Shoot-the-messenger Marvelly trapped in identity politics
In the Weekend Herald, Lizzie Marvelly wrote, “I was unfortunate enough to stumble upon a publication entitled Free Press, which the Act Party seemingly sends out as a press release on a regular basis . . . Though I generally try to avoid reading about anything the Act Party says or does out of concern for my sanity, the Free Press caught me by surprise. I’d almost have thought that a Suffrage Day issue dedicated to mansplaining was a joke, but that would require the Act Party to have a sense of humour and a shred of self-awareness.”
That was, in essence, her response to a couple of suggestions from an Act email newsletter. The first was that “demographic” ministers such as the Ministers for Women, Ethnic Affairs, Maori Affairs, Seniors, Pacific Peoples and Youth don’t achieve much, and we shouldn’t have them.
The second was that if we are going to have these ministers, perhaps we should merge them into a Minister for Race Relations and a Minister for Gender. It went on to argue that men have a lot of social problems too these days, and because modern gender issues are so interlinked (eg, the Chiefs-stripper saga was really about male behaviour), a Minister for Gender could tackle modern gender issues more effectively.
You may not agree with those suggestions, but hopefully you aren’t offended by the basic assumptions — that the Government has a lot of ministers devoted to specific groups of people and it’s not entirely obvious what they achieve (how many people can name the Minister for Ethnic Affairs?), that men are on the wrong end of a lot of social statistics these days, and that the Minister for Women has been missing in action lately.
The problem with Marvelly’s column is a kind of anti-intellectualism where identity matters more than ideas. Stripped of all the bile, it said: “A Minister for Women is needed because women are still behind in many statistics, whereas a Minister of Men is not needed regardless of challenges the gender faces because there are lots of men in Parliament to advocate for men.”
It’s not a very interesting argument and doesn’t even consider whether demographic ministers have been effective or whether a Minister for Gender would be more effective than a minister for one or the other.
The assumption that politicians will look out for their own gender but are incapable of doing so for the opposite sex is more of the identity-first theme, and it’s silly. Do men in, say, Louise Upston’s Taupo electorate have a local MP, or do they travel to Rotorua to see Todd McClay, who understands them? Do New Zealand women have a Prime Minister at the moment, or does John Key’s maleness make him unable to represent them?
Identity politics also explains the rather derogatory opening of the article. Thirtyseven per cent of Act MPs have been women, more than the current parliamentary representation of 31. This fact has escaped Marvelly, who seems to assume that Act is an all-male enterprise (hence if the party explains an opinion it is “mansplaining”). As if that isn’t enough to justify the abuse, the fact that Act dared question the need for “identity” ministers seals the case. Such is the anti-intellectual world of identity politics where bad people can’t have good ideas.
Identity arguments are the easiest in the world to make and impossible to refute. If I say left-handed people will never understand what it’s like to be right handed there is no comeback for the world’s lefties. They have already lost the identity argument no matter how well they argue.
Of course, our society is different from most that have ever existed because we treat people equally and are committed to the respectful exchange of ideas. We’re not perfect, though. We’ll need to overcome many more challenges. Our best hope is the same as ever: a respectful debate focusing on messages rather than messengers, where ideas matter more than identity.