Posts by Russell Brown
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Emma Hart,
but it takes even more courage to say, as Bart and Robert have here, and some of you have on other threads of mine, “I used to think this/say this/do this, and it was wrong, and now I try really hard not to.” Those are the moments I do this for, to be honest. It’s what it’s all about for me.
I’ve chewed over a couple or three things over the years, still do. None of them terrible, all of them things I wish I had the chance to do over because I don’t like who I was then and there.
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I’ll try and be brief about this. I understand and wholly support the reaction of the women I know to this horror. My response, equally understandably, I think, was that here was yet another young man with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis going on a brutal rampage. Like Adam Lanza, who slaughtered 20 children and six adults 18 months ago at Sandy Hook, Rodger was the same age as my older son. That weighs very heavily on me.
I’ve been wearied and sometimes upset by the constant Twitter retweet noise telling me I’m not allowed to think about that. I made myself read Rodger’s screed and I believe that he clearly had a severe personality disorder and probably symptoms of ASD.
The thing here is that what Emma aptly describes as “the script” (I thought “the text”) came from a pervasive culture of misogyny. It was that which colonised the space in Rodger’s alienated life. It is that which is a constant reality for women who have to be around misogynist men. That weighs heavily on me too.
I wrote a post about this after Sandy Hook, so I don’t need to carry on. That’s not what this conversation is today. But I would ask that people allow that there is more than one dimension of these horrible events.
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Hard News: The Digital Natives, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Laila Harre.
I think that’s a bit of a win.
Big win. She has left-wing cred – NDU, Green Party and the ILO in Fiji(!) in the past few years. But she also ran the HR part of the Auckland Transition Agency, bringing the old councils’ staff in the new Auckland Council structure, which must have been a very demanding role. . She’s a business owner. And, of course, she’s been an MP.
I’m genuinely impressed. Caveat: she doesn’t seem to stay anywhere for long.
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Hard News: The Digital Natives, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
has any one heard from Paul Brislan recently?
I believe he's just stepped down as TUANZ CEO...
Nope. He's off to a swanky new PR/comms start-up.
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So, they're looking at work visas and the family reunification cap, because they're the only categories big enough for the leverage they want. This is where is might get messy for them.
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Hard News: The Digital Natives, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I also think Labour is smart enough to know that doing an Epsom in Te Tai Tokerau, or anywhere else, would alienate a lot of members and flaxroots campaign activists you don’t want staying home with their wallets shut in an election year.
Exactly. If you really wanted a way to get the "Labour takes Maori for granted" meme into play, that'd be it.
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In other words, we need to let men out of the Masculinity Box. We need to be accepting of men having actual real emotions and accept them finding healthy ways of processing them. A man crying needs to be more socially acceptable than a man punching, and it’s not.
If you read Rodger’s “manifesto” (and I actually don’t recommend it), he cried quite a lot, out of anger, hate, frustration and shame. He cried literally like a child and out of the whole, gory thing, so fixated on the validation of his manhood, he never seems like an adult man. It might make sense to add maturity to the list of essential attributes for men who are safe to be in the world with. Or perhaps that's a function of other attributes.
And there we’ve kind of hit the heart of it, in that old feminist cliché: it’s about seeing women as people.
Rodger never did and it worries me how many men there are like him.
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Hard News: The Fine Line, in reply to Chris Waugh,
But I really struggle to see how capping migrant numbers would work, or adjusting the points system to maintain an effective cap. For starters, it could only apply to categories such as student, work, or business migrants. And even then, how could you reasonably tell applicants “sorry, you meet all the criteria, but we filled the quota”? To try and limit categories like refugee/asylum/protection or family reunion or spousal visas strikes me as being utterly inhumane.
We already do this. The Capped Family Stream is set at 14,850 to 16,500 places between July 2011 and June 2014. There's also a balloted Pacific Quota. The government had to move to block a surge of applications under the old policy when it revised the Business Migrant category in December. The points systems change over time.
The question isn't whether it's okay to vary immigration settings. but whether that lever will do the job Labour thinks it will. And, of course, how it will play out in an election year.
And yet, of course, simply throwing open the gates and accepting all comers is not going to be a smart idea.
Which we've never done.
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Hard News: The Fine Line, in reply to william blake,
…what about a few tariffs on imports?
Working out monetary policies that aren't entirely premised on hot-money-attracting high interest rates would do the same thing more productively.
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Hard News: The Fine Line, in reply to Sacha,
Exactly. We’re using migration as a convenient excuse to avoid addressing our ongoing national failure to make our economy sustainably better at earning more from the world through high-value, high-skilled work and smart, creative enterprises.
And let’s be honest: immigration buttressed Labour’s economic story in government quite nicely too. It created growth they wouldn’t otherwise have had.