Marsden is Here

Before we get to my submission, here are some guides to writing your own.

* Emily Writes: How to make a submission against the Treaty Principles Bill
* No Right Turn: Submit to defend te Tiriti!
* Green Party:
Make a submission - Treaty Principles Bill
* NZCTU: How to make a submission on the Treaty Principles Bill
* PPTA: How to make a submission on the Treaty Principles Bill
* Greenpeace: Treaty principles bill submission guide
* Honour The Treaty: Submissions

And the official online submission form.

If you want to draw on mine as inspiration for your own personalised submission go right ahead, but please write something unique, don't cut and paste from this without making it clear that you are quoting from another submission :)

( Submission )

D had a Significant Birthday this year, and with some money from her inheritance chose to take us both Sydney for a long weekend, and to cram as much into the few days as possible.

This was my first time out of the country, which meant that I had to bite the proverbial bullet and get a passport. This was a bit of an exercise in itself as the photo we paid for from the chemist wasn't adequate and we ended up just having E take photos of me against the kitchen wall with my phone and using the online tool at passports.govt.nz until we got one that was good enough (the main issue was shadows around the eyes).

( Travel log, very long with photos and links to galleries )
Overall despite some hiccups it was a very enjoyable and interesting, if full on with little-to-no time to relax, trip with lots of new experiences and many good memories made.

It's the first New Zealand observance of King's Birthday Weekend since 1952, following the ... transition from Queen Elizabeth II to King Charles III.

A poster on mastodon whom I will credit if I ever manage to find the post again, made mention of tripping over the change in name of the public holiday, and I agree that it should henceforth be called simply "Quing's birthday weekend" until such time as we manage to strike it from the calendar and replace it with something more appropriate to modern Aotearoa / New Zealand. Perhaps a memorial day for the past, freeing up more of Waitangi Day for celebrating the present / future.

Anyway that post put this image in my head, and now I put it in yours.



Historical note: the regular observance of Quing's Birthday in New Zealand was set during the reign of a later George than the one portrayed above, George VI.

~~~

People have been pointing out that now is a good time to make the move away from Commonwealth state to Republic, but there is still not the /political/ will do so. Unfortunately our politicians are still for the most part either part of or beholden to the class of people who fear that making that necessary step away from our colonial past will mean having to

* admit to and maybe even [horror] /give up/ some of the social and economic privilege bestowed upon them by the historic and ongoing wrongdoings of the "Crown" and
* take on the challenges of becoming something new, properly recognising the principles in Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

While I am definitely keen on us making the move as soon as practical, there are national conversations we need to have first, and one of those is around what we do about having "head of state" (a.k.a. king, queen or president). I question what we actually need a separate head of state - particularly an elected one - for at all.

The most common suggestion is simply to transfer the duties to the "Governor General" - a title which is already a misnomer as it has had no relevance to the actual governing of the country in decades. The responsibilities as they stand are purely ceremonial/diplomatic/social and actually I would be fine with the idea of codifying that as a (suitably titled) position for conveying and upholding the mana all peoples of Aotearoa on the public stage, as long as it doesn't become just another plum political appointment for MPs who are past their use by date.

From the interviews I have read in the mainstream media my feeling is that many of the actual anti-mandate protesters are struggling with a shift in world view. Small business owners, nurses, teachers, .. professionals who up to now have been used to feeling that they are in control of their lives and secure in the knowledge that the system operates to their benefit. Suddenly that control has been rudely taken away, because of something which probably doesn't feel particularly real to them.[1]

At a personal level, that has to feel really unfair and hurtful. And it is, in the way life often is. I sympathise in that I really don't know how I would cope if my job or ability to work was suddenly taken away. It's not comfortable to think about. But it is always a possibility at the back of my mind, so I like to think I am as prepared as I can be, because I know our social support systems while not perhaps currently actively hostile to those who need or want to change or withdraw from employed life for whatever reason are not actually particularly supportive.

( continues )

Around the world the pandemic has highlighted inequity. Inequity is fuel to the fire of those feeling disenfranchised and angry, and to professional shit-stirrers. In New Zealand we're actually in a good position to address that, especially right now with a somehow well-performing economy while so many of the politically vital middle class / small business actually have to look at the uncomfortable reality that "that could be me". The solutions lie not in how we treat and respect /workers/ but in how we treat and respect those who /for whatever reason/ are not currently able to work.

( footnotes )

Well, what a year. One might have thought that getting married in January would mean the rest of the year would seem relatively uneventful, but Covid was already on the horizon.

Lockdown itself didn't affect us much, as I was able to work from home and otherwise we don't get out much anyway. Deciding that it was time to sell the house and move on came as a surprise, and the subsequent accommodation-related and money stresses have probably defined or at least outlined my life since. We were supposed to have foundations by this point, instead the consents have only just gone to council.

Work remains stable although I have been struggling more and more to make my targeted hours. We did take on a new programmer (after years of needing one) just after lockdown which has redistributed the load in a good way. I'm now primarily stressed only by not getting whatever my current project is out in a timely fashion and not also by the queue of waiting projects and have managed to find time to spend on future-time-saving improvements to our CMS and experimenting with better/alternate workflows.

Other things which have been chewing up my time included aforementioned property matters and looking after D who has sprained her "on" shoulder twice this year, once at the beginning of lockdown and again a few weeks ago (same shoulder, different muscle). If the inset sewing table I brought her for Xmas prevents a future occurrence it will have paid for itself in saved medical costs. The latter has also meant I have no choice but to shoulder more of the housework.

Time to myself has become more and more rare and is probably partly to blame for my current addiction to the Star Realms game on my phone. I resisted putting any games on this phone for a long time, but I also own the hard-copy version (a prize from Buckets of Dice some years back) and it provides excellent semi-mindless replayability with just enough luck involved that I don't feel bad on the occasions I lose to the AI. The free version is ad-free, but I will at some stage when I don't feel money is so tight drop the $10 to unlock the hard AI and more cards.

Related to this although I am technically on holiday I have been spending 2-5 hours in the office most days working on a project which needs to be done, but can't or won't be afforded by the (non-profit) client and will only continue to be a headache for me (and others) long term if it is not. It's nice and quiet in there with everyone else away and although progress hasn't been as fast as I would like it is still progress and I at least feel that I am achieving something and will eventually have one fewer concern weighing me down. (Also I've been able to quickly jump on the couple of live issues which have come up, so a bit of paid time on top of the annual leave burnt during shutdown.)

Contact with other people has also become more rare and in a lot of ways 2020 has seen further weakening of connections which were already on the way out. I had already been sacrificing attended SAGA for work for a couple of years and I now probably wouldn't recognise anyone on the committee. Gaming with friends has been rare and intermittent, I am enjoying being in the ongoing game Z started late this year.

Lockdown stopped KAOS parties and sheer exhaustion has stopped me/us attending many of the smaller KAOS-adjacent or friends events which I/we have been invited to or for as long as I would have liked. We always planned to start having small groups of friends over for dinner/board games at Gladson but actually organised it maybe twice, and our current flat has been decreed too small to entertain. We did make it to he New Years party which was relatively small and quiet and although I didn't interact much I did enjoy myself.

I still as frequently find myself thinking "I should reach out to [names here] and find out what is really going on in their life" on Facebook or via email/text to catch up, and either not having the energy or not knowing what to open with and not doing it :(

~~~

Society wise

- lockdown(s) affected the country in ways which we probably won't fully understand for decades. I am more grateful than ever to be living where I am in the world, and that we had a government prepared to move fast and "risk the economy", rather than the plentiful counter-examples elsewhere in the western world.

- We had an election which returned that government in the unprecedented position to govern alone under MMP, and we are still waiting to see what they do with that. Significant structural changes to both the education and health systems are happening, it remains to be seen if the latter will be what is needed or any more than shuffling some chairs to the upper deck.
I can understand why they are moving slower on many issues than many people would like, both for long term political reasons and because it takes time to line up major structural change properly. Social welfare benefits should absolutely have been increased by more already though, there better be some damn good announcements coming.

- The same election contained referendums on assisted dying, which brought in a not perfect but also not "poor law is worse than no law" legal support for the option despite outright scaremongering and falsehoods from opposition groups, and narrowly rejected much better law for the legalisation and control of cannabis. Perhaps the next left-wing government will act on this since our current PM has a tendency to say "not on my watch" in response to even middling public opinion against significant law change (see also capital gains tax). (I maintain this is a long term strategy so she can step down and let her successor bring them back to the table).

I generally feel that as a snapshot these events indicate that we are becoming a more progressive society on several fronts, and there is hope on others. Not however on the housing market front :( Any money the government puts into the economy seems to end up there somehow, either landlords putting up rents to match benefit increases or investors taking advantage of ever lower interest rates to buy up even more properties.

~~~

Going forward: basically I feel that I am surviving, little more. One more day, one more closer to house. Everything is an effort, often including spending time with my wife :( There is still time for something disasterous to come out of the White House or the stacked administration which it is leaving behind.

Still standing, but staggering.

On Friday the 15th of March NZ had it's own mass-shooting(s). I was at an event nearby which was ended early (although we didn't known why at the time) and then returned to my workplace also only a couple of blocks from the worst event.

To start with there was only shock and sadness. Not shocked or surprised that something like this happened, like many others I considered a mass shooting in NZ only a matter of time, or at the direction in the violence was aimed. Just what you would expect from the immediacy of the event.

Once I had time to process things I also began to feel how lucky I am - not to have not been involved but almost the opposite

- the shooter was a blond, white male. I am also a blond white male, but I am at no risk of suffering any sort of "reprisal" because I happen to share one of these physical characteristics with him
- I did not need to spend the next days and nights worrying that there might have been another gunman still loose out there for whom I was a target. I do not need to worry that another radicalised individual might be out there planning a repeat or variation in which I will be a target, or even that just by walking down the street I might become a target of opportunity for someone equally full of hate and just a little less stable.
- my personal risk of being a victim of gun violence or indeed any sort of violence feels no more immediate than it did last week.

There was no anger at that time. There is still no anger towards the event. I believe that exhaustion from other areas of my life simply left me no energy to be angry. But then articles like this one:

At least five years of solid government engagement across a National-led and then a Labour-led government. We begged and pleaded, we demanded. We knocked on every door we could, we spoke at every forum we were invited to.

At a major security conference in February 2018, Aliya challenged the sector: if you can spend so much on surveilling our community, why can you not spend on preventative programmes?

and this one:

Planned and executed with complete impunity and without any hesitation, the massacre took place because the perpetrator, like so many others before him, felt a confidence that in our societies is afforded only to white men.

He felt this confidence, and was vindicated for it. As media, politicians, and everyday discourse focused on the threat of radicalisation supposedly harbored by Muslim communities – a suggestion that would now surely be farcical if its consequences weren’t so tragic – as the SIS and the GCSB were busy scouring the facebook accounts of Māori activists and Muslim youth, this man blithely and unashamedly made his violent intentions plain and clear, and visible for all to see.

I’ll never forget the many meetings and roundtables I attended, alongside other Muslim advocates and leaders, where we argued and pleaded, pointlessly it seems, with different government agencies to turn their attention from our communities and mosques to the real threats in this country. I’ll never forget the empty reassurances, let alone the smirking faces as someone dismissively joked, in reference to the far right and white supremacists in New Zealand: ‘it’s hard to take these guys seriously.’

... stirred the coals of a different anger. About our unquestionably white-centered "security" services, who would rather browbeat environmentalists and create phantoms of Māori or Islamic violence to chase than look into genuine threats to our citizens.

I wrote then (on Facebork)

"Up until now I haven't had it in me to feel angry about this situation. Now I am angry. At the so-called security services of this country and other agencies whose job it was to recognise and act on the concerns of these communities and who absolutely failed in that duty. In doing so they have failed not only the Moslem citizens of New Zealand but *all* of us and they should be held to account commensurately.

They won't be of course. They never are :( "

~~~
There have also been a lot of (white) people crying "this isn't us, this is not our New Zealand." I'm glad to say that there has come a great pushback against that in opinion pieces from white writers I respect as well as from less-white ones sharing their experiences.

Toby Morris summed it up in cartoon format here.

But if you have any doubt about the depth of racism and other isms in New Zealand society you only need to pause and imagine what the ... I'm going to use outcry as a moderate term for it ... would be if one of the "major" political parties were to elect or appoint as leader someone who was something other than a practicing or passes-for-lapsed Christian, or anyone clearly of other than Pākehā or Māori descent. The dogwhistles and allusions of loyalty to "somewhere else" which would permeate an election under those conditions.

Or to quote from the first article linked above:

I would ask you to picture this: what if the shooting had been a Muslim perpetrator, and it was 50 non-Muslim New Zealanders who had been shot? Would our community be receiving the same level of support that we have today?

Imagine what the media commentary would have been like. We would not have been able to leave our homes, the level of retaliatory attacks on our community would have been swift and immediate, and the police would have struggled to provide any meaningful protection.

Yet I can walk without fear.

~~~
On a final note there are of course people saying that the shooter should receive a death penalty, whether delivered formally or informally. I say that is too good for him, a martyrs end. He deserves to grow old in a place from which he can influence or harm no-one, watching New Zealand come together into a more integrated and caring nation despite of or even because of what he has done.

I believe that we do currently have the political leadership to act on the current mood and momentum for change but whether we actually mange to accomplish that better nation is left as an exercise for the reader.

Topic warning: sexual harassment

Context: Yesterday a #metoo campaign to raise awareness of sexual harassment and assault started to spread on social media.

If all the people who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me, too." as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

( content behind the cut )

I experienced less disappointment on elections night / the next morning than last time; probably because National does not have the straight up majority of last election.

The post election commentary as rounded up by Bryce Edwards at the Herald is split with those firmly on the right lauding National's having the largest single share of the vote as a win and moral majority while more numerically educated voices point out that under MMP being the largest major party means diddly squat (especially when your raw number of votes fell); under MMP it is the coalition which represents the largest number of NZers. The fact that we've had a couple of instances of one party effectively managing to govern alone does not change that.

There is a strong narrative at the moment that National has received an extraordinary result. But has it really? The vote for centre right parties has actually declined significantly at this election. At the 2014 election, the aggregate vote for National, Act and the Conservatives was over 52 per cent. This year, the final result for those parties is projected to be little more than 45 per cent. What's more the National Party has now lost allies - United Future and the Maori Party are gone from Parliament, and Act's party vote has halved. Basically, National has cannibalised the vote of other rightwing parties. In devouring its coalition partners, National might now look stronger, but in reality, fewer voters are actually supporting parties of the right.

But it is the illusion that National has won significantly more vote than the political left that particularly needs addressing.

Not included in the roundup but on my radar this from Stephanie Rodgers at Boots Theory

"A side note: The repeated line of questioning about whether there’s a rule, convention, or expectation around the largest party forming the government demonstrate how we’ve really failed to grasp the core function of MMP: delivering a balanced one which is the most appealing to the broadest number of people, not an all-powerful one based on arbitrary geographical lines.

[I continue to be frustrated by the NZ love affair with a two-party, us or them, "rulership" concept of government]

~~~
Surprised by the obliteration of the Māori party but I guess that is the kererū coming home to roost after two? terms of being in coalition with National against the expressed will of their constituency; now that Labour is looking like an effective alternative again.

This makes things interesting because National doesn't have the option of getting support from one minor party or another on a case by case basis. It's basically all or nothing with NZ First ... rendering ACT also irrelevant so maybe we can look forward to them being gone altogether next time.

Riffing off a friend "Democracy: one man, one vote. Today that man is Winston Peters". He does not seem likely to announce his decision until the outcome of the special votes (which includes all those who enrolled while voting early) making about 15% of the total vote - easily enough to move things one way or another by a seat or two. While my personal preference at the present time would be a functional MMP coalition of Labour / NZ First / Greens I think my second preference would be his smartest play: he supports either National, Labour/Greens or Labour with additional outside government support from the Greens form a minority government and rides them for support on every piece of legislation.

That's more how MMP is supposed to work in my opinion; it shouldn't matter which party puts up legislation it should stand on it's own merits against all parties rather than being successful or not at the whim of the "governing" party or parties.

Unfortunately I don't see Winston being happy without a seat at the cabinet table.

Either way I'm not seeing an awful lot of progressive legislation managing to be passed or a significant culture change in the public service over the next few years :( So the rest of us who are comfortable are just going to have to keep stepping up and looking out for our friends - and strangers - who continue to be ground down.

~~~
Particular electorates I was interested in (preliminary results)

# Christchurch Central
Finally dropped National's Nicky Wagner who mostly seems to have MIA for the past term for the Labour candidate; but there is only 0.1% between Labour and National in the party vote

# Epsom
ACT remained in existence thanks to National party voters faithfully using their electorate vote to get David Seymour the electorate seat; however the loyal pooch has already been kicked to the curb for having no actual use in the next terms government.

Sadly it is too soon to say ACT is finished; we will probably have to wait another 3 years to find out. Still I wouldn't be surprised to see a by-election in Epsom sooner than that.

# Ilam
Gerry Brownlee of course won convincingly :( But Raj Manji (Independent) did manage to get over half as many votes as Brownlee, and the Labour candidate managed nearly that many. Combined a total of exactly as many as Gerry (I put the numbers through the calculator several times) so there is actually hope that a well targeted campaign might get him out next time.

# Ōhāriu
Labour took the electorate on the night but only barely ... 679 votes is easily small enough to change on the specials. National easily got the bulk of the party vote. I hear that happened in a number of electorates.

I am not a fan of the Labour candidate who got in there; Greg O'Conner has a well documented history of being "tough on crime" and pro the police having carte blanche to use force and little to no accountability for their actions. I do not buy his line that he was only saying what he had to as the spokesman of the police union; as there is no indication that he was actually trying to challenge the negative culture and corruption within the NZ police force.

# Wigram
My own electorate; Megan Woods won by a far more comfortable margin than last time (I switched my electorate vote to Labour because of the earlier result) but the party vote only had 0.4% in it and went to National :(
~~~

It is ANZAC day here in New Zealand, the annual public "holiday" to commemorate and honor those who died fighting in "our" name in military service. In practice this means primarily World Wars I and II with in recent years the occasional nod creeping in to Vietnam or more recent actions in the Middle East.

There are links I have shared on FB over the past few years that this year I am going to round up here before putting down more of my thoughts

#lestweforget
~~~

Cliffs of Gallipoli [Sabaton]
"There is no enemy, there is no victory
Only boys who lost their lives in the sand
Young men were sacrificed their name are carved in stone and kept alive
And forever we will honour the memory of them""


19 things you need to know about ANZAC Day (that we should not be proud of)
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/25/19-things-you-need-to-know-about-anzac-day/

The Pencilsword remembers the Maori Land Wars - arguably more important to NZs history and identity but often forgotten
http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-lest-we-forget

The Making of Gallipoli into a Marketable Memory
http://werewolf.co.nz/2015/04/whats-to-commemorate/

I was only 19 [Redgum]
"And can you tell me, doctor, why I still can't get to sleep?
And night time's just a jungle dark and a barking M.16?
And what's this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means?
God help me - I was only nineteen"


~~~
"Lest we forget" means different things to different people. For some it is about the family who went to war whether by choice or otherwise and didn't come back. For some it is about the need to be prepared to go to war "for the right reasons" (these reasons vary).

For me it means
a. Being aware that
-- wars past and present are not times of glory and righteousness as presented by the media and spin doctors, but of horror and death

-- that the amounts spent on military adventurism by western economies would go a long way to giving the oft-struggling citizens of those countries(arguably the losers and casualties of a form of civil /economic/ warfare which has taken place of the intervening decades) a decent standard of living. Food, healthcare, accommodation, the freedom to be productive rather than just trying to survive.

b. Saying #notinmyname when my government continues to choose to hire out our military "defence forces" especially in a time when modern military conflict often seems to mean
-- a technologically superior force operating on behalf of interests who are posed no significant threat by the other side
-- sowing death with machines which doe not need to have human compassion or judgement drilled out of them, dissociation of their operators enabled by a safe distance
-- inflicting civilian casualties and recording them as "enemy combatants" for simply being present

c. That the best way to not become involved in a war against a nation with a "morally bankrupt" government is for people to stand up, be critical and questioning, and prevent their government from becoming that sort of institution.

Every. Day.

~~~
War (What is it good for?) [Edwin Starr]

Today I added my body to a Women's March here in Christchurch, a sister and supporting event to one focused on Washington, DC. Because,
- as their manifesto says, Women's Rights are Human Rights and I support that. Both in the specific and in the general sense that improving women's rights will by extension improve the lot of (at least) every other marginalised group containing women
- and I feel it is important for progress that men are seen to be supporting that, because sadly many men are still more likely to listen only to other men
- but also on another level because I feel it's also important for the well-being of men that women are seen and treated as equal.

Here I just want to pull together a few threads from around the internet on why I think there is still a long way to go in western, particularly New Zealand society.

1. From an early age boys have been told to "don't be a girl", teased for being "girly" or put down for "hitting like a girl" in response to failure, asking for help, or expressing any "negative" emotion except anger. As well as indoctrinating the idea that women are somehow less than men in both boys and girls from an early age this negative approach to dealing with emotions also contributes to New Zealand having one of the highest rates of youth suicide (especially among young men) in the developed world.

Things are getting better on this front (I believe) but there are generations of us still alive who need to challenge those ideas within ourselves and strive to do and teach better.

2. If a little boy pulls a little girl's hair "it means he likes you". Not only is the reverse not held to be true, this normalises attack (physical or emotional) as a form of showing affection. Follow the chain and you get coercion seen as a valid form of obtaining affection in the form of sex, women criticised for not responding positively to catcalls or unwanted advances, and "he only hits me because he cares".

Again, NZ has one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the developed world.

3. There's this thing about queer/gay being used as a slur. Why is it that being romantically/sexually attracted to men is percieved as a bad thing by other men?. I'm theorising here, but coming back to my first point could it be that being attracted to men is something women do, so it is another accusation of girliness? Or could it be, as beautifully laid out here that a lot of men are afraid that a man attracted to them will subject them to the same form of unwanted attention they know they give the "objects" (women) of their affection (or even passing interest)?

I believe that in our hearts we men (most of us anyway) know that this behaviour is wrong because we become uneasy at the idea of it being turned on us. Knowing that it is our responsibility to try and
- firstly face up to the discomfort and accept when we are called out on it, then try and do better.
- secondly publicly represent and model for that better behaviour
- the hardest of all (and I fail at this often myself; pick your battles): call our friends and family out on it and support others - whatever their gender, orientation or colour - when they call others out on it in our presence.

If men can step up and do this instead of passively supporting the status quo, then fairness for women (and intermediate/null genders) will come a lot faster than if they have to keep wading through us every step of the way.

~~~
With all that off my chest, here is the gallery from todays march.

Victoria Square to Cathedral Square