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?
The embryonic coalition between the religious right and the secular ultra-right, and women angry about being silenced over what they perceive to be a range of threats to sex-based rights and to children’s safety, has focussed on the phenomenon of drag queen story hour.
Gender identity as an issue and a movement was created and marketed in the first world. In that context, a leader of women opposed to gender identity, who “channels her inner Monroe” while surfing a wave of anger on social media, is unsurprising.
I don’t know if Kelly-Jae Keen believes in her brand, but I do know that many of the women who support her are well-intentioned and genuine in their beliefs and concerns.
This is Part one of a three part post which expresses the writer’s personal opinion. It may not be that of all members of WLA.
Part One: Appearances Can Be Deceiving
If we all dressed in sex neutral clothes, wore our hair etc in sex-neutral styles, would we have such a thing as gender identity?
Do the existential crises and social conflicts flowing from the claims that an individual gender identity outweighs biological sex, have their roots in the soil of the capitalist era’s heavily sex-defined personal appearance standards?
Towards the end of March, Kellie-Jae Keen, aka Posie Parker, will be visiting NZ with her Let Women Speak roadshow. On cue, some members of the Green Party have called on the government to ban her, either from entry to NZ, or from speaking in public. They claim what she has to say is “hate speech”, and she’s depicted as a fascist, a white supremacist, and a transphobe.
Statistics NZ is still open to feedback on its inclusion of sex, gender ID and ‘sexual identity’ in the upcoming 2023 census. Census forms will be going out some time in February for collection in March.
Consultation about the sex, sexuality and gender variables in the 2023 census has been extended to next Friday, 5.00pm 20th January 2023.
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