Tag: nz politics

Facebook: Rules of Engagement

(original photo by Makeen M.Alaa on Unsplash)

Facebook has become a crucial battleground in politics.

On Facebook, waves of comments expressing toxic views create an illusion of mainstream agreement, establishing dangerous social norms.

On Facebook, deliberately contrived propaganda is carried into regular communities to harm positive and progressive causes.

On Facebook, soundbite opinions about political events are circulated, spread, and refined.

If you’re still on Facebook, you’ve seen how wild it gets over there. It can feel like reality has been swamped by bots and monsters. Take heart! The troll army is smaller and weaker than it seems. We can push back, and make a (small but mighty) difference.

(1) Why Facebook matters

The internet has changed a great deal in the last decade, and now we are dealing with a single overwhelmingly important truth: Facebook is the only social media platform where regular people talk to each other.

Other big social media sites (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.) are broadcast channels for receiving content as an audience. Other talk-based social media sites (Reddit, X/Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads) are small next to Facebook, and do not really attract a membership of regular people. (Users tend to be ‘very online’.) Specialist community social media (Neighbourly in NZ, Nextdoor in the US, the NeighbourhApp in Dignity Falls) gets close but doesn’t have the reach.

Regular people go to Facebook and use it daily for regular person reasons:

  • It has a peer-to-peer marketplace that dominates informal selling.
  • It is the online front door of many small and medium businesses.
  • It has an events system that makes it easy to organize parties, special occasions, public events, and more.
  • It shows you what your friends and family are up to, and lets you share your activities with them. (Although this functionality has been degraded, it still works enough to keep people on the site.)
  • And, crucially, it has interest group spaces, where you can see and join discussions about whatever you’re interested in. (This is the only aspect of Facebook that genuinely works well.)

One of the most popular interest group types is the local community group, where a broad cross-section of people in your city, town, or suburb can report lost pets, complain about driving, and discuss the news. On the entire internet, Facebook is the only place this happens at scale.

This makes Facebook crucially important for societies and communities. Politics happens there in a way that it does not happen anywhere else online.

We’d better not abandon it to the right wing machines.

(2) On Facebook, influence is tilted.

In the New Zealand election 2026, Facebook posts and comments will directly influence the voting decisions and political beliefs of countless Kiwi voters.

That influence will be overwhelmingly tilted in favour of reactionary, conservative, and paranoid right-wing parties.

The right has several advantages that help create this tilt:

  • They have the money to place their messages into the platform’s machinery. The political parties directly, but also lobby groups such as the Taxpayers Union and the Sensible Sentencing Trust.
  • They benefit from the structure of the platform. Hot take posts with a simple message provoking a negative emotional reaction generate the kind of activity that leads to circulation via the algorithm. These kinds of post suit right-wing politics much more than left-wing politics.
  • They have the global moment in their favour. Reactionary forces have not been so dominant around the world for over half a century. International messages are delivered into local context by the algorithm.
  • They might also have international interference operations in their favour. Russian activity is real, and while it remains to be seen whether this will a factor in the coming election, it was a factor in the last one.
  • They have the benefit of mendacity. Knowingly false or extravagantly exaggerated claims can easily be illustrated with AI slop and thrown into the algorithm to powerful effect; these kinds of posts serve right-wing messaging much more than left.

These advantages give right wing forces high visibility on Facebook.

There are many Facebook interest groups founded on social fear. Groups spring up expressing worry about immigration, or new health measures, or governance changes. Some are created deliberately by malign actors working to a strategic plan, but others form genuinely as grass-roots actions by concerned people who hold on to social fears.

These groups can become thick with discussion about what is feared, and spread worry and anxiety. Discussion in these groups is almost never about limiting worry or calming members down. The direction of travel is always towards greater fear, and more extreme views. In this way, these groups become entry points into more extreme message groups, which promote ever more elaborate and toxic views of the world.

The distance from a toxic fear group to a busy local community group is small. For those caught up in these fear beliefs, all of these items appear in the same scroll on their Facebook feed. They see paranoid hatred towards Jacinda Ardern that deems her a mass-murdering globalist, and just below, a National Party member scaremongering about the dangers of the Labour government. It all becomes one thing.

Inevitably, then, fear messages from these toxic communities make their way into regular discussion. They come from genuine members of these communities who earnestly hold these beliefs and express them; they come from cynical provocateurs who enjoy stirring up trouble by poking at the ‘do-gooders’ of the world; they come from bad faith political actors who have no actual beliefs to speak of but recognize these messages serve their ends; they come from fake accounts operated by foreign actors seeking to harvest engagement or stir up trouble.

The way Facebook works right now, these messages propagate on neutral spaces in numbers that vastly overrepresent the actual social presence of these beliefs.

They make it seem like there are lots of them. Like their views are extremely common, even the majority. They are not, not even close.

That discrepancy is territory we have ceded.

We can push back.

(3) Rules of engagement for Facebook

On the largest scale, there is not much to be done that will change this election. These factors on Facebook are locked in place. The playing field is tilted. That can’t be fixed in the next few months. It’s an important battle, but the best thing to do for it right now is strive to get the best people for that fight into government.

But there is a huge amount that can be achieved as part of our everyday engagement with our social media environment.

Whenever you visit Facebook, aim to make it just a little bit more pleasant and a little bit more real.

Here’s how to make your contributions most effective, and avoid making things accidentally worse.

[NOTE: Am I missing something? Is something wrong? Let me know so I can improve this list.]

How to engage depends on the kind of post you are looking at:

Posts from right-wing sources: Scroll past any post from a right-wing source. National/ACT/NZ First politicians, Destiny Church, lobby groups… Don’t engage. This just promotes their messages and gets the algorithm humming. They want battles under their posts, do not give them such. (Hardcore options: Read to identify key messages; screenshot and reply elsewhere without sending views to the original post.)

Neutral media sources: Under media sources, e.g. political news articles from RNZ or The Spinoff or NZ Herald, we can comment without driving engagement to RW messages. Particular things to do:
* take messages from the story that resonate and restate them in your own words. Many people won’t click the link.
* directly quote key lines from the story, with a comment like “this is the most important bit”.
* respond to a political message with a real world example from your life. (Don’t make one up!) “This policy would make a huge difference to my brother who does X, Y, Z.”
* reply to other people saying positive messages with more positive messages, particularly if they are getting shitty replies.
* if there are racist/hate messages in the comments (surprisingly common), make a comment (not a reply to an offender) asking for comment moderation.

Things to avoid:
* replying to RW troll/propaganda/negative messages. The engagement just pushes their comments to the top of the heap so people scrolling by will see them first. In fact, the “Most Relevant” filter will often hide your comment and just show theirs.

Friendly sources: Under posts by left-bloc politicians and parties, science outlets commenting on issues of concern, progressive activist folks, etc, you can get stuck in in support. Any action here will help the algorithm push this further. Particular things to do:
* heart and like reacts for the main post
* respond with any kind of positive personal message, something very ordinary is good to set the tone (but not revealing! Don’t open yourself to targeting by trolls!)
* reproduce and celebrate specific points made that you agree with
* wherever possible, emphasise how these politics are extremely normal in the global context. Giving NZ a chance to catch up with other countries is always a great message. Something having worked well in other countries similar.
* reply to any post with hateful subtext not with rage or disgust, that’s what they want. Dismissive contempt is the way. Don’t let hate sit unremarked, but don’t give it heat either, chill the temperature down until everything is icy cold.
* if you want to reply to less offensive troll posts with dunks, mocking rebuttals, sad GIFs, or whatever, this is the place to do it. Can’t do much damage here.

Things to avoid:
* don’t get over your skis, going too hard and overstating how amazing someone is. Regular people react badly to puffery. If you have a personal story of how someone genuinely did something amazing, then go for it, but if it’s just generalised cheerleading, watch the tone.
* don’t get so caught up in fighting trolls that you start to hate the internet and yourself. There is a cohort of people out there who are literally playing a game where they win by emotionally exhausting you. You can always ignore them, and should do so forever.
* by the same token, if a troll account challenges you to prove something or say something or whatever, don’t do it. Even if you do have the answer, just don’t do it. Treating these asks seriously is giving them respect they do not deserve and prolonging a conversation that helps them more than you. Just leave them hanging, like they don’t matter to you in the least. They hate that.
* (if it’s a normal person asking for more info, then go for it, keep chatting. You have to use your judgment about who is normal and who is troll. Some people have aspects of both, humans are complex!)

Local community groups: In these spaces, you can definitely make a difference. Here are some things to do:

* Share political posts from good sources into the group, with a context note about how it will affect local services or local people. Advanced mode: in the context note, instead of saying the thing, ask everyone a question about how the subject might help your community. You want the question to close off avenues for troll/shitpost responses as much as possible.
* Uphold an expectation of respect and kindness in your community. Every community wants to see itself as respectful and kind. Call out instances where kindness fails or respect has not been shown; “here in X town, we show respect to each other.” Don’t come in too hard, but don’t waver either.
* Be present and supportive in non-politics posts too. Community members will remember your name from post to post.

Things to avoid:
* International politics issues. Trans discrimination in the UK, the death toll in Gaza, freedom of speech in the US… Local people just don’t want to see these invoked. Even if they are relevant to what you’re discussing, don’t bring them up. Find another way to deal with the real topics. Yes these things matter! But you are not being negligent by not bringing them up as part of this process.
* Criticising people who don’t get everything right. Sometimes people are wrong on the internet, let it go. You have bigger targets.

(4) Look after yourself

Remember to log off. If you are not used to getting involved in this kind of talk on Facebook, it can be… unpleasant. People act awful online, much more so than in real life. Comments can feel very personal even if they’re not. And sometimes they will be personal, and that’s not okay! Don’t wreck your wellbeing for the sake of a few Facebook comments, that’s not helping anyone.

Find some friendly support. Any Facebook friends who are on the same page as you? Give them a message. Have each others’ back out there.

Consider locking down your account, especially if you are anything other than a white guy.

Accept that you will never see any proof it helped. There’s no way around that. You’re working to shift an invisible vibe among lurking users. There’s no way to see if it works. You just need to trust that it does, because real people are on Facebook and then those people vote. No matter what you do, the laugh react guys will keep laugh reacting, but you can be confident voters have seen your signal too.

That’s it. Repeat until the election. Good luck.

(Thanks to Kelly Whyte for some very helpful advice.)

Why I’m Tired

I posted on Bluesky about the state of society, politics, media, all of it. Reproducing it here with slight edits for readability.

I start by quoting the following post from Russel Norman, former leader of the NZ Greens so not just some internet rando: “We now know that within the Prime Ministers Office there was a political lobbying pathway operating via the PM’s Chief Policy Advisor’s private email. Fonterra says it was told to send the lobbying docs via this pathway. It may still be operating via other staffers private email addresses.”

Part of why I/we are feeling so tired is that there is so much obviously unacceptable shit happening and the channels for even pointing it out have narrowed to what feels like a limit.

The quoted post from Russel Norman is incredibly damning but it’s hard to imagine how it might get the wide attention it deserves.

Mainstream media is incapable of meeting the moment. Well-intended journalistic principles have been thoroughly gamed, resources have been starved, journos crushed with broken incentives, and ownership has been co-opted. Illiberal forces know this is their opportunity and they are going for it.

And outside of that, what is left?

The “bluesky is an echo chamber” complaint isn’t wrong; this is one of the only remaining places where reasonable assessments can even be heard, and so we gather and share those reasonable assessments to reassure ourselves we can see it. Whole place is the 😅 emoji.

Meanwhile, I see local communities doing their best to function on Facebook, doing a good job by and large; but next to them on the feed is an overseas news post about Jacinda Ardern swamped with literally hundreds of comments calling her a horse (or worse). A public square irretrievably poisoned.

Yes, this is the exact same thread i have posted probably a hundred times before, expressing the same lamentations in slightly different words. Only a decade ago all these things worked so much better! The Dirty Politics machine could be countered! But now there’s nothing else.

It makes me so angry to see how far social infrastructure has been allowed to collapse, and how those who’ve retained a voice have largely been content to just sit and watch it happen. Their compliance so easily purchased, not even with flattery or corruption; all that was needed was expectation.

It’s an academic disease to overweight the importance of the thing you know about, but I did a masters degree on the power of social norms and it sure seems to me they are the trivially apparent engine of so much of our dysfunction. We all want to fit in with those around us. We trust the wisdom of our crowd. And that is leveraged against us as the extremely wealthy converge on self-serving messages, and well-resourced malefactors flood social channels to create harmful norms.

We know that actually sitting down with people in our communities reveals much more generous views of each other, and more readiness to think critically and openly. But at scale, that is massively expensive. And in its absence, manipulation rushes in.

So I’m exhausted. This NZ government is the worst we’ve had in many decades. Actively destructive to constitutional principles, heedless of evidence, profoundly undemocratic, willing to entertain and encourage hatred for the sake of its coalition. And I just can’t see how to fight it from here.

The wickednesses of the coalition are precisely aligned with the weaknesses of how we do society in 2026. (The weaknesses of the opposition are likewise aligned with the failings of what we are forced to work with.) We’re left hoping for a thousand viral TikToks to somehow turn the tide.

All we can do is push. Luckily Aotearoa NZ’s elections are proportional, so every vote won makes a difference. So I’ll keep pushing. And I’ll stay in the BlueSky echo chamber, where the norms aren’t toxic. Which you’d think wouldn’t be so special. But 2026 is like that.

Regulatory Standards Bill submission

Finally got around to reading this Bill on the last day subs are open. Made these notes (on Bluesky, thinking out loud).

  • It seems to be “if your legislation doesn’t match ACT-style libertarian principles, you need to admit it and wear a sign saying NOT LIBERTARIAN ENOUGH” which has various emergent consequences if embedded in a system.
  • 8 (l) legislation should be the most effective, efficient, and proportionate response to the issue concerned that is available. Is *this bill* the most effective and efficient response to the (supposed) issue of poor-quality regulation? A new legal obligation and oversight board?
  • Creating regulations is always about complex trade-offs on many dimensions. The Bill’s proposed principles are a narrow set of political priorities, not universal concerns, and as such using them as a universal measuring stick is farcical.
  • Surely a future government would just immediately repeal this rather than repeatedly hold up a “not libertarian enough” sign? And if that’s the case, this whole Bill is a waste of effort, right? You can’t legislate norms
  • The principles by which regulation might be judged are not, probably can’t be, settled. The Regulatory Standards Bill would force subsequent governments to pre-concede a particular political framework. It’s an attempt to win a political argument by legislating that you won.
  • basically, (1) any set of principles is inherently political & contestable, this legislation reaches too far in declaring such a set; (2) where specific principles are widely agreed (e.g. role of courts), this Bill is an extremely heavy-handed way to increase conformity even if such is needed

After thinking about it on a dog walk and then later on another dog walk, I turned that into a submission, which is reproduced below. (Unmentioned in this sub is how disgusted I am by the antics of David Seymour online, encouraging his followers to jeer at people who have voiced opposition to the Bill. He is a grotesque hypocrite and a perpetual irritant.)

My submission on the Regulatory Standards Bill

The Regulatory Standards Bill is bad law. While acknowledging other submissions will raise many areas of concern, I will focus on two that stand out to me as sufficient reason not to progress this poorly-conceived bill into law.

1) The heart of the Bill is the set of Principles given in s8. As designed, the Bill demands all new regulations be tested against these principles, and a clear statement is required when there is an inconsistency.

This set of principles is not a generally accepted set of norms for responsible regulation. To the contrary, the principles contain political stances that are heavily contested within the NZ Parliament. 8(b) in particular is an example of such a political claim. The heavily contested nature of the construction within 8(b) is plainly evident in the response to this Bill, and in years of discussion and argument about how “liberty” should properly be represented in the laws that govern society.

By the same token, other Principles that might be widely held as important to responsible regulation by key constituencies, such as consideration of Te Tiriti or climate crisis, are entirely absent. 

This Bill is an attempt to leapfrog political debate and embed a particular political position within the legislative process. This is improper, in that it treats an active debate as a settled one. It is antidemocratic, in that it attempts to legally privilege some perspectives over others. And finally, and most importantly, it is unwise, in that it will lead inevitably to this legislation either being repealed entirely, or becoming a repository for an endlessly revised set of principles that reflect the political goals of the government of the day. 

This reason alone is enough to strike down this Bill now.

2) Secondly, the Bill proposes a legislative reportiing requirement from Ministers for all proposed new regulations, and then builds an elaborate further system complete with a newly constituted Board, in order to achieve its aims. Even on those principles that might be broadly held (e.g. 8(i) on the importance of consultation with those affected by law), the structure imposed by this Bill would be far in excess of what is demanded by the problem. Principle 8(l) says legislation should be the most effective, efficient, and proportionate response to the issue concerned that is available; this system is none of those things, but instead creates work for a fresh bureaucracy. Other avenues that are more effective, efficient, and proportionate exist: taking the pressure off the public service to do more, faster, with fewer people, for example. Policy makers in public service are highly skilled and highly principled but wildly overstretched, and dealing with that is surely the most obvious first step to address the problem claimed by this Bill.

This reason, too, is sufficient to strike down the Bill.

This Bill should not be progressed, as it is improper, antidemocratic, unwise, and unnecessary. It is badly conceived and would make bad law.

Submission on the Treaty Principles Bill

Submitted on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, on the official website. Submissions remain open until 7 January.

The Treaty Principles Bill would be disastrous to the future wellbeing of Aotearoa and should be rejected with sufficient force and clarity as to damage any future attempt to revive it.

I endorse the submissions of many other organisations, and also the advice of the Waitangi Tribunal and the Regulatory Impact Statement from the Ministry of Justice, as to the deficiencies of this Bill. In particular, I oppose this Bill’s attempt to remove indigenous rights by referendum.

Indigenous rights do exist, as an historical fact by virtue of the Treaty arrangement made between two peoples on the European settlement of Aotearoa, as a legal fact by virtue of international jurisprudence around Treaty and colonisation law, and as an ethical fact by virtue of the natural justice that must accrue to the descendants of those harmed and deprived by systematic exploitation approved by the colonial government. The Bill’s purpose is ill-founded.

Furthermore, putting indigenous rights to public referendum is a grotesque proposal given the extensive popular misunderstanding of crucial facts about this nation’s history and the well-founded grievances of Māori. These misunderstandings are loudly encouraged by bad actors fomenting social division for varied self-serving reasons, and by an international context of so-called ‘culture war’ that is clouding our ability to perceive and manage ourselves as a distinct nation. In such an environment of loud but misplaced opinion, a public referendum poses a profound risk of creating injustice.

Even accepting the premise of the Bill that the Treaty Principles should be revised, a good faith effort to do so in the manner proposed could only begin by launching an extensive effort to educate and inform citizens about Aotearoa New Zealand history, de-prioritise contrarian disinformation sources, and speak honestly about what our society really is. In the absence of any attempt at such a project, it is necessary to conclude that this Bill is presented in bad faith, as an attempt to take advantage of misinformed public sentiment to remove the proper rights of a people who remain disadvantaged by profound and systematic harms. 

There is no place for this Bill. It can do no good, only harm. 

Government of Reckons

They reckon the governmental budget is like a household budget.

They reckon ‘tough love’ is the way to motivate beneficiaries.

They think boot camps are going to fix young offenders.

They reckon the clean car discount didn’t actually work.

They reckon world-leading smokefree legislation wasn’t going to work.

They reckon Three Waters co-governance was anti-democratic.

They reckon giving ACT the nod to undermine the constitutional basis of the country won’t actually matter because they’ll stop the bill eventually.

These are the reckons you produce when you don’t actually know what you’re on about. These are reckons that get embarrassed by the most basic research. These, of course, are reckons most loudly voiced by idiot racists and arrogant populists.

Either the new government are proudly sharing these genuine reckons because they are that stupid; or they are cynically sharing their pretend reckons because they are eager for the support of bigoted fools. (There is no shortage of reckon-happy voices in the media who will be happy to protect this government from the consequences of its failures.)

Either way, they must think it doesn’t matter whether or not they are wrong, and who will be hurt as a result. They don’t care about families doing it tough, or people on a benefit, or anyone hurt by youth offending, or meeting climate change targets, or reducing smoking in communities, or the nature of democratic participation, or the importance of the Treaty at the heart of this nation.

This is easily the most embarrassing and pathetic and inadequate and unserious government this country has endured in my lifetime. Probably for generations before that as well.

Bunch of eggs, the lot of them.

For f**k’s sake please vote in the local elections

(Asterisks included above for the sake of content filters on work computers. Is that still a thing? It used to be a thing.)

The sun is out, the buds are on the trees, and every main road is suddenly lined with signs showing unfamiliar faces saying VOTE FOR ME! You know what that means: it’s local election time!

Soon an envelope will arrive and you will put it on the stack of things you will definitely get to, and then SMASH CUT to like two months later and you find the envelope again and you never even opened it, and you have a little chuckle at yourself because, hey! It’s only local government, right?

Well I have something to say: NOT THIS YEAR, BUDDY-O! Heck no! This year you’re gonna open that envelope and vote! Because this year your local government elections are the front line of a crucial fight!

Your local elections vote has never had as much riding on it!

You will of course have noticed that things have gone a bit… weird in the last few years. Like, David Bowie died in January 2016 and it all kind of went wrong from there? Of course things were quietly going wrong a long time before that, but in 2016 the wrongness got hold of a vuvuzela and now it’s Blaring Loud Wrongness, Keeping You Up At Night.

And all that wrongness is going to smash right into your local government. Unless you stop it.

Here are two urgent, crucial problems that show why voting matters extra bigly this time.

Problem 1: The allies of fascism are infiltrating government

That description reads like hyperbole, the kind of overheated claims you’d find in the weird corners of Indymedia in 2001. It is honestly a bit hard to accept that this is where we are now.

But we are. If you haven’t already, take the time to review the Stuff Circuit investigation by Paula Penfold & colleagues, Fire and Fury: Disinformation in New Zealand. The hourlong documentary is an intense and sobering watch.

Image from Fire & Fury (Stuff)

A very active set of agitators are busy every day spreading disinformation, fomenting hatred, putting violence on the table. They are chewing on the table legs of our society.

Standing for local election was an idea that circulated widely through these networks, with the explicit aim of making the country ungovernable. As a result, many candidates aligned with conspiratorial views, or worse, have entered local election races. Most of these have kept their affiliations secret.

If elected, they will haul water for this country’s rising ring of fascist agitators. They will disrupt government and provide a platform for fascist recruitment and organising.

We have to vote to keep them out.

(Again, I can hardly believe that I am typing this as a fair description of what is taking place in this country, but that’s where we are. The long 2016 is a deeply weird time to be alive.)

Problem 2: Climate change is local now

Climate change has been a challenge for a long time (I’ve been writing about it on this blog since it was an email newsletter, way back when email newsletters were a thing, oh hey they are a thing again) but we are in a new phase now. Unprecedented weather disasters are finally dragging top-level political actors to the table – heck, even the USA has successfully passed a major climate action bill!

The new urgency is this: dealing with climate change at street level. All those slips around the Hutt and Wellington are a portent of things to come, unexpected trouble all over. We need to build resilience! Our councils need people who are prepared to be prepared.

Image from this Stuff article, Why are there so many slips in Wellington?

But that’s just a side issue compared to the real challenge ahead: massive community transformation!

We need to redesign our towns and cities into new forms. For example, we need a completely new approach to transport. Public transport and active transport have to become the easiest and best ways to get around our communities!

Local and regional government will be forced to make some very big calls, soon. (In fact they are already doing this!) Over the next five years, decisions made by your local body will decide the future shape of your community.

These will be some of the most consequential and far-reaching decisions ever made by local government! Your council needs people who are prepared to be brave.

We have to vote for them.

Heck yeah I’m gonna do the thing, except how??

You’re gonna do the thing! You’re going to vote! So… what now?

  • START A TEAM-UP! You probably have a few trusted friends who live in the same electoral area as you? Ask if they want to team up on figuring out who to vote for. Many hands make light the work, and more fun the work too. Small group action: this is the way.
  • IDENTIFY THE ROCKING GOOD CANDIDATES! You can’t downvote the infiltrators, so you have to help the super-sweet candidates to out-compete them! This election guide covering all candidates is essential: plug in your address and it tells you who is standing for what in your area.
  • TELL YOUR NETWORKS! Personal recommendations are THE most powerful thing in local body elections. People will generally pay attention to what they hear from friends and neighbours, much more than from any other source. So don’t do the hard work of figuring out who to vote for, only to keep it all to yourself! Instead, get the word out!

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF TELLING YOUR NETWORKS

Karen ‘Kaz’ Yung – photo from the election guide website

Here’s who I am backing in the Hutt City Council elections: Karen Yung, a.k.a. Kaz.

Kaz is standing for council in the city-wide field, not tied to any specific ward. So she’s going to be on the ballot paper for everyone here, all across Hutt City.

I’m going to give her a tick because I am impressed by her commitment to ground-level community engagement, and because I like her focus on addressing the challenges of climate change.

I voted for her last elections too. She almost got into council then and I am confident her reputation has only increased since. I have followed her on Facebook over the last few years, while she has continued to be very active in the community and has served on the Petone Community Board. She’s just a really good candidate and will be an exciting new voice on council.

Check out Kaz’s entry in the election guide mentioned above.

And you can see what she’s up to and where to meet her on her Facebook campaign page.

If you’re in the Hutt, make sure you consider Karen Yung at voting time!

Guest Post: Love Matters

It’s second vote day for the Marriage Equality Bill, & an old friend of mine has a few thoughts about that. The video Craig and his husband Marcel made, at the bottom of the post, is worth watching and sharing. Tell your elected representatives that love matters!

In the past I could not relate the idea of being gay to pride. I remember seeing gay pride campaigns and not understanding the connection between being gay and pride. I no more felt proud being a Kiwi or Pakeha or gay or having blue eyes for that matter. They are all simply ways of describing the attributes of who I am, they weren’t something I had earned, and therefore there was no way to be proud of them.

Today I have a better sense of what pride means. It’s not pride at what I’ve accomplished. It’s pride that I am entitled to and should be given the same respect as everyone else. It’s as simple as this: everyone is entitled to be respected for who they are and treated the same under the law. Some call it pride. I call it respect and civility.

Discrimination is a form of cancer in society. It causes people to feel disenfranchised and isolated, and reinforces ill-treatment of the target group. In my opinion, this prevents a society from ever reaching its full potential.

I know first hand what it was like to be bullied…relentlessly for being gay, and laws that discriminate against gay people indirectly and implicitly reinforce this behaviour. Young LGBT suicides are an absolute tragedy, as are any youth suicides. A society built on acceptance and respect instead of fear and discrimination nurtures and fosters our youth. We owe it to them. We owe it to ourselves.

We have been together now for 15 years, and I look forward to the day when the most interesting thing about that is not the fact we are a same-sex couple, but how it is that he has put up with me for this long.

I’m looking forward to the next 15 years, but this time being your NZ husband.

P.s. No Winston Peters, human rights are not a question of popular vote. Human rights are a question of entitlement and respect. Same-sex marriage is not impinging on the human rights of any other section of society and your job as an elected representative is to protect human rights, not to deflect attention away from the real point of the discussion: State-endorsed discrimination. Tsk tsk.

However, you know what? Even if it came to a popular vote, I have confidence Kiwis would support it.

Thanks Craig!

Good for the Greens

Three years ago, I was disillusioned about the low % of votes cast for the Green party, despite what I thought was a perfect set of conditions for them to thrive. “Is 7% as high as it’s ever going to get? Will the Green party always be this small?”

Turns out the people in the comments who said, nope, it can go bigger – they were right. The Green vote is sitting around 11% this time around.

It’s a marvellous result for them, even if it sits in the context of an election result that doesn’t give much to celebrate – very low turnout, a savage defeat for the main opposition Labour party, key losses for the left in almost every close electorate contest, and (most galling) the ridiculous spectacle of consummate politician (and political opportunist) Winston Peters riding in at the last moment and polling nearly 7% in doing so.

It’s a clear success for the new approach taken by the Greens, a careful don’t-scare-the-horses, friendlier-to-business model that has drawn a lot of criticism from their base. Ultimately I’m comfortable with this; given the failure of the big parties to engage with urgent environmental problems, the Greens need to be a party of influence, and if they have to sell some of their soul to get there then that seems like a political calculation they need to make.

A less-scary Green party also opens up space on the left for a true social justice party to come in and be vocal about those causes. The Mana party is the first shot at this, but I’m not yet confident it can hold together under the strain of the big personalities at its core; only winning one seat might be a blessing for the longer game.

Anyway. The country voted John Key back into power, despite polls showing they don’t really like his policies and don’t really know much about the rest of his party. That’s not a great endorsement for the NZ version of democracy, I guess.

Gonna be a tough three years.

(I also predicted “Many inside the Nats are eager to get on with their 90s-era project while they have their hands on the tiller. Expect big battles inside the National party as the ideologues take on the pragmatists.” – and the view from the outside is that I was wrong about that. There might be battles inside the party but almost nothing has leaked out into public view, it’s all a united front behind that nice Mr Keys. Anyway, with a second term won while openly campaigning on asset sales and welfare reform, the pragmatists and ideologues now find themselves happily in alignment. The waiting game has worked out beautifully for them.)

Election ’11: Something you can do

In our MMP electoral system, every vote matters.

Social psychology tells us that the biggest influence on our behaviour is the behaviour of people we know.

Our day-to-day social groups usually share our opinions on political matters, but Facebook (and, to a lesser extent, other social media tools) connects many of us to people beyond this.

So here’s a simple thing you can do before the election: announce on social media how you’re going to vote. Perhaps also say why if you can sum it up in a sentence. No big song and dance required, no need to engage in arguments if people reply. Just speak up.

It will count.