Women’s Refuge

I was struck by a comment on David Farrar’s blog on his post about today being the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and his suggestion that it is an appropriate day to donate to Women’s Refuge. A comment was that “I'll donate to them when they drop their anti-male feminazi stance.”

Now it should be without question that anyone who initiates any violence against women, men and children, is an uncivilised barbarian. Violence is only ever legitimate in defence against violence – and the real issue in New Zealand are cases of domestic violence. Yes, men are victims of violence too, mostly from other men, occasionally by women. Children are also victims of violence from women, more often than is acknowledged given that women are still the primary caregivers of children (and women typically get lower sentences for any violent offences against children than men do).

Women's Refuge undoubtedly does a great deal of good – it provides a place for women in crisis to go if they fear violence, and take their children. It is somewhere where they can feel safe, and for that alone, Women's Refuge gets my support. I am unsure where men who fear violence should go, but Women's Refuge has no obligation to do anything about that – nor should it.

However, I thought I would take it upon myself to check out the claim that Women's Refuge has an “anti-male feminazi stance” by simply looking around the website. If this is true, then Women's Refuge deserves criticism for that – if not, then good people may be withholding support for what is just a rumour.

Feminist philosophy flows through the pages, but I found nothing that was blatantly “anti-male”. Certainly I’d question whether there are “systems in our society that blame the victim”, but much of what is said is arguably true. The “wheel of equality” (yes I know, this sort of thing isn’t my way of doing things either) certainly mentioned a lot about listening to “her” and respecting “her” opinions, when a good relationship has all of thing listed running both ways, but that is a minor error. The Lesbian Power and Control Wheel was interesting, particularly in a section called “using heterosexual privilege”, but there are issues of inter-lesbian violence and whatever they want to do to deal with it, is their concern. There is a sense of the world being a big patriarchal power structure, where men control everything and think in a “man like” way, and sustain structures that oppress women.

I don’t think Women's Refuge would agree with most of my politics or philosophy, but then again – that doesn’t really matter to me. Women's Refuge does not exist because a bunch of women hate men, but because some rather cowardly men beat up women – instead of being alone or treating people they profess to love with some respect, they use women and their kids as punchbags – and that in my mind is a far greater sin than being ideologically different from me.

Nowhere on the website did I see the hate filled venom of the true feminazis – Catherine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin – who have written about how heterosexual sex is like an invasion of a woman’s body, and that all penetrative sex is a form of colonisation. That sort of nonsense, written by the Hitlers of feminism – should be consigned to the dustbin, but nowhere on the Women's Refuge website is there any support for initiating violence against men. All men are potential rapists just as much as all women are potential child beaters – whoop de do – just because the occasional bitter twisted woman carries hatred towards men, the sort akin to the racism of the National Front, shouldn’t taint what good this service does.

Women's Refuge does a good service – and if you want it to disappear then ostracise everyone who initiates violence. In the meantime, donate and men, tell them what a good service they do. Remember, most of the women in these places largely deal with men who are abusive, they could do with seeing that in most cases, most men are peaceful and intolerant of violence.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge that almost everyone on the free market "right" and those who are libertarian, despise domestic violence or indeed any form of violent or sexual abuse. It is a construct of some on the fringes of the left who think that those on the "right" are conservative, United Future type family values supporters who want women chained to the kitchen sink and obeying their husbands - this is, with few exceptions, utter nonsense - but that belief helps keep them angry.

Stan Newens – Ceausescuphile

Following the discussions about Keith Locke’s Marxist-Leninist past, I thought I’d add one of the more loathsome former British MPs to a list of shame.

Stan Newens. He was a British Labour MP in the 60s through to 1983. Then became a MEP (European parliament) from 1984-1999. None of this would be important if he hadn’t written a tome on Nicolae Ceausescu that was glowing called “Ceausescu- The Man, His Ideas, His Socialist Achievements” in 1972.

Remember Ceausescu, the megalomaniac dictator who levelled suburbs so a grand palace could be built, who used torture and political executions as a matter of course, and did virtually nothing useful his entire life, along with his wife who called the Romanian people “rats”. This is the country where HIV was spread by using infected blood donations to feed abandoned children – abandoned because contraception and abortion were banned to increase the birth rate, which had declined because the standard of living had declined. Ceausescu was a murderer, his eldest son was a rapist – and the family was reviled throughout Romania for good reason. His hated Securitate would kill political opponents, and were known to work in New Zealand – as some who fled the regime travelled that far.

Of course the 1970s British Labour government feted Ceausescu, effectively requiring the Queen to give him a knighthood and hold a reception for him. There was even one of those cool leftwing trade deals, where British intelligence and expertise were gifted to Romania - Romania started making British airliners, which nobody wanted (nobody wanted BAC 1-11s back then anyway). Margaret Thatcher, a chemistry graduate and then Leader of the Opposition amusingly started a conversation with Elena Ceausescu about science (Elena claimed several "degrees" in chemistry and other sciences ) which turned ugly because Elena knew absolutely nothing about it, and couldn't hold an intelligent conversation about her "degrees".

Unfortunately Ceausescu fooled a few Western governments by not allowing Soviet troops to be based in Romania - they thought he was independent and gave him intelligence, which was passed onto Moscow with little effort.

Stan Newens was a guest of Ceausescu’s Romania and contributed to its propaganda and aggrandisement. One of his books sits in the Victoria University Library. He would also write against human rights abuses and the lack of freedom in Bahrain – he isn’t wrong there, but one is staggered by his utter hypocrisy. I don't know if Stan Newens ever rethought about his book on Ceausescu, but there is no apparent evidence he ever apologised for it.

The wilful blindness of some of the left to the horrors of Marxism-Leninism is unconscionable – as would be similar blindness of those on the right to anti-Marxist dictators like Suharto, Pinochet and Somoza.

Wellington: Median Barrier on Centennial Highway

Given my penchance for going on about Transmission Gully, it is great news that Land Transport New Zealand has agreed to fund the construction of a median barrier along Wellington’s Centennial Highway between the Fisherman’s Table restaurant and below Pukerua Bay. See your petrol tax can be used on something useful!

Transit hopes to use this funding to start construction in March 2006, although if it needs resource consents and some useless entity opposes it, it will hold it up for far longer. I don't expect environmentalists should, as it shouldn't mean building out over the coast (but probably means some widening), only some trenchant Transmission Gully supporters may oppose it, because they think letting more people die along this road will increase pressure for their pet project.

Admittedly, following on from the congestion relief from the recently opened Mana upgrade, this project, for only $15.2 million does reduces pressure for accelerating Transmission Gully at its $1.1 billion cost (or even the 4-laning along the coast). This will make the road much safer (hopefully nobody will cross the line between the barrier and Pukerua Bay – it isn’t being installed on that hilly section) and because of that, it will be closed far less often (it is almost always only closed due to accidents) - meaning far less pressure for an alternative route. Whether Transmission Gully is built or not, the existing highway should be safer and this will make a big difference!

Buy something tomorrow

Tomorrow is apparently International Buy Nothing Day. This is a ill-conceived attempt to make people in wealthier countries feel guilty about their consumption, based largely on the theory that everything that exists on earth is part of a zero-sum game, whereby what you consume is a loss to someone else, rather than a traded value for value. It is on the premise that the way forward is to consume less and trade less, which is completely wrong.

Now if it was a way to encourage people to save and invest for themselves, rather than use credit, there might be some value in that - but it isn't.

The Green Party is unsurprisingly promoting this. Unfortunately there are plenty of places in the world where the idea of buying nothing is just a daily fact of life, and it is not because of too much capitalism, in fact, quite the opposite. Chad, Burma, North Korea and Cuba come to mind.

You are far more likely to make the world a better place by buying something (with your own money mind you) that you really want -regardless of where it comes from - because you are doing something very simple, trading value for value. Buying isn't a one way process - you only buy because the money in your hand is worth less to you (as it is, or for other goods or services) in your hand than the good or service you are purchasing. After buying you (should) have more value than before you bought - similarly the merchant regards your money as having a higher value than holding onto the good or performing the service. Both of you receive "profit" from this. This is capitalism - and it is moral.

You see money is the root of much that is good - it is a means of exchange that enables people to translate what their minds and their labour create into something they want. Trading has been responsible for the enormous increase in wealth and standards of living worldwide in the last couple of centuries, and the ones who have missed out have been those who haven't traded. North and South Korea, West and East Germany are stark contrasts that should be obvious. One traded and has property rights, the other didn't - and one is poorer, less safe and more polluted than the other. Taiwan and China before it opened up, are the same. How many failed countries need to exist before people learn?

With a higher standard of living people demand cleaner air and water, and better standards of safety - because they can afford to. Higher standards of living come with property rights and with property rights people protect their property from destruction through pollution. People can also afford to own and protect land as parks, reserves and other places of natural beauty because they are not subsisting for food and shelter.

This article from the New Individualist argues that the sustainable development agenda is a major attack on individual liberty and is an excuse for destroying property rights.

Buying nothing means you have some money in your pocket - and someone else doesn't. Free trade is beneficial to all. Take this example:

Lets say that Vietnamese companies can produce shoes for $1 a pair whereas NZ companies can only produce them for $20 a pair. Under free trade, New Zealanders will buy their shoes from Vietnam. This benefits people in both countries. Vietnamese will have more money to buy food, clothing and shelter. New Zealanders will spend less on shoes and have more money to buy CDs, books and furniture, and the investment capital formerly spent on shoeswill be put to more productive uses, such as new technology or creative industries or pharmaceuticals. Multiply this by millions of products and hundreds of countries and over time the benefits run into the trillions of dollars.

These benefits already have - imagine the wealth of humanity had the whole world been consumed by the anti-capitalism of Nazi Germany or the USSR.

So go out and buy something -celebrate capitalism.

The website promoting this buy nothing doggerall is full of nonsense:

1. “at a global level its been said that to satisfy consumption demands of everyone, if they were to consume like the affluent West, we'd need 3 more planets worth of resources.” Well “it has been said” is a good way of saying something without knowing a damned thing about it. “It has been said” that environmentalists routinely engage in coprophagia – see, just as valid a quote! Regardless of the source, this is absolute nonsense, as when a resource becomes scarce, the price goes up and either more can be extracted economically, or alternatives are found (including recycling).

2. “A 1998 UNDP report points out that one child in a developed country will consume, waste and pollute the equivalent of more than 50 children in a developing country.” Well one UN employee probably consumes more than 3x the average person in a developed country, as hypocrisy runs deep in one of the most inept and morally bankrupt organisations on earth. However the real point here is that the child in the developed country enjoys a good standard of living – is the solution to halve the standard of living of the developed country child to boost the others? Should the state funded welfare system be extended to be global (if not, why not on the basis of this philosophy) and are you all prepared to pay enormous taxes for that?

3. “So from the prospect of being fair - acknowledging that less developed countries have the right to the same standards of living as the West - our consumption is unsustainable.” This is a non-sequitur. Why is our consumption unsustainable? Saying it doesn’t make it so. Besides, nobody has a right to a certain standard of living, how is this right to be delivered? How do you force people to give others a standard of living. People have standards of living and have the right to pursue improved standards of living, but there is no right to a particular result regardless of your circumstances.

4. How do you lead a fulfilling life? Only you can answer that, finally.” WOW, something libertarian in it. The choice is ours – so it wont be forced on us, an enormous relief (and some hope)!

5. “Buy Nothing Day is also concerned with other issues related to consumption and consumerism - the use of sweatshops and prison labour to produce more and more of the goods we buy (what does that mean for our own jobs, and the lives of those who now have those jobs, but often at unlivable wages?);.”

Hold on. People queue up to get sweatshop jobs because earning a living wage in countries with such sweatshops is more liberating than working in subsistence agriculture when a bad season can mean you starve. They are not unlivable wages in the countries these people live in, quite the opposite. There is no evidence given that sweatshops and prison labour produce “more and more of the good we buy”, as it is just as likely that production is increasingly automated. However, what does “the inability of our current political system to measure social progress and relate that to economic progress; support of locally made and ethically based products and investments” mean? Presumably it means paying well above the market value for goods and services. Which is fine if you get value from that, but if you’d rather spend the money on buying your kids another pair of shoes, then it probably is better than you do that.

6. “The effects of over-consumption on the environment (such as toxic pollution and climate change) are widely known. These mean we need to reduce consumption, especially in many Western countries like New Zealand that are consuming much more than their fair share of resources.” Toxic pollution exists as a tragedy of the commons, and should be controlled by introducing private property rights to those commons. Besides, in the quest for efficiency many processes are becoming cleaner and less polluting – the almost non-existent growth in petrol tax revenue (except for increases in the tax) despite growth in traffic is due to the improved fuel efficiency of new cars.

What are a “fair share of resources”? Who decides this? The resources you are entitled to are those you own or legally acquire through purchase, gift or inheritance – your greatest resource is your brain. Are you to be forced to give up some of this for someone you don’t know? Who will enforce this? Funnily enough it would appear the countries with the greatest “share of resources” (the advocates of this like the word share, as if there was some higher power who dished out the shares rather than the wealth being created) actually created it.

The USA is the wealthiest country on earth because the people who live there used their minds to apply to the natural and human resources they acquired. It is capitalism – people traded value for value, whether it be labour, goods or services, and they discovered how they could apply their minds to the world around them. Bauxite was not a resource a few centuries ago, because nobody knew how to smelt it into aluminium, now it is valued because aluminium can be used for all sorts of construction (and is often recycled – the aircraft industry recycles virtually all plane fuselages).

7. “Every product we buy has an effect on the environment - extraction and processing of raw materials, manufacture of products and dumping products at the end of their lives causes pollution, creates toxic waste, wastes energy and destroys precious wildlife habitats..”

Well yes it does have an effect, but most of the time the effect is virtually nil. Many products decompose, and most pollution dilutes until it is unnoticeable. Paper products are almost always made from plantation pine forests that are constantly renewed, glass is virtually infinite (think the planet will run out of sand do you?) You think not? Well every day you urinate ammonia and urea – and breathe out carbon dioxide and produce methane, so feel guilty. Don’t have children, that will do more to reduce consumption than anything you try to do.

The more concerning notion is that “Transporting products internationally is often extremely wasteful of fuels, if the product can also be produced nationally”

What nonsense! What is so important about national boundaries that it is ok to ship something from Invercargill to Auckland, but not from Sydney? Are people in Luxembourg not to buy chocolate from Belgium? More importantly, why should anyone put up with goods made locally that are poorer quality and more expensive? The Trabant car was east Germany’s great experiment at that- expensive, poor quality and environmentally disastrous. Argentina went for import substitution in the 1940s and by the 1970s had gone from being up with the rich countries to being with the third world – import substitution makes people poorer.

That is not to mean that competitive import substitution is bad, it isn’t – just that the state shouldn’t tax people for importing or regulate it.

So all in all, international buy nothing day is based on a large number of unsubstantiated assertions. Besides, I bet nobody who adheres to it will switch off their electricity, gas, water, phone or not catch the bus or drive anywhere. If you are that concerned about your consumption, then stop the lot – don’t look at blogs, because you are helping empty a dam or burn fossil fuels. Buying nothing for the sake of it does not make you think – it means you are buying into a simplistic jingoism that does nothing to make a real difference to toxic pollution or poverty.

Maori TV reports a successful first year?

One of our compulsory pay TV channels – Maori TV reports a successful first year.

Well, if someone gave me oodles of other people’s money to set up a business and there was little threat the supply would be cut off, I’d be “successful” too.

Its surplus of $3.2 million is much like the “profits” that the Railways Corporation made in the early 80s, because they were after enormous subsidies had been pumped in.

Of course the measure of success is that it showed vast amounts of NZ content and had a cumulative audience of 426,300 in April 2005. Note that it doesn’t mean that that many people watch it at any one time, just that many have watched it ONCE during a MONTH. Cumulative audiences are used by broadcasters to demonstrate big figures for audiences, but they show very little. It is a bit like saying 400,000 shopped at a supermarket during one month, but most of them could have only bought a bar of chocolate. Cumulative daily audiences and share of audiences at key times are better measures. I doubt Maori TV gets 1% of all viewing.

Gerry Brownlee is calling for the audience share figures to be released, but then it isn’t clear whether National would scrap funding for Maori TV – it almost certainly wouldn’t scrap NZ On Air funding for TVNZ/TV3 and Prime – and what is good for Maori TV is also good for commercial TV.

Anyway, none of this would matter a jot to me at all if it wasn’t getting taxpayer funding. There is nothing wrong with anyone setting up a Maori TV channel and broadcasting whatever they wish – just it shouldn’t be compulsory pay TV. I remember some years ago Saturn Communications (now part of Telstra Clear) offered cable TV capacity for a Maori channel, but it wasn’t taken up (it would only have covered Kapiti and Wellington then, but better than nothing).

Taxpayer funding for Maori TV should end, along with NZ On Air and Te Mangai Paho. There should be no taxpayer funding for any television on any channel.

The cost of producing television is lower now than it has ever been, with digital technology – so those who want it should pay for it and enjoy it. I am sure that with the will, there would be a commercially sustainable Maori TV channel – it might not broadcast long hours, and it might not have expensively made shows, but neither do Maori magazines or newspapers.