OPINION
Looking forward to the National Party’s new “man ban”?
Think I’m kidding? National leader Christopher Luxon wants half his MPs to be women. As reported by the Herald’s political editor, Claire Trevett, over the weekend, he would “love to see a 50-50 gender balance”.
So how is that going to happen? Bear with me, for some numbers.
Trevett also reported there are 44 electorate seats in Parliament that National can realistically view as “winnable”. The party has chosen its candidates for all of them, and 33 are men. Just 11 – a quarter – are women.
National has been stuck on about 35 per cent in the polls since early last year. If that becomes the election result, it will translate into 42 seats. Once the votes for parties that don’t reach the 5 per cent threshold are discarded, that would climb to 44 seats.
This means that if the party wins all 44 of its “winnable” electorates, there will be no room in its caucus for any list candidates. No capacity to address the profound gender imbalance produced by candidate selection in the electorates.
This isn’t business as usual with National, by the way. They currently have 11 women MPs, but only 34 in all. Women make up a third of the caucus, but, even from that low base, now they are going backwards.
I know, I know, this is all nonsense, they should select the best candidates for the job.
But it’s 26 years since we first had a woman prime minister. We have heaps of inspirational women leaders, in Parliament and in most other parts of society. There is clearly no shortage of women who want to be MPs and no shortage of women with the life experience and skills to suggest they’d be good at it.
The thing is, if National really was choosing the “best candidates for the job”, they wouldn’t keep preferring men. The gender split would be roughly equal.
But they’re not even close. There’s only one credible explanation for this: bias has influenced their selections.
Perhaps it’s unconscious, perhaps it’s not. Most likely it’s both. But it’s there, and, despite the platitudes of the leader, the party has, to date, been incapable of addressing it.
So if Luxon really would “love to see a 50-50 gender balance”, what does he have to do to get it? Would lifting their election result help?
Not a lot. With 40 per cent of the party vote, they’d get about 50 MPs: that brings in six from the list.
But National has already selected two list-only candidates and they are both men: Gerry Brownlee and James Christmas. So if the next four spots went to women, that would give them 14 women in a caucus of 50.
That’s 28 per cent: still not even back to where they are now.
What if they hit their own highly aspirational 45 per cent goal?
That would translate to perhaps 57 MPs, of whom at least 35 would be men, leaving at best 22 spots for women. Less than 40 per cent.
All the other parliamentary parties already have a higher proportion of women MPs than National can hope for after this election, even if things go swimmingly well for them.
And if National is going to shift the dial at all, you know what they’ll need? A “man ban”.
“Man ban” is the sneering phrase National used in 2017 when Labour announced it wanted to achieve gender equity in its caucus. But unless National stuffs the high spots on its party list with women, its caucus will be hardly any more gender equitable than it was 20 years ago.
The plain fact is, if you leave it to “choosing the best person” without recognising the inbuilt bias in your concept of “best”, you will perpetuate the inequity.
Once National has grasped this, what chance it might apply the principle to its understanding of wider society?
If Māori and rural people, say, routinely have to wait longer for surgery, perhaps it’s not because they’re less deserving of the surgery. Perhaps it’s because there’s an unaddressed structural bias against them.
Attempts to address that bias are not a crime against democracy, despite the idiotic squeals of so many people about surgery waiting lists last week.
The National Party held its conference over the weekend and focused on a topic it hopes will push all the right electorate buttons: crime.
The party loves to say New Zealand is “soft on crime”, even though we have one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the world and we’re ranked second, after Iceland, for safety.
Still, it’s not surprising. Violent crime, especially what we now call “retail crime”, has become an extremely troubling issue and it’s obviously not under control.
What is surprising was the lack of costings. Luxon likes to tell his campaign meetings he’s “a numbers guy”. Understand the numbers, he says, and you’ll know what’s really going on. But he did not seem aware of any of the numbers relevant to his law-and-order announcements.
His policies will push up the prison roster, but he didn’t know what it costs to lock up a prisoner for a year.
He relied instead on the word of his justice spokesperson, Paul Goldsmith, who confidently told him it was $100,000. That was barely half of it: the correct figure is $193,000.
This means the tougher sentencing policies Luxon announced will add hundreds of millions of dollars to the Corrections budget.
He also promised full rehabilitation services for prisoners on remand. That’s very welcome, but it’s certainly not cheap. It’s not new, either: the current Government has already started to do it.
Rehabilitation is a complex issue in prisons, not least because, like smoking, people have to want to do it or it doesn’t work.
And there’s a lot to do. Corrections estimates that 91 per cent of prisoners have or have had mental health and/or substance abuse problems. The NZ Howard League says more than half of prisoners are also “functionally illiterate”.
Rehabilitation has to address those things and more: anger management, parenting skills, vocational training, placement in mentored employment, getting a driver’s licence, living in a flat.
Life skills, somehow delivered to people whose experience of education, health and employment – of society – is that it fails them and excludes them.
It would be terrific if our justice and corrections systems focused more on all this. It’s essential work. But a commitment to it with no apparent thought for the cost is not a commitment at all. It’s just window dressing.
And there’s another financial issue: putting every angry, illiterate and damaged young person we can into a place likely to turn them into a hardened criminal will cost us all for decades.
If your crime policy is motivated primarily by a need to punish, you will struggle to make society safer, even though that is what everyone wants.
It’s a bit like having gender equity aspirations in a set-up designed to reward businessmen in blue suits. Inequity, wherever it is, doesn’t go away on its own.
Simon Wilson is a senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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