"merit" vs representation (I just have to put it in quote marks)

"Political candidates should be judged on their merits. What we need is quality; whether they're male or female or gay or straight or white or brown or purple shouldn't matter!"

This is nonsense.

It's nonsense because it ignores the obvious question: what, exactly, constitutes merit with regards to a political candidate?

I thought I'd try to unpack what constitutes merit for me, when I'm trying to explain why I think particular politicians suck or not.

*

Political identity is complicated, and it's different for everyone. What may be a low priority for some people (the fact that they're a woman!) may be a high priority for others (the fact that they're a woman!).

For me, my political identity isn't really centred on me being a woman, or even on me being a single woman who is purchasing a property with her non-romantic, non-sexual domestic partner-type person (even though this causes me to have to explain shit to people so fucking often and frustrates the shit out of me).

But!

I don't think any moral value attaches whatsoever to what each individual adult decides for herself is important to her identity.

I do think that moral value attaches to making sure that each individual adult has a reasonable chance of voting for someone (or for a party) that she feels represents her, in whatever form that may take.

Aaaaand, as a statement of fact, lots of different groups of people feel that their interests have been shafted by rich old white men! Repeatedly! To the point that sometimes an individual adult, having thought about what's important to her, may feel like rich old white men don't represent her at all, or do so badly.

And for lots of people, it doesn't go that far. Like I said, my political identity isn't really centered on me being a woman. But that doesn't mean it's not important to me at all, or that I'd be happy if political life were always dominated by men in NZ to the extent it is today.

It's important to have a diverse range of backgrounds and personalities and personal characteristics in Parliament because we're a representative democracy, and society is diverse.

"But quality should trump that, right?"
Yeah, except that from where I'm standing there's not a lot of evidence that we have, or have had at any time in our history, so many brilliant politicians jumping at the bit to enter Parliament that we should judge on talent and talent alone.

Whatever talent means.

*

I'd start with the ability to analyse policy. At a basic level, an MP should be able to:
1. Explain what the current law and policy is on a particular issue that they have chosen to speak about.
2. Explain what, if any, current problems there are with that law and policy, and articulate why the problems are problems and not imaginary boogiemen sent out by PR firms to frighten the public.
3. If there is a balancing exercise in the current policy or law, explain what that balancing exercise is (for example: the trade-off between freedom and security). Explain why the balance is wrong, if the MP thinks it is.
4. Explain what the MP's proposed new law or policy is. Explain how it is intended to operate.
5. If there is criticism of that proposed new law or policy, be able to counter it with an argument logically connected to both the proposal and the criticism (rather than: "my opponent obviously spent the night on the toodle!")

A totally made-up example of this in action might be:

"The current law on unicorns is that they must be kept not closer than 3 miles from populated areas at all times. Any area that has more than 100 people living there counts as a populated area.

There are a number of problems with the current law. First, this law means that unicorns are mostly found in the central North Island, where they occasionally cause trouble at the Army training camps, and in Fiordland, where they compete with native birdlife for food. Second, the reference to "3 miles" has not been updated since we moved to the metric system.

As unicorns are dangerous to most adult humans, there is a strong public interest in keeping them away from people. However, although they are not a native species, they are internationally endangered and have adapted well to our New Zealand ecosystems.

Our proposed policy is that unicorns must be kept not closer than 1 kilometer from populated areas, but may travel to towns and cities for veterinary purposes. We will also work to remove unicorns from national parks, with the exception of a reservation near Mount Taranaki. Over time, we will create a sanctuary for unicorns on an offshore island.

The Opposition would have you believe that this will cost the earth. They are wrong: DoC figures suggest removal from Crown land will cost less than $25 million over 4 years, and will help to ensure the survival of some of our most treasured native birds. We do not think $25 million is too high a price to pay."

Can all of our current MPs do this? No. Often political explanations of policy come out as "blah blah blah SLOGAN blah blah blah BUZZWORD blah blah blah I WAS RAISED BY blah blah blah BUZZWORD blah blah blah." Politicians are often reasonable at explaining what the policy is, but totally crap at explaining how it's going to work, or acknowledging that it's not perfect, or explaining what the drawbacks are, or engaging in legitimate debate about its worth.

*

So if there even is a trade-off between "tokenism representation" and "merit", NEITHER SIDE IS WINNING AT THE MOMENT. Parliament is still pretty unrepresentative of New Zealand society, for a whole bunch of reasons. And despite being unrepresentative, it's not exactly filled up with the intellectual heavyweights of the world, who, uh, mostly happen to be old-ish, rich-ish white dudes.

*

At some point I intend to further examine what I think constitutes merit in an MP - it, like most things, is ~complicated~. But I do think there's an assumption hidden in the merit/representation thing that assumes that people who aren't "diverse" are more likely to meet the talent standard - like, you're a fat queer chick, obviously you're here for diversity reasons and not because you're any good - how could you be?

Hungry Hungry Kids

From tsmithfield at 12.55 pm in reply to The Standard's post "Too Many Hungry Kids":

Anyway, do you agree that IF parents in NZ avail themselves of all the help available (WINZ, emergency grants, foodbanks, etc) there is no need for any children to go hungry in NZ. If so, the argument for why the fault is with parents not the government runs like this:

1. There is sufficient resources in the system to ensure that no children go hungry.
2. Responsible parents would ensure they availed themselves of all available resources to ensure their children didn’t go hungry.
3. Children are going hungry.
4. Therefore, the reason that children are going hungry is that not all parents are responsible.

I really really like people who use deductive logic; it pleases me greatly when people tease out their arguments. So even though I know T Smithfield not at all, I'm writing directly in response to his or her comment because I think it spells out the conservative viewpoint really nicely, and I'm posting it to my own blog because (a) the Standard isn't an especially welcoming forum, and (b) like everything I write, this is likely to be long.

I'm going to accept point 1 above very quickly: I think it clear that New Zealand is in a position to feed all her people; we're not in a famine.

I'm also going to accept point 3 as a point of general knowledge, and one that's being pretty widely discussed in the media at present.

For the purpose of this post, I'm going to extend "parent" to include anyone who has dependant children, because I don't see the purpose of excluding custody arrangements other than "mum and/or dad looking after kids".

There are two main reasons why I think the argument above doesn't work well in reality. One is internal to the logic, and one is external; I'm starting with the former.


I: Responsibility, availability, and The System
Let's start with the position that a parent deliberately withholding sufficient food from their child constitutes abuse, that abuse is a separate issue, and that here we're talking about parents who are, or who feel themselves, unable to provide sufficient food for their child.

An analogy:

My mother is an advocate for the elderly and the disabled. As such, she is very very familiar with the workings of WINZ, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, and various social agencies. My grandfather, her father, has recently been diagnosed with dementia and is currently going through a slow and horrible decline (even from a distance, it's uncomfortable to watch: and we're not close). She doesn't live in the same city as her father, and her brother who does is acting as his welfare guardian as he's no longer able to make many decisions himself.

When things go wrong with the careworkers, as they often do (careworkers aren't brilliantly paid, for starters; also, the administrative skills required to organise a large number of staff over dozens of disparate locations are immense and time-consuming. Stuff gets missed), my mum gets called. Her brother finds dealing with the agencies really difficult and frustrating; my mother calls them and explains what she wants to happen and what their legal responsibilities are and then it gets fixed.

This isn't because she knows how to game the system; it's because learning how to get the most out of a large and complex bureaucracy is a learned skill. She's been working in the field for more than 10 years (and she got into it in the first place because my younger brother is disabled).

Social assistance is a similarly large and complex bureaucracy. You don't just rock up to WINZ and ask for money. There's also Budget Advisory Services, various charities which provide emergency assistance, Citizen's Advice Bureau, Housing New Zealand, your children's schools, and so on. There are many different agencies, and they all have different people to talk to and different (sometimes contradictory) policies and aims.

People do not magically know the best way to approach a foodbank when their cupboards run bare. It is a learned skill. Not all parents who have hungry children will have learned that skill yet; they may have suffered a complete collapse in the family finances recently. Maybe up until now friends have helped them out. Maybe mum did have a job but has been laid off.

And—I'm a highly-educated, literate person and I still find forms really confusing. Admittedly I've never had impending hunger to spur me on, but I'm honestly not sure if I could manage to figure out all the help I could get if I found my funds weren't going far enough.

WINZ isn't in the habit of widely advertising everything a person can get access to; you sort of need to know what question to ask. As for the charities, they do exist but they don't advertise much either; they can't. When they do, literally hundreds of people turn up.

I'm really, really uncomfortable with the idea that not knowing how to get stuff automatically makes you irresponsible. There's probably a point where it does: if you know how to contact a charity and know that they can help you, but you don't because you can't be bothered, for example. Though that would fall towards the abuse end of the spectrum, for me. I'm not sure where I'd place "didn't contact them because I was embarrassed and ashamed of being unable to provide for my own kids", and that's probably a more realistic example.

Tied into this is the actual availability of assistance at any particular instance of food crisis.

WINZ has really strict guidelines on how often a beneficiary can get an emergency grant. I believe foodbanks (usually) put the same kind of boundaries on how much and how often they'll give assistance to an individual or family.*

So if you're a household that has had several food crises in a row, some of the help out there in the world may not actually be available to you, because you've already hit your limit for the year. Maybe you've made really bad spending choices, or maybe you've just had a series of really bad shit happen to you. Unexpected expenses can and do arise: the kids have lots of ear infections or respitory disease; the car breaks down and you have to fix it or else dad legit cannot get to work**. If there's not a lot of fat in your budget at the best of times, these unexpected expenses will be very difficult to deal with.

So the kids go hungry.

And that's shit. I don't want anyone reading this to get the impression that I think kids going hungry is somehow okay. It isn't.

But I think it's faulty logic to say that hungry kids implies without exception irresponsible parenting. The parents may well be acting the best they can, doing the best they can, and with every intention of giving their kids the best lifestyle they can - and still not do very well.


II: Where the harm lies.
My more serious objection to the standard conservative "irresponsible parents! don't encourage them!" line is that, you know, the problem that we are discussing here is one of HUNGRY CHILDREN.

The children have not gone and signed their mums up to the DPB.

They have not rocked up to the Sallies for a food parcel.

They didn't ask for mum to be laid off, or for nana to have gotten sick, or for their dad to be addicted to the pokies, or for whatever problem has occurred in their families that means they're now not getting enough to eat.

It isn't that I have some idealised view of children as little innocent lambikins who deserve nothing but cuddles and good times. It's that children aren't in a position to be able to determine their own fate. They don't decide who their guardians are.

Perhaps more crucially to this debate, they don't get to vote, or to determine public policy, or to have their opinions quoted in the newspapers, or to write blog posts. We decide what their needs are, and then we implement policies to achieve them. We seem to have decided that a need of children is that they not be hungry. Awesome!

Buuuuuut, like. If there are areas of New Zealand where lots of parents are not giving their kids breakfast or lunch (and there are areas!), whether that's because they're all irresponsible or because shit has gone wrong in their lives or because of a combination of things, the thing we should be focussing on is that THERE ARE AREAS OF NEW ZEALAND WHERE LOTS OF KIDS ARE GOING HUNGRY.

Talk all you like about personal responsibility: you're still not talking about the actual harm. Personal responsiblity does not here lie with the people who suffer the harm. Talk all you like about not encouraging people to remain dependant on the state, but don't fool yourself that you're helping the ACTUAL HUNGRY CHILDREN when you talk about "moving into work" and "bootstraps". I totally agree that full-time work does usually provide a better lifestyle than living on benefits! It still isn't the point!

Public policy should be firmly aimed at solving the specific identified problem, and not some other random thing that you've tacked on there for shits and ideology. The specific identified problem here is hungry children, not irresponsible parents, and the policy should therefore focus on said hungry children and not the sins of their fathers.


PS: Throwing Money At Problems Won't Help
AHAHAHAHA

Actually, throwing money at problems is the standard first step to resolving them. Labour and resources cost money if you don't have them already (unless you can barter for them or receive them as gifts).

People unable to access healthcare? We fund better access! The amount of money thrown at a problem may be proportionally very small or very large: at one end, redesigning a single form so that it makes more sense to the people using it; at the other, redesigning an entire computer system.

I don't purport to believe that throwing money is in and of itself a solution. Obviously there must be thought involved to determine what the best solution is and how to achieve it.

Where the problem is explicitly that some people lack resources, the solution is inevitably going to cost money (assuming that you agree that the problem is a problem and should be resolved). It doesn't necessarily have to cost a lot of money, and part of the decision-making process is figuring out what represents best value.

But an education program aimed at teaching budgeting skills costs money.

Raising wages costs money***.

Raising benefits costs money.

Foodbanks cost money. School breakfast schemes cost money. Putting the kids into CYFS custody costs money.

You know what, in this, doesn't cost a cent? Leaving the kids to go hungry.

* And there are good reasons for this, most fundamentally that their resources also are limited.

** Haaaaah, the public transport debate: You Don't Really Need A Car. See, public transport (plus the occasional taxi) works well for me, as a person who works Normal Office Hours and who lives in an inner suburb. It doesn't work for my dad, who works a night shift (the buses don't run that late!), or my mum (who does work Normal Office Hours, but whose job requires her to travel anywhere in the North Shore/Waitakere DHB area to visit clients). It would work well for one of my brothers, though he does have a car, but not for the other, due to his disabilities.

*** Though is WAY more complicated than that.

women: making choices or making babies (it's not a binary)

I've been following the debate about abortion on the Standard plus various other blogs with interest (for starters, try the Hand Mirror's excellent series on abortion in New Zealand).

It's a difficult subject to talk about. It's fraught with a whole lot of ethics (women's right to autonomous decision-making regarding her own body; the status of a foetus; whether any other person should be involved in a woman's decision-making process) and a whole lot of politics (is there room on a left-leaning Order Paper for a bill about abortion rights and access? Can we convince the punters?). It's also deeply personal for me, a person who could become pregnant (and probably will never choose to do so).

The thing is: I think at least some of the criticisms laid against the firmly pro-choice position from other pro-choice positions are a little disingenous. Here's why:

As I understand it, the firmly pro-choice position boils down to—
1. the person most qualified to make a decision about her bodily integrity and her ability/willingness to carry a foetus to term is the woman whose body it is.
2. that woman should be able to make a decision about whether to continue carrying a foetus to term at any point during the pregnancy.

The effect of this position is abortion on demand, including late-term abortions.

Now, let's take the position I was at until this weekend, which was:
1. without reservation, a woman should be able to decide to terminate a non-viable foetus. This includes all early-stage pregnancies as well as pregnancies which are later discovered to not be viable.
2. I have difficulty in accepting that a woman who is healthy herself and whose pregnancy is at a sufficiently late stage for the foetus to be viable (without significant disabilities such would greatly reduce the child's quality or length of life once he or she has been born) should be able to choose to terminate the pregnancy. This is one of those ethical gut-reactions that I can't suppress or adequately justify.

I still have difficulty accepting 2. above. But I don't think it matters.

The firmly pro-choice position would extend the right to seek an abortion to the greatest number of women who might choose to have one, namely all of them. This would necessarily include a woman who chooses at 38 weeks to terminate her pregnancy despite being in the picture of perfect health herself and knowing that the foetus is also healthy.

I don't know that that woman actually exists. If she does, I haven't heard of her. Women who choose to terminate a pregnancy at a very late stage do so almost exclusively for medical reasons, either their own or those of the foetus. The literature I have read (which is far from exhaustive) seems to suggest that there are women who would like to abort past the current limits in NZ law, but often this is a result of having been unable to access abortion services within the current limits in NZ law.

So why I think my earlier position was somewhat disingeneous is:
1. the firmly pro-choice position extends abortion rights as widely as possible.
2. there may be hypothetical women who would exercise that right in a way that I find morally repugnant.
3. however, if the firmly pro-choice position is restricted (for example, by term limits), it would almost certainly restrict the choices of women who I accept without reservation should be able to access an abortion.

That is to say, by focussing on a hypothetical set of women I am ignoring the needs of actual women. This is not good policy-making.

The other argument I find slightly disingenous is the argument that runs:

"But what about the views of the man/boyfriend/partner/husband/parents/family/wider society? DO OUR VOICES NOT COUNT?"

The firmly pro-choice position is mainly framed as a simple "no." It may in fact be "no"; I haven't done a straw poll, nor is everybody's opinion identical (obviously).

But. Women don't exercise choice in a vacuum. That's probably one of the main points of feminism and feminist theory: that our choices are profoundly influenced by the positions we find ourselves in, and that the positions we find ourselves in may be (and often are) outside our control.

As a corollary of that, women don't make decisions in a vacuum. There's nothing about the firmly pro-choice position which excludes women who are deciding whether or not to seek an abortion from soliciting the opinions of people whose opinion they think are important, and from then considering those opinions in their decision-making process. For some women, the opinion of her partner may well be determinative.1 The point is that other people's opinions should not be determinative (or influential) if the woman exercising her right to choose does not want them to be.

So where's the problem? Most women will want to know what the feelings of their partner are, if they're in a relationship (you expect that, I think, in relationships). Many women will talk to their family, or to close friends, or to whoever they want to. Your voices will be heard! Many women will have regard to how you feel! It may take the form of consultation, where there's no requirement to actually follow what the consulted people ask for, but it will be there in many, if not most, cases.

(There'll be women who choose not to involve anybody else in their decision. And I fail to see the problem with that: they're autonomous human beings too, kid.)

1. You know, [stuff about power imbalances goes here], but I think a woman could legitimately choose to have a baby or not to have a baby because her partner wants one/doesn't want one, and I think it's absolutely that woman's right to decide for herself what factors are and are not important in her decision-making process. That's kind of what this whole thing is about, for me.

stick it to the (wo)man

So, in brief lots and lots of words:

1. the Government explicitly wants to get more beneficiaries in work. Don't get me wrong: this is a laudable aim. Most people who subsist on state benefits would like to have more money, and most of them would like to get it through paid employment.
   
2. the Government wants to cut funding to education, including early childhood education. To some extent, I do sympathise with the view that early childhood education is basically daycare by another name. But whatever it's called, it's the place where a lot of kids go when their parents or guardians are at paid work, and where some kids go when their parents or guardians aren't at paid work.
   
3. cutting funding to early childhood education will have the direct result of increasing the amount of money parents and guardians pay in hand to the centres. This is because the cost of running the centre doesn't suddenly decrease just because their income from one source has fallen.
   
4. this will in turn decrease the marginal income of working parents and guardians. That is, the sum of "net income" minus "costs associated with working" will be a smaller figure.
   
5. costs associated with working aren't, of course, limited to childcare. Other costs include transport, work-appropriate attire, and any work equipment. And I think these costs are reasonable enough, just as I think that parents paying part of the cost of their small children's daycare needs is fair enough.
   
6. but childcare is a really, really high cost for a lot of people. Not everyone is in a position to rely on other family members to take on childcare so that they can enter paid employment. Not everyone has family. Not everyone has family in the same city. Not everyone has family who are appropriate carers for small children.
   
7. and children are a social good. I mean, obviously they are also people -- and perhaps someday I will write about why I think people owe each other some care -- but they're an investment (trite, I know) into what this society will be able to support in 25 years.
   
8. so the idea that parents should bear sole responsibility for raising and providing for their children doesn't really work for me. I'm going to personally benefit from there being qualified doctors in 40 years, so I should bear some responsibility for making sure that there are children to get there.*
   
9. getting back to where I was going with this: it is contradictory to have an explicit policy to encourage people back into work and then create stumbling blocks that you know full well will make employment difficult in some cases and impossible in others.
   

*As an aside: if your policy, personal or political, ever relies on people not fucking in situations where it is likely that people will want to fuck, your policy is stupid.

For this reason, the statement that people should not have children they cannot afford, aside from being an utterly disgusting statement of privilege and assumption, is just so mind-bogglingly stupid it blows my mind. Children are a logical consequence of sex, and if it ever gets to a point where heterosexual sex, sans totally effective contraception, does not reliably, across the species, result in offspring -- we are so totally -- I'm trying to think of an adjective here...