Almost four decades of neoliberalism has hit New Zealand beneficiaries hard, especially large numbers of solo mothers on benefits. They have become the most demonised of beneficiaries, as seen in the impact of sanctioning parents (96% of whom are women) for failing to name the other parent of their child.
It’s incredible that the Government is happy to waste so much political capital on laws for which no cogent case has been made.
A recent debate on The Standard about trans rights touched on a range of issues – dead naming, the use of preferred pronouns, the actual incidence of sex self-ID related harm to women since the passing of legislation, access to toilets, and so on. If this was a 1960s British comedy, it would be titled Carry On Up The Cul-de-sac.
The issue of female-only facilities such as public lavatories1 changing rooms, domestic violence and rape crisis centres, hospital wards and prisons has to be placed in both an historical and a contemporary context.
If you allow yourself to be distracted, diverted and divided by any single issue at this horrifyingly dangerous point in history, you are complicit in a looming catastrophe.
In an interview in March this year, in response to a question from Ash Sakar about whether the housing of trans prisoners in the female estate puts women prisoners at risk of assault, Professor Judith Butler said that until people identify how much at risk female prisoners are from guards and from other women prisoners, we should not even be asking the question.
Employers and business owners, who wish to extract maximum profits by paying their lowest ranked and most precariously employed workers a pittance, are the people most likely to welcome the new right wing coalition government’s repealing of NZ’s Fair Pay Agreement. Unsurprisingly, given the long history of women being an exploited sex-class, there tends to be a disproportionally high percentage of women in such low paid positions.
NZ Labour, Te Pāti Māori, The Opportunities Party and the Women’s Rights Party all have some policies that will benefit women, especially those on low incomes. I would prefer any of them to form a government compared with National, ACT and NZ First.
But, which one could I vote for?
The NZ Green Party have some very good policies for women and low-income people, particularly ones that will help a fair number of women struggling to pay essential bills. However, they have significant silences, confusions, and/or contradictions in their policies and plans that will have a negative impact on females.
We are living through a time of turbulence, instability, and uncertainty. The decades long neoliberal dominance within Western-European patriarchal capitalism is under extreme pressure. The four biggest political parties in NZ have all been infected to a greater or lesser degree by neoliberalism, with National and the ACT parties being the most deeply contaminated.
This is the WLA submission to the NZ government, Safer Online Practices and Media Platforms Consultation. The government was asking for feedback on their proposal, which is to be made into a Bill in 2024.
They are proposing to have a government appointed regulator to set codes of practice for social media and the NZ media. But, who will be watching the watchers?
It is surprising that transwomen have been the main focus of transactivist lobbying for their inclusion in female sports, when it is fair treatment for trans identified females (transmen), and some people with Difference/Variations of Sex Development (DSDs) that really is the difficult issue. This is glaring evidence of yet another form of sex-based inequality.
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