FROM THE EDITOR
On my desk is a picture of Meri Te Tai Mangakahia (Te Rarawa). The first woman to address the lower parliament. A registered nurse. A suffragette who walked the difficult, radical path in the campaign to give women the vote.
This week, we marked the 130th anniversary of Suffrage Day. It was also the 90th anniversary of the first woman MP, Elizabeth McCombs, in September 1933.
Also, this week, on X (formerly known as Twitter) someone posted: “Celebrated Women’s Suffrage Day by watching two white men called Chris competing to be the less worst Chris.”
No prizes for guessing, but one of those Chrises is “personally pro-life”. Wants to reintroduce $5 prescription costs for those on the pill, or other contraception drugs, if he gets in power.
How far have we come? That answer has a very long tail.
In a recent parenting column, author Emily Writes discussed single mothers and their struggle. It featured an observation in the comments: can we stop calling it the cost-ofliving crisis? It’s all in the language, they said.
“How about the cost of capitalism crisis, or the cost of multi-nationals crisis, or the cost of greed crisis.”
Call it what it is. One deftly and heroically accustomed to calling it and walking right into the fire, is star foreign correspondent Yalda Hakim. When she was 6 months old, her parents escaped the mujahidin regime in Afghanistan for a new life in Australia.
She’s a fearless journalist and campaigner for the rights of women, around the world, but particularly those in her home country. She is counting the days since the Taliban banned teenage girls from an education. Hakim posted: “Today [August 15, 2023] marks two years since the Taliban swept into the Afghan capital. It’s also been 694 days since teenage girls were banned from school by the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
Numbers are important, but they are nothing without the voices delivering them. And she will not go anywhere — Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, you name it — quietly.
In our cover story this week, she reflects on the Taliban regime’s impact: “You saw musical instruments being burnt just a few weeks ago. Artists, writers, journalists — there really isn’t a media sector any more. Those big things are gone. They’ve disappeared. They disappeared overnight.”
She continues: “I tell this to budding journalists, people who are aspiring to enter this field — you have to find a point of difference ...” And sometimes that is “about rolling the dice, taking a risk and, you know, not getting too comfortable”.
The fight for women’s voices, pay parity ... the beat goes on. As we come to the end of this week’s Suffrage celebrations, let’s remember the heroes like Meri Te Tai Mangakahia and Kate Sheppard, and those who walk among us right now, putting themselves on the line. But let’s not get too comfortable.
Noho ora mai