently stripped New Zealand products from their supermarket shelves.

Perhaps reality is starting to bite for the Lucky Country. The mining boom helped insulate Australians against the global financial crisis and may have convinced them they were invincible – a view to which the typical Ocker is highly susceptible.

Don’t you feel sorry for them? No, I don’t either.

* * *

WATCHING the rebirth of ACT, and in particular the performance of its new leader Jamie Whyte, is like watching a high-wire artist crossing the Niagara Falls.

Mr Whyte is an intelligent man who, unlike the impostor John Banks, believes in ACT’s original credo and promises to take the party back to its ideological roots.

His big problem is that he seems honest. Once journalists latched on to this novelty, they realised there was some sport to be had.

A question about incest, which Mr Whyte answered with the ingenuousness of a political novice, was quickly followed by one about polygamy.  Result: a media furore.

As long as he responds to questions like a philosophy lecturer (his previous calling) rather than a politician, the media will continue trying to trap him into saying outrageous things which can then be used to ridicule him. It doesn’t help that these are philosophical positions that can’t easily be explained in a sound bite.

Whether this will harm him politically is another matter. It’s possible the commentariat was more excited by his statements than the public, which very likely recognised it was Whyte the pointy-headed philosopher speaking.

To get back to the high-wire analogy, Mr Whyte has managed to stay upright so far. But each curly question is like a gust of wind that causes him to teeter precariously before regaining his balance.

Will he make it safely to the other side, or will he topple into the torrent below? Either way, ACT’s true believers may be in for a few more heart-stopping moments.

* * *

NEW ZEALANDERS drink to get drunk, declares the ever-censorious Ross Bell of the New Zealand Drug Foundation. “One of the ways Kiwis drink is we drink to get drunk,” he told the Dominion Post this week. “People plan their whole weekend around it – what’s the next drinking occasion and how much can I drink.”

Really? This doesn’t describe any New Zealander I know. Mr Bell’s description may apply to a small and troublesome minority of binge drinkers, but he didn’t differentiate. According to him, we’re all hopeless inebriates.

As long as the wowser lobby resorts to ridiculous hyperbole in an attempt to whip up hysteria over alcohol, it forfeits the right to be taken seriously.

Were we too quick to dismiss John Banks?

The announcement that National will trial charter schools in low-income areas as part of its coalition agreement with ACT suggests that John Key’s government will be a lot more adventurous in its second term than in its first.

It’s an extremely significant policy gain for ACT and runs counter to the suspicion expressed by many commentators (me included) that John Banks is a political impostor; a National MP in disguise. Charter schools and parental choice in education have been core ACT policy from the start but until now, have never looked like gaining mainstream traction.

It rather looks as if National is using its tiny ally in Parliament to advance policies that it knows will resonate with National supporters – and no doubt with many of its MPs too – but which it hasn’t had the nerve to embrace itself. Radio New Zealand political editor Brent Edwards also pointed out this morning that it’s in National’s interests to help ACT rebuild so that it continues to have a dependable partner on its right. Allowing ACT a few important policy gains – and several ministerial positions – would be consistent with that strategy.

That John Key went on Morning Report this morning to defend the coalition deal with ACT – and took a pot shot at the “vested interests” of the teacher unions that oppose charter schools – is another indication that National has experienced a testosterone surge as a result of its election triumph. In the past Key has only rarely been interviewed on Radio New Zealand, leading to accusations that he wasn’t up to aggressive questioning.

We should all now brace ourselves for a furious co-ordinated offensive from the teacher unions, which have been remarkably successful in bullying governments in the past and will see the introduction of charter schools - even if only on a very limited scale - as a threat to their iron grip on the education system. To the teacher unions, parental choice is a seriously subversive concept. Inevitably, they will seek to forcefully remind the government just who the system exists for: the teachers.

The big question then will be whether the government stands up to the unions or shamefully capitulates, as National did over bulk funding in the 1990s. To its credit, the Key government stood its ground over national standards in the face of an almost hysterical outcry - the first setback for the teacher unions for as long as most people can remember. I hope it demonstrates the same resolve over charter schools.

It is, after all, just a trial, although we can rely on the NZEI, the PPTA and the school principals' organisations to portray it as tantamount to the sacking of our schools by Barbarian hordes.

Big-boots journalism

One of the most striking aspects of the drama surrounding the Act leadership has been the venomous nature of much of the media coverage.

I can’t think of any political party that has aroused more naked hostility from journalists. Even when the press gallery was gunning for Winston Peters, there was a tendency to cut him some slack because … well, because he was Winston Peters, and everyone expected him to be shifty, evasive and generally behave disgracefully.

No such tolerance is exercised when it comes to Act. The media malice is undisguised and unrelenting.

Admittedly, Rodney Hide and Don Brash have at times invited ridicule. I like Hide, but I struggled to take him seriously from the time he demeaned himself by taking part in Dancing With the Stars (in my book, an even more lamentable lapse of judgment than globe-trotting with his girlfriend at the taxpayers’ expense). And I wonder whether Brash still lies awake at night rueing the fact that he was talked into a series of silly photo opportunities during the 2005 election campaign.

But do these follies justify endless recycling of news footage showing Hide dropping his dancing partner, or of Brash clumsily trying to insert himself into the cramped driver’s compartment of a stock car? There is a point at which constant repetition of those scenes – and we saw them several times during the TV news last week – becomes more than simply gratuitous. The unmistakeable message it conveys is that these men are clowns, and we’d be mugs to think that either of them should be worthy of anyone’s support.

This, in the same week as we were expected to swallow mad John Minto’s straight-faced assertion on the national news that the new party formed by Hone Harawira for a tiny minority of the bitter, the angry and the vengeful represents “mainstream” New Zealand. I note that this flat-earth pronouncement passed without so much as an involuntary gasp of disbelief on the part of the reporter.

Interesting, that. Radical parties on the Left are treated with kid gloves; radical parties on the Right, on the other hand, are fair game for vilification.

We are, of course, now well accustomed to being told what to think by political journalists, especially on television, but TV3’s Patrick Gower takes things to a new level. Gower revels in his role as TV3’s hatchet man and seems to regard political journalism as some sort of gladiatorial spectator sport in which the spoils go to whichever reporter can perfect the most contemptuous sneer. I can’t watch him without being reminded of Stanley Baldwin’s famous description of the British press: “power without responsibility … the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”. (The line actually came from his cousin Rudyard Kipling, but Baldwin made it his own.)

Recalling a time when people who got beyond themselves were said to be too big for their boots, I call this big-boots journalism. It’s a deeply unattractive phenomenon in which journalists make the mistake of thinking they deserve to be more than mere reporters or observers. They consider themselves key players, positioned at the centre of the action and with the power – and, what’s more, the right – to influence events. The tragedy is that many politicians, fearful of the power of television, encourage them in this belief.

This is a distortion not just of the journalist’s traditional role, but of democracy itself. It shows a telling lack of respect for the ability of ordinary people to decide for themselves which politicians might be worthy of their support.

Journalists overstep the mark when they tell us what to think. As long as they do their basic job properly, which is simply to tell us what’s going on, their viewers and readers are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what to make of it all. They don’t need smug, preening journalists making lofty pronouncements about who might be fit or unfit for office.

And here’s something else that journalists too often overlook. They like to think of themselves as somehow morally superior to devious, venal politicians. I suspect many of them genuinely believe the American journalist Frank H Simonds’ famous line that there’s only one way for a journalist to look at a politician, and that’s down. But in fact politicians in a democracy will always have one huge moral advantage over the journalists who pass judgment on them. That is that ultimately, they must subject themselves to the public’s judgment. I can think of more than a few journalists whose overweening self-confidence would rapidly evaporate if they had to submit to a similar test.

ACT enters the terminal phase of self-destruction

Will ACT survive the next election? I don’t think anyone will be betting the house on it right now. The party seems determined to disembowel itself in full public view.

My own reaction to this is mixed. On one hand I’m disappointed, because I supported most ACT policies and admired many of its MPs, at least up until the point when the party suddenly jumped the rails by aligning itself with the Sensible Sentencing Trust.

I have nothing in particular against Garth McVicar’s outfit, but the “three strikes and you’re out” shtick muddied the ACT brand. It diverted the party from its core foundation principles, which today’s New Zealand Herald correctly summed up as individual freedom, personal responsibility and small government, in favour of a focus on crime and punishment. The bizarre result was that Rodney Hide ended up courting Winston Peters’ natural constituency – the angry, frightened and bewildered. Hide’s attempt to promote himself via an inane television show further devalued ACT’s brand, giving the party’s critics (never in short supply) more ammunition with which to ridicule him, and alienating core ACT supporters who found the Dancing With the Stars episode trivial and demeaning.

It didn’t help that the 2005 election saw ACT’s representation in Parliament reduced from nine seats to two, taking out most of the party’s intellectual heavy-hitters and ideological standard-bearers – people like Stephen Franks and Muriel Newman. ACT has never fully regained the status it enjoyed between 1996 and 2005 as a coherent and sturdy alternative to National’s soft-centred, let’s-not-frighten-anyone pragmatism. And of course Hide did himself no favours by exposing his double standards on the question of MPs’ travel perks – the very issue on which he made his name.

David Garrett, who entered Parliament in 2008 and has plunged ACT into the crisis which now threatens its survival, seems a very different personality from the old-school ACT MPs, and looked a potential liability from day one. He’s intellectually sharp and has made some impressive speeches in the House, notably on the foreshore and seabed, but there’s a loose-cannon quality about him – something slightly feral – that makes his false passport escapade much less of a surprise than it would be if any other MP had done it (or at least anyone from the current crop of MPs, arguably the most goody-two-shoes mob in memory; sometimes one longs for a John Kirk or Alamein Kopu).

As I write, Hide has returned from his foreshortened holiday in Hong Kong and is reportedly meeting Garrett this afternoon. There is speculation that Garrett will be made to resign from the party – but will that put the issue to bed? Hardly. Hide himself has some hard questions to answer because he knew of the false passport affair but was apparently happy for Garrett to keep quiet about it. It won’t look good if he makes Garrett walk the plank for something in which he (Hide) was complicit. Garth McVicar was probably right when he said Garrett should have fessed up when he made his maiden speech in Parliament. It would have caused a temporary sensation, but without the potentially fatal effects a beleaguered ACT is now having to deal with. Covering something up in the vain hope that no one would ever breathe a word of it to the media (in a political hothouse like Wellington???) was extraordinarily ill-judged.

As the Dom Post editorial points out today, ACT’s problem is also National’s problem. There has been media speculation that National will abandon Hide and put up a strong candidate against him in Epsom. But if Hide loses his seat, National would have no ally to its right and would therefore be wholly dependent on the Maori Party for support – an unappealing prospect for National, and for the rest of us too.

I wonder if what we are now seeing merely demonstrates that it’s ACT’s turn to suffer the curse of being a minority party in government. As long as a party remains outside government, as the Greens have done, it can safely occupy the moral high ground. Its high-minded principles are unlikely to be compromised by the dirty reality of having to govern. But the moment a party is drawn into a coalition, it’s exposed to that reality. Deals are done and principles get stretched.

It’s also unhealthy for political egos. Ambitions are unleashed. Tensions arise between idealists and pragmatists. We saw these strains when Heather Roy was given the heave-ho as ACT’s deputy leader. Given that the information about Garrett's Day of the Jackal stunt was reportedly leaked from within ACT, possibly by a disaffected Roy loyalist, the current crisis in ACT may be directly related to Roy’s demotion.

Being in government also means a minority party is subjected to much more intense media scrutiny. Who cares what a no-name backbencher might have done in 1984? But when he’s one of five MPs propping up the government, his past becomes a matter of public interest.

All of these pressures must be magnified when the party caucus consists of only five people – and not only that, but five strong-willed people with firm ideological views and bigger-than-usual egos. In a larger caucus, such as National or Labour, I imagine tensions are more easily diffused. But the tectonic forces at work when ACT’s MPs get together in a small room must be of Canterbury proportions.

Will ACT go the way of the Alliance, Mauri Pacific and New Zealand First? It certainly seems to be nearing the terminal phase of self-destruction. As I said at the start of this post, I would be disappointed if that happened. ACT has performed an important function on the right of the political spectrum, just as the Greens have on the left, and has achieved more in government than its critics imagined possible. But it has lost its way and must accept responsibility for the mess it now finds itself in.