December-January issue of Fightback online
December 29, 2014 by
MANA Movement regroups, call for Mana Wahine policy
December 9, 2014 by
In the wake of this years’ electoral defeat, the MANA Movement is regrouping. On November 29th, Fightback members attended a Members’ Hui in Tāmaki/Auckland, with around 70 attending from around the country.
‘Back to the community’ was the overwhelming mood of the hui, with leaders outlining the formation of community hubs in Te Tai Tokerau and in Tūranga Gisborne.
The hui agreed to support MANA involvement in the upcoming State Housing Crisis National Hui, to be held in Auckland on February 21, 2015, and to support the organisation of a national educational conference later next year.
Hilda Halkyard-Harawira reported on her involvement in the recent electoral recount in Te Tai Tokerau, and the disenfranchisement faced by many Maori. Atleast 900 votes were discounted, for reasons as simple as voters moving house. Gerard Hehir, outgoing MANA National Secretary, noted that electoral reform is not in the government’s interests, so this requires a wider political struggle not just a campaign for enrolment.
To applause, Hilda Halkyard-Harawira also underlined the recent Waitangi Tribunal finding that Ngāpuhi – the Harawiras’ iwi – never ceded sovereignty. Participants acknowledged that the Tribunal’s finding was not news, and (again) that power cedes nothing without struggle. Fightback continues to critically support MANA because we maintain the importance of linking the struggle for tino rangatiratanga and the struggle for democratic socialism.
Call for Mana Wahine policy
After the election, the New Zealand Herald alleged that Hone Harawira hired sex offenders during his time in parliament. Although he chose not to engage media, Hone claimed at the recent hui that parliamentary services vet staff, and that the charges had not been laid when the men were hired. Regardless, the case poses a problem with ongoing significance; the challenge of dealing with sexual violence in the movement and society as a whole.
Kim Dotcom’s Moment of Truth event offered a platform to Julian Assange, who is facing questioning for sexual assault. Dotcom has his own record of sexist behaviour. These are only the most prominent cases; 1 in 3 women have experienced intimate partner violence. All too often, the ingrained instinct is to close ranks and protect abusers. Any movement for liberation must draw a clear line that gender violence will not be tolerated; you cannot have liberation without women’s liberation.
As Richard Pryor famously observed, when you go looking for justice, that’s what you find: just us. As demonstrated in the recent Roastbusters case, the same ‘justice system’ that locks up thousands of Māori men also protects sexual abusers – especially the sons of cops. John Tamihere and Willie Jackson, whose response to the Roastbusters case was unacceptable victim-blaming, nonetheless faced more consequences than the perpetrators. Whereas Tamihere and Jackson were stood down, the perpetrators and the cops got away scot-free. Worldwide, black and brown men are overwhelmingly scapegoated for sexism.
Combating racism and sexism requires prioritising Māori women’s leadership. Fightback has worked alongside other MANA members to propose a Mana Wahine policy for the movement, including the formation of a nationwide wahine caucus. MANA leadership must be accountable not to Pākehā journalists and courts, but to the wāhine toa who keep the flame alive in the movement.
At the recent hui, former MANA President and Waiariki candidate Annette Sykes endorsed and argued for the formation of a wahine policy and caucus. Sykes was a founding member of Rape Crisis in Rotorua, and is a continuing supporter of the Women’s Refuge movement. Fightback will continue to work within MANA to assert rangatiranga for te pani me te rawakore katoa.
#Gamergate, Roast Busters and Revenge Porn – The limits of the law in combatting sexual violence on the internet
November 8, 2014 by
By Vita Bryant (Fightback Wellington).
My knowledge of, and interest in video games is practically non-existent, but when I saw #gamergate trending on my social media newsfeeds, I was intrigued – was the community finally having a discussion on the role of women in gamer culture that went beyond token sterotypes of “cool girls” and “booth babes”? If it something sounds too good to be true it often is – it turns out #gamergate was not a social movement but a bizarre case of cyber-harassment gone viral. Eron Gjoni, a disgruntled ex-boyfriend of independent game developer Zoe Quinn posted a series of rants on a number of internet gaming forums detailing the breakdown of their relationship. Included in this treatise was the allegation that during their relationship, Quinn cheated on him with a number of people, including a journalist and reviewer for a well-known gaming website. Eventually, enough people (perhaps with limited experience of interpersonal relationships) read these posts and decided that the fact that a consensual sexual relationship between a game developer and a game reviewer had not received any coverage by the mainstream gaming press must be symptomatic of a mass conspiracy of a press collusion with game developers and producers.
If this sounds like a ridiculous “storm in a teacup” to you, that’s because it is – and yet the explicit death and sexual violence threats levelled against Quinn and her supporters were enough to make Quinn leave her home and go into hiding and others to leave the gaming industry altogether. What’s perhaps the most shocking is that despite these threats being made in very public forums, at the time of writing no criminal charges have been laid as a result of #gamergate.
Meanwhile in California, the state legislature has amended SB 255, its “revenge porn” law, to include “selfies” distributed without the subject’s permission, following a 2013 study by internet security company McAfee which found that about 10% of ex-partners had threatened to expose intimate photos of their ex online, with about 60% following through on those threats. So far California is the only state that specifically makes the non-consensual distribution of “selfies” a criminal offense. Similarly in UK, the House of Lords have unanimously agreed that the proposed Criminal Justice and Courts Bill should include provisions criminalising revenge porn, after the eight police forces in England and Wales who kept data on the issue received 149 complaints from victims of revenge porn in the past two and a half years, most of whom had to rely on copyright/civil law (and thus access to a lawyer and the court system) in order to have the pictures removed.
Finally in Aotearoa, after a year-long investigation into the so-called “Roast Busters” group, police have stated that none of the perpetrators will be prosecuted due to a lack of admissible evidence – despite the fact that the offenders maintained a Facebook group dedicated to bragging about their crimes. All of these incidences highlight both an inability and an unwillingness of criminal legislation and the police and prosecutors who enforce it to adequately deal with sexual violence. Relegating the distribution of intimate images to the realm of copyright infringement and civil law creates a two-tier system where only survivors with access to lawyers will be able to take measures to reclaim their images. If perpetrators can brag about their offenses on social media, and those social media posts do not hold sufficient evidentiary value to initiate sanctions against the offenders, those rules of evidence are failing survivors.
The failure of criminal justice systems to address the needs of victims of sexual violence is both global and systematic. It is born from legislatures that prioritise defence budgets over responding to technological developments in gender violence, and perpetuated by police forces with a limited understanding of the effects of all kinds of sexual violence on survivors. Without a complete overhaul of the way we make and uphold laws, survivor-centred criminological research and education of law-makers and law-enforcers, sexual violence will continue to be perpetrated, both online and in the “real” world, with no access to justice for its victims.
Housing under Neoliberalism
November 1, 2014 by
Joel Cosgrove (Fightback/MANA Poneke).
It is a generally acknowledged political fact that housing is unaffordable. Within the awkward blame shuffling and finger pointing, MANA’s policy of building 10,000 well-built and insulated homes per year until demand for affordable housing was satisfied, was a good policy. The policy called for an expansion of state-housing. Yet the Internet MANA alliance also endorsed renting-to-own, a policy which maintains the need for private home ownership.
The nature of private home ownership
Why do people want to rent-to-own? In part because there is no surety now in state housing tenancies, with the National government revoking the right to lifetime tenancies, and the opposition Labour Party raising barely a whisper of opposition. The current alternatives to private home ownership are the vagaries and insecurity of private renting or the modern, run-down state housing ghettos, the product of budget cutting and under-maintenance by both National and Labour governments over the past thirty years.
The collapse of state housing as a serious alternative to private rentals makes for grim reading. Currently, 3,700 of 68,460 current state houses are empty, with a majority ready to be immediately occupied.
The current situation has its origins in the massive attacks on workers’ conditions that were carried out in the early 90’s. The CTU estimates that if pay rates had kept up with productivity rates, the average wage would be $35.91 per hour as opposed to $28.20 currently, a gap of over 20%.
Alongside attacks on wages and benefits was a massive escalation of house prices and housing-based debt. According to the Reserve Bank, household debt has increased from around 60% of disposable income, to around 144%. Around 97% of that debt is in housing.
To a certain extent, as long as you were able to maintain ownership of a house, you could leverage the increasing value of housing (which is now 75% above its historical value), swimming on debt in the assumption that capital gains from the sale of the house would bring a tidy profit. In Auckland alone, average house prices have risen from $340,000 in 2004 to over $700,000 in 2014. Those with houses have profited mightily. Those without have had to weather continual rent increases.
With average national house prices having risen by over $30,000 in the last year, and average wages by only $1500, the gap between those who own houses and those who don’t is only increasing. The Dominion Post reported in August this year that investors who already own ten properties or more brought two out of every five homes on the market.
That the overwhelming amount of household debt is property-based further demonstrates the divide – those with property have potential access to hundreds of thousands, while those without are left with credit cards, overdrafts and loan sharks.
Stable living standards are increasingly tied to atomised individual asset ownership, as opposed to a collective process of winning wage increases in worksites. This is a departure from the historical period of Fordism, with large industrial worksites, with relatively clear identity, tied in part to collective work.
While speculation on properties increases, and rents increase, rents are (relatively) constrained by wage growth. This leaves a yawning gap between the going price of a property and what can be charged in rent for it.
We live in a country of abysmal housing, with the recent Housing Warrant of Fitness survey finding that 94% failed on at least one of 31 criteria that they were judged across. Criteria included weather-tightness, insulation and ventilation, lighting, heating, condition of appliances and general building safety. Yet the system of housing speculation specifically pushes people to provide the bare minimum to maintain their properties, as the point of houses is not primarily to be lived in, but to appreciate in value and make money for the owner.
Social base of the National Party
There was a lot of (important) talk of the missing million at the most recent election; non-voters uninspired by the options on offer, largely the most poor and marginal. Another million is also important, namely the million who have voted for the National Party over the past three elections.
National is favoured by business; however this is not the whole story. Ninety-seven percent of the 112 chief executives who responded to an NZ Herald ‘Mood of the Boardroom’ 2014 survey indicated support for National leader John Key. However, that only accounts for 108 votes all told.
Debt encumbered home owners, although being rich on paper, are nonetheless in a precarious position – one needs only to look at the sudden fall of Terry Serepisos – and this ties them to the status quo. This is a form of social pacification, binding people to a capitalist hegemony.[1]
Building state houses, until demand for affordable and safe housing is met, would cut at the base of a significant part of New Zealand society. Currently there are over 570,000 homes rented out, according to Statistics NZ. This is a question of billions of dollars in yearly rents and hundreds of billions in speculative value. The National Party allays the anxieties of a middle-class and other property owners operating on a speculative bubble.
Fighting for public housing
In seeking to reverse the upward redistribution of wealth, we call for more and better state houses.
A serious public-housing building programme would make a major difference to the overcrowding and poverty-related illnesses that currently exist within New Zealand. It would also undercut the dependence on speculation as a basis for security.
On one hand, there is something to be said for satisfying people’s desire for security in housing. On the other hand, by upholding private housing, there is a danger that those trying to challenge the situation end up being absorbed into the status quo. We need to be clear about the need for a public, collective solution to the housing crisis.
Whatever private home ownership might have meant in the 70’s, it increasingly serves class stratification. Those with access to property profit from those without.
The human need for shelter plays only a secondary role at best in this dynamic.
[1] ‘Hegemony’ refers to a situation where an oppressive social system is so entrenched that many consent to it, not requiring direct violent coercion.
“One ocean, one people” – Interview with Teresia Teaiwa on self-determination struggles in the Pacific
October 29, 2014 by
Teresia Teaiwa speaks at Capitalism: Not Our Future (photograph by Bronwen Beechey).
Teresia Teaiwa is a poet and founding academic of Pacific Studies in Aotearoa/NZ, who spoke on the gender panel at Fightback’s 2014 public conference Capitalism: Not Our Future. Teresia recently attended an international workshop on self-determination in Papua New Guinea. Ian Anderson interviewed her for Fightback.
You recently attended a workshop in Papua New Guinea. What was this all about?
The Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG), Social Empowerment Education Program (Fiji) and the Bismarck Ramu Group (Papua New Guinea) collaborated to organize this event called the “Madang Wansolwara Dance 2014” [Wansolwara means “one ocean, one people”]. The gathering brought community-based organisations, activists, artists, academics and theologians together in order to re-ignite a movement of solidarity across the Pacific. Close to 200 participants from Hawai’i, Guam, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Fiji, Vanuatu, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Papua New Guinea (PNG) explored issues of grassroots sustainability and national self-determination in the face of the relentless assaults of extractive industries, militarization, consumerism and colonialism. A crucial dimension of the gathering was a commitment to putting artistic and creative practice at the centre of our activism—the genres of art we focused on were visual art, poetry, music, and dance. The gathering was described as a dance rather than as a conference, because its structure and philosophy was not at all that of a conventional conference. Three of us went from Wellington: myself, my son Mānoa who is studying dance at Whitireia, and one of our Pacific Studies Honours graduates, Tekura Moeka‘a, who is a Cook Islands dancer and choreographer. A contingent of slam poets came from Hawai’i; visual artists came from the University of the South Pacific in Fiji; there were musicians from the University of Goroka in PNG; yam farmers from PNG and Vanuatu; forestry workers from PNG; social workers from FSM and West Papua; landowners from Fiji and Aotearoa and tribal chiefs from PNG and Vanuatu; theologians from West Papua, Australia, Fiji and Te Ao Ma‘ohi (French Polynesia)—it was quite an amazing gathering of people, perspectives and skills!
What are some of the ongoing struggles in Papua New Guinea?
It’s important to remember that PNG occupies roughly one half of the second largest island in the world. PNG is also the Pacific Island region’s most populous country at 7 million; it is the most linguistically diverse with over 1000 distinct languages at a recent count, and it is also the most rich in natural resources. The “Madang Wansolwara Dance 2014” was held in a province of PNG (Madang) that harbors mining industry, logging, tuna fisheries and a cannery. Over the six days we were there, we learned that ongoing struggles include a) preventing the rampant exploitation of the country’s vast resources; b) ensuring the equitable re-distribution of wealth generated from both foreign investment and local industry; c) developing strong governance systems that allow for robust civic participation and state and corporate accountability. It’s hard for us in this part of the Pacific to imagine how much wealth is being extracted out of PNG, I mean they’ve just delivered on an 18+billion dollar liquefied national gas project with BP! So it should have one of the highest per capita incomes in our region, it should be able to sustain a high quality infrastructure and provide decent medical services and education to all its citizens, but it can’t because the wealth that isn’t going off-shore is held in the hands of politicians and other local elites, and that ‘wealth’ is based on the destruction of the environment. One of the newspaper headlines that greeted us when we landed in Port Moresby was that the Fly River, the second longest river in the country, was dead. This was a consequence of untreated waste from the Ok Tedi open pit copper and gold mines being discharged into the Fly and Ok Tedi rivers.
What was the main message you took away from the discussion of struggles in Papua New Guinea?
Before going to Madang, it was easy to be influenced by the foreign media’s preoccupation with violence and security issues in the country. The main message that I took away from our gathering was that things are a lot more complex there, and while it seems logical to work to eliminate things like inter-tribal warfare, raskol attacks and gender-based violence from everyday life in PNG, we need to be vigilant about the way that ‘security’, ‘peace’ and even women’s rights can effectively be coopted into the agendas of government and large corporations—that aren’t really about security or peace or women’s rights, but about making it easier to extract natural resources. It’s heart-breaking to think that the cost of what is perceived to be ‘peace’ might have to be national, cultural, political, economic and environmental sovereignty.
What’s the connection between the movement in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere in the Pacific, particularly Aotearoa/NZ?
The main connection is that we are facing similar types of economic logics, and the same type of corporate and state collusions around extractive industries. Our demographics are rather different, though. PNG’s population of 7 million has an indigenous majority. Aotearoa New Zealand does not have an indigenous majority—Māori are 15% of the population at the latest census. While Māori understand their need to be actively involved in decisions around mining, Pasifika people as a migrant group constituting 7% of the population and largely urban-based, may not be as alert to the implications of extractive industries for them. Also, with mining being a mainly terrestrial activity in the Pacific in the last century, the centre of gravity was mainly in Melanesia, so Melanesians have a longer history and familiarity with these industries, while the Polynesians who have been migrating to New Zealand haven’t really had to think too much about it. In the 21st century, however, with the advent of deep sea mining technology, countries with small land areas but huge marine territories granted to them under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention are now being encouraged to exploit their sea beds. The Cook Islands is one of those countries. With over 61,000 Cook Islanders living in New Zealand and less than 15,000 back in the islands, this means that Cook Islanders in New Zealand will need to educate themselves pretty quickly about the costs and benefits of proposed sea bed mining in their homeland. Hopefully, they’ll be able to learn some valuable lessons from their cousins in Aotearoa New Zealand as well as in Melanesia.
You brought copies of the Fightback magazine as a gift. How were these recieved?
Yes, I did. I took copies of the Fightback magazine as well as copies of Kassie Hartendorp’s booklet on Women, Class and Revolution over to Madang as gifts. Some I presented to individuals who I thought would especially appreciate them, and others I left on a gift table, and they all got snapped up! One PNG participant used the Fightback magazine as a kind of memento book that he asked everyone to sign and write notes of encouragement or their email addresses on. That was really cool!
What opportunities can you see for deepening the connection between self-determination movements in this region?
I think this Wansolwara [“one ocean, one people”] movement is very promising, and really fills a gap that was left when the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement fell into inertia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Our next meeting is in Vanuatu in 2016, and there is a Youngsolwara (youth) meeting planned for Suva in 2015. Right now, I think it’s really important that the movement grows strong roots and branches in the Pacific Islands. As far as the Wansolwara movement in Wellington is concerned, when Mānoa, Tekura and I returned from Madang, we organized an evening session where we invited friends from the university and wider community to hear about our experiences and join the movement. Our focus in Wellington since we returned from Madang has been on building awareness about West Papua’s struggle for independence. We’ve been promoting the #WeBleedBlackandRed campaign that was started by PCC and PANG in Fiji to build regional awareness about West Papua, and we’ve also done a few actions around media freedom in West Papua. We’re also slowly building up a second stream around seabed mining, and Tekura and I made a joint written submission to Vanuatu’s first national consultation on deep sea mining earlier this month (October). We’re keen to work in solidarity with groups like Peace Movement Aotearoa and the Green Party, who have been the most consistent in reminding New Zealanders of their obligations to West Papua. I think we have a lot to learn from the dialogues and debates and formulations of a socialist position that go on in Fightback Aotearoa, too. But it’s crucial for us to develop our own ideological standpoint and a solid and autonomous constituency amongst Pasifika students and youth in this country.
Subscribe to RSS feed
FightBack 
You must be logged in to post a comment.