On Voting Intentions

Speak Up For Women NZ (SUFW)  analysed some of the policies of the five “major” parties (1)  as they impact women, and scored each issue based on an analysis of how that policy would “progress or hinder women’s liberation” and colour coded them : red = negative; yellow = neutral/could do better; green = positive; or no information, which might be either +or-.

The areas they list are gender identity ideology (referencing policies on children, education, healthcare, sex self-ID, definitions); reproductive rights (abortion, maternal and sexual healthcare);  surrogacy; prostitution;  childcare; violence against women; pornography; unpaid labour; and women’s sports in relation to funding, fairness and safety.

The group was taken to task on its Facebook page by a left-wing woman who is vehemently opposed to the group's stand on gender self-ID specifically and gender identity ideology more widely, but she is a long-standing and strong advocate of women's and workers' rights. She queried why the group had not addressed wider policies that impact on women.

Sadly, the resulting exchange - especially from whoever was writing on behalf of SUFW - was rather too much an exercise in ego to be of much use in clarifying the issues. 

Women’s sex-based rights are framed explicitly and implicitly within laws and attendant policies but can be undermined and even rendered meaningless unless they are firmly embedded in the wider social contract – ie broadly accepted by a large enough number of citizens to become normative.The issue of women-only toilets and changing rooms is a case in point in that, both the need for, and respecting access to them, have been widely accepted by men without needing to be formally legislated or policed. 

 

Formal rights can be rendered effectively meaningless if people lack the economic means to access and exercise them. eg.

• The Nordic model on prostitution is unworkable without genuine, permanent ways out of the sex trade, in the form of education/training opportunities and secure well-paid employment.
• Commercial surrogacy becomes a more attractive option to women who are economically marginalised.
• Domestic violence is often triggered, made worse by wider domestic stressors such as racism,  overcrowded or substandard housing, poverty and precarity.
• The pressures on women and girls of unpaid labour are always far greater in conditions of poverty or precarity caused by a low wage economy.
• Funding for sport is rendered meaningless for people who suffer poverty-related poor health outcomes that act as a barrier to participation in sport.
• 
  

One area not mentioned by SUFW is prison reform. The appalling rates of, and gross disparity in, both female and male incarceration rates when measured by ethnicity and socio-economic status, are not challenged by any of the right wing parties. 

 

If SUFW is committed to prison reform – ie not just using the extreme vulnerability of female prisoners in its arguments around transgender prisoners, but wanting to end the iniquity of almost all NZ’s female prisoners being poor and 62% being Māori –  why was there no interrogation of the parties’ stand on issues specific to women in the  criminal justice system?

 

ACT is rightwing libertarian and, until a current boost in the polls, was a one-man band gifted a seat by National. In principle it is opposed to government intervention in pretty much all money-making activities – unless there is political mileage to be made–  so it is unlikely to want to control the sex or porn trade or to do anything to address the poverty that makes poor women most vulnerable to them. 

 

Both ACT and National pay lip service to women’s rights, while having economic and social policies that serve to maintain or widen a poverty gap which impacts women first and hardest.

 

Missing out wider economic and social policies that very obviously impact heavily on women, either positively or negatively, makes SUFW's exercise look strongly ideological rather than purely informative and non-partisan. (2)

In fact, in the absence of a wider lens on how these parties' policies will impact on all women – the exercise looks perilously like a call to NOT vote Labour/Green, largely on the basis of their stance on gender identity, and/or to vote FOR a Nat/ACT alliance on the basis of their highly equivocal or unstated stances on the same issue.

Notes:

(1) In a podcast two of the SUFW leadership also discuss New Conservative but I admit to having lost interest before I got that far. 

(2) Semiotically it's interesting - in its positioning of National first and making it look like the party of 'least harmful' centrist moderation, and the placing of the Greens dead centre and with a much wider column than all the others resulting in far more prominent blocks of DO NOT VOTE red.