Up Front by Emma Hart

I want to spend some time talking about the opposite of a Universal Basic Income. Well, not quite the opposite. We know what happens if a state makes no provision for its worst off. We don’t have to imagine what happens without social welfare: Engels wrote it all down for us. Then Dickens cleaned it up quite a lot and wrote it down so people would actually read it.

I want to talk about England, and the Disability Benefit. More specifically, the “Fit for Work” test. You see, one of the things we apparently have in common with England is an epidemic of people pretending to be ill, or pretending to be more incapacitated than they are. For some reason, their doctors conspire with them in this. The assessments of NHS professionals cannot be trusted, and must be verified by other NHS professionals. A government cannot, particularly in a time of austerity, allow its citizens to defraud it.

The job was outsourced to a company called ATOS. People with Parkinson’s were declared fit for work. So were people in hospital receiving cancer treatment. (Luckily, this would never happen in New Zealand.)  People were declared fit for work days before dying.

Late last year, a report was released linking Fit for Work assessments to nearly six hundred suicides.

One million recipients of disability benefit had their eligibility reassessed under the WCA tests in England between 2010 and 2013, according to researchers from the University of Liverpool.

The researchers calculated that these assessments were linked to an additional 590 suicides, 279,000 extra cases of self-reported mental health problems and the prescribing of an additional 725,000 antidepressants between 2010-13.

This is equivalent to a 5% rise in total suicides, 11% increase of self-referred mental health problems, and 0.5% more antidepressant prescriptions.

The human toll of these assessments, on people who are not job-seekers, but too physically or mentally ill to work, is appalling. On the other hand, it’s technically a success, because those 590 people are off the government’s books. If it’s morally unconscionable, at least it is actually saving money, right?

Yeah, nah. That’s when we get to here. The fit for work assessments cost more money than they save. Despite the British government having Sercoed ATOS and brought in completely different private contractors, the situation has if anything got worse.

The study by the National Audit Office (NAO) found that the Department for Work and Pensions is handing over £1.6bn over the next three years to private contractors who carry out the controversial health and disability assessments. 

But at the same time, the Government’s own financial watchdog has warned that savings in benefits payments are likely to be less than a billion pounds by 2020 as a result of the new tests.

Surely we can agree that this policy is purest ideology. It’s a failure in both human and financial terms. Its sole purpose is to punish people for not working. The experience of being on welfare is so appalling that people are killing themselves rather than endure it.

New Zealand is very little different. The underlying mentality is the same.

Yet a Universal Basic Income seems politically, and perhaps financially, Too Hard. Is there a middle ground, between hounding cancer patients and sending out trucks of free money? Well, I have some suggestions.

Remove the Stand-down

The stand-down is the period after you successfully apply for a benefit you’re entitled to, and before they start paying it to you. Why? Because. It’s usually two weeks, though it can be thirteen, and may be longer if you have unused holidays from a previous job.

Fuck that noise. Grabbed your kids and left your abusive partner? Good on you. Well fucking done. Have a benefit, right now. Saved money while you were working, before you got sick or lost your job? Yay you. Instead of punishing you for not pissing it all away, have a benefit, right now. Human being cannot actually live on just air, so have some money, so you don’t die.

Get Rid of Medical Assessments

I mean okay, also, bring back a separate Sickness/Invalid’s benefit. There’s a simple clear policy idea right there. Bring it back, put those people on it, and then leave them the fuck alone. (Yes, there is a Supported Living Payment, but in practical terms it’s very difficult to get, and doesn’t cover most people who would have been on a Sickness Benefit.)

Don’t work-test them. They have doctors, who know them, and specialist who, y’know, specialise. Don’t waste money paying other doctors to check up on them, and don’t make them sicker by putting them through the stress of a Designated Doctor assessment.

And don’t make people with permanent, chronic conditions and disabilities keep going to their doctor to get a certificate to say yeah, they haven’t magically regained their hearing or the use of their legs. It’s stupid. It’s just stupid.

Don’t Work-Test Care-givers

Don’t make parents of young children look for work. That thing they’re doing? It’s work, and what you pay them for it is total and utter shit.

Help

You know what Work and Income is really, really bad at? Helping people find work. Imagine if that was their prime function, for people on the Jobseeker Allowance. You don’t have a job, you want a job, you go in, and they help you find a job. Apart from anything else, this would make things far more pleasant for their staff, if their relationship to their clients was less adversarial.

Just help. It’s the right thing to do.

I like to take what I consider to be a healthy interest in other countries’ politics. In part, this offers a refreshing break from crying when people tweet about New Zealand electoral law.

I’m not ready to pay too much attention to the US presidential race, in the same way March is too early to pay attention to Super Rugby. There is, however, only so long you can spend watching Justin Trudeau cuddle baby pandas. (It’s a long time, mind, but a finite time.) Eventually, one has to glance across the Tasman and think. “Oh dear. What the fuck are yous doing?”

First it was the review of the Safe Schools Program, because Heaven Forefend children learn not to bully people because of their sexuality or gender identity. That’s indoctrination. And then there’s the same-sex marriage plebiscite.

Now, perhaps you’re wondering, WTF is a plebiscite? Why isn’t it a referendum? I’ve been doing quite a lot of reading, and while it’s very confusing, I think I may have some answers.

WTF is a plebiscite? How’s it different from a referendum?

In Australia, a referendum concerns the constitution, and is binding. A plebiscite is for non-constitutional law change, and isn’t binding.

So the Australian parliament can just ignore the result of the plebiscite?

Yes they can. But Turnbull has said they won’t.

But they can?

Yes.

But they won’t?

Fuck knows. Some government MPs who are opposed to marriage equality have said they will consider themselves bound by the plebiscite, but they also expect it to be defeated.

Will it?

Will it fuck. Various polls put the Australian public’s support for same-sex marriage at 65-75%, with only 25% opposed – very similar to the numbers in New Zealand.

Okay, so what’s the question going to be? Who gets to decide the wording of the question? I mean, that stuff’s quite important, yeah?

Yes it is, officially the Prime Minister, and nobody knows yet.

So if we already know the result, and it’s not binding anyway, why have it? Why not just have a parliamentary vote like we did in New Zealand?

The plebiscite appears to be part of a deal Turnbull did with his conservative MPs. It’s a delaying tactic. It’s basically an extra, time-consuming hurdle for the law to get over.

Okay, so when will the plebiscite be?

The Attorney-General, George Brandis, said it would be after the election, but before the end of the year.

So, then?

Then Malcolm Turnbull said “Eh…” So probably not.

What happens if Labor wins the election instead?

They’ve promised to hold a parliamentary vote within their first 100 days.

Couldn’t they have done this under one of their Prime Ministers, though?

You might very well think that.

Well, it sounds like Australia is getting marriage equality next year no matter what. So what’s the problem with having a plebiscite? Isn’t this lovely cuddly democracy in action?

Well, let’s say we don’t care about the $160m it’ll cost. Democracy is expensive. What it means is that both sides of the argument will have extensive, largely unregulated campaigns on the issue.

Take a moment to imagine what that’s going to sound like.

A plebiscite would give anti-gay campaigners the biggest stage they have ever had. US research (Hatzenbuehler et al) has shown that the mental health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people suffered significantly during referenda debates on marriage equality.

For LGBTI people who experienced a US state referendum on marriage equality there was;

-          a 37 per cent increase in mood disorders,

-          a 42 per cent increase in alcohol-use disorders, and

-          a 248 per cent in generalised anxiety disorders.

In states without such referenda, there was no increase.

This is why having referenda (or, okay, plebiscites) on human rights issues is inherently degrading. In this case, it means giving a platform for some people to be called child molesters, to be told they’re not fit to raise their children, that they are simply less human than other people.

But then there’s a party, right? And everyone sings Pokarekare Ana and cries.

Yes.

Eventually.

Everyone who’s still standing.

 

It’s not often I get a column mostly written in my head, and then have to tear it up and throw it away. Surely that should be even less likely to happen with a memorial column: isn’t the subject the past? But this will be a very different column from the one I would have written two weeks ago.

I have very dear people in my life who come to visit Christchurch once or twice a year. Because they don’t see it every day, they can be our best guides to how things are changing. All those I saw around Christmas remarked on how the city felt noticeably better this time.

Much of this is the central city. Finally, more is going up than coming down. My own feeling is that the impression is due not so much to the completion of any one project, like the bus exchange or the Margaret Mahy playground, as the way the dots are starting to join up. The shops on New Regent St are no longer isolated. They’re between the Isaac Theatre Royal and the playground. St Asaph St is turning into a lovely bank of bars and restaurants that should be really nice if they ever stop digging up that road. We could do with more functional footpaths and bike lanes, but there’s obvious progress. I spent Sunday at Hagley Oval, the prettiest test cricket ground in the country, and yes I will fight the Basin Reserve over that title. We have pavement cafes and by gods we will use them.

And then, things happened. Because this isn’t about the past, five years on. Things are still happening.

I was out in the garden when the Valentine’s Day quake hit. It was vast and rumbly and long and far stronger than anything we’ve had for years. I went inside, and I was right back to picking things up off the floor and cleaning nutmeg out of the pantry. A week later I’m still finding things that have shifted or fallen, and my bedside lamp will never be the same again. It’s not just one quake, either. It never is. Little aftershocks still rumble lazily on. We’d been so long without them, we let our defences down.

Almost immediately afterwards, we were told our mental health funding had been cut.

The babies born on the day of the quake start school today. Like the rest of our children, they’re more likely to show signs of anxiety and developmental delays. And I don’t know, you might be sick of us because of the way we voted (no we didn’t, but never mind), or our endless whining, or the way we want to keep complaining and yet won’t take your eminently sensible ‘just leave’ advice, but we’re a vulnerable population. When you neglect a vulnerable population, bad things happen. Bad, expensive things.

On a smaller but similar note, it turns out my kids’ old school has in fact not secured a rebuild site. This feels like yet another step backwards. Five years on, to have any school still in limbo, still in temporary premises, still subject to disruption, is not good enough.  

What’s also not good enough is our public library. The Central Library wasn’t badly damaged by the quakes, and could have been repaired on its site for very little more than its insurance payout. But no. Because the convention centre. So five years on, we have two tiny ‘temporary’ libraries instead, and no sign of any permanent replacement.

It’s fair to say, my optimism has taken a few knocks, and not just because of the Australian batting I sat through yesterday.

So today we will remember. The important thing is, today we will be allowed to remember. We will be given space to be sad, to reflect on the way our lives have been shaken up. It’s good for our mental health. And then we will get up and get on, because as my mother used to say, there’s no other choice.

One of the great things – possibly the only great thing – about having a post-grad degree in English Literature is that I can now read whatever the fuck I want. I have earned my Book Cred. I will never read anything to impress anyone. After finishing my degree, it took me nearly a year to learn to read for pleasure again; not to analyse theme and form and subtext, not to look for good pull-quotes. To lose myself in a story.

Twice, as a child, I can remember being told off by teachers for reading something that wasn’t good enough for me. The first time, it was reading The Hardy Boys when I was nine. The second time, it was reading Agatha Christie when I was thirteen. That second time, my teacher gave me Jane Ayre instead. I read the first chapter, which weirded me out, and didn’t touch it again until I was nineteen, and fully capable of realising how dodgy that book is.

Hardy Boys. Agatha Christie. I once made friends with a strange woman twice my age because I was reading a Trixie Belden book, and she wanted to know if Trixie and Jim had hooked up yet. I still love detective fiction so much.

I know it’s genre, and formula, and to be sneered at nearly as much as romance. But a well-crafted mystery is a feat of the writer’s art. It’s a puzzle. Its solution should be both unforeseen by the reader, and make perfect sense in hindsight. It should be factually accurate and feel psychologically plausible.

So I never stopped reading Agatha Christie. After the earthquakes, I pillaged our much-diminished libraries of every book of hers I could find, even the later ‘drugs and spies’ books that maybe aren’t her best work. Then it was Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley mysteries. They were comforting amongst so much pain and disruption.

The book I most often claim as my favourite is Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, which is one of the contenders for the title of “first detective novel”. It’s a masterful piece of fiction, especially considering Collins was bombed out of his skull on laudanum and managing two mistresses. It’s a series of first-person narratives from a succession of characters, and each narrator’s voice is absolutely distinctive.

And if it’s okay for me to love Victorian detective fiction, it is also okay for me to love Raymond Chandler, whom I consider to be a massively under-rated writer. People understand his contribution to the archetype of the hard-drinking deeply unhappy overcoat-wearing detective, but the imagery of his prose is still, after all this time, startlingly original.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

I love murder mystery television too, though I tend to stick to adaptations of authors I haven’t read. There was some fearsome shouting at the telly when one P.D. James adaption removed the end plot-twist where it turned out the blackmailer wasn’t the killer after all, and replaced it with a chase across tidal flats and a fist-fight. I got through several seasons of Bones by pretending the show was nothing to do with Kathy Reichs’ books.

It’s not just old murder mysteries, books by women, and anything featuring Laurence Fox. I love Jim Butcher and Ben Aaronovitch, because yeah, why not mysteries featuring vampires and wizards and werewolves? It’s not like we have any kudos to protect. We were never really trying to stay hip.

So let’s take time out from pre-Christmas stress and bitching and Judith Collins’ smug face, and share stories of our favourite murder books. New finds, old favourites, guilty pleasures, sheer kitsch disasters. Grab a seat and a gin; the book club is in session.

When I was at uni and it came time to vote in student politics, there were a lot of people who would fill up their votes by just picking all the recognisably-female names on the ballot. I was pretty annoyed about it: surely we should be choosing candidates on merit, not gender. Sure, most of those elected were still male, but there was nothing stopping more women standing, right?

So it was with some bemusement, when Justin Trudeau announced his gender-balanced cabinet, that I found myself entirely in favour of Quotas for Women.

My views have changed in the last twenty years. Not so much about Ends, but I’ve got a whole lot less fussy and idealistic about Means. What I’ve come to realise is that the arguments against quotas for female representation simply don’t stack up.

The most important thing to realise was actually pretty simple: Our Defaults Are Not Neutral. The system selects in favour of men. It’s already clearly not a meritocracy, unless you believe that there’s something about men that makes them inherently better at politics than women.

The weird thing about that, though, is that in Gender-Essentialist Land, men are better at spatial things, at maths. Women are better at linguistic things, at talking, better with emotional intelligence. Which one of those skill sets sounds more useful in politics? It’s mostly talking and working with people. Even if men were somehow better leaders (being confident and decisive where women are shrill and pushy), you only need a couple of leaders. Others need to be persuasive, and good at building consensus. That sounds pretty girly to me.

What we’re battling against is a long tradition of politics being exclusively at Men’s Club. New Zealand women got the vote in 1893, but they couldn’t stand for election until 1919. (Rate-paying women could vote in and stand for local body elections from 1867. Elizabeth Yates became the British Empire’s first female mayor in 1893.) We didn’t get our first female MP until 1933. By the end of the 70s, women had never held more than 6.3% of seats in the House, and only four had ever served in Cabinet.

Things got better after the introduction of MMP, as you can see here. Most female members of Parliament came in from the lists, rather than as electorate MPs. Still, it seems we’ve reached a plateau, where women make up about a third of MPs. That’s serious under-representation for women, which simply isn’t getting any better.

And yes, a woman may not represent me any better than a man. Surely I’m no better represented by Paula Bennett than by Grant Robertson, who is LGBT and understands the long-term struggle of being a Black Caps supporter. But this isn’t about one individual woman representing another individual woman. It’s about having enough women to provide a representation of the diversity of women.

Then of course the argument becomes, well, if we have to represent women, why not other minorities? Why not quotas for gay MPs and disabled MPs, and every minority ethnic group? Where are our lesbian midget MPs, hm?

For a start, women are not a minority. This really is low-hanging fruit territory. Also, Maori and Pasifika people are currently represented in Parliament in roughly the same proportions as they are in the general population – 18% and 7% respectively. I can’t tell you if LGBT people are, because we don’t have the data. Disabled people are not, and work needs to be done on accessibility issues. But no “well why not that then” argument means that we should not do this.

The concern-trolling argument is that if we had quotas for women, people would think that women hadn’t achieved their positions through merit, but only to fill the quota. Because right now, it is of course never assumed that a woman holds her job because of who her husband is, or who she’s slept with, or how she looks. Or to put it another way, the Greens have a gender-balanced list. Please tell me which female Green MPs don’t merit their jobs.

What people should be doing, in fact, is looking at a system which ensures that men make up roughly 70% of both Parliament and Cabinet, and thinking that some of those men are there because they’re men, not because of merit. They don’t have to overcome the same barriers women do: nobody asks male candidates who’s looking after their children, after all. Nobody assumes they’re there to make the tea, or because they’re somebody’s spouse.

And then yesterday this happened, and kind of made my case for me.

Female MPs, from Labour and the Greens, co-ordinated a unified response and took a stand which was hugely effective in influencing the public discourse. They did this using their personal experiences. Because they were women, they could say, “What you have done is offensive and damaging to us, because we have been through this ourselves. We are not your punch-line.”

These women made me feel proud. I reckon we could do with some more of them. And the current system will not deliver. I reckon a quota can’t hurt.