Four months ago, a group of lawyers in Aotearoa New Zealand called for a little reported inquiry into New Zealand spy agencies over whether there has been possible assistance for Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a letter to the chief of intelligence and security (IGIS) on 12 September 2024, three lawyers argued that the country was in danger of aiding international war crimes, reported RNZ News.

Inspector-General Brendan Horsley, who had previously indicated he would look into conflict-related spying this year, confirmed he would consider the request, according to the report.

• READ MORE: Behind settler colonial NZ’s paranoia about dissident ‘persons of interest’
• Other SIS security reports

At least one of the lawyers had been confident of a positive response, said the news report.

“I’m actually very optimistic,” noted University of Auckland associate professor Treasa Dunworth in the media interview about their argument that New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) intelligence might be making its way to Israel via the US, “because our request is very, detailed, backed up with credible evidence, [and] is very careful.”

But she got a disappointing result. The following month, on October 9 — just seven weeks before the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity — Inspector-General Horsley ruled out an inquiry at this time.

He said in a statement he did not want to “stop the clock” and tie up his office’s “modest resources to a deeper review of activity I have already been monitoring” while armed conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine were currently “active and dynamic”.

Rapid deterioration
Yet rapidly the 15-month Israeli war has deteriorated since then with President-elect Donald Trump due to take office in Israel’s main backer the United States later this month on January 20.

As the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens with intensified attacks on hospitals and civilians, a breakdown of law and order at the border, and more than 50 complaints filed against Israel soldiers for war crimes in multiple countries, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has urged medical professionals worldwide to sever all ties with the pariah state.

I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide.#FreeDrHussanAbuSafiya https://t.co/qzZ7CqufI6

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) December 30, 2024

Ironically, the New Zealand intelligence “debate” has coincided with the publication of a new book that has debunked the view that the SIS and GCSB have been working in the interests of New Zealand. The reality, argues social justice movement historian and activist Maire Leadbeater in The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of the State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand is that these agencies have been working in the interests of the so-called “Five Eyes” partners, including the United States.

Her essential argument in this robust and comprehensive 427-page book is that New Zealand’s state surveillance has been part of a structure of state control that “serves to undermine movements for social change and marginalise or punish those who challenge the established order. It had a deeply destructive impact on democracy.”

As she states, her primary focus is on the work of New Zealand’s main intelligence agencies, the SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) “and their forerunners, the political police”.

The author explains that she is not concerned with the “socially useful work of the contemporary police in the detection of criminal activity, including politically motivated crime”. She notes also that unlike the domestic spies, police detection work is subject to detailed warrants, there is due process over arrests, and the process is open to public scrutiny.

Leadbeater points out that while New Zealand experience with terrorism has been limited, neither of the country’s two main intelligence agencies were much help in investigating the three notorious examples — the unsolved 1984 Wellington Trades Hall bombing that killed one, the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland that also killed one (but the casualties could easily have been higher), and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that murdered 51.

The regular police were the key investigators in all three cases.

Also, there is the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.

Working for ‘Five Eyes’ interests
Instead of working for the benefit of New Zealand, the intelligence agencies were set up to work closely with the country’s traditional allies and the so-called “Five Eyes” network — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

An example of this was Algerian professor and parliamentarian Ahmed Zaoui who arrived in New Zealand in 2002 as an asylum seeker after a military coup against the elected government in his home country. Within nine days of arriving, his confidentiality was breached and he was falsely branded by The New Zealand Herald as an “international terrorism suspect”.

He was jailed for two years without charge (part of that time held in solitary confinement) because of an SIS-imposed National Security Risk certificate and this could have have led to “deportation of this honourable man” but for the tireless work of his lawyers and a well-informed public campaign, as told by Leadbeater in this book, and also by journalist Selwyn Manning in his 2004 book I Almost Forgot about the Moon: The Disinformation Campaign Against Ahmed Zaoui.

Set free and granted asylum, he later became a New Zealand citizen in 2014. (However, on a visit to Algeria in 2023 he was arrested at gunpoint in a house in Médéa and charged with “subversion”).

Leadbeater says a strong case could be made that New Zealand’s democracy “would be stronger and more viable without the repressive laws that currently support the secretive operations of the SIS and the GCSB”. The author laments that the resources and focus of the intelligence agencies have focused too much, and wastefully, on ordinary people who are perceived to be “dissenters”.

“Dissent is the lifeblood of democracy but SIS operations targeted many of our brightest and best, damaging their personal and professional lives in the process,” Leadbeater says.

Among those who have been targeted have been the author herself, and others in her “left-wing family milieu” — including her late brother longtime Green Party foreign affairs spokesperson Keith Locke, as well as her parents Elsie and Jack, originally Communist Party activists prior to 1956.

The core of the book is based on primary sources, including declassified police records held in the National Archives and the declassified records of the SIS which have been released to individual activists – including her and she discovered she had been spied on since the age of 10 due to state paranoia.

At the launch of her book in Auckland last November, guest speaker and retired First Union general secretary Robert Reid — whose file also features in the book — said what a fitting way the narrative begins by outlining the important role the Locke family have played in Aotearoa over the many years.

The final chapter is devoted to another “Person of interest: Keith Locke” – “Maire’s much-loved friend and comrade.”

“In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country,” Reid said.

“The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.”

Surveillance stories and files
Among others whose surveillance stories and files have been featured are trade unionist and former Socialist Action League activist Mike Treen; Halt All Racist Tours founder Trevor Richards; economics lecturer Dr Wolfgang Rosenberg’s sons George and Bill; Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) organiser Murray Horton; antiwar activist and Peace Movement research Owen Wilkes; investigative journalist Nicky Hager; Dr Bill Sutch, who was tried and acquitted on a charge laid under the Official Secrets Act in 1975; and internet entrepreneur and political activist Kim Dotcom.

State paranoia in New Zealand was driven by issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, decolonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought.

Leadbeater reflects that she had never accepted that “anyone in my family ever threatened state security. Moreover, the solidarity, antinuclear and anti-apartheid organisations that I took part in should not have been spied on. Such groups were and are a vital part of a healthy democracy.”

At one stage when many activists were seeking copies of their surveillance files in the mid-2000s through OIA requests or later under the Privacy Act, I also applied due to my association with several of the protagonists in this book and my involvement as a writer on decolonisation and environmental justice issues.

I merely received a “neither confirm or deny” form letter on the existence of a file, and never bothered to reapply later when information became more readily available.

But I have had my own brushes with surveillance and threatened arrest as a journalist in global settings such as New Caledonia, including when I was detained by soldiers in January 1987 for taking photographs of French military camps for a planned report about the systematic intimidation of pro-independence Kanak villagers.

This was perfectly legal, of course, and the attempt by authorities to silence me did not work; my articles appeared on the front page of the New Zealand Sunday Times the following weekend and featured on the cover of Fiji’s Islands Business news magazine.

Watched become the watchers
The structure of The Enemy Within is in three parts. As the author explains, the first part focuses on the period from 920 to the end of the First World War, and the second on the impact of the Cold War and the Western anti-communist hysteria between 1945 and 1955.

The final part covers the period from 1955 to the present, when the intelligence and security services have been under greater public scrutiny and faced campaigns for their reform or abolition.

As Leadbeater notes, “the watched, to some extent, have become the watchers”.

Because of my Asia-Pacific and decolonisation interests, I found a chapter on “colonial repression in Samoa” and the Black Saturday massacre of the Mau resistance of particular interest and a shameful stain on NZ history.

As Leadbeater notes, it was an “unexpected find in the Archives New Zealand” to stumble across a record of the surveillance of the “citizens who mounted an opposition to the New Zealand government’s colonial rule in Samoa”.

She pays tribute to the “vibrant solidarity movement” in the late 1920s and early 1930s, inspired by the peaceful Mau movement and its motto “Samoa mo Samoa” — Samoa for the Samoans — in their resistance to New Zealand’s colonial project.

This solidarity movement was in the face of a “prevailing attitude of white settlement” and its leaders were influenced by the Parihaka resistance of the 1880s.

Leadbeater is critical of New Zealand media, such as The New Zealand Herald, for siding with the colonial establishment and becoming “positively hostile to the Mau movement”.

New Zealand administrators under the League of Mandate to govern Samoa following German rule were arrogant and regarded Samoans as “inferior” and were “aghast” at Samoan and European leaders collaborating in resistance.

Black Saturday massacre
On 28 December 1929, what became dubbed the “Black Saturday massacre” happened in Apia. A peaceful Mau procession marches to the Apia wharf to welcome home exiled trader Alfred Smyth.

Police tried to arrest the Mau secretary, Mata’ūtia Karaunu, but the marchers protected him. More police were despatched to “assert colonial authority”, shots were fired at the crowd and in the upheaval a police constable was clubbed to death.

A police sergeant the fired a Lewis machine gun from the police station over the heads of the crowd, while other police fired directly into the crowd with their rifles.

Paramount chief Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, dressed in white and calling for peace, was mortally wounded and at least eight other marchers were also killed. The massacre was chronicled in journalist Michael Field’s books Mau and later Black Saturday: New Zealand’s Tragic Blunders in Samoa.

Protests followed and the Mau Movement was declared a “seditious organisation” and the wearing of Mau outfits or badges became illegal.

A crackdown ensued on Mau activists with heavy surveillance and harassment and in New Zealand public figures and community leaders called for an “independent inquiry into Samoan affairs”.

Eventually, the Labour Party victory in the 1935 elections changed the dynamic and the following year the Mau was recognised as a legitimate political movement.

After the Second World War, New Zealand became committed to self-government in Western Samoa with indigenous custom and tradition “as an important foundation”. However, full independence did not come until 1962.

Four decades later, in 2002, Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologised to the people of Samoa for the “inept and incompetent early administration of Samoa by New Zealand”.

She cited officials allowing the “influenza” ship Talune to dock in Apia in 1918, and the Black Saturday massacre as key examples of this incompetence.

However, Leadbeater notes that the “saga of surveillance and sedition charges” outlined in her book could well be added to the list. She adds that Samoans remember the Mau Movement and its martyrs with “pride and gratitude”.

“For New Zealanders, this chapter in our colonial history is one of shame that should be far better known and understood. The New Zealand Samoa Defence League was ahead of its time, and thankfully so.”

Behind settler colonial #NZ’s paranoia about dissident ‘persons of interest’ | #AsiaPacificReport #MaireLeadbeater #progressivebooks #RobertReid @miketreen #statesurveillance #dissidents #statespying @JohnJohnminto https://t.co/B9qws9s1La pic.twitter.com/5ELHTIDv4l

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) November 9, 2024

Looking for ‘subversives’ in wrong places
Leadbeater notes in her book that the SIS budget alone in 2021 was about $100 million with about 400 staff. Yet the intelligence services have been spending this sport of money for more than a century looking for “subversives and terrorists” — but in the wrong places.

This book is an excellent tribute to the many activists and dissidents who have had their lives disrupted and hounded by state spies, and is essential reading for all those committed to transparent democracy.

Following her section on more contemporary events and massive surveillance failures and wrongs, such as the 2007 Tūhoe raids, Leadbeater calls for a massive rethink on New Zealand’s approach to security.

“It is time to leave crime, including terrorist crime, to the country’s police and court system, with their built-in accountability procedures,” she concludes.

“It is time for the state to stop spying on society’s critics.”

• The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater. Potton & Burton, 2024. 427 pages.

Sex

Whoever would have predicted that the definition of ‘male’ and ‘female’ could ever become a matter of contention? My professional life has been in political economy, which includes social science and humanities: philosophy, economics, history, statistics, demography, and geography. Demography in particular, requires a biological definition.

The objective science of sex is simple, and genetic. Males have a Y-sex-chromosome as well as an X-sex-chromosome; females instead have two X-sex-chromosomes. To get around the fact that some people want to play-down this observation, commentators and politicians often refer to sex as ‘biological sex’ or ‘sex assigned at birth’. Some organisations refer to ‘gender’ when they mean ‘sex’. Statistics New Zealand doesn’t have any of these problems; for example, the first set of data in the New Zealand cohort life tables: March 2023 update is simply labelled ‘Estimated births, deaths, net migration by sex‘.

Confusion exists because there is a different concept, ‘gender’, which also uses male-female categorisation. When it is necessary to avoid confusion, a person’s sex may be characterised as their ‘genetic sex’ (or ‘reproductive sex’) rather than their biological sex; this is because ‘gender’ may also have a biological basis, and some people whose gender differs from their sex may gave gained this gender variation at conception, in the womb before birth, or even in the birth process itself.

Gender

Gender differs from sex in that it is subjective. A sense of divergent identity from within may arise from any mix of biological or cultural influences. On the biological side, possible influences include aspects of the species genome other than the Y-chromosome, environmental influences within the mother’s uterus, and the birth process itself (eg caesarean birth versus natural birth). Endocrinological and neurological variation can occur before, during, or after birth. One important driver of this gender variability is most likely the microbiome: the changing bacteria and other microbes which inhabit especially the gut, the brain, and the birth canal.

Unlike sex, a binary concept, gender is a spectral concept. And gender is not fixed for all time, it’s fluid. The microbiome is mutable; cultural memes amplify, deamplify and reamplify over time.

It seems to me that a good way for demographers to document gender is through a scale from one to nine. One through to three could be characterised as ‘female gender’, four-to-six as ‘non-binary gender’, and seven-to-nine as ‘male gender’. So a somewhat ‘macho’ male might be described as ‘male sex, male (9) gender. And some ‘trans’ women might be best described as ‘male sex, female (3) gender. For short, for data-coding purposes, these two example people could be listed as ‘m9’ and ‘m3’. F1 through to f3 would translate to ‘cis-female’ in the jargon now used by many as gender identifiers. The mere use of this new jargon is of itself a cultural self-identifier.

It is important to note that the prefixes ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ do indicate that the gender-diverse community does in fact make the distinction between sex and gender, and therefore does not fully deny the reality of genetic sex; the issue is deemphasis, not denial. The issue that impassions that community seems to be to render the concept of sex as unimportant, even unnecessary. But, in the sciences of biology, demography and epidemiology, sex can never be redundant.

Demography

The ‘bread and butter’ of demography is reproduction, migration and death. In this context, ‘age’ and ‘location’ are the most important statistical characteristics of people.

‘Sex’ is in the next tranche of important demographic variables, because genetic sex is an important determinant of the reproduction of populations. Sex should be an easy identifier, because sex is an objective attribute; a person’s genetic sex is a matter of observation, just as whether a person has died is a matter of observation.

Another second-tranche demographic variable is ‘ethnicity’, although to be objective it needs to be ‘ancestry’, and ancestry is often not fully-known. (Many people not know who both of their biological parents are, let-alone their great grand-parents; some people do not know that they do not know this information.) In early United States censuses, the description of a person as ‘black’ or ‘white’ was regarded as central to their demographic identity as whether they were male or female. There certainly is an argument, nowadays with most people having multiple ethnicities of different proportions, that ethnicity should be treated as a subjective ‘third-tranche’ demographic variable. Likewise, religion. (The counterargument is that people who are substantially of a single ethnicity, or who were born into particular religions, do have life outcomes – maybe health outcomes or culturally-determined food choices – which reflect in part the ethnic genetics or religious faiths of their parents.) The important thing is that persons’ designated ancestries or religions should never become the basis for differences in their democratic rights. Demographic attributes should be kept separate from democratic attributes (with the exception of the designation of a young person as a ‘minor’).

Gender, a subjective attribute, distinct from sex, may nevertheless be important in a number of social studies. From a demographic viewpoint, gender may be classed as a third-tranche variable. It may be an interesting scientific question to compare and contrast the life experiences of genetic females (ie people without a Y-chromosome) who are gender-female, gender male, or gender non-binary. Likewise, the gender-diverse life-outcomes of genetic males.

Demography is a very important, though underappreciated, social science; a sibling discipline to epidemiology, and also to human geography. Optimal public health outcomes depend on good-quality demographic research. (Demography provides the all-important denominators needed to make sense of public health data.) Further, like all social-science disciplines, demography is intrinsically historical. Demography is closely intertwined with the disciplines of economic history and economics.

Identity Documentation

Sex or gender are widely used in identity documents; too widely, perhaps. For important demographic purposes, sex is necessary in birth certificates, death certificates, and documents used for travelling between countries (especially passports, now the basis for statistics of international migration). Demographers need to know the age and sex distributions of countries’ populations to be able to make population projections. (I congratulate Statistics New Zealand for well-crafted questions on sex and gender in the recent 2023 New Zealand census.)

Additionally, some kind of reliable documentation should be available for persons using spaces which are reserved for specific demographic subgroups. (We should note that women should not be too precious about ‘their spaces’. Those of us old enough remember the racially segregated toilets that used to exist in South Africa and parts of the USA; many white women and white men did not like their spaces to be transgressed by black women and men. Nevertheless, there is no argument at present for the removal of remaining reserved spaces.)

Does a person need to declare their sex or gender if, say, buying a flight ticket, or enrolling at an educational establishment? (How do the recipients of this information use it? Do they use it?) Sex may be useful on a document used to determine entry into restricted spaces. It may be worthwhile to have a bespoke identity document – a voluntary document – that helps people who need to inform others of their sex, gender or age.

The gender-diverse community wishes to play down excessive gendering in our administrative lives, and, for the most part, prefers to have access to unisex toilets rather than have to use sex-exclusive facilities. (Ask any parent with a young child of the ‘opposite’ sex about gauntlets they have had to run re public toilets. Unisex toilets, much more common today than last century, represent commonsense progress.) If, when buying an airline ticket, does the airline really want to know a person’s sex or gender? Yes, maybe; knowledge of their passengers’ sexes (but not genders) could help an airline to estimate the take-off weight of an aircraft.

Finally, in this section on documentation, we probably should not be using birth documents as general identity documents. While a passport should refer to birth documentation (which should designate ‘sex’), I see no reason why other identification documents – eg documents used by banks – need such information. Thankfully, we do not require a person’s ‘race’ on a drivers’ licence or an airline ticket.

Cultural Wars I

In noting that ‘gender’ is very much a subjective attribute of people (and not only people), that is not saying  there are no biological aspects to gender. Nevertheless, to use modern parlance, the confrontations about sex and gender which we are seeing at present are taking place very much in the human ‘cultural space’.

I was intrigued to read Bryce Edwards’ The ugly stoking of a culture war in election year(Evening Report and others, 27 march 2023). It’s a good non-partisan piece of writing. I was intrigued to see that an academic source to whom Edwards referred was a lawyer called Thomas Cranmer.

Much of my time this year has been spent in reading about the historical origins of modernity. It turns out that the culture wars of the sixteenth century in Europe – otherwise known as the protestant Reformation and the catholic Counterreformation – represent central events that created the global modernity which (for worse and for better) we now take for granted today.

The first true battles of that culture war took place in Tudor England, in particular in the years 1547 and 1558, during the short reigns of the young King Edward VI and then his older sister Queen Mary. (In the kinds of dramas about the Tudor period seen on television and in the movies, this critical and difficult period is rarely touched on. Instead we see various reruns of the 1530s’ story about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and, in the later Tudor period, about the contested lives of Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots.)

A central figure of the mid-sixteenth century cultural war in England was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. In New Zealand, his role in that cultural war is commemorated through the name of Cranmer Square in Christchurch, alongside that of another protestant martyr, Hugh Latimer, who is commemorated in the same city through Latimer Square. This cultural conflict, ostensibly a war of religion but really about much more, lasted a very long time. (Port Chalmers in Otago is named after Thomas Chalmers, a central figure in the Scottish religious schism in the 1840s.) In my historical judgement, this particularly nasty war only ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, Northern Ireland. If we start with Martin Luther in 1517 and end in 1998, we may call this the 481-years-war.

(And a piece of historical trivia that does foreshadow the events in England from the 1530s to the 1550s. So many of the prominent people in England in those days had the given name ‘Thomas’. This is because it became fashionable from the 1470s and 1480s to undertake pilgrimages to the then magnificent shrine of Thomas Becket, archbishop and martyr, who was killed in 1170 at the behest of King Henry II. See the reference to this in Chris Trotter assesses what happened on Saturday at Auckland’s Albert Park and what it means, interest.co.nz, 27 March 2023. Becket won fame for standing up to his king, speaking for the separation of church and state as institutions of authority. Indeed, a number of the later Thomases also met their ends through displeasing their monarchs. It’s too late to visit the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury; King Henry VIII looted it to destruction in 1538.)

It is also important to note that the culture war referred to here peaked in Europe in the period from the 1560s to the 1640s; the military component being the ‘Eighty Years War’ between the Spanish Empire and the ‘rebels’ of the Dutch United Provinces (the forerunner of the modern Netherlands), with the last part of the Eighty Years War also being the descent into near-perpetual violence in central Europe known as the Thirty Years War.

While the Reformation is correctly attributed, more than anyone else, to Marty Luther from 1517, the most important figure in the ensuing culture war was Jean Calvin (cis-male), in Geneva, whose principal publication was in 1539 (the second edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion). Calvin’s disciples became evangelists for his more direct and more strident protestant variant of Christianity, becoming a direct and immediate threat to the established (Catholic) Church as well as to the Lutheran reforms. Much of the British ‘intelligentsia’ quickly became attracted to Calvin’s message. But they had to bide their time as King Henry’s administration of the Church in England became very conservative in his last years.

The evangelicals got their chance when the nine-year-old King Edward ascended the throne. They ‘came out’ and basically ran the country. The rhetorical wars commenced and much of the language was inflammatory and belligerent. The Pope who had hitherto been the leader of the Church was now routinely lambasted as the Anti-Christ, the Devil if you will, and Catholics were rhetorically condemned as ‘papists’. (The result was the creation of a climate of rumour whereby the Devil could be anywhere and in any disguise.)

Much of the conservative Establishment bit their tongues and bid their time. Many clerics had been able to go along with King Henry’s sacrilege of the Church’s property (and many of its clergy) so long as the overall doctrine remained substantially unchanged. Others of the Henrician establishment – mainly the ones who would have been seen as ‘progressive’ but who did not naturally take to belligerence – merged into the world of the radicals after 1547. Thomas Cranmer was prominent among this decreasingly ‘moderate’ group. He wrote the new Church prayerbook to fit the new prevailing culture.

Everything changed again when Edward died, aged 15, in 1553. With no male contenders for the throne, the Edwardine radicals tried to install a cousin – Jane Grey – as Queen. But the peasants – the ordinary folk – would have none of that; and for the most part the people were unconcerned about the escalating culture war. They knew very well that the next in line for the throne was Edward’s older half-sister Mary; they wanted their country’s leaders to abide by the rules (of succession), even when those rules were inconvenient. Basically, 1553 was a case of coup and counter-coup. Jane Grey’s key supporters were dispatched by her opponents, and soon enough she was executed too.

Mary was what we might call a ‘cultural conservative’ and she surrounded herself with those former establishment conservatives who had been biding their time. With the ensuing reinstatement of the ‘Heresy Laws’, things heated up, literally. I will say no more, other than to note that Thomas Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury) became the most renowned victim of this Marian prelude to the Counterreformation. There were many other evangelicals, artisans as well as intellectuals, who chose to die; rather than rejoin the catholic Church, rather than breaking with what they understood as their direct relationship with God. Passions prevailed over pragmatism.

Queen Mary and the ensuing Archbishop of Canterbury (Reginal Pole) both died on 17 November 1558, victims of a pandemic that had all the hallmarks of a coronavirus much like the Covid19 virus. The culture war in England subsequently defused, under the new Elizabethan administration. That defusal in England was facilitated by the self-exile of culture radicals and counter-radicals to Europe, especially to the lands we now call Belgium. And it was there in the 1560s that the religious massacres in Europe really got underway.

Culture Wars 2

I tell the above story as a cautionary warning about how matters can escalate in a culture war when the participants are intentionally inflammatory, belligerent, provocative, and intolerant of people who see certain issues differently. And for too many of the people who could be debating the issues to be intimidated into silence instead. Inflammatory speech, which overlaps with the contemporary concept of ‘hate-speech’, is a form of violence that can have profound consequences. (In the Nazi context, an important consequence was the Holocaust.) Inflammatory speech includes comments – especially comments about groups of people – that are true, but which are said for the purposes of initiating or exacerbating a cultural conflict.

The principal issue in today’s culture war, as I see it, is the determination of a small group of people to eradicate the demographic concept of sex – of genetic sex, of XY sex – as an identity marker.

The most poignant moment that I saw in the television coverage of the events in Auckland on Saturday (refer to Bryce Edwards and Chris Trotter above) was of an older (though not elderly) woman – probably dismissed by the cultural radicals as a TERF – with a placard which simply read:

• XX = female
• XY = male

Completely and incontestably true. The foundation facts of reproductive biology. And not in any way inflammatory.

Yet this placard-holder was crowded out, disrespectfully, by others a generation-and-a-half younger than her. Few people with access to the news media that most people see or hear have spoken-up to support her message. “Bad things happen when good people remain silent.”

And to those who unknowingly or knowingly aggravate the problems which they claim to be addressing, remember the first law of holes: ‘Stop digging’. Like other wars, culture wars drag on because few protagonists of these conflicts have a vision for what success actually looks like. If you must instigate or perpetuate a culture war, then please at least lay out your vision of your utopia. In particular, how should your cultural enemies live and behave? Should your cultural enemies live?

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

This 21st century epoch is coming to be one of ‘existential crises’, meaning that various large-scale dangers are increasingly coming to be seen to threaten ‘our’ existence, where ‘our’ most commonly relates to people, but may also relate to multicellular life on Earth. An existential catastrophe might fall short of human extinction; a loss of civilisation would also qualify.

The greatest threats to humanity?

In May on RNZ (Radio New Zealand), Toby Ord discussed a whole range of threats, but emphasised ‘man-made’ threats of human origin over geological and celestial risks such as volcanoes, earthquakes, and asteroids. In his discussion, pandemics were treated as essentially ‘man-made’.

The main existential threats of human origin mentioned were – in no particular order – pandemics, artificial intelligence, climate change, world war, and global poverty. The latter – global poverty – was particularly noted as a problem of ‘moral paralysis’. He believes that “if global poverty was to no longer exist [in the future] at the current levels it was it now, then people would look back and be dumbfounded by the moral paralysis of people”.

While he said, “it was crucial to devote resources to ensure we do not fail the future or past generations”, it is not clear that the form of ‘effective altruism’ that he subscribes to is the answer to the conundrum posed. In our cynical world, we are much better at identifying problems than at actually addressing them.

The Social Dilemma

I watched this Netflix feature documentary about social media and artificial intelligence – The Social Dilemma – a few days ago. The trailer finishes: “If technology creates mass chaos, loneliness, more polarisation, more election hacking, less ability to focus on the real issues, [then] we’re toast. This is checkmate on humanity.”

The existential issue here is the way that, in commercial societies, the mass of people are manipulated (‘influenced’, ‘nudged’) to behave in ways that enable a small elite to successfully pursue the petty yet destructive end of ‘making money’. (In market economies, money works as a ‘means’, not as an ‘end’.) While advertising and other forms of persuasion and guided misinformation have been around for as long as people have existed – and there’s also plenty of deception practiced in nature by other species – the nature of 21st century social media technology makes the processes of manipulation and deception so much faster and more overwhelming. The manipulators now have the means to ‘win’ by creating something akin to a monetary black hole, an outcome that represents the destruction of manipulated and manipulators alike.

This is the ‘artificial intelligence’ variant of the ‘moral paralysis’ problem identified by Ord.

Non-Existence

Of course, to properly understand existence, we have to have some sense of non-existence. Human extinction is no more non-existence than is the death – or non-birth – of an individual person. To appreciate the boundaries of the universe – boundaries in time and space – many of us turn to cosmologists and their astrophysicist colleagues.

On Sunday, RNZ listeners heard astrophysicist Katie Mack discussing cosmic endings, including the eventual fate of the universe. (Interestingly, although the scenarios posited related to billions of years in the future, listeners were engaging from a human-centric viewpoint, pretty much in denial that humans may well be practically extinct by the year 2525, as the famous song goes, long before any cosmic event could possibly affect us.)

The problem with this scientific approach is that it is unable to give any meaning to the concept of ‘non-existence’. We are left to, sort of, imagine a universe that is infinite in both space and time, and also completely empty of mass and energy. But that’s not non-existence.

For non-existence we have to go outside the realm of physical science, and to imagine a ‘being’ that does not exist; an ‘entity’ that does not exist, except, that is, in the imagination of those with a capacity for abstract thought. Such a ‘being’ is of course ‘God’, Who exists only in the non-physical realms of human experience, and Who therefore is not subject to the laws of physical existence. ‘God’ is a very neat and universal solution to the problem of non-existence, and can be applied through literature or mathematics to all aspects of non-existence; not only to the non-existence of the physical universe.

I learned maths before the era of Google. And I was fortunate to have had the same very very good maths teacher from the third form to the fifth form. (I remember him carefully erasing the blackboard of modular arithmetic calculations, so that the next class to use the classroom would not think that he was mad; in one useful version of modular arithmetic, 7+7=2. I also remember learning about Group Theory, and the reaction of one classmate who cried out “What is the use of this?”; and the story told about how the foundations of Group Theory were rapidly scribbled in 1831 by a 20 year old youth – Évariste Galois – who knew he would die in a duel the following morning. That’s a personal existential crisis, if ever there was one.)

As a young man, there were two numbers that particularly fascinated me. One was googol. In those days, ‘googol’ was unambiguously a number, a very big number. The name was coined by a nine-year old, in 1920, so we should actually be celebrating the centenary of googol this year. A googol is 10¹⁰⁰; that is, 1 followed by 100 zeros. Googol took hold of my youthful imagination. (Actually, since then, the number that fascinates me more, today, is 1 googol minus 1. That’s 100 nines; or IG in post-modern Roman Numerals. Quite easy to write, but I challenge anyone to name that number.)

The other number that truly fascinated (and fascinates) me is the number that, for me, best describes God. It is the solution to the simple equation:

•   x²+1 = 0      (alternatively, this means that x is the square root of minus one)

There is no solution. The solution for x does not exist. But, just as the physical universe (universes?) may be best described mathematically as an 11-dimensional multiverse, this little problem of non-existence is not going to get in the way of a creative mathematician. It turns out that, while non-existent, this particular entity is mathematically useful. Just as God is useful enough to have been imagined. The solution to this little algebraic problem is ‘i’, which stands for ‘imaginary number’; it could also stand for ‘abstract intelligence’. Or for God. God is the intelligent construct of the imagination, that enables us to conceive non-existence in a practical and useful way. Practical abstract intelligence, through mathematics and through faith, was the precursor to civilisation.

Our Maker as an Accountant

This brings me to Judith Collins, putative Prime Minister of a National Party led government.

Two weeks ago, she invoked our Maker in an ambiguous political speech, and proceeded over the next few day to reiterate her belief in God – and to pray in view of the television cameras after she voted.

Collins said that a prominent critic of hers “still needs to meet his Maker”. She subsequently explained that we all die one day, and that we all meet our Maker. This idea is an excellent example of the practical utility of God. The idea is that we should live our lives as if – at our ‘end of life’ – we will have to account for our actions and choices. It’s an idea that no doubt helps many of us to lead better – more moral – lives than we otherwise would.

Accountancy is the world’s oldest profession; no other occupation could be called a profession in the absence of an accounting mindframe. So, it is appropriate that our most practical image of God is as an Accountant Creator, deft in the art of existential double-entry bookkeeping. The cosmic Big Bang is most practically thought of as the Creation of the universe from which nothing (literally nothing) became a universe of matter and energy, and a parallel universe of anti-matter and anti-energy. The end of the universe will be when God’s ledger once again balances at zero on both sides.

The universe is a miracle. Indeed, it is good to have political leaders who believe in miracles. And so, each individual life is also a miracle. It is a matter of practical convenience to think of our Maker as also our Accountant (as distinct from our accountant). We are in our Maker’s debt. Should we pay the debt back? Is that what we do when we meet our maker? Or, could we think as a good life as ‘servicing’ our existential debt?

Should we pay the debt forward instead of paying it back? Paying the debt forward would seem to me to be the central concept that underpins the effective altruism which Toby Ord understands as necessary to get us past the year 2525.

By RNZ News

The sense of national unity felt during the Covid-19 lockdown may disappear as social isolation and economic costs hit home, a report by leading social scientists warns.

Koi Tū: the Centre for Informed Futures from the University of Auckland has released a discussion paper outlining potential difficulties as restrictions lift.

It argues that social cohesion must be a key consideration for policymakers in a post-Covid-19 world.

READ MORE: Al Jazeera coronavirus live updates – Some countries begin easing lockdowns

Koi Tū director Sir Peter Gluckman said the level of community compliance and collective purpose shown during the fight against Covid-19 has rarely been seen outside wartime.

He warned this would likely begin to waver as the country moved out of the acute phase and the implications of the lockdown became apparent.

“Already, we’re seeing a rise in tension between conflicting economic and health interests. Sectors are starting to compete for attention. Some are in hurry to return to a pre-covid life; others see the opportunity for a major reset,” Sir Peter said.

“Many lives have been fundamentally changed, and for those people, the new ‘normal’ is full of huge uncertainty. That is where social cohesion will start to break down and the mental well-being of many will be further affected.”

Enhanced cohesion
As well as Sir Peter, the paper was written by Professor Paul Spoonley, Anne Bardsley, Tracey McIntosh, Rangimarie Hunia, Sarb Johal and Richie Poulton and informed by a larger group of mental health experts.

Professor Spoonley said enhanced cohesion was often seen in the initial response to major crises as communities pulled together against a common threat.

However, as the situation evolved over time, social cohesion could be lost and may even become worse than before the crisis.

“We cannot be complacent. Social cohesion is a major asset for New Zealand. A cohesive, safe and Covid-free country will enhance New Zealand’s global reputation and help project our place in the world – with positive flow on effects for our economy,” he said.

“But once lost, it becomes extremely difficult to restore, especially when there is both increased uncertainty and new forms of inequality.”

Sir Peter said that in the coming months and years, there would be many decisions made by government, individuals and businesses to recover from the crisis.

There would be a need to look for the advantages of the “new normal” that would emerge, he said.

No new NZ cases
There were no new cases of covid-19 confirmed in New Zealand today, but one probable case has been reclassified as confirmed.

Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said that meant New Zealand’s total of confirmed and probable cases remained the same at 1487. The total number of confirmed cases is 1137.

Dr Bloomfield said there had been no additional deaths, leaving New Zealand’s total at 20.

The last time there was 0 new cases was on March 16.

Yesterday 2473 tests were done. The total number of completed tests is 152,696.

There are seven cases in hospital, and none are intensive care.

The number of clusters in NZ remains at 16, three of them have now been closed as there have been no cases of community transmission in the past few days.

“Clearly these are encouraging figures today, but it is just one moment in time. The real test is later this week when we factor in the incubation period for the virus and the time it takes for people to display symptoms which is generally five to six days after exposure,” Dr Bloomfield said.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards – Tonight’s historic first vote on abortion laws will inevitably disappoint many advocates of reform. This is because of the watered-down proposals put forward by the Government, and the politicking that has accompanied the legislation – especially New Zealand First’s insistence on seeking a referendum. 

Of course, abortion law reform has been inevitable for some time, and the nature of the issue means it was always going to be complicated. Politicians have been avoiding the reform question for decades, while a public consensus has continued to build in favour of liberalisation. The public are generally more progressive on abortion than the politicians, who continue to risk only moderate change for fear of alienating more conservative voters.

That’s why, even over the last year, the Government’s promises of reform continued to be stalled as Labour attempted to negotiate a compromise package of reform that would keep their New Zealand First colleagues happy. The results of this process, as well as all the overall politicking around it, are nicely laid out today in Thomas Coughlan’s article, Abortion bill heads to Parliament: What’s changing and when.

Reform success looks likely

It is clear that the more moderate legislation planned by the Labour-led Government has been designed so as not to buy too much of a fight or mean it will struggle to get passed. Hence, early signs are that the first reading tonight will very easily get the numbers. Henry Cooke and Thomas Coughlan are projecting, at this stage, 73 votes for and 26 against – see: Abortion vote will sail through with or without NZ First, according to Stuff survey.

Aside from the mysterious New Zealand First orientation to the bill, the stances of other parties’ MPs are becoming clearer: “All 8 Green MPs have said they will support it, while 32 of Labour’s 46 MPs have said they will definitely back it. Four more say they’d be likely to support it. National is slightly more divided with 17 of its 55 MPs saying they will definitely back it, with just 7 saying they will definitely oppose it. Ten say they’re not yet sure how they’ll vote. Act leader David Seymour and independent MP Jami-Lee Ross have both said they back the Bill.”

And for more on how a number of conservatives, including the National Party leader, seem to be on board for at least the first reading of the legislation, see Henry Cooke and Thomas Coughlan’s Simon Bridges will vote for abortion bill at first reading but wants more safeguards.

Bridges’ own position seems to have become more liberal lately, as this article reports that he now supports “the changes to the law for abortions in the first 20 weeks”, with him saying “the position pre-20 weeks of gestation is one where law and practice should match, they haven’t, so I accept that’s the right decision” – which is a turnaround from his position last year in which he insisted that the current rules don’t need fixing.

The same article delves into the positions of some of the more socially conservative Labour MPs, and also finds increasing support for change. For example, “Aupito William Sio, Peeni Henare, and Kris Faafoi all said that they were ‘leaning’ to or ‘probably’ voting yes. None opposed the bill.” Similarly, “Several MPs who voted against the End of Life Choice Bill on euthanasia were supportive, such as Health Minister David Clark and backbencher Kiri Allan. Some members, like Maori caucus co-chair Meka Whaitiri, said they would vote for the bill at its first reading, but would not commit to voting the bill any further.”

But there will still be some Labour MPs who vote against it, and are not willing to speak publicly about their stance. For example, the article reports: “Nanaia Mahuta refused to say how she would vote, simply describing it as a conscience issue.”

The Government’s conservative reform

Despite some degree of positivity that politicians are finally catching up with the broader public mood in favour of increased liberalisation, the details of the Government’s reform are finding less favour with many advocates of reform.

After all, the Government bill really amounts to only partial-decriminalisation instead of full decriminalisation of abortion. This won’t satisfy those who believe that abortion should fundamentally come down to a “woman’s right to choose”. Instead of going along with that demand and principle, Justice Minister Andrew Little has very determinedly decided that it’s a woman’s right to choose up until 20 weeks of pregnancy, but women lose the right after that, by which it essentially remains a criminal issue rather than a health issue.

I wrote about the details of this issue in a previous column, earlier in the year – see: Abortion reform in question. This pointed to an array of health professionals and reform advocates wanting a more progressive result than the Government was looking to deliver.

And it has come to pass that the Government has gone with a watered-down and relatively conservative option for moderate reform. This has caused some to complain that Labour have let the reform movement down, as they have on other important issues. For example, the No Right Turn blogger says it’s “another example of Labour chickening out. They promised to listen to medical professionals, and they haven’t. While a technical delivery on their promise, its a substantive failure” – see: Labour chickens out on abortion.

Here’s the main point: “Health professionals were crystal clear in supporting complete decriminalisation. But instead of that, Labour has taken the most conservative option, then made it worse, imposing a test for women to access an abortion after 20 weeks. Such abortions are almost always performed for medical reasons, and so should be a health issue, but instead Labour is going to make women continue to endure the wagging finger of society if they need proper medical care.”

The blogger argues that Labour MPs need to push amendments to make the legislation more radical, but fears they will “refuse to in order to avoid upsetting their bigot rump and their conservative coalition partner.”

RNZ has published one anonymous opinion piece on the issue, which criticises the reform bill for retaining much of the status quo for pregnancies beyond the 20-week mark, saying: “The proposed bill is not much better. It sends the message that you may know what’s best for yourself up to 19 weeks, six days, 23 hours and 59 minutes. Once the clock ticks over at midnight, boom, a doctor suddenly becomes the expert on your life. How can a country that trusted women enough to allow us to vote, not trust us to know our own situations?” – see: Abortion is a medical necessity, reform is needed.

According to this writer, “The proposed bill has been called a “mixed bag”. To be blunt, it’s a bit of a cop-out. Sure, the government took a turn in the right direction by making it a health issue and proposed some steps to ensure better access to abortions. But it does not go far enough.” They urge the Government to go further, and to use this moment to create a legacy rather than just another compromise fix.

Similarly, leftwing commentator Gordon Campbell is disappointed that the reform falls so far short of what has been required for modernisation: “Abortion is to be medicalised, rather than criminalised. That’s progress, I guess. If that sounds grudging… it is. Undoubtedly, the proposed law will be better than the 1977 legislation it replaces. Yet surely, you’d hope there would be progress, 42 years down the track” – see: On reforming the abortion laws.

Campbell doesn’t believe that abortion control should simply be converted from being a criminal issue to a medical one: “there is no objective need for the level of medicalisation envisaged by the current Bill. The message being: the ultimate control of women’s reproductive choices is being handed over from the Police to doctors. That’s supposed to be counted as progress.”

And if the issue is a simple health one then why, Campbell asks, isn’t it being treated like this by the Government and Opposition: “If abortion really is just a medical procedure, then the Health Minister should be owning it, and promoting it as part of the government’s health programme. That’s what a grown-up country would do.” He argues against the vote being a conscience one.

Campbell also makes the case that the legislation is entirely backward in assuming that abortion has to be a “medicalised procedure enacted by a doctor”, when the trend – especially in other parts of the world – is towards the use of chemical abortifacients: “they offer a safer, less invasive means of abortion than surgical means. It is a process that can be supervised by a nurse.”

Here’s Campbell’s main problem: “In other European countries, the two pills involved are moving towards being available as an over-the-counter abortifacient. The reforms being proposed in New Zealand do not recognize this trend. For the foreseeable – and by that I mean potentially for decades to come – the women who import such drugs and/or those people who help them to access such drugs will continue to be prosecuted under the Crimes Act.”

Referendum debates

The law reform itself has been overshadowed in recent days by New Zealand First’s desire to make reform contingent on a public referendum – see Jenna Lynch’s Justice Minister Andrew Little caught off guard as New Zealand First hints at abortion referendum.

It seems that in the months of negotiations between Andrew Little and New Zealand First’s Tracey Martin, the traditional stance of her party in favour of referendums on moral issues like abortion never arose. But then in NZ First’s caucus meeting this week, MPs pushed back, despite – or perhaps, because – Martin had said publicly the same day that no referendum was necessary.

According to Henry Cooke: “It’s understood NZ First members have been giving the party some grief about the fact it is demanding a referendum on euthanasia but not abortion” – see: Winston Peters pulls rug out from under Andrew Little – again.

Cooke gives his view: “Little has every right to be furious with this blindside from NZ First, even if he can’t quite say it. He’s already softened the bill to keep NZ First happy, shrinking the number of weeks that an abortion can be accessed without a statutory test. But he shouldn’t be surprised. Peters has used the Parliamentary process to have several bites of the same cherry before, and has also humiliated Little in the past over three strikes. At the end of the day these people are from different parties and will be fighting over the same voters in about a year’s time.”

Of course, New Zealand First wanting a referendum doesn’t necessarily impact on the legislation at all. The party has already signed off on the bill being introduced to Parliament tonight. It simply means that the party is likely to put up an amendment to the bill to include a referendum. This wouldn’t happen in practice until after the second vote on the bill, and it’s very unlikely to be successful. The big question is whether New Zealand First MPs will vote for the bill without a referendum being put in place.

This is all best dealt with in Claire Trevett’s column, NZ First abortion referendum ploy leaves sour taste (paywalled). She argues that no one should be surprised that Winston Peters would want a referendum: “It was not that long ago both NZ First’s leader Winston Peters and Martin herself had provided statements setting out the party’s position that abortion was for a referendum. Given that, if it was not raised in caucus perhaps Martin should have raised it herself to ensure it would not become a stumbling block later.”

Trevett suggests that the re-positioning by New Zealand First could simply be one of empty strategy: “NZ First could simply be posturing to allow Peters to say the party had tried to stick to its policy but was thwarted by others”.

So, who’s to blame for the miscommunication and incorrect assumptions about New Zealand First’s policy on referendums? Mike Hosking points the finger at both Tracey Martin and Andrew Little – see: Winston Peters again pulls the wool over Labour’s eyes on abortion referendum.

And today Winston Peters has struck back, accusing Andrew Little of bad faith and blindsiding New Zealand First – see: Winston Peters takes aim at Labour over abortion law reform.

There is now some very interesting discussion going on about the role of referendums in determining law. For the best of these, see Sam Sachdeva’s Why Winston Peters is wrong on referendums, and today’s editorial in The Press: Abortion debate: let the politicians decide.

Finally, for satire on these issues, going back a long way, see my blog post, Cartoons about abortion law reform in New Zealand.

The original news story by Nita Blake-Persen was published on the RNZ website, and relayed how “Parents lined up in the torrential rain for hours this morning outside Manurewa’s Work and Income office to meet with advocates who help them with their claims. Without them, they say their desperate pleas for cash are almost always denied” – see: People queue from 2am outside Work and Income for help.

The first person in the queue, who arrived at 2am, told the reporter he needed a grant, as he was struggling to buy basic necessities for his three children: “I need to buy long pants, jumpers, jerseys and that, and then I need to get food, because I stay in a three bedroom house – I pay $610 a week.”

Like others lined up at the Work and Income office, he had come on that particular Thursday because the advocacy group Auckland Action Against Poverty (AAAP) come along on that day every week to help beneficiaries obtain their full entitlements. Those advocates claim that beneficiaries are otherwise being turned away from proper grants.

One of the AAAP advocates appealed to the Prime Minister to sort out the situation – Kathleen Paraha challenged Jacinda Ardern, saying: “The government needs to get off their bums and come down and have a look for themselves.”

The story has provoked some strong reaction on Twitter, with many saying it epitomises this Government’s failure to deliver the transformation it has promised. For example, Newsroom editor, Tim Murphy, stated “This is one of those stories that will be remembered about a government’s time in charge”, and “The more that this Governments term progresses, the more clear it is that that they are at their core no better than the last guys, or the ones before that. Virtuous media soundbites & photo ops aren’t making a difference”.

And his business journalist colleague Bernard Hickey pinpointed the conservative fiscal approach of Ardern and her Government as being responsible, saying the 2am welfare scenes occurred “At the same time as a ‘progressive left’ Government has a $7b budget surplus and has net debt so low that even Moody’s says we could almost double it and keep our AAA rating. Yet…budget Rules…”

Political activist and former MP Sue Bradford suggested that the Government was not following through on its promises: “Minister Sepuloni used to talk about the culture change she wanted at Work & Income, but the ongoing desperation of people who need help to get the most basic of needs from W & I flies in the face of Labour’s supposedly ‘kinder’ approach to welfare.”

In the blogosphere, some on the political left expressed their frustration. Steven Cowan blogged to say the continued plight of beneficiaries was a case of Paying the price of Jacinda Ardern’s austerity policies. He argued “these Auckland beneficiaries provide more stark evidence of a society where the depth of poverty continues to deepen and the chasm of inequality continues to widen”.

And he pointed out that “It was only two months ago that the Labour-led government declined most of the recommendations of its own welfare working group”. Similarly, Martyn Bradbury argued the incident was an example of The Toxic culture of WINZ & MSD laid bare,

But is it really fair to see the 2am Manurewa event as representative of the Government’s failed welfare reform agenda? The Minister of Social Development, Carmel Sepuloni, went on RNZ’s Checkpoint programme to dispute this version of the story – see: Long queues outside MSD ‘shocking’ but not the norm – minister. Sepuloni’s reaction to the story was: “I saw the image and I saw the story and no one would pretend that it’s not shocking to see that… that is not a normal occurrence at MSD (Ministry of Social Development) offices around the country.”

The Minister’s main point was that the queues from 2am in this instance were not directly due to Work and Income decisions, but because the advocacy group AAAC had arranged for beneficiaries to gather in a way that they needed to arrive early to get the chance of advocate help.

She said: “They’re not meeting with MSD at that hour, they’re actually meeting with their advocates… We tell AAAP… on Thursdays they have guaranteed appointments for their clients, that we will see them on that Thursday – so there’s no reason for them to turn up at that hour of the morning.”

In another interview, Sepuloni explained “I am advised that the long queues seen at Manurewa are the result of benefit recipients being encouraged by their advocates to all congregate at the same time on Thursdays”. She has also called on AAAP to work differently to help beneficiaries: “The queues can be avoided if AAAP works with MSD to deal with these cases in an orderly way across the week, rather than creating a bottleneck that forces everyone to be there at once in the rain” – see Michael Daly’s Auckland Action Against Poverty hits back at Government over WINZ queues.

The same article reports Work and Income regional commissioner Mark Goldsmith claiming that the AAAP advocacy group had refused “numerous attempts” made to work together. And, further, that “We would be happy to pre-book appointments with clients and AAAP advocates so clients don’t have to wait, but so far AAAP haven’t agreed to this.”

The group has responded, disputing this: “It’s categorically untrue we’ve refused to engage with MSD re:Manurewa.” And in open letter to the Government, published on The Spinoff, the group say: “When you say we should go to different offices to spread out the work of Ministry Social Development staff and avoid ‘creating a bottleneck’, what you are admitting is that MSD staff all over Aotearoa New Zealand are failing the people they are meant to be assisting. You are admitting that there is something seriously wrong with our welfare system” – see: We should not have to do MSD’s job for them.

The group also challenges the Government on its welfare policies in general: “There is enough money to end poverty but you need to be bold. You need to tax wealth and redistribute it into social welfare and public housing. You need to spend that surplus you are sitting on. It is socially and fiscally irresponsible to allow people to continue to live in poverty. We would like to see this rhetoric on well-being and kindness materialise in the lives of the people we work with.”

To get a better understanding of the work that the AAAP group is doing with welfare beneficiaries at the Manurewa office, it’s worth reading Michael Daly and Joel MacManus’ Minister responds to Manurewa Work & Income queue problem. In this, it’s explained: “The arrangement with Work and Income was that AAAP advocates were allowed to help 65 people in the queue on Thursday mornings. There were usually about seven advocates at the office, and they interviewed those 65 people.”

AAAP coordinator Ricardo Menendez March is reported saying: “In reality we always see far more. People have the right to have a support person at Work and Income… Throughout the day we end up helping far more people, explaining to them the process and making sure the case managers are doing their work and following the law adequately”.

Menendez March says that this has been going on for about two years, during which time the queues have always existed but are getting worse. Why? He says: “We know beneficiaries have been the most disproportionately impacted by the rising cost of rent. More people than ever require hardship grants to get by.” And according to this article, “The Manurewa WINZ office gave out $698,000 in Special Needs Grants for food last year, the highest in the country by more than $200,000.”

This article is also useful for providing the Government’s side of the story on what it is changing at the frontline to help welfare recipients, with Sepuloni stating: “this Government has sent a clear instruction to frontline MSD staff that anyone coming in is to be provided with the full financial support they are legally entitled to…. As a result of this instruction the number of hardship grants provided by this government has increased 60% year on year. The value of hardship grants has gone from $81m to $128.5m from March 18 to March 19.”

In addition, the article points out that “The Government has also announced funding for 263 new frontline MSD staff over the next 4 years.”

Perhaps this means that Work and Income offices will also stop referring beneficiaries to loan sharks to help raise their necessary funds, as reported recently by 1News – see: ‘Fundamentally wrong’ – Ministry referring beneficiaries to loan sharks, activists claim.

What else can be done to alleviate the plight of those on benefits? University of Auckland economist Susan St John has come up with a list of possible solutions that could be implemented immediately. Her “emergency package” includes the “Payment of the full Working for Families tax credits to all low-income families”; “An increase in the allowable income before any benefit is lost to 10 hours at the minimum wage or $170 per week”, and “A suspension of all student loan repayments for families who get Working for Families” – see: Poverty: not an earthquake but still a crisis.

As to what reforms the Government has already come up with, St John is derisory: “The tiny changes made in the 2019 budget will miserably fail to make a difference to the immediate problem. Worse still they don’t come in until April 2020.”

And like other economists, she criticises the fiscally-conservative approach of the Government as being at the root of their failure to act: “It may be laudable for the Government to be fiscally responsible, but not in the very narrow ways it has chosen. The nation is facing a crisis, it’s like a slow earthquake shaking our values to the foundation. You don’t store up goodies for the future when faced with life damaging catastrophes, you invest in reversing the damage and in preventing further damage.”

Finally, is there a need for reform of how the welfare system treats people in relationships? A new report out last week challenges the “traditional” and “current rules” in which people’s eligibility for benefits is based on whether they are in “relationship in the nature of marriage” – see Sarah Robson’s Welfare system needs to change how it defines relationships – report. And for a personal version of this story, see Sarah Wilson’s The consequences of love: how finding a partner left me penniless.

The concept of a “woman’s right to choose” is at the centre of the demand for abortion liberalisation reform. Campaigners believe that neither the state nor doctors should have any say in whether a woman terminates a pregnancy. They want the current laws repealed so that the existing legal and practical barriers are removed, allowing individuals to freely obtain pregnancy terminations. And this was something promised by Jacinda Ardern during the 2017 election campaign.

However it’s not clear that this is going to be delivered. Instead, it looks more likely that only some barriers will be removed, meaning that a woman’s right to choose will be remain limited.

So far, the Government’s reform plans on abortion liberalisation are well behind schedule. Delays, produced by internal coalition negotiations, suggest that the reform agenda is in danger, and there must some risk that the promised legislation won’t get passed this year as planned.

Originally, a Cabinet decision was due at the end of last year, following the November publication of the Law Commission’s report on reform options. This report gave three options for reform – ranging from Option A (complete decriminalisation) to Option C (partial decriminalisation, based on a cut-off date of a 22-week gestation – after which a medical consultation process would still be necessary). And ever since then the Government has been suggesting that a decision is imminent.

The latest news on the abortion reform process came earlier this month in Claire Trevett’s article, Breakthrough sees possible abortion reforms back on track (paywalled). According to this, the Government appears to have decided on a reform option that would see a degree of liberalisation, with women being given the right to choose to have an abortion – without legal barriers – for the first 19 or 20 weeks of pregnancy. But after 19 or 20 weeks, any woman seeking a termination would still need to go through a consultation process with a doctor.

This amounts to the Government choosing the more conservative Option C from the Law Commission, but shifting the cut-off point forward from 22 weeks to 19 or 20. After that 19-20 weeks of pregnancy, abortion would essentially remain subject to the Crimes Act or something similar.

As Justice Minister Andrew Little said in an interview late last year, “If the threshold test is to have any meaning, there’s got to be consequences” – see Dan Satherley and Simon Shepherd’s Justice Minister Andrew Little backs removing legal restrictions on abortions up to 22 weeks. According to this report, “it’s not clear what would happen if an abortion was carried out after the 22-week threshold without meeting the statutory requirements”.

That article also points out that “During consultation almost all health professionals supported having no test.” This is also a point made by Eleanor Ainge Roy’s Guardian article, New Zealand pro-choice campaigners hail move towards abortion law reform. She reports that the Law Commission “found health practitioners and professional bodies were ‘almost unanimous’ in their support for model A.”

Furthermore, she reports that “Terry Bellamak, director of ALRANZ Abortion Rights Aotearoa, said model A was the only option that would make accessing abortion a more streamlined and dignified experience for women, many of whom found the existing system ‘degrading’.” This model – which asserts a woman’s right to choose at any stage of the gestation – is used in other countries such as Canada.

Bellamak also writes about this elsewhere, quoting Little’s justification for keeping a limit on women’s right to choose: “given the likely viability of the foetus there are public policy considerations that come into it that I think a GP should be held to when they are giving advice.” She provides her own interpretation of what Little means by this: “it looks like he’s saying women can’t be trusted not to request abortions later in pregnancy in situations where the doctor would be required to put a check on their wishes and deny their abortion in the interest of public policy. It implies women are likely to delay requesting abortions for reasons that are morally indefensible” – see: Four different perspectives on reproductive rights.

She points to the fact that “women in other countries have been deciding to receive abortion care without let or hindrance for yonks”, and therefore suggests that limiting a women’s right to abortion is “sexist” and “shows a complete lack of trust in women and pregnant people as fully autonomous human beings”. Furthermore, she argues that “the cultural narrative of a woman popping off to get an abortion on a whim at a late stage for morally indefensible reasons” is a “ridiculous lie”.

Another pro-choice campaigner, Liz Beddoe, says “Most people want the option which leaves the decision to terminate a pregnancy to the pregnant person and would enable self-referral to free and accessible services” – see: As US protection of abortion rights weakens, NZ should strengthen laws.

Beddoe is suspicious that the Government is watering down the reform agenda: “We were told by Minister of Justice Andrew Little that a decision would be announced in April. In the middle of May we have yet to hear that decision. Women are questioning what is happening behind the scenes? What rights are being traded as coalition politics pitting conservative New Zealand First politicians against Labour and the Green Party, both of which have promised reform? Will we yet again see our rights cynically traded for political favours? This is a watershed moment for women’s reproductive freedom in Aotearoa.”

A challenge is issued to the Prime Minister not to compromise: “Will the Prime Minister stand up to the misinformed, selfish zealots and deliver women a safe legal abortion service as promised? Women are watching and anything less than this, with protection of patients and health professionals from harassment, will not be forgiven. It’s time Prime Minister. This is the ‘well-being’ legislation we want.”

Most politicians are likely to favour the compromise solution of Option C. This is explained by Claire Trevett in her excellent overview article from late last year, in which she examines the orientation of various MPs and political parties to the prospect of reform – see: To the Barricades: The battle over abortion forty years on.

From this, it appears that the only MP who overtly favours complete decriminalisation of abortion is Act MP David Seymour. The Greens don’t seem to have come to a position on this, while the other parties are clearly divided. The overwhelming lesson of Trevett’s article is that virtually all politicians are treading very carefully for fear of offending voters  Even someone as normally outspoken as Judith Collins is noted as being reluctant to talk. And Jacinda Ardern, despite her promises of reform, wouldn’t be interviewed on the topic.

In contrast to the timidity of MPs on abortion reform, there seems to be a growing societal mood in favour of a “woman’s right to choose” on the matter. According to one recent poll, two-thirds of New Zealanders are in favour of a women’s right to choose – see Regan Paranihi’s Abortion survey: 66% support women’s right to choose.

A Newshub-Reid Research Poll in March also showed the majority want abortion decriminalised – see Tova O’Brien’s Revealed: Large majority of Kiwis want abortion law change.

Clearly politicians are struggling to catch up with the public on this issue. I wrote about the rise of abortion politics in New Zealand in two 2017 political roundup columns: Should abortion be decriminalised? and The uncomfortable abortion reform challenge. As I explained in these columns, there are some disappointing reasons that the issue of abortion law reform has been kept off the agenda and, although politicians lacked the courage of their convictions on this, they were being forced to confront a growing demand for change.

Late last year I also wrote about the rise in public acceptance of abortion: “Abortion has gradually become more acceptable to the wider public. Yet over that forty years politicians of all sides have effectively kicked for touch on the issue, happy with a compromise situation in which abortion laws have been draconian in theory, but liberal in practice. Therefore, the politicians – from Labour and National, alike – have simply not kept up with social progress” – see: The mild abortion “culture wars”.

In this article, I also tracked how the topic of abortion reform had heated up after a long period of inactivity. This is reflected in my research on media publications: “the number of published articles about abortion remained relatively stable since 1991, with normally about 700 published each year. But since 2017, the number of published articles mentioning “abortion” has started to skyrocket” reaching about 2000 articles last year.

Last week saw an explosion of new articles relating to abortion due to National MP Alfred Ngaro’s views on the matter being investigated. The MP shared a Facebook post comparing abortion to the holocaust, which he later expressed regret over saying abortion was, more accurately, a tragedy.  He also made a very contentious statement questioning the necessity of abortion reform: “Here’s the thing: Has any woman actually ever been made to feel like a criminal? Absolutely not. Those provisions have been there for some time”.

Ngaro also brought the discussion back to the question of when a “woman’s right to choose” begins and ends, “claiming the Government had suggested abortions up to the full term of 40 weeks as part of changes to abortion law” – see Katie Fitzgerald’s Government ‘poked the bear’ with discussion about abortion rights – Ngaro.

He argued the Government was being provocative in potentially giving women the right to choose at any point during gestation: “I tell you who poked the bear, it was this Government which decided in their recommendations they want to go from 20 weeks to 40 weeks. Now the question is do you think New Zealanders accept that? Absolutely not.”

Finally, partly in response to Ngaro’s claims, but also in reaction to the increased debate about abortion reform, there have been plenty of personal stories published of womens’ lived experiences of abortion and contraception – see, for example, Emma Espiner’s Abortion – a life on my terms, Lynn Williams’ On Abortion, and Paula Penfold’s Women are in fact made to feel criminal, Mr Ngaro.

The world is changing fast, with digital technological innovation that is both liberating and disturbing. The threats and opportunities this presents requires a massive debate, and intervention, to ensure such changes are as healthy as possible for humanity. The online dimension of the Christchurch terrorist attacks is now provoking a sea change in attitudes towards social media.

Around the world we are now seeing attempts to rein in the tech giants with government regulations. There are blunt questions being asked about whether the likes of Facebook are “monetising hate”, and whether the dream of social media enhancing democracy and social connectedness is over.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Christchurch Call to Action campaign is currently at the most visible end of this new momentum, and commentators have declared her trip to Paris a success. For example, this afternoon Henry Cooke has concluded: Jacinda Ardern’s big day in Paris ends with her getting what she wanted.

Likewise, Gordon Campbell is impressed with how the final Paris manifesto has come together, apparently managing to satisfy all sides, including Facebook – see: On the Christchurch Call.

But the campaign isn’t over yet. According to Kelsey Munro, a research fellow at Australia’s Lowy Institute, Ardern’s bid is still a difficult one – see: Christchurch Call: Jacinda Ardern’s Paris pitch a sign of tech giants’ power.

Munro points out that attempts to regulate social media so far, have been fraught and dangerous: “Many nations around the world have concluded that the public sphere must reassert a regulatory role; the problem is how to do it within reasonable limits. No one wants anything resembling the Chinese model. Australia’s ‘knee-jerk’ reaction has been widely criticised by the tech industry and lawyers as rushed and ill-defined.”

Clearly Ardern has been keen to keep away from some of the issues around free speech that are brought up by government regulation, as I explained in my previous column – see: Ardern’s “Christchurch Call” might not be so simple.

So is her campaign going to work? There are all sorts of risks with this sort of attempt at regulation. And this is best dealt with in Henry Cooke’s article, The risks Jacinda Ardern faces with her ‘Christchurch Call’ in Paris. He outlines three broad threats: 1) Over-reach, 2) Under-reach, 3) Being used by Macron to launder his image.

In terms of those first two dangers, the Christchurch Call might end up being too strong or too weak. The third point is the idea that in collaborating so closely with the French President and other world leaders, Ardern is naively being exploited for their own electoral opportunism. Cooke suggests that Ardern might need to “make her disagreement with these other leaders clear”.

This is also the view of Newstalk ZB’s Barry Soper: “What is French President Emmanuel Macron playing at? The answer’s pretty obvious, he’s trying to boost his flagging popularity at home while at the same time trying to establish himself as a world leader on cleaning up the internet” – see: Jacinda Ardern being used by Emmanuel Macron to boost his image.

Soper suggests that Macron has been rather disingenuous in his role: “If you needed any convincing that she’s being used, get a load of what happened as she was packing her designer bags for the French capital. Macron releases a 33-page report he’d commissioned… Why he couldn’t delay the release until this week’s summit is an insult to those attending. And what’s more, the investigation was only halfway through but Macron decided to make a song and dance about how well France is doing.”

The bigger problem is that Macron has a terrible record in terms of civil liberties, and is clearly no friend of free speech, which could taint the ongoing campaign to regulate social media. This is all very well explained by leftwing journalist Branko Marcetic who puts forward “a brief review of what Macron’s done while in power” – see: Jacinda Ardern must not let Emmanuel Macron co-opt the Christchurch Call.

Marcetic then asks whether New Zealanders should be comfortable with such an alliance: “This is the man Ardern is teaming up with to figure out a way to regulate online spaces. Concerns over this shouldn’t be limited to the New Zealand right – with Macron at the helm, there are legitimate worries the outcome could threaten free speech, including for that of the liberals and left that are backing such measures right now.”

He concludes: “Ardern should be careful that Macron and any other embattled leaders in the G7 don’t use this meeting as an opportunity to push measures that harm not just journalism, but all of our civil liberties. But more importantly, the New Zealand public needs to hold her to account and make sure she doesn’t.”

And some are worried that the clampdown will inevitably intrude on the traditional media. Barry Soper criticises Ardern for “trying to reign in the mainstream media’s coverage of events to ensure it’s not gratuitous, and that for all of us should be worry. It’s not for the politicians to dictate how events should be covered” – see: The media here is generally self regulatory.

It’s clear that the task of social media regulation isn’t a simple one. And one of the best outlines of the pitfalls and best practices that Ardern and co should keep in mind can found in Dan Jerker B. Svantesson’s article, It’s vital we clamp down on online terrorism. But is Ardern’s ‘Christchurch Call’ the answer?

He cautions against the “risk of hasty, excessive and uncoordinated responses” to social media problems and suggests that we are currently seeing a rush of politicians who all want to gain political capital from coming up with fast answers. He says “as part of this we must avoid hasty ‘solutions’ that will only mask the issues in the long term, and potentially cause other problems such as excessive blocking of internet content.”

Svantesson’s own list of requirements for new regulations are the following: “Effective legal regulation of the internet must be clear, proportional (balanced for all involved), accountable (able to be monitored and checked) and offer procedural guarantees (open to appeals).”

Similarly, Jordan Carter and Konstantinos Komaitis, of Internet NZ and the Internet Society, have put forward their own suggestions of what needs to underpin any new rules and laws – see: How to regulate the internet without shackling its creativity.

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark has also jumped into the debate this week with the launch of her own Foundation think tank report, titled “Anti-social Media”. This calls for a new body to be set up to regulate social media in this country in the same way that the New Zealand Media Council and Broadcasting Standards Authority does with traditional media. For an in-depth discussion of the report, see Thomas Coughlan’s How to regulate social media.

Clark has explained the thinking behind this, and how it’s partly based on her own personal experience: “What I’m concerned about is that the rising level of rhetoric on social media from people who think they can get away with just about anything… And let’s face it, they can. I have regularly reported very hateful content, and very often you just get these reports dismissed. So that’s why you now need what this report recommends, which is the statutory duty to self-regulate, and then you need the regulator overseeing that” – see 1News’ Changing hate speech laws would ‘not necessarily’ have prevented Christchurch attacks – Helen Clark.

For more on this, as well as other debates about regulation of social media in New Zealand, and what sort of agreement was expected from the Paris meetings, see Derek Cheng’s Christchurch Call summit: New rules must leave nowhere to hide. In terms of the Paris agreement, he notes that “whether it will have any teeth will be a key issue, given it will be a voluntary framework.”

A new survey out shows that there’s a strong demand amongst New Zealanders for this problem to be sorted out: “More than half of New Zealanders want livestreaming stopped until platforms work out a way to immediately remove violent or other harmful content, a survey indicates. The online survey of 1134 adults carried out in the second half of April, found 54 per cent of those questioned wanted a halt to livestreaming in the meantime. In contrast, 29 per cent thought platforms should be given time to sort out a solution” – see: Most Kiwis want livestreaming halted until violent content can be curbed: survey.

Much of the debate about the problems of online extremism and regulation comes back to The Matrix movie’s concept of being “red-pilled”, which is explained in today’s Christchurch Press editorial: “To be red-pilled is to have the shackles of delusion removed and to see things as they really are” – see: Cleaning up the dark corners of the internet. But if this sounds like a positive development, then for a bigger explanation of the problem, see Henry Cooke’s Christchurch Call could lead to work on ‘red-pilling’ of online radicalisation.

Despite the difficulties involved, there’s no doubt that the tide has turned, and there is now a significant public appetite for some sort of action to be taken that might deal with the tech giants. After all, their reach affects everything in society – including democracy and politics.

This is a point well made in a report released this week, “Digital Threats to Democracy”, which suggests that the way New Zealanders are interacting with information online “can lead to the rapid spread of incorrect information and hinder the discussion and debate of issues of public policy” – see Brittany Keogh’s Social media influences New Zealanders’ opinions on politics and hurts democracy, study says.

Finally, there’s plenty of other disturbing evidence of the brave new world we are moving into. For one of the best recent accounts of this, see Danyl Mclauchlan’s book review, Big Google is watching you. Looking at an important new book by Shoshana Zuboff, a professor of social psychology at Harvard Business School, called “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power”, Mclauchlan explains why he feels so uncomfortable at the supermarket.

1960 was a big year for my adopting parents. First came the infertility diagnosis. Then a new baby arrived with little warning and no fanfare. Followed within days by a new refrigerator.

I was one of over 103,000 New Zealand babies forcibly removed from my single mother. Her dying mother sent her to the doctor’s house with a couple of months to spare. The generous Dr Gerald Gleeson put her to work cleaning and scrubbing. Weeks before I was born he promised me away to the “an attractive young couple who belong to the Church of England.”

It was a typical story. The same thing happened in Canada. They describe it as one of their “most agonising scandals and one which for decades was covered up – the forced adoption of hundreds of thousands of babies born to unmarried mothers.” A full-scale inquiry is ongoing.

In New Zealand, we pretend it never happened.

In the total absence of government action, apology or investigation, I’ve been unraveling New Zealand’s history of forced adoption.

We’ve wrapped adoption in secrecy, tied it up with clichés and obfuscated the truth at every turn. We’ve conflated orphans with the illegitimate. We’ve never once paused to inquire about outcomes.

With so much around adoption shrouded in legal black holes and social expectation, most adopted people struggle to talk about it. Not only their own but the practice itself.

If you experience a difficult time in your natural born family, people understand. A violent father? A cold mother? There’s plenty of support for that trauma. .

But if you’re adopted that toxic family story takes on another element. When you try to speak about it, someone will ask the ‘what-ifs’. What if you’d been aborted? What if your natural family were worse? You could have grown up in an orphanage? In care? On the streets?

This is often followed by the, “I know a happy adoptee,” narrative. As if that one person’s experience is more significant than everything you’ve lost. And all the wrongs of being taken from your mother and stripped of your identity are irrelevant.

But what if you do grow up in a loving adopted family? And you really are that ‘happy adopted person?’

In many ways, this makes it more difficult. If you feel even the slightest bit ‘not right’ in your happy family there’s nowhere to place those feelings. To express doubts, to acknowledge a yearning for blood in the face of good parenting is almost impossible. Even to yourself.

And so the fog descends. The disconnect between your inner life and external expectations is vast. Often the fog is preferable.

Whether you recognise it or not, adoption is trauma. In truth both the idyllic and the unfit family is invested in being better than the mother they took you from. The person you might have been, the life you would have lived, if not for them, is rarely acknowledged. But no matter the quality of your upbringing, we all live with a sense of a yearning for blood connections.

For me, as young teen all I wanted was someone who looked like me. I had to wait until I gave birth to my first daughter. She arrived with fine hair and delicate features. But then I realised there were no photos of me until I was three months old. I had no idea if I looked like her as a new baby. No reason, my adopting mother said, casually, when asked. “I was too busy to take photos.”

Except for that camera-worthy new refrigerator. It was either me or the fridge. It’s obvious who won. I have the photo to prove it.

– ref. The baby or the fridge – https://www.barbarasumner.nz/blog/2019/2/13/the-baby-or-the-fridge

As a child, my family saw the musical Oliver. For days after, my adopting mother hummed and sang the theme tune:

Consider yourself one of us
Consider yourself at home
Consider yourself one of the family ….etc etc

The song is a bit of an earworm. I’d forgotten it and the memory until recently when I heard it on the radio.

If you’ve seen the film (or read Dickens), you’ll know that being ‘one of us in Oliver was conditional on acting the part. You had to abide by their code of thievery and obey Fagin, the orphan master.

It makes sense. Like Fagin’s gang, we humans are tribal.

We gather with those who share our values. We’re always on the lookout for casual signifiers of belonging.

When we have kids, family and friends scan the scrunched face of your newborn for resemblance. His father’s nose, her mother’s eyes. When we pull out baby photos of close family and compare them, we recognise the child as one of us.

But does it work the other way?

For a pre-verbal baby, it’s all about smell and sounds. Studies reveal that the basis of bonding is the mothers scent..

Familiar odours wired into a babies brain affect nerve pathways and brain development. One researcher found that in the first few hours after birth, a baby identifies her mother by her smell.

In another study, day-old babies recognised their mother’s voice. They connected pacifiers to tape recorders. One sucking pattern turned on their mother’s voice, while another activated a strangers voice. Guess which sucking pattern the babies used?

So how does this all work for a person removed from their mother for adoption?

In The Primal Wound, Nancy Verrier says there’s an assumption a baby knows nothing. Any deprivation can be overcome by the adoptive parents. But for the infant, absence of her mother is the same as death. She goes through a withdrawal process as her most basic need for connection goes unmet. The loss of the original mother becomes imprinted in the child’s psyche and cells.

Growing up adopted in a stranger family I’ve experienced first hand how deep that loss and grief runs. How everything from smell to sport was wrong. And how the things we ignored, such as lack of family resemblance were the unspoken arrows of daily life.

It’s not easy for the adopting mother either. They also are grieving the child they could not have. They lack hormone bonding. They miss out on that recognition and satisfaction a new mother feels, despite the trials and exhaustion of birth? No one comments on how her baby looks like her. No one expects her child to be like her in any natural way. Instead, she must work extra hard to imprint her culture on the little stranger. While convincing herself that her experience is no different than for a biological mother.

This is the dirty secret of stranger adoption. Adoption is rarely a first choice. It’s not the same as biological parenting. No matter your parenting skills or commitment, this is not the child you would have had if you could have your own.

You won’t read that in pro-adoption literature. You cannot expect the adopted person to become the child you could not have.

I believe it does something to the adopting mother, creating an atmosphere of rote caring. The mother working hard to be seen to love the child she has no connection to.

In “Blueprint, How DNA Makes Us Who We Are,” Robert Plomin, concludes that babies are not balls of clay. Plomin is a behavioural geneticist. He says babies are not shaped by their parents after birth.  You arrive with imprinted traits from your biological parents.

His research proves that nurturing has little effect on the person you become. Children take after their first parents, not their adoptive parents. From cognitive skills and interests to personality traits. They even resemble their first parents in non-genetic traits. Television watching for instance and likelihood of getting divorced. “This comes as no surprise to first parents who meet their lost offspring. But it’s heartening and reassuring to have our impressions supported by scientific research.”  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/29/so-is-it-nature-not-nurture-after-all-genetics-robert-plomin-polygenic-testing

So how does an adopted person cope with this? They fake it.

The fantasy of the happy adoptee is ingrained in our society. It becomes the job of the adopted person to prove this story true. To salve the wounds of the adopting parent’s infertility. To act as if they are the missing child, to bend and fold and adjust themselves to fit into the adoptor’s family. As if they have no other mother. As if they are indeed one of them.

Of course, someone will jump up and say “I had good adoption. That was not my experience.’

I’m happy they got lucky. But that’s the point. They were fortunate not to experience abuse in addition to what every adoptee already endures.

Because adoption itself is inherently abusive. To say I had a good adoption is like saying I had a good car accident or a good mugging. Of course, some are worse than others. But they’re all bad things. Every adopted person has experienced separation trauma and had their rights violated. Even if they are not ready to acknowledge it. Adoption itself is the trauma.”

I’d describe stranger adoption as a state of suspended animation. You learn early that your inner need for authenticity will never be met. So you split that part of yourself of. And go through the motions. In adoption circles, this is the ‘good adoptee syndrome’. Your real self packed down tight while you smile and wave at the world.

The idea of being a stranger within your family is not limited to children and parents. In my experience, the wider family feels it too. You are a cuckoo in their extended family nest, treated with suspicion, your provenance a mystery.

Throughout history, humans have distrusted outsiders. We’ve always had city walls and borders and the need to identify ourselves. We’ve always had this innate sense of the good us versus the untrustworthy them. Just as Charles Dickens characters understood.

In the absence of blood ties, the only signifier of being one of us is your behaviour. So be a good adoptee, play your part and all will be well with the world.

– ref. Consider youself one of us – https://www.barbarasumner.nz/blog/2019/1/15/consider-youself-one-of-us

There have always been inconsistencies in my birth story. The dates, the people involved, the actual circumstances. All missing, suspect or manufactured.

As an adopted person I have no legal right to know anything other than the story my adopting parents chose to tell. So I decided to challenge that.

I started with govt.nz, the guide to finding and using government services. Could it really be as simple as requesting a copy of my ‘pre-adoption birth certificate?’

A pre-adoption birth certificate? As if the adoption itself is my starting point. Anything else must fit into the nebulous ‘pre’ where anything before is a priori – based on a theory.

After all, I already have a birth certificate. It records my adopting parents as my natural parents. As if I am the natural child of my adopters. As if I am no different than anyone else.

Except, I came into this world with a background as dark as deep space. My adopting father’s workmate nailed it. “Why would you (adopt), you don’t know what you’ll get?” This story was told as a way to explain what a generous thing my adopting father had done.

His workmate was right. I was an unknown quantity. Not quite natural, not entirely trusted in the way we trust blood. You are, as a relative of my adopting family once described me – strange fruit.

So I requested my pre-adoption birth certificate. That “may contain details of your birth mother and birth father.”

Except mine had my mother only, even though I now know my father’s name is in my file. I’ve yet to meet an adopted person with their father’s name on the original birth certificate. Which makes you wonder if pre-adoption certificates are not designed to document birth. But rather, to further social agendas. Like protecting men from the consequences of their sexual activity.

Next, there’s an age limit. You have to be 20 or older to apply for your pre-adoption birth certificate.

Why 20, you ask. You can have sex at 16, enlist in the defence force at 17, drink, vote and get married at 18.

The New Zealand Law Commission says it was to assuage the fears of adoptive parents. Natural mothers might try to intervene.

Crazy mothers showing up to claim back their babies! That would never do. But hidden beneath that reasoning is the notion of lifetime infantilising.

Because, you will always be an adopted child. Never an adopted adult. A judge nailed it when he described us as “adopted children of any age.”

Luckily I met the over 20 criteria. But instead of receiving my birth certificate in the mail like any other citizen I must see a counsellor. At 58. The counsellor gets to decide if I am balanced enough to receive this information. (I passed the test)

Next step. Govt.nz tells me to contact Oranga Tamariki—Ministry for Children. “An adoption social worker will find your adoption records and give you details recorded at the time of your placement.”

I’m not sure what an adoption social worker actually does. But Oranga Tamariki’s website says, “It may be possible to find information about your birth parent. We can help you with this process.”

And right there we jump from infantilising to farce.

My adoption social worker found my records. With the file sitting on her desk she informed me there was a problem. The law did not allow her to reveal the contents to me.

So she passed me over to a new recruit. A young man, fresh out of social worker school, with no understanding of adoption issues.

I complained. My adoption social worker promised to provide a file number (not the file itself) by the next day. That was months ago.

I complained. She passed me onto the Supervisor at the Caregiver Contact Team. This person sighed and directed me back to my adoption social worker.

I complained. My adoption social worker said she would seek advice from her Regional Advisor.

I followed up. She was now seeking advice from her Supervisor. I let the usual ten working days elapse and followed up. “I need to seek advice from my Regional Executive Manager,” she said.

That person referred me back to the Adoptions Services team. And you guessed it, they referred me back to the social worker.

Weeks turned into months. Then my adoption social worker came up with the answer. I needed to make a request for my file through the Privacy and Official Information Services.

I filled out the paperwork. They missed the statutory deadline to answer my query. I followed up. They’d forgotten to send my request to the correct person. I waited. 20 days later they directed me back to my adoption social worker. Who missed her deadline to reply. I followed up. And she referred me to her advisor at the National Office.

And that’s where we’ve left it, with my file on any number of anonymous desks. My information denied to me.

Such paternalism and control litter the history of adoption in New Zealand. Single mothers suffered unconscionable cruelty. Child trafficking and medical and social experiments were par for the course. Today, in service to those ideologies government departments peddle disinformation. While the staff delay, deny and deflect anyone who questions the official story.

I’m told the reasons revolve around privacy. Given anyone who might be affected is dead, I suspect the real goal is to preserve secrecy. To continue to hide our recent and most shameful past.

As a baby, I was the object of a transaction, a contract I was not a party to. I’d like to know when will my rights as an adult transcend the rights of people involved in that contract? And what will it take for the government to give up those secrets, apologise and make amends?

– ref. Strange fruit – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/11/22/strange-fruit

The Gallows Bird is a historical trilogy I have coming out next year. There, we meet Mr Fingleston, a silk merchant and tailor.

The character of Mr Fingleston visited me in the early hours, over 20 years ago. I described him as an ivy bush of a man, small and messy with a moustache drooping below his chin.

The timing is important.

For most of my adult life I’ve been on a shadow journey to find my biological family. In 1983 after an overheard comment and some pre-internet sleuthing I found my mother. Shortly after she died in a fiery plane crash on her way to meet me.

From that point on I searched for my father. There were many wrong turns, false information, raised hopes and deep disappointments.

I found him, finally in 2017. Five years too late.

In finding my father, I discovered a new sister, a genealogist cousin and a very detailed family tree.

Including my great-grandfather, Alfred Fingleston.

And yes, he has the same name as my invented character. Yes, he was a master tailor. And yes, he lived where my novel is set. Then I find I look just like my father. I share a skill set with one of my sisters and have the same passions as another. Our children echo one another.

It makes you wonder to what extent our behaviour is predicated on the long-ago past? On DNA and genetic determinism.

25 years ago, proponents of the Human Genome Project said DNA would change everything. It would lead to ‘a new understanding of what it means to be a human being.‘

“Genetics and the Sociology of Identity”, a social sciences publication, studies genetics’ penetration into social life. How we negotiate the space between self, others and institutions in light of DNA. They worry about genetic determinism. The idea that genes control your behaviour.

Reading the science (as a non-scientist) I am struck by how nervous the writers seem.

And so they should.

Because it’s stepping back in history. Way back. To Plato and Aristotle. To Essentialism and Determinism. To the idea that every entity has a predetermined, genetic set of essential attributes necessary to its identity.

That belief held sway through history all the way until  Charles Darwin and Karl Marx changed the world by theorizing that external material conditions create identity.

This philosophy had to be if they were to end the inequities created by birth. (For men anyway. Women were still expected to behave in a gender deterministic way)

Nurture over nature.

Except DNA came along. Is DNA the elephant in the room of social sciences and social determinism?

Because DNA delivers a high degree of certainty about who we are. Race, ethnic origin, kinship, propensity to hereditary diseases and other traits.

But NZ law says otherwise. Under the Adoption Act 1955, I have no heredity rights. The act says I am ‘as if’ born to the people who adopted me.

I am a social experiment. My whole life It has been concomitant on me to play the part of the happy(ish) adoptee. To prove that social determinism is indeed a valid way to run society. While behind closed doors my behaviours and actions are still discussed as aberrations. A flaw in my genes.

It was not Karl Marx’s fault. It was my fault I did not fit the family deemed more socially acceptable than my unmarried birth mother.

Meanwhile, the Adoption Act 1955 remains firmly in place. Propped up by unthinking judges and social workers. And by successive governments.

Between 1955 and 1990 the government took over 103,000 children from their mothers. They did it in the name of social engineering. Not one of us has ever had our rights restored.

Yes, DNA has given me some freedom. But my files remain locked away, my legal right to my history is still denied.

The Adoption Act 1955 remains able to separate children from their parents.

Thanks to DNA, Plato’s idea of essential nature is again a determinant of identity. Science, medicine, insurance companies, employers, government departments, policing and childcare services all seek to ascribe status and identity using DNA.

Except in New Zealand legislation. which still believes nurture can cure nature.

And The Gallows Bird? Thank you for asking. It should be available in about six months. Send me an email if you’d like to join either my author newsletter or the Like a Stranger newsletter. hello@sadiesumnerbooks.comT

There’s a cartoon doing the Internet rounds. A mum and a dad look down at their little girl: “Sarah, I’m afraid we’re not your real parents. You were made with sperm from Germany and an egg from Denmark from an Italian man and a Swedish woman, born to an English surrogate, rejected because you were a girl, adopted by Californian lesbians, looked after by a Cuban nanny and found by Derek here in a skip when you were three”.

Little Sarah looks bewildered. She’s in good company. Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have created thousands of people.

It’s a genomic revolution.

But like stranger adoption, there has been next to no public conversation on the outcomes.

Back then they framed stranger adoption within the historical shame of illegitimacy. This was a failed experiment in social engineering. But our collective amnesia ensures we never talk about it.

Now, within that silence, a new generation of disinherited people is being born.

The genomic revolution is replete with social, scientific and human complexity. But the ramifications are hardly touched on.

Instead of engaging with this we stick to the idea of a couple struggling with infertility. Our couple visits a specialist to have their gametes extracted. They create an embryo that is then implanted in the intending mother. It’s a private medical issue, only a few steps removed from natural conception.

There’s nothing wrong with this picture. Except, like the myth of successful stranger adoption it doesn’t match reality.

Inside the ART industry, there’s little distinction between the two types of children. One, conceived with medical help from its parent’s gametes is born to its natural mother. The other curated, from an anonymous gamete lookbook, a surrogate and its parent’s bank account.

Rather than make those distinctions we look to Hollywood to define the issues for us. In the movie, The Switch Jennifer Aniston’s character is looking for a sperm donor. Her friend played by Jason Bateman’s asks: “What sort of qualities would you be shopping for? It’s a throwaway line in a rom-com with a twist. In The Kids are Alright the sperm daddy enters the lives of a lesbian couple and their twins. They make a mess of the consequences, tune it for bittersweet comedy, and ignore the real issues.

Films like these reveal how normal it has become to acquire a family in these ways.

In Los Angeles, so many are ART conceived. There, teenage cryokids check their donor numbers to make sure they’re not ‘hooking up with a syb.’

Many of us are unaware of how far science has advanced and how unprepared New Zealand is.

Currently, in New Zealand, we are looking to loosen regulation to allow the creation of a market to import and export gametes and embryos. England is assessing bio-prospecting and has allowed three-biological-parent IVF. Germany has debated pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and the spectre of eugenics. In India, they colonise the wombs of the poor and reproductive tourism is a hot-button issue. In Spain, a shortage of donor eggs has given rise to research into the creation of children from eggs gathered from aborted fetuses. In the US where anything goes if you can afford it, the production of twiblings is on the rise. While saviour siblings are no longer rare. Clinics author traits such as hair, eye colour, height, muscle strength and skin colour. In Australia, a leading fertility clinic is listed on the stock exchange. They run a chain of cut-price clinics. Another Australian clinic sidesteps local laws on PGD by owning a clinic in Thailand. While also in Thailand an illegal surrogacy slave ring was recently uncovered.

In New Zealand, the Advisory Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ACART) assesses these technologies. It was set up to plan policy and advice specific to New Zealand and is open to public submissions.

But in reality, since the disbanding of The Bioethics Council in 2008, we do not have a public forum. (one of the National Party’s first actions on coming into power.) So very little public discourse takes place on any of these issues.

Instead, we have the fertility industry working as an active advisor to the ministry. They insist they are trust-worthy to lead all fertility regulation and decision-making.

Just as the church did back in the 50’s as they helped frame up adoption legislation.

Then it was the Anglican and Catholic churches and the Salvation Army. They played up the sin of illegitimacy and the sanctity of marriage. They created the fantasy of mothers happily giving up their babies to save them from shame.

In the end, it does not matter if you use science or morality to seperate people from their heritage. The result will always be the same – disenfranchised people, turned into commodities to satisfy a religious, social or financial agenda. Try being fully human when that is your legacy.

– ref. We’re not your real parents – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/10/30/were-not-your-real-parents

While browsing Instagram, an image jumped out at me. A woman and her husband stand beside the bed of an exhausted mother who has given birth to twins. The woman, identified as the #IP (intending parent) has her hands clasped in prayer or gratitude. Her husband is leaning over looking as exhausted as the new mother.
Posted by a surrogacy agency, the photo features the photographer’s comments. (Yes, the IPs hired a photographer to cover the event.)
The photographer says: “Previous to witnessing this surrogate birth I found myself wondering – isn’t it hard to give up the babies you grew from nine months? Isn’t it hard to recover from birth without the end reward of a sweet baby to care for and love? What about your milk production? And so on. But now I understand. Surrogacy is a selfless act, and the definition of selfless is to be concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than with one’s own. That’s a beautiful thing to witness.”
A selfless act is the bugle call of surrogacy.
Framing the work of one woman growing children for another as selfless is essential. Because if it’s not altruistic or selfless, then it’s paid work.
But when we discuss the ethics of paying surrogates, we balk.
The Creative Love Agency who posted the image does pay. But it’s like a peppercorn rental: That exhausted woman will get $1000 for clothes and $5000 for the babies, and maybe a few other costs covered.
It’s hard enough carrying a single baby for nine months, let alone twins, but $555 a month must not be enough to break the selfless ceiling. You have to ask why we value this work so low and why we need to frame it as altruism and selflessness.
The reason is simple. Society believes if you were to pay real money for growing a baby that would turn the child into a commodity.
I disagree.
The child is already a commodity. The ethical issue of paying or not paying is a smokescreen.
Because it is the demand for a child that turns it into a commodity. Not the payment of fees.
In economics, they use the equation ‘demand = desire + ability to pay + will to spend’ to quantify if something is a commodity.
The demand for babies is ancient. In Genesis 30:1 Rachel pleads with Jacob, “give me a baby or I will die.” She instructs him to bed her maid. Bilhah is forced to carry two sons for Rachel. After that Bilhah disappears from history, her sex and surrogate work forgotten.
Not much has changed in the idealogy of entitlement,
It’s the same as when they took me from my single mother and placed me with a married couple mid last century. Their infertility and desire for a child created the demand.
That demand saw an entire group of young, single, pregnant women turned into suppliers.
They used the same words the back then too. It was an act of altruism and selflessness to ‘give away’ your child. People still say to me “but your mother gave you away.”
But ask one of those mothers today and you’re likely to hear a different story. How they were shamed, pressured and coerced into providing the cure for infertility.
Now that we have science to create our babies to meet that demand we imagine things are different.
Unless you ask someone like Gracie Crane, a woman conceived from a donor embryo. Interviewed by a newspaper in 2014, Gracie was one of the first donor conceived babies in the UK.
Now, annoyingly, she is no longer a baby. And she is not happy.
Like adopted people in New Zealand, she also has no right to her biological history.
Gracie says “If I cannot be looked after by somebody I am genetically part of then I don’t feel I’m part of a family. Families are like packs, they look alike, but I don’t resemble anybody I know. I brought a friend home from school recently and I’d never told her how I came to be born, so when she saw my parents, I think she was quite shocked. I tried to explain, but it’s not like adoption, so people find it really hard to understand.”
As an adopted person I know precisely how Gracie feels because it is like adoption.
We were both procured to resolve a couple’s infertility.
I am not one to downplay the power of desire for a child. After all, Rachel in Genesis believed she would die without one.
But many things in life are unattainable. Stuff we want but know we do not have an inalienable right to. Except, it seems, children.
In my perfect world, where the needs of children are paramount, here are the questions the photographer should have been asking:
Isn’t it hard to give up the mother you’ve known for nine months? Isn’t it hard to recover from your birth without the reward of your mother’s skin? Her heartbeat, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hands, the safety of her care and love? What about her milk? Your perfect food that changes daily depending on your needs?
In all that gushing about a selfless act, the photographer apparently forgot about the most import people in the room – the ones being born.

– ref. A selfless act? – https://www.sadiesumnerbooks.com/blog/2018/10/22/a-selfless-act