Archive for the ‘New Zealand’ Category
Louise Nicholas: Support Rape Victims
The Louise Nicholas case of rape against a senior serving police officer and two former police officers failed to get a conviction. Outraged by the result, supporters of Louise Nicholas claimed that two of those acquitted were already serving a jail sentence for rape, a fact that was suppressed under NZ’s penal law. Should such information be made known at trials or are their other ways of defending rape victims from failures in the bourgeois justice system?
No More Rape Victims on Trial!
The Louise Nicholas case had disturbed many New Zealanders even before it ended with a not guilty verdict. The team of lawyers representing the three senior police officers accused of rape had effectively put Nicholas in the dock by making a series of attacks on her honesty and integrity. The jury’s verdict was the final insult, because it seemed to brand Nicholas as a liar and legitimise the behaviour of the defence team.
To those who knew some of the information about two of the accused which had been kept out the case, the jury’s verdict was even more frustrating. Within hours of the end of the trial the suppressed information had appeared on the internet and on leaflets distributed by protesters. Anyone who has been privy to this information will find it very difficult to believe that Louise Nicholas got a fair deal in court.
In the aftermath of the trial many people are wondering what steps can be taken to prevent a repeat of the injustice that Louise Nicholas has suffered. Some feminists have suggested that the law should be changed so that relevant previous criminal convictions of the accused can be considered by a judge and jury rather than suppressed. It is hard to see, though, how such a measure can be squared with a commitment to a fair trial and to the reform of sexual offenders. It is worth noting that the call for the consideration of previous criminal convictions is being echoed by some organisations on the far right of New Zealand politics, including the Act Party.
Other observers pin their hopes on the reform of the police to eliminate the sort of abuses that Louise Nicholas suffered. Some on the left welcomed the appointment of Annette King as Minister of Police, hoping that the presence of a female at the top would help to get rid of some of the sexism of the force. Others call for the recruitment of more female officers. Such suggestions are naive, because they rest on the belief that sexism exists in the force because of the presence of a few ‘bad apples’, or at worst a macho ‘cowboy culture’.
A similar analysis of police racism has seen successive governments recruiting thousands of Polynesians to the force, and organising workshops on ‘cultural sensitivity’. Yet the police force remains a profoundly racist institution which is disliked and distrusted by many Polynesians. The racism of the police has come to be symbolised by the slaying of Stephen Wallace in Waitara in 2000, yet the policeman who shot Wallace repeatedly in the back was Maori. The truth is that, whatever the views of their individual members, the police are institutionally racist and institutionally sexist. The police defend capitalism, which is a system which creates the oppression of women and ethnic minorities in a thousand ways every day. Efforts to reform the force by injecting a ‘feminist’ culture into it will fail. The police can only be transformed when society itself is radically transformed.
But society is not going to be transformed overnight, and many people are looking to take action now to help prevent a repeat of the injustice Louise Nicholas has suffered. If tinkering with the legal system and trying to reform the police are not options, what can they do? One thing that we can all do is work to strengthen the independent organisations that assist victims of sexual violence. In New Zealand, these organisations help thousands of women every year, yet they are chronically under funded and struggle to survive.
Sexual Abuse HELP
In Auckland, the Sexual Abuse HELP organisation does a heroic job on a very tight budget. HELP operates a twenty-four hour hotline for victims of sexual violence, provides doctors for these women, provides advisers to coach them through the stressful process of confronting the police, laying a complaint and going to court, and also provides long-term counselling to help victims transcend their suffering.
Anyone who followed the Louise Nicholas case can see how the services which HELP provides could have benefited Louise in the aftermath of the assaults she suffered. If Louise had been able to make a complaint to the police promptly and undergo a prompt examination by a sympathetic doctor, then it would have been much harder for her attackers to smear her by contesting the truthfulness of her memories, and by alleging she enjoyed the sex she had with them. Medical evidence would have shown that the sex was forcible, violent, and painful.
But without an organisation like HELP to turn to, it is not surprising that the eighteen year-old Louise Nicholas felt unable to report the abuse she suffered to the police or a doctor. The huge numbers of women who turn to organisations like HELP today are proof that many sexual violence victims still find police stations and doctor’s examining rooms intimidating places. In Auckland, HELP last year received 8,000 contacts through its hotline, and guided hundreds of women through the courts and into counselling programmes.
Yet HELP and similar organisations still struggle for funding, and often exist on the edge of insolvency. Their inability to service the whole country and their inadequate advertising budgets mean that many sexual violence victims still do not know that organisations exist to help them. These women suffer the isolation of the eighteen year-old Louise Nicholas, and frequently succumb to depression, substance abuse, and even suicide. Government under funding of HELP and similar organisations is directly responsible, then, for unreported rapes and the unnecessary suffering of many women.
While the government lavishes money on the police, new prisons, and troops to fight George Bush’s war in Afghanistan, HELP is forced to appeal to private donors, because its four main public funders – Children Youth and Family, ACC, the Ministry of Development and the Auckland Health Board – invariably fail to provide it enough to operate on. Other organisations that assist victims of sexual violence complain of similar insecurities.
Two years ago HELP initiated a protest campaign to draw attention to the fact that it was on the edge of bankruptcy. After doctors and other caregivers told a large public meeting they were prepared to go on strike, the government stepped in with a one-off injection of cash. But such last minute payments are not enough: HELP and similar organisations should be assured adequate funding from a single government source, so that they can do their jobs free from constant worries about insolvency.
Everyone who is outraged by the injustice that has been done to Louise Nicholas should demand that the government respond to this injustice by massively increasingly funding for organisations that assist and represent the victims of sexual violence. Trade unions have an especially important role to play. Many of employees of HELP and similar organisations are members of trade unions, and the Service and Food Workers Union helped organise the 2004 public meeting to defend HELP. After the murder of Stephen Wallace in 2000 the National Distribution Union took up the Wallace family’s campaign for a public inquiry into the actions of the police and the broader question of police racism. Today, trade unionists should support the protests against the sexism and injustice Louise Nicholas has suffered, and also demand better funding for those who help victims of sexual violence.
Hands off the Solomons!
Most of the media coverage of recent events in the Solomon Islands has focused on the sensational details of riot and disorder: burning buildings, beaten-up cops, and looted shops have all been paraded across our screens. Explanations of the reasons for the riots in Honiara have been hard to find. Some commentators like Russell Brown have resorted to racist stereotypes of an uncontrollable ‘communalist’ people; others like the NZ Herald’s Audrey Young have ventured the slightly more sophisticated opinion that the riots were caused by resentment of Chinese and Taiwanese interference in Solomons politics
It’s about imperialism
Missing from the mainstream media has been any sort of account of the role that the United States, Britain and their South Pacific deputy sheriffs Australia and New Zealand, have played in creating and maintaining the manifold problems of Solomon Islands society. The Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) has faced various criticisms of its handling of the riots, but no one has suggested that the Mission and the regional powers that back it are part of the Solomons’ problems, not their solution.
When mainly Australian and New Zealand troops occupied the Solomons under the banner of RAMSI in 2003 the country was in the grip of a crisis that had been manufactured in the offices of the International Monetary Fund. Under pressure from the Australian and New Zealand governments, the Solomons government had implemented IMF ‘reforms’ that devastated its economy and profoundly destabilised its society.
After gaining independence from Britain in 1977, the Solomons found itself with a primitive infrastructure and an economy fashioned by the selfishness of colonialism that preferred plunder to sustainable economic development. Always heavily dependent on the prices it could get for exports of its raw materials, in particular timber and gold, the Solomons economy took a big hit when the ‘Asian flu’ of 1997 led to a drop in demand in its key export markets. In 1998 alone, the GDP of the country declined by 10%.
Pressured by Britain, Australia, and the US, the government of Bartholomew Ulufa’alu responded by implementing a programme of drastic economic ‘reforms’ drawn up by the International Monetary Fund. The country’s currency was devalued by 20%, and hundreds of public employees were sacked. Conflict between the country’s different ethnic groups followed, and at the beginning of 2000 a coup put Ulufa’alu into ‘protective custody’. Continuing violence left the country’s economy in ruins.
Instead of admitting the role that IMF policies had played in the collapse of the Solomons, the Howard government in Canberra used the chaos in its neighbour to demand even more brutal ‘reforms’ as the price of humanitarian aid. In November 2002 the government of Sir Allan Kemakeza began a new programme of spending and job cuts, sacking a third of public sector employees. Even worse, Kemakeza was forced to cede control of his government’s Finance Ministry to Lloyd Powell, the Australian head of a New Zealand-based multinational company called Solomon Leonard. At a conference held in Honiara in June 2002, the IMF had demanded Powell’s appointment as Permanent Secretary of Finance as the price of any new financial aid to the Solomons.
The second round of IMF reforms had predictable consequences. Even rudimentary health and education services collapsed in the slums of Honiara and in the provinces; power blackouts became frequent even in the capital; law and order broke down as police and judges went unpaid; and competition for scarce government funds renewed conflict between ethnic groups.
Howard rides in as US deputy sheriff
By the middle of 2003 it was clear that the reform of the Solomons economy by imperialism could only take place at gunpoint. The Howard government had become the US’s most loyal ally in the Asia-Pacific region, having just participated in the invasion of Iraq. Proclaiming the Solomons a ‘failed state’ that like Iraq could become a base for terrorists and the cause of regional instability, Australia organised a force of 2,500 troops to occupy the country.
The real reason for the invasion was two-fold. In the first place, Australia and New Zealand feared that the chaos in the Solomons could damage their own economies, by ruining the many Australian companies that do business in the islands. In the second place, the Howard government’s masters in Washington had become alarmed that the government of the Solomons might turn either to China or to France for aid money and help restoring security. With colonies in New Caledonia and French Polynesia, France still maintains a strong presence in the Pacific, and early in 2003 it had offered military aid to the Solomons government. Neither the US nor Australia wanted to see an expansion of French influence in an region they considered their own backyard. After the formation of RAMSI was announced in July 2003 the French offered troops for the force, but were brusquely turned down by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
With its economy booming, China is seeking energetically to expand its influence in the Pacific. The country’s drive to build trade and diplomatic ties has become particularly urgent since the government of Taiwan began using ‘chequebook diplomacy’ to bribe small countries with votes in the UN and similar international bodies to recognise the government in Taipei rather than the government in Beijing. With its view of China as an emerging rival superpower and potential medium-term military foe, the Bush government was concerned by the possibility of increased Chinese involvement in the Solomons.
NZ follows as the Deputy’s Dog
The government of New Zealand had extra reasons of its own for involving itself in the occupation of the Solomons. After tacking away from Australia and the US by siding with France and China over the invasion of Iraq, the Clark government was desperate to assuage anger in Canberra and Washington by proving that it could ‘play ball’ in the South Pacific. In addition to making up with its old allies, the Labour government believed that it could moderate the unilateralist tendencies of Australia and the US. Clark and her Foreign Minister Phil Goff trumpeted the multinational makeup of RAMSI and the consent of the Kemakeza government to RAMSI’s intervention as triumphs of multinationalism over the ‘Iraq approach’. In reality, the RAMSI force was dominated by Australia, and the Kemakeza government had already been stripped of most of its ability to make independent decisions. The Australian government treated the vote of the Solomons’ parliament as a fait accompli: it had dispatched some 2,000 troops to Honiara before the vote had even been taken.
In the two and three quarter years it has occupied the Solomons the RAMSI force has made it abundantly clear that it acts on behalf of the Pacific’s big states and international capital, not on behalf of the people of the Solomons. Like the army occupying Iraq, RAMSI’s soldiers are exempted from prosecution or even investigation under Solomons law. They have authority over the Solomons’ own police force. Soon after landing in the Solomons RAMSI had begun making sweeping arrests – by the anniversary of the occupation it had detained 700 people, most of whom had not faced any sort of trial. In August 2004 eighty prisoners of RAMSI staged a rebellion at Rove Prison in Honiara. After breaking out of their cells and overpowering guards, the prisoners shouted slogans condemning their inhuman treatment’. Most had been held in solitary confinement for a year. Despite the protest, hundreds of people are still detained without trial in the Solomons.
RAMSI has also felt free to intimidate the population of the Solomons and over-rule the country’s government whenever it has felt the interests of international capital have been threatened. In March 2004, for instance, the Solomons’ remaining public sector workers voted to stage a national strike to demand a pay rise. In an effort to avert a strike, the Solomons government announced a meagre increase of 2.5%. RAMSI’s response was swift: the head of the Solomon Islands Public Employees Union was summoned by RAMSI staff to the Australian embassy, where he was warned that he was ‘destabilising’ the country. Shortly afterwards a RAMSI representative handed the same union leader a written warning that if he did not revoke the pay claim Australian aid to the Solomons would be suspended. Eventually the union capitulated.
Riots legacy of imperialism
The riots that have destroyed large parts of Honiara in the past week can only be understood against the backdrop of the history of imperialism’s exploitation of the Solomons. The underdevelopment left by British colonialism has been exacerbated by brutal IMF policies which Australia and New Zealand have shown themselves prepared to implement at the point of a gun.
The rioters have accused Taiwanese and Chinese businessmen and diplomats of interfering with the electoral process by bribing key politicians, and condemned the new Prime Minister Snyder Rini as corrupt. But it is imperialism and RAMSI’s occupation of the Solomons which has created the environment for such corruption. The arbitrary, arrogant, and self-interested behaviour of RAMSI has created an atmosphere in which corruption can flourish. IMF policies and RAMSI occupation have greatly weakened the institutions of the Solomons state and cowed the trade unions, which might have acted as watchdogs against corruption. The Chinese and Taiwanese dealmakers and chequebook diplomats have stepped into the economic vacuum created by the failure of IMF policies and Australasian businesses to deliver prosperity.
The Australian and New Zealand governments have responded to the riots in Honiara by sending more troops to prop up RAMSI. Alexander Downer expressed the contempt of the Howard government and RAMSI for the sovereignty of the Solomons when he said last week that:
“The situation there is inherently unstable and our police will have to remain there for a long time to come and we will have to be prepared from time to time to send in military reinforcements if it’s necessary just as it is at the moment.”
Campaign for Australian and New Zealand forces to be withdrawn from the Solomons just as we call for their immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.
From Class Struggle 66 April/May 2006
Aotearoa: ‘Clean Start’ campaign
CWG members were at the Methodist City Mission Hall, for the Auckland launch of the Clean Start – Fair Deal for Cleaners campaign, which is being waged in New Zealand by the Service and Food Workers Union and in Australia by the SFWU’s sister union, the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union.
About one hundred and twenty people – union organisers, delegates, rank and file members, journalists, and the usual unctuous politicians – listened to New Zealand Idol winner Rosita Vai give a rousing start to proceedings by filling the hall with her twenty-four track voice.
Vai’s would be a hard voice for anyone to follow, and the nasal whine of SFWU National Secretary John Ryall never stood a chance. Vocal performance aside, Ryall did make some sound points about the necessity and justice of the cleaners’ campaign, citing research which shows that cleaners in New Zealand work three times as much floor space in a shift as their Texan counterparts. Given that Texas is not a part of the world renowned for strong trade unions, Ryall’s data spoke volumes about the situation of cleaners in New Zealand. Sue, an SFWU delegate from Auckland Airport, made the same point using personal experience rather than statistics, noting that she’d been working at the airport for seven years, for a ‘really really really mean’ boss who had recently offered her a thirty-five cent pay increase. ‘That’s a box of matches’, Sue observed. In her seven years at the airport, she had helped increase union membership from 35 to 140, as more and more workers saw the necessity of uniting to demand more than a box of matches.
The SFWU is demanding a minimum pay rate of $12 an hour for all cleaners, the establishment of a proper health and safety regime in the buildings cleaners service, and the end of the sub-contracting of cleaning services to fly-by-night outfits who make impossible demands on workers. It is not clear, though, how these aims are to be achieved. John Ryall spoke of ‘waking the companies that own the buildings in Auckland as well as Australian cities’ up to their ‘social responsibilities’, and getting them ‘to sit down at the table with the union’. The task, it seemed, was the conversion of bosses from a profit-driven immorality to a community-minded generosity. MP Mark Gosche mounted the podium to make a similarly evangelical appeal to ‘all those big businessmen who want to shake hands with Polynesian superstars like Rosita and Tana Umaga to also respect the parents of these people, the low-paid workers’. But big business and its advertising agents use celebrities like Umaga and Vai as cynically as they uses cleaners: both are exploited, it’s simply that – until they retire or record an album that flops – the celebrities are more valuable commodities than the cleaners.
Gosche’s fellow Labour MP Darien Fenton followed him to the podium, and delivered a breathtakingly banal speech. Fenton recalled her many years in leadership positions in the SFWU, and the effort and financial expense that went into the Labour election campaign that dragged her into parliament last year. ‘I haven’t forgotten you and where I came from, I always keep my desk clean, and I always talk to the parliament cleaners’ Fenton announced proudly. Whether such shining examples of working class militancy represent an adequate return for the tens of thousands the union spent getting Fenton to parliament is open to question.
Green MP Keith Locke made a speech which managed the not-difficult task of upstaging both Gosche and Fenton. Locke noted that the Green Party demands an immediate increase in the minimum wage to $12 an hour, and called on the SFWU to support Green MP Sue Bradford’s bill to abolish youth rates. Neither Gosche nor Fenton had managed to mention either the minimum wage or youth rates, preferring to bask in the feeble glow of Labour’s 1999 Employment Relations Act, and stoke up fears of National MP Wayne Mapp’s doomed 90 Day Probation Bill. The failure of these two members of Labour’s ‘left’ faction to so much as mention a progressive piece of legislation like Bradford’s Bill should be a warning to all SFWU members. If it is to be successful, the Clean Start campaign will have to rely on rank and file action, not the ex-leaders the union has packed off to Wellington.
The internationalism of linking up the NZ and Australian unions is an important move, since the cleaners would be working for many of the same firms (such as Spotless) now that NZ is virtually a branch of Australian capitalism. According to one of the SFWU organisers, the US service worker union, the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) is also involved. This is one of the biggest unions in the states with 35,000 cleaners (janitors) as members.
This was the union that made a big splash in the early 1990s unionising mainly Latino women workers in the big cities in the US – the Justice for Janitors campaign. Ken Loach made a good film on the Los Angeles campaign, “Bread and Roses”. The film was notable for depicting an almost unrecognisable LA from the usual glitzy Hollywood image. Some of the tactics used by the workers such as invading the private parties of super-rich lawyers whose offices they cleaned (inspiring viewing) could be used to advantage here. Imagine occupying the Koru and Kangaroo Lounges.
We hope the SFWU is planning a big rank and file contingent for May Day. It would be most fitting for NZ service workers, many of them migrant workers, to join in solidarity with the many US (around 12 million ‘illegals’) migrants who will be on the streets for a nationwide stopwork May 1 to tell Bush where he can stick his plan to make’ illegals’ criminals.
The mass movement of migrant workers in the US is the biggest thing to hit the US working class for years. I hope that some of the inspiration rubs off on kiwi and Aussie workers! It could be just what is needed to kick start a much needed rank and file control of the unions in these countries.
Supersize my Pay, Supersize my Party
Matt McCarten’ s Unite Workers Union has got off to a good start in building a union base for a new workers party. This project took a leap ahead with its Supersize my Pay campaign.
Unites campaign to recruit young casualised fast-food workers has met with some success. Recruiting, organising and introducing active campaigns like the Supersize My Pay campaign is a good start.
Attacking youth rates is way overdue. But the call for a minimum wage of $12 an hour is too small. Even the NZCTU leadership can endorse these demands. They do not reflect the real needs of workers for higher wages, and are a compromise with the labour bureaucracy of the CTU to embarrass the Labour led government.
This strategy betrays the left bureaucrat’s credo that a revived labour movement can push the Labour Party to the left. This is has been the politics of Matt McCarten since his early days as a union organiser and Labour Party insider. It remained his objective as a leader of the Alliance from 1980 to 2003. These demands are not strong enough to expose the clapped out labour bureaucrats or the Labour government who pay give lip service and stall for money, but to build a base in the unions for the new reformist workers party that will emerge from the Workers’ Charter before the next election.
The irony is that even though McCarten’s strategy is a rightward break from the Alliance the rump of the Alliance voted for the Workers Charter at its annual conference after an address from John Minto. Does this mean that the Alliance now has two programs, or that its vote was indicative of a cooperative attitude to WC or what? It seems that the rump of the Alliance now recognises that McCarten has stolen a march on them so there is a sheepish shuffle back to acknowledging the only viable Green Left kiwi franchise in town.
From Class Struggle 64 Nov 05/Jan 06