Forwards And Backwards.

The Right In Action: Nothing in politics is ever settled. The hands of History’s clock can go backwards, as well as forwards.

IT REALLY WAS THE BEST OF TIMES. The brief recession of the late-1950s was over. The United States was led by a young, Harvard-educated war hero, with the dashing style and good-looks of a Hollywood movie star.

The Kennedy Administration had made idealism sexy, and politics heroic. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” John F. Kennedy had declared in his Inaugural Address of 20 January 1961, “ask what you can do for your country.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and its peaceful resolution, offered proof positive that “the best and the brightest” of the “Free World” were more than a match for the hard men of Soviet Communism. There was a confidence and purposefulness about the United States that not only lifted the spirits of Americans, but fuelled the hopes of people all over the world.

Even the great American scars of racism and poverty no longer seemed beyond remedy. Dr Martin Luther King’s non-violent civil rights movement was galvanising young Americans of all colours in ways not seen since the Civil War of the 1860s. It recalled the high idealism of the Abolitionists: that extraordinary fervour for racial justice reflected in the words of The Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As [Christ] died to make men holy, let us die to set men free.”

Kennedy had also invited Michael Harrington, democratic socialist and author of the 1962 best-seller, The Other America, to the White House for a briefing on those pockets of poverty Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had left in place, and how, finally, they might be eradicated.

Underlying all this optimism and idealism was a rising tide of Keynesian-inspired economic prosperity that had lifted all boats high enough for the usual hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth priorities of ordinary Americans to be temporarily set aside. If the United States was rich enough to contemplate putting a man on the moon by 1970, then perhaps the elimination of racial inequality and poverty could be overcome.

Paradoxically, Kennedy’s assassination only hardened the resolve of Americans to meet the challenges their fallen leader had set before them.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson pledged unreservedly to make good his predecessor’s promises. In January 1964, just weeks after the tragedy in Dallas, “LBJ” used his first State of the Union Address to declare an unconditional “war on poverty”. In November of that same year, Johnson handed Barry Goldwater, the presidential candidate of a Republican Party hi-jacked by its far-right lunatic fringe, a stunning and humiliating defeat.

In his most effective campaign ad’, Johnson said, simply: “Either we must love each other, or we must die.” Less than sixty years ago, an American President had secured a landslide victory on a platform of delivering racial justice, ending poverty, and keeping America at peace.

In the bitter aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s revocation of Roe v. Wade, the above history lesson should serve as a sharp reminder of just how tenuous, and temporary, political progress can be. In the space of just four tumultuous years, the United States had retreated so far from its progressive high-water mark, that Richard Nixon was able to re-take the White House for the Republican Party. Nothing in politics is ever “settled”. The hands of History’s clock can go backwards, as well as forwards.

Nor are such dramatic political reversals peculiar to the United States. In 1972, the New Zealand electorate swung sharply left, propelling the Labour Party into power with 48.4 percent of the popular vote and a whopping 23-seat majority. The professors and the pundits of the time were unanimous in their opinion that a majority of 23 could not be overturned in the space of a single term. Labour, they insisted, was good for at least six years.

They couldn’t have been more wrong. Between 1972 and 1975, the mood of the New Zealand electorate soured to the point where National’s right-wing populist leader, Rob Muldoon, was able to exactly reverse the 1972 election result. Politically and socially, New Zealand voters had swung as sharply to the right as, only 36 months before, they had swung to the left.

Fear was the key: fear and its associated need for reassurance and protection. Muldoon’s success was built on the sudden failure of the New Zealand economy. Rampant inflation, rocketing petrol prices, and the widespread conviction that something very serious had gone wrong with the stable (some might say smug) New Zealand so gently mocked in Austin Mitchell’s in/famous bestseller The Half-Gallon, Quarter-Acre, Pavlova Paradise.

Which is why, when professors and pundits glibly reassure us that there is no way New Zealanders could turn against a woman’s right to choose an abortion, we are entitled to a small snort of derision.

Four years ago, approximately 65-70 percent of New Zealanders were in favour of legalising cannabis. That’s roughly the same percentage of the population that supports the current abortion law. After 18-months-to-a-year of extremely sophisticated campaigning by the anti-cannabis lobby, however, the percentage of voters supporting marijuana law reform had plummeted to just under 50 percent – a fall sufficient to cost the reformers the 2020 referendum. Public opinion doesn’t just change, it can be made to change.

With most economists predicting an imminent recession, many New Zealanders will enter 2023 in fear of what lies in store for them, and resentful of a Labour Government they believe has let them down. If extra-parliamentary forces like the Family First organisation are able to associate Labour’s political leadership with an ideology that despises and derides the beliefs and values of ordinary people, linking their lack of empathy with New Zealanders’ declining economic fortunes, then the chances of them producing a dramatic shift in the electorate’s thinking are relatively high.

In a commentary-piece written for The Conversation, the Auckland academic Suze Wilson warns New Zealanders against placing too much stock in Opposition Leader, Christopher Luxon’s, reassurances that National would not pursue a change to this country’s abortion laws should it win government.

“Even if Luxon’s current assurance is sincerely intended,” writes Wilson, “it may not sustain should the broader political acceptability of his personal beliefs change. And on that front, there are grounds for concern.”

Wilson draws particular attention to the sharp rightward drift set in motion by the Covid-19 Pandemic and the measures adopted by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-led Government to protect New Zealanders from its worst effects. The early success of those measures, sufficient to secure Labour’s landslide victory in 2020, has not been maintained. Voters who, just 18 months ago looked upon “Jacinda” as a national hero, are daily falling prey to extreme right-wing conspiracy theories depicting her as a power-crazed tyrant.

“If these kinds of shifts in public opinion continue to gather steam, it may become more politically tenable for Luxon to shift gear regarding New Zealand’s abortion laws”, Wilson warns.

The same America that gave us JFK, also gave us Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. The same New Zealand that gave us Norman Kirk, also gave us Rob Muldoon. Except they weren’t really the same countries, were they? Because, when Prosperity leaves the building, Empathy is seldom very far behind.

Nothing in politics is ever settled.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 4 July 2022.

Let’s Not Make 2023 About Abortion.

No Common Ground: The destructive and punitive impulses aroused by the abortion issue make a rational, let alone a civil, debate virtually impossible. Indeed, the very idea that those on both sides of the abortion issue might be decent and caring individuals, whose opposing positions are based on reasonable and eminently defensible philosophical propositions, religious principles, medical facts and socio-economic realities, will be rejected as dangerous nonsense.

WHETHER OR NOT ABORTION emerges as a major issue following next year’s elections depends on National’s candidate selections. National lost 13 seats in 2020, and on current polling can be reasonably confident about reclaiming most of them in 2023. Much then depends on the beliefs – pro-choice or pro-life – of the candidates selected over the next few months. If National replenishes its caucus with pro-life MPs, and ACT emerges with a reasonable number of pro-lifers in its own, then the debate may, once again, be set alight.

The reignition of the Abortion Debate will become a dead certainty, however, if Brian Tamaki is successful at bringing together the fractious Far-Right political parties under a single banner. Should his new conservative coalition crest the 5 percent MMP threshold, the outbreak of an American-style culture war will be very hard to prevent. Moreover, if Labour and the Greens sustain significant losses in 2023, as current polling suggest they will, then that war will be very hard to win. Certainly, a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion will be among the first casualties.

This state of affairs will not be attributable entirely to the electoral success of the Far Right. In both Labour and the Greens a defeat of sufficient magnitude to bring the likes of Tamaki’s Christian soldiers into Parliament will likely generate a particularly vicious backlash against the social-radicalism which conservative leftists will be quick to blame for their party’s punishment at the polls.

After all, it’s not as if Labour’s te Tiriti-driven, feminist and LGBTQI factions will be able to point to a proud collection of policy successes in relation to poverty, housing, health and education – quite the reverse. Working-class party members (if any remain) will have every reason to demand a thorough-going purge of middle-class social-radicals from Labour’s ranks. A similar purge, mutatis mutandis, will sweep away the identarian Greens.

If such purges do not eventuate, and the two left-wing parties remain in the grip of identity politicians, social-radicals and ethno-nationalists, then it is difficult to see them making a swift recovery at the polls. At least initially, the voting public is likely to cast about for a political movement less alienating, and more encouraging, of “mainstream” electoral support. If the rightward tendencies within Labour and the Greens do not succeed in providing these conservative left-wing voters with such a vehicle, then they will call forth somebody better equipped to offer them a ride.

Historically, the damage inflicted by such right-wing re-settings of left-wing parties’ ideological compasses has been enormous. Convinced that a Labour Party as left-wing as Norman Kirk’s could never be re-elected, the rightward elements that would eventually give New Zealand “Rogernomics” spent fifteen years destroying Labour as a party of economic redistribution. After years of bitter factional strife, the party’s left-wingers were finally driven from its ranks. Labour only survived to reclaim the Treasury Benches in 1999 on account of being restrained from veering too far from its electoral base by the competitive presence of Jim Anderton’s Alliance and Jeanette Fitzsimons’ and Rod Donald’s Greens.

The New Zealand of the 2020s is not, however, the New Zealand of the 1990s. Our thoroughly digitalised society no longer possesses the human resources capable of creating new political parties dedicated to the nation-building and/or nation-restoring missions of the Alliance and NZ First. Corny though it may sound, at the heart of these two essentially patriotic electoral projects lay an undeniable love of country.

Thirty years on, the creation of political movements is driven much more by the voters’ intense hatred of what their enemies: neoliberals, colonisers, patriarchs, heterosexuals – take your pick – have done to Aotearoa-New Zealand. Where once the urge was to build and/or restore, today’s activists seek only to attack, punish and destroy.

In relation to the issue of abortion, these destructive and punitive impulses will make it virtually impossible for the debate to proceed on a rational, let alone a civil, basis. Indeed, the very idea that those on both sides of the abortion issue might be decent and caring individuals, whose opposing positions are based on reasonable and eminently defensible philosophical propositions, religious principles, medical facts and socio-economic realities, will be rejected as dangerous nonsense. Pro-lifers are no such thing, they are simply misogynistic religious bigots. Pro-choicers stand condemned as monsters for whom human life matters less than personal convenience.

In these circumstances, simply to raise the issue of abortion is to set up the conditions for the most reckless expressions of hatred and loathing. In the Age of Twitter, Tik-Tok and Instagram, which is to say, in the Age of Declarative Solipsism, extremism will always arrive on the battlefield firstest, with the mostest. Small wonder, then, that Christopher Luxon is so determined to make sure that the battle never takes place.

Sometimes, as the US Supreme Court may yet discover, doing nothing is the only sensible thing to do.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 June 2022.

Struggling Upwards For America’s Soul.

Justice Denied: At the heart of the “Pro-Life” cause was something much darker than conservative religious dogma, or even the oppressive designs of “The Patriarchy”. The enduring motivation – which dares not declare itself openly – is the paranoid conviction of male white supremacists that if “their” women are given personal control of their wombs, then white Americans will soon be “outbred” by Blacks and Hispanics.

THIS IS WHERE it was always bound to end: at the base, not the summit, of the political pyramid. The acceptance of racial equality. The recognition of a woman’s right to choose. These are battles that have to be won on the ground and in the ballot boxes, not at the Supreme Court Of The United States.

Dr Martin Luther King understood this necessity better than most of his white supporters. The whole point of his campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience was to produce not only political but spiritual transformation.

Nonviolence certainly ennobles those who practice it, but of equal importance is the impact on those who resist its objectives. Against the hardened shells of unrepentant racists the disciplined sacrifice of the civil rights activists make no impression. But these lost souls are fewer in number than many reformers suppose.

What many knee-jerk racists saw happening in the streets and at lunch counters across the South gave them pause. It made them think. And when they learned about the children killed in the Birmingham bombing, it made them ashamed.

This was precisely the response Dr King was hoping to evoke. The fight he was engaged in was for the souls of the whites who had been raised to see African-Americans as something less than truly human. He knew the battle for racial equality would never be won until his movement had made the process of dehumanisation morally repugnant – not only to decent America, but also to its indecent bigots. Only when these ‘good ole boys’ no longer had the stomach for repression would the Civil War finally be over.

The great tragedy of the Civil Rights Movement was that it required a measure of patience and forbearance beyond the reach of all but a handful of very special human-beings. The race-riots of the mid-Sixties: in Watts, Detroit and Newark; were catastrophic to Dr King’s cause. “Burn, baby, burn!” let White America off the hook. The violence and destruction, no matter how egregiously provoked by racist police officers, reconfirmed all the old racial prejudices.

Ultimately, Dr King’s moral struggle failed. Supreme Court rulings might compel racism to adapt, but they could not kill it.

Something very similar happened in relation to the struggle for the right of women to control their own fertility. The protagonists for abortion never truly plumbed the depths of their opponents’ determination to overturn the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision, referred to simply as “Roe v. Wade”, which decriminalised terminations in the first trimester of a woman’s pregnancy.

At the heart of the “Pro-Life” cause was something much darker than conservative religious dogma, or even the oppressive designs of “The Patriarchy”. The enduring motivation – which dares not declare itself openly – is the paranoid conviction of male white supremacists that if “their” women are given personal control of their wombs, then white Americans will soon be “outbred” by Blacks and Hispanics.

The family size of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants has been steadily shrinking for generations. The United States of America, which these “WASPs” regard as their own, could not be permitted to fall under the sway of ethnicities typically producing larger families. Not for nothing did the Far-Right demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, greet Black, Hispanic and Jewish counter-demonstrators with chants of: “You will not replace us!”

It is surely instructive that the legal grounds for protecting American women’s right to abortion is located in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Passed by Congress in 1866, this amendment guaranteed the bodily liberty of America’s former slaves, along with the “equal protection of the laws”.

The Supreme Court has found that without individual privacy, individual liberty is rendered legally unintelligible. Private decisions about what we do with our bodies, and who we choose to perform those acts with, cannot be the proper business of federal and state legislators.

To revoke Roe v. Wade not only strikes at the heart of women’s freedom, but at the bodily freedom of all Americans.

To “breed” slaves it was necessary to impose a tyranny of terrifying intimacy. Neither the womb, nor the child that issued from it, belonged to the female slave. White Supremacy’s need for this intimate tyranny endures, extending now to the wombs of all American women. With the Supreme Court under its sway, the struggle for America’s soul must toil upwards.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 May 2022.

The Politics Of Distraction.

Keeping Their Eyes On The Road: The Coalition Government's re-election depends crucially on the dominant themes of the 2020 election remaining firmly rooted in the practical concerns of the majority. If, however, the National Party Opposition can wrench the electorate’s attention away from the Coalition’s bread-and-butter priorities, then everything will be made significantly more difficult for Labour, NZ First and the Greens.

2020’s GENERAL ELECTION will differ from 2017’s in one vital respect – it will not be about “the economy, stupid”. This poses serious problems for the Coalition Government. 

The unlikely pairing of Labour and NZ First would not have happened had the dominant themes of the 2017 election not been inequality, homelessness, child poverty and pollution. Fluid public concern surrounding these issues had congealed into a broad political consensus that “something must be done”. This, in turn, had led to a blurring of traditional electoral boundaries. It was this blurring effect which encouraged a party of the populist right to reach out to a party of the centre-left and, more surprising still, accept the participation of radical greens in a new government.

The re-election of this unlikely electoral alliance depends crucially on the dominant themes for 2020 remaining firmly rooted in the practical concerns of the majority. Is the gap between the rich and the poor widening or closing? Are people better housed than they were in 2017? Have first-home-buyers been given the hand-up they were promised? Has the percentage of kids living in poverty gone up or down? Are New Zealand’s rivers and lakes more – or less – swimmable?

Positive answers to these questions – and the absence of too many distracting alternatives – should turn the Coalition Government’s re-election into a slam-dunk. If, however, the National Party Opposition can wrench the electorate’s attention away from the Coalition’s bread-and-butter priorities, then everything will be made significantly more difficult for Labour, NZ First and the Greens.

Unfortunately for the governing parties, the 2020 election shows every sign of being defined by the politics of distraction.

For this, the governing parties have no one to blame but themselves. They were the ones who decided to put euthanasia, the legalisation of cannabis, the decriminalisation and liberalisation of abortion, and the reform of New Zealand’s justice system on the political agenda. All of these issues are distinguished by one over-riding political characteristic: their capacity to polarise the electorate. The very outcome which this curious, composite government should be straining every political sinew to avoid.

The National Party and its allies have lost little time in girding their loins for this fight – one much easier to win than a battle against consolidating the material gains of the voting public. Already, the conservative lobby-group, Family First, is pouring over the poll results supplied to it by Curia Research, the agency directed by National’s long-time pollster, David Farrar.

Family First have noted the white-heat generated by all aspects of the transgender issue and, thanks to Curia Research, now know how New Zealanders feel about some of the most sensitive questions associated with transgender politics. More importantly, Family First has hard evidence that the gulf between the attitudes of NZ First and Green Party voters is vast. The potential to destabilise the government by driving the transgender issue to the front of the electorate’s consciousness is, correspondingly, huge.

Curia’s data also makes clear how divided the centre-left’s electoral base is on the transgender issue. If the Right is able to goad the identity politicians of Labour and the Greens into displaying a series of extreme responses to the transgender issue, then the potential for alienating a significant number of socially conservative Labour supporters is considerable.

The likelihood of the activist left perceiving this danger is, however, remote. Of more significance to them will be the fact that upwards of a third of voters are happy to have transgender issues canvassed within New Zealand schools. They will, rightly, celebrate the sheer numerical dimensions of the tolerance and solidarity on display. Of less interest to these activists will be Curia’s finding that a clear majority of citizens are opposed to teaching children that their gender, far from being biologically fixed, can be changed.

The exploitation of the political sensitivities associated with the transgender issue will only be the first of many diversions as the politics of distraction unfolds between now and the general election. At most risk of electoral injury will be NZ First, whose deeply conservative electoral base will experience ever-increasing levels of personal and political unease as Labour and the Greens advance their ultra-liberal social agenda.

If, by 2020, National is able to convince NZ First supporters that Labour’s and the Green’s priorities are no longer theirs, then it will win.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 January 2019.

Historic Victory For Irish Women.

Dublin. Saturday, 26 May 2018: Thousands of Irish women cheer the announcement that a nationwide referendum has produced a decisive 66.4 percent vote in favour of repealing the constitutional prohibition against abortion in Ireland.

TRUST THE IRISH to tell a good story. Fifty years from now the young women who gathered in their thousands outside Dublin Castle to cheer the stunning result of the “Repeal the Eighth Amendment Referendum” will have a wonderful tale to tell their grand-daughters. Not only was the result wonderful – 66.4 percent voted in favour of removing what was in effect a constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland – but so too was the way it was won.

As the polls showed a tightening of the gap between the “Yes” and “No” camps, the call went out to Irish women and men scattered across the globe to come home and vote for change. And come home they did. Ireland’s wild geese flocked home in their thousands. The distinctive black “Repeal” T-shirts of the Yes Campaign could be seen at airports and ferry terminals across Ireland. Irish women from as far away as Canada and Australia made the journey to rescue Ireland from the reactionary grip of a Catholic Church which, in the wake of child abuse revelations spanning 20 years, has lost all moral authority.

As the results of the referendum came in, it was clear that something politically and culturally profound has been taking place in the country once written off as a hopelessly conservative, priest-ridden culture still languishing in the dark politics of the Republic of Ireland’s violent birth. Only in County Donegal did the No Campaign prevail – and only by a single percentage point. Throughout the rest of Ireland, most noticeably in Dublin and the larger cities, but also in the rural counties and provincial towns, clear and decisive votes were cast for repeal.

The patient and respectful campaigning of a coalition of moderate and radical women’s groups had done its work. Not even the presence of “Pro-Life” campaigners shipped in from the United States could withstand the clear and incontrovertible evidence of the costs: physical, psychological and economic; of the legal denial of Irish women’s right to exercise control over their own bodies.

By the end of the year the two political parties commanding a majority in the Irish parliament are pledged to introduce and pass reform legislation that will propel Ireland well ahead of New Zealand on abortion rights.

It’s a grand tale which will, no doubt, grow grander in the telling. How the women of Ireland and their upright brothers brought home the Goddess to Erin’s green isle.

This essay is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Reforming The Abortion Laws: A Simple Guide

I don't know how she feels
And I can't know how she feels.
But I want her to know
That I feel for her, oh
I want her to know that I feel.

And I feel so ashamed,
That her life should have been so maimed
By the blindness
That drove her to this, oh
I feel so ashamed.

But his face just curled in contempt.
"Don't sing me your sad lament!"
When she said "I can't cope",
The old man with the stethoscope
Just curled his face in contempt.

And the cold rain fell
On that back street hell.
On the hard table-top
Would the pain never stop
As the cold rain fell.

On a grey afternoon,
In an old waiting-room
He said: "In this circumstance
She's a fifty-fifty chance."
On a grey afternoon.

And I don't know how she feels.
And I can't know how she feels.
But I want her to know
That I feel for her, oh
I want her to know that I feel.

Chris Trotter
1974

(Lyrics to the song performed by Chris Trotter at a pro-choice rally addressed by US feminist, Jessica Starr, Victoria University Student Union, 1974.)

REFORMING CONTROVERSIAL LEGISLATION is a daunting political project. Just how daunting is signalled by the adjective we place before the noun. The presence of the word controversy – literally, “to turn against” – should warn us that what we are dealing with is conflict. And therein lies the reformer’s greatest challenge. Legislating from the starting point of ideological consensus is easy. Passing laws in circumstances of ideological conflict is not only difficult, it's hazardous.

Thirty-five years ago the abortion issue lay at the heart of an ideological conflict that encompassed much more than a woman’s right to determine when and with whom she would bear children. It was the touchstone of second wave feminism. For many active feminists, how far New Zealand was prepared to go in recognising a woman’s right to choose, would be the measure of how far it was prepared to go in recognising women’s rights – full stop.

The legislation which eventually emerged from this conflict, the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act (1977), fell well short of feminist demands. New Zealand’s legislators were unwilling to concede that the termination of a pregnancy was a choice to be made by the woman involved – and by her alone. The CS&A Act did, however, legalise abortion – but only in circumstances where, in the opinion of medical professionals, the continuation of a woman’s pregnancy would endanger her physical and/or mental health.

Even this very limited concession would not have occurred without the mass organisation of pro-choice opinion undertaken by the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand (ALRANZ) and the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition (WONAAC). These pressure groups, combined with the accumulating moral force of the Working Women’s Charter – then making its torturous way through the trade union movement and the Labour Party – forced the issue of abortion onto the political agenda in a way that made some form of legislative response unavoidable.

The reformers’ successful mass mobilisation of pro-choice sentiment had followed, with Newtonian precision, the emergence in New Zealand of a well organised anti-abortion lobby. The catalyst for this so-called "pro-life" movement had been the successful liberalisation of abortion laws in the UK (1967) and Australia (1969).

Arrayed against the forces of change were a formidable combination of religious and secular opponents. The Catholic Church, in particular, waged an uncompromising struggle against any form of legislative reform. The anti-abortion lobby’s secular wing was the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) established in 1970. Significantly, it drew a large measure of its support from those socially conservative New Zealand women who rejected the feminist project as a direct challenge to their more traditional definitions of womanhood.

In purely electoral terms, it was this latter group which exercised the decisive political influence. The findings of the Royal Commission on Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion, whose conservative report provided the blueprint for the CS&A Act, reflected the fact that in the 1970s, outside the socially liberal milieus of the universities and the leafier suburbs of the larger cities, New Zealand remained a very conservative country.

The liberal/conservative balance on abortion did gradually begin to shift, however, as fresh cohorts of younger New Zealanders joined the electorate. But even in the mid-1980s the forces of conservatism remained a formidable obstacle.

Those who wonder why Labour feminists like Anne Hercus, Fran Wilde and Helen Clark failed to introduce a more liberal abortion regime between 1984 and 1990 need look no further than the series of “Women’s Forums” that the new Women’s Affairs Minister, Anne Hercus, organised in the first few months of the Fourth Labour Government. These were open to all women and were (at least in part) intended to demonstrate to the wider electorate how much support already existed for a substantial advance in the rights of New Zealand women.

What the forums actually showed was how effortlessly conservative women were able to out-organise their liberal sisters. Within weeks of their initiation the forums had degenerated into angry battlegrounds, where reformers and traditionalists traded verbal, and on at least one occasion, physical, blows. When it became clear that the conservative women’s groups had mastered the art of “stacking” the forums with their own supporters, Hercus’s brave experiment in participatory democracy was brought to an ignominious, and for Labour’s feminist MPs, salutary, end.

On the matter of access to abortion services, however, the reformers had the last laugh. While the black letter of the CS&A Act continued to criminalise abortion except in extremis, in practice New Zealand women found obtaining a termination to be a relatively straight-forward exercise. Judged solely by the number of terminations per capita, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish New Zealand from those jurisdictions in which abortion-on-demand is already legislatively entrenched.

Both sides of the argument now face a dilemma. If the pro-choice advocates attempt to completely decriminalise abortion and make it entirely a matter of maternal choice they risk a full-scale mobilisation of the religious and political Right. But, if the pro-life advocates persist in seeking a judicial reversal of the de facto abortion-on-request status-quo, they risk igniting the furious indignation of hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealand women.

Breaking this impasse will be extremely difficult.

As a first step, pro-choice reformers should make a serious effort to ascertain the current balance of pro- and anti-abortion opinion in New Zealand. By serious, I mean offering respondents a plausible set of choices ranging all the way from outright prohibition to abortion-on-demand. They should also be asked how far they’re prepared to go to see their choice enacted. Additional focus-group study of the issue would be helpful in terms of identifying those philosophical arguments and rhetorical tropes which attract, and those which repel, popular support for abortion rights.

Armed with this basic data, the reformers could begin designing an effective pro-choice campaign. (If the polling data reveals overwhelming support for changing the existing legislation in a more liberal direction, then an important component of the organising effort might be a nationwide petition.)

Running parallel to the market research exercise, the reformers should embark on an effort to accurately identify where every Member (and potential Member) of Parliament stands on the abortion issue. Careful note should be taken of the arguments they use to justify their For/Against/Undecided/Won’t Say positions. This sort of research formed an important part of earlier pro-choice campaigns (Ref: Erich Geiringer's SPUC 'Em All! Abortion Politics 1978, Alister Taylor Publishers, 1978).

The best possible time to begin such a campaign would be about two years out from the next scheduled general election. If the reform campaign was designed to reach its crescendo about a year from polling-day the political parties would have both the incentive and the time to develop clear policy on the issue. The reformers could then endorse the party (or parties) whose policies most closely resemble their preferred outcome.

If the reformers’ endorsed party (or parties) won sufficient seats to take office after the election, then the passage of more liberal legislation could proceed smoothly and swiftly within the first six months of the new Government’s three year term.

Just in time for the conservatives to start planning the launch of their own “REPEAL” campaign about six months later.

Harping On About The Abortion Issue

No Compromise!: But radical Pro-Choice feminist blogger The Queen of Thorns should remember that political activists who demand "All or Nothing!" almost always end up with nothing at all.

THE “QUEEN OF THORNS” described it as “Chris Trotter’s worst nightmare”. A gathering of approximately 70 “liberal lefties” who, by daring to raise the divisive issue of abortion were, to use QoT’s provocative language: “going to just ruin Labour’s chances of winning the 2011 election”.

It was a curious way of describing the participant’s objectives. A reference, I suppose, to this posting from July 2010 in which I questioned the political wisdom of Labour List MP Steve Chadwick promoting a private member’s bill legalizing abortion at the woman’s request up until the 24th week of her pregnancy.

What QoT and a host of other feminist bloggers objected to so strongly back then, and are even more vociferously opposed to now, is the notion that reforming the abortion laws might take second (or even third) place to other political considerations. I don’t believe I’m in any way misrepresenting their position when I say they consider anyone who counsels letting sleeping dogs lie on this issue as “objectively” (if I may resurrect that fine example of Leninist jargon) locating themselves in the anti-abortionist camp.

There’s a bullying aspect to this style of politics which takes me all the way back to the late 1970s – when the only acceptable position for a man to adopt in relation to feminist political priorities was one of enthusiastic and unquestioning support. (As I scrolled down the hundreds of passionate comments elicited by QoT’s posting, I must confess to experiencing a wave of nostalgia for those ideologically invigorating times.) But nostalgia is no substitute for hard-headed political analysis. Abject surrender to ideological extremism and political solipsism is no more intelligent now than it was 40 years ago.

It is worth re-stating, therefore, that the heedless pursuit of abortion on demand could very easily prove counter-productive. There was – and is – absolutely no guarantee that kicking these sleeping dogs into angry wakefulness will result in them sinking their teeth into the forces of conservatism. As the recent, extraordinary, Section 59 acquittal made depressingly clear, social liberalism is on the retreat in New Zealand. If QoT and her comrades put their boots into the Rottweilers of Reaction they may very soon find these no-longer-sleeping canines at their throats.

As usual, the United States points the way when it comes to reactionary political trends. Before embarking on their crusade for abortion law reform in New Zealand, QoT and her friends should first consider the implications of the sudden and dramatic collapse of support for the “Pro-Choice” position in the USA.

As recently as May 2006 the Gallup Poll showed that 51 percent of Americans considered themselves to be Pro-Choice, with only 41 percent declaring themselves to be “Pro-Life”. By May 2009 the position had been almost exactly reversed with the Pro-Lifers on 51 percent and the Pro-Choicers on 42 percent. The Gallup pollsters also asked respondents to tell them whether they personally believed abortion to be morally acceptable or morally wrong. In 2006 43 percent believed abortion to be morally acceptable and 44 percent said it was morally wrong. By 2009, abortion’s moral acceptability had fallen to 36 percent, with those believing it to be morally wrong rising to 56 percent of the Gallup sample.

More recent polling (January 2011) by the Pew Research Centre shows the overwhelming majority of Americans positioning themselves in the middle of this issue. Only 18 percent of respondents believed abortion should be “legal in all cases”, with just 16 percent willing to declare it “illegal in all cases”.

New Zealand is not the USA and I must be cautious about extrapolating too freely from the opinions of Americans. What I can say, however, is that the political strategists of the Right, both in the United States and New Zealand, have demonstrated a far greater talent for the prosecution of “wedge politics” than the Left. The latter could once rely upon the so-called “liberal media” to carry its arguments to the public. But is that still the case today? Whose arguments do we hear most clearly in the 21st Century? Something tells me that in the age of Fox News – it ain’t the Left’s.

It’s all too easy for QoT to come out swinging at the liberal and left-wing contributors to The Standard (and Bowalley Road). Let’s see how far her expletives-included, take-no-prisoners tactics get her in the mainstream media.

The brute political fact remains that if New Zealand is not to experience another blitzkrieg of neoliberal “reform” in 2012, a combination of centrist and left-wing parties will have to secure more seats in the House of Representatives than the parties of the Right in 2011. Perhaps, if Labour and the Greens between them were in a position to form a government, abortion law reform could form part of either, or both, parties’ manifestoes. Unfortunately, a Centre-Left victory is almost certain to depend on NZ First crossing the 5 percent threshold. The socially conservative supporters of Winston Peters seem unlikely partners in any abortion law reform initiative.

Is QoT really so willing to abandon solo mums and their kids to the tender mercies of the two Paulas? Is she really so impervious to the argument that the consequences of unemployment and poverty will fall most heavily on women and children? If politics is about priorities, is she really so sure that abortion law reform comes ahead of protecting what’s left of the New Zealand welfare state?

Even some of her own supporters don’t think so. I’m thinking of a prominent feminist blogger who was recently elected to public office. In her election propaganda she described herself as a “mother” and declared her commitment to building “strong communities”. Nowhere in any of the material distributed to the electors did she inform them that she was an active left-wing trade unionist and a vehement supporter of abortion on demand.

In the deeply conservative part of New Zealand in which she was standing, keeping these facts from the voting public made perfect political sense. Had she been completely honest with the electors they almost certainly would have rejected her.

But that’s politics QoT. To get some things you have to give others away. Political activists who demand “All or Nothing!” almost always end up with nothing at all.

Your sister-in-arms understood that, QoT.

It’s time you learned.

Bitter Fruits

Re-igniting the War? Barbara Kruger's iconic "Your Body is a Battleground" reflects the extreme levels of social, religious and political conflict occasioned by the issue of abortion. New Zealand's Contraception, Sterilisation & Abortion Act (1977) is a legislative compromise, cobbled together by the exhausted antagonists after seven years of increasingly bitter struggle. Is it really time to re-start the fighting?

THE FIRST QUESTION I’d like to ask the Labour List MP, Steve Chadwick, is: "Why now?"

What’s convinced her that the time is right to re-open the abortion debate? What ill-omened denizen of the current political environment has told her that this is the moment to introduce a private member’s bill permitting abortion-on-demand up to the 24th week of pregnancy? I would really, really like to know who it was. Because, try as I may, I’m finding it really difficult to make the cost/benefit analysis come out in Ms Chadwick’s, her party’s, or even her gender’s favour.

Her decision might, of course, be driven entirely by ideological considerations: by an unwavering conviction that every woman has an incontestable right to do whatever she pleases with, and to, her own body. That would make a sort of sense – providing, of course, she’s willing to accept the consequences of making ideology the battleground upon which this issue is decided. What’s sauce for the ideological goose must also be sauce for the ideological gander.

Clearly, Ms Chadwick’s proposed private members bill has got me genuinely perplexed. I simply cannot see what difference – in practical terms – changing the current legislation would make.

According to statistics supplied by the Abortion Supervisory Committee, there were 18,382 abortions carried out in New Zealand in 2007. That’s 12,437 more than were carried out in 1980 – barely two years after the Contraception, Sterilisation & Abortion Act came into force on 1 April 1978.

Does Ms Chadwick not believe that 18,382 abortions are enough? Does she think there should be more? Has the existing legislation created an unfulfilled demand for abortion which her proposed private members bill seeks to satisfy?

That seems unlikely – given New Zealand’s undoubted competitiveness in the international abortion stakes. Among a selection of twelve of the world’s low-fertility countries we jostle with Australia, Sweden and the USA for the honour of recording the highest abortion rate. We’re consistently well ahead of countries where abortion-on-demand is already legally enshrined.

Could it be that Ms Chadwick is hoping to bring down New Zealand’s gold-medal-winning abortion rate?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve no desire to make it more difficult for New Zealand women to access abortion. My position on this issue was decided many years ago when I asked myself whether, given the responsibility, I was prepared to require a woman to give birth to a child she didn’t want – and decided I was not. Nor, I realised, was I prepared to delegate the power of decision to anyone other than the woman herself.

When push came to shove – and throughout the 1970s and 80s there was lots of pushing and shoving – I had to come down on the side of those who said that abortion was a choice only the human-being most directly involved had any claim to make.

But there were hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who did not agree with me: decent, well-meaning people who could not get past the fact that something human always dies when an abortion is performed. Their passionate contention was, and remains, that there is more than one individual involved in the decision to terminate a pregnancy, and that every human-being is morally obligated to speak up for those who have yet to attain a voice.

This is the "icky" factor that Ms Chadwick’s feminist supporters urge their sisters to ignore. It simply does not help to think too much about the messy mechanics of the abortion procedure itself – let alone what it destroys. In the words of one blogger calling herself the Queen of Thorns: "Dear anti-choicers: go get yourself a fucking tapeworm already and sit down to a marathon of the Alien quadrilogy and then whinge to me about ‘it’s no big deal, just wait X months’."

With friends like these, Ms Chadwick has no need of enemies.

But enemies she will have if this is the tone of those who carry her spears.

And it is here that my misgivings are at their greatest. How numerous have the enemies of abortion become? The fervent Baby Boomers who marched and petitioned for "A Woman’s Right to Choose" have had thirty years to savour the fruits of the war-weary political truce our parliamentarians fashioned into the Contraception, Sterilisation & Abortion Act.

Very few of them have been sweet.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 9 July 2010.