Human rights are your rights too, David Seymour
There’ll be lots of us – those who found themselves on the losing sides – who’ll still be feeling the sting of disappointment at the referendum results announced Friday afternoon.
They’ll include parents who recognise their kids already have easy access to cannabis through dealers with links back to gangs (and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it) and are scared those kids won’t get help if they need it, thanks to the stigma that prohibition carries. For them, and others, the narrow margin of the loss will make it sting all the more.
The disappointed will also include the (smaller) group of opponents to the End of Life Choice Act, whose concerns about a lack of safeguards in the proposed legislation remain.
They won’t include David Seymour. The ACT leader will have known the act he sponsored was heavily favoured to win public favour, and accordingly he threw a party at Parliament to celebrate as the results were announced.
Seymour has much to be proud of. The act was his baby and is symbolic of everything ACT claims to stand for – in fact, it’s right there in the act’s label. It is a vote for choice.
Keep one finger on that word, choice, and rewind to just one day before the referendum results were announced. That day, Thursday, Seymour took a huge swing at New Zealand’s Human Rights Commission, calling for it to be scrapped altogether.
(A little insider knowledge here; ACT has an energetic media team. Maybe it’s because until now Seymour has been the party’s lone spokesperson, but it feels some days he’s taking over my email inbox with his reckons. Some are predictable, some are interesting, but none have been as hair-raising as Thursday’s.)
The Commission, according to Seymour, is not the independent, domestic realisation of international agreements New Zealand has been signed up to for literally decades (that we all thought it was). No. It is a ‘‘hard-Left organisation masquerading as a government department… no longer interested in helping real people with actual human rights issues, but simply advancing a left-wing agenda.’’ Huh.
There’s a break between fact and Seymour’s fiction here that I will deal with quickly because it’s so basic; the HRC is not a government department for starters. And it is not ‘‘hardLeft’’ because it does not have any political ideology. It’s a body created by an act of legislation that specifically requires it to hold itself independent of any and all political party or doctrine. Its touchstone is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
That’s worth pointing out, as there will be people who take Seymour’s statements at face value, because they don’t know much about the commission or what the bleddy-heck human rights even are. Maybe it’s because talking about human rights just sounds dull. It’s all covenant-this and mandate-that, and a whole pile of letter-stuffed acronyms that are impossible to recall.
Which is almost certainly why chief commissioner, Paul Hunt, is on a mission to move away from the lawyer-speak and make human rights relevant to actual humans’ actual lives.
In a recent op-ed, Hunt spelled it out. ‘‘Human rights are for everyone, everywhere, every day. They are about clinics, hospitals, residential care, decent homes, fair wages, a healthy environment, schools, universities, robust democracy, humane prisons, and building strong inclusive communities.’’
New Zealand struggles to make the real-life changes that would deliver these things. Although we like to think of ourselves as straight-up, fair and the best place in the world to raise a kid, our record on human rights is only middling. New Zealand is ‘‘close to average’’ on most of the markers tracked internationally.
Across the board we’re no better really than Australia (I mean, really?)
We don’t have a country where everyone has access to a safe, warm and dry home, or a wage they can live on, or a chance to bring their families out of poverty, or at equal access to education for their children with disabilities, or to live according to the principles of te tiriti.
That’s the real-world stuff the commission advocates for (and it is right there in its founding legislation that it must do so) as is the practical stuff it does, like getting both parties in a dispute in a room together and hashing things out, hopefully to everyone’s satisfaction. The mediation the HRC provides, is not available anywhere else unless you’re able to pay.
Take that away and what’s the alternative? If you’ve been badly bullied, or discriminated against because you are different, Seymour would have you go to your local MP, the Citizens Advice Bureau, or straight to the courts for a hearing.
For a person who claims to be all about freedom of choice, he should realise this would drastically reduce ordinary people’s choices. The courts are already overloaded; not everyone (hardly anyone) has the dollars to hire a lawyer. Where would the Citizens Advice Bureau send them for resolution? How would an MP at an electorate clinic deal with the excruciatingly personal, complex and upsetting disclosures in a sexual harassment case?
In response to questions, Seymour did say he liked the work of the Human Rights Review Tribunal, which is the ‘‘sibling’’ of the HRC but which operates independently and takes human rights cases to court.
‘‘(That) has actually been helpful for constituents who have had genuine human rights concerns. I have lobbied for it to receive additional funding.’’ he told me. Which is a great thing to hear; the tribunal desperately needs more funding to speed up its process, which can currently take up to three years to get a case through the courts.
But what about our international reputation? If we are left with only the Citizens Advice Bureau to lean on when our rights have been violated, we will have undermined work going back to the end of World War II, when we helped cement human rights in the founding United Nations Charter.
Seymour told me getting rid of the HRC ‘‘won’t’’ affect this country’s standing overseas. Experts beg to differ. Stephen Hoadley, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Auckland University, says the move would be ‘‘noticed adversely and would be a negative step for NZ’s ‘soft power’ reputation’’ in the Asia Pacific region.
One of Seymour’s more personal attacks has been on Paul Hunt himself, accusing him of undermining freedom of speech with a call for hate speech laws. Eddie Clark, from Victoria University of Wellington’s law faculty, says this has been a focus of Seymour’s since the March 15 mosque attacks.
‘‘We do need a serious debate on how and whether to further regulate hate speech. It’s difficult to do in a way that doesn’t chill speech on issues we do want discussed.
‘‘But that’s why it has to be discussed without indiscriminate bomb-throwing.’’
I think the bomb here is being lobbed by Seymour as an opening salvo in a national debate we need. He has already proposed a Freedom to Speak Bill, which would repeal parts of the Human Rights Act.
We can have that debate without getting rid of the very-much independent, Human Rights Commission.
There will be people who take Seymour’s statements at face value, because they don’t know much about the commission or what the bleddy-heck human rights even are.