Ep 4 Let's talk politics - a brief history

The transcription discusses the impact of social policy on social work and the importance of political engagement. It provides a brief history of democracy in New Zealand, highlighting the initial exclusion of Māori and women from voting. The discussion then focuses on recent changes in electoral rolls and political representation, emphasizing the need to consider policies rather than just parties or individuals when voting. The speaker also raises concerns about the disenfranchisement of marginalized communities and the low voter turnout in local elections. The episode ends with a call for increased self-determination and engagement in the political system. Hello and welcome to this episode of Bellbirds social work squawk. My name's Rachel and I've been thinking recently about how social policy impacts everything that we do in our social work space. How decisions that are made potentially inside an ivory tower, potentially by people with no lived experience, people way up in their decision making chain and how those decisions filter down into policy, into contracts, into service delivery and how we work them on the ground. What difference that makes to how we work, what is happening for people. Do we have funding? Do we have access to resources? Are decisions that are being made actually representative of our community? Are they helping people? And under what philosophical or ideology perspective are they being driven? I'm really interested in this because in two months time we have a general election and I think about the current political landscape and I think about how we have those conversations. Do we have healthy, robust debate, discussions about politics? Quite often it can be a bit difficult. Some people can feel a little bit defensive and certainly it can feel a little bit personal. But maybe it should because it is personal. It does matter because how we vote often represents our values and our beliefs. We vote based on fundamental principles that represent how we see the world. So how do we talk about politics in a way that is safe, that is open, that is robust? Challenge my thinking. How do I explore what I really believe about something? Because we care. And this is a democracy and all views have the right to be heard. So I'm going to take this episode to have a think about some of the political landscape that we sit in, what's going on for us at the moment and maybe have a conversation with a couple of people who would be willing to have a chat with me about what politics means to them. So with open minds and open hearts, let's see where this conversation takes us. The first thing I'd like to do is to have a little bit of a potted history of where our democracy came from. This is a very brief history and I certainly don't mean to give you a comprehensive timeline of everything that has occurred. But there are some significant dates and events that really give us an understanding of the foundation of the democratic system that we operate in today. So let's start in 1840. Titility or Waitangi was signed and at that point Britain ruled New Zealand essentially, took over the governance. And in 1852 Britain agreed that actually New Zealand should have its own government and so set about trying to establish that. And there were some debates back and forth where it should be sat, Auckland, Wellington, but in 1865 it was established as a permanent home that Wellington would be where government sat. At that time landowners were allowed to vote. So in 1867 the Māori Representation Act gave four seats to Māori and said that all Māori males over the age of 21 were allowed to vote. This was really to address the land ownership issue around voting. So at that time European men that were landowners could vote but all Māori males over the age of 21 were given the right to vote for these four seats that were only temporary. Pākehā had 72 seats in Parliament. These four seats were made permanent in 1876 and did not increase until 1996. That's 120 years later. In 1870, three years later, secret ballots were introduced but only for European seats. Māori still had to vote by a show of hands and this continued until 1938. In 1979 it was agreed that all men over the age of 21 could vote but where you lived defined how many votes you had. This was called plural voting. So if I was a landowner and I had land in multiple different seats, I could vote in every seat where I owned land. So ten years later legislation changed again and in 1889 they introduced one man, one vote. One man, one vote. Four years later women were given a vote. So I just wanted to think about the changes that were made, the disenfranchisement from the beginning of the political system that established democracy that of course it was designed by white wealthy men, landowners, men, Europeans that were given the favoured ways of voting, being able to vote by secret ballot, being able to be by far wider represented in Parliament, 72 seats against four, and that women were in fact the last to get the vote in 1893 and although New Zealand heralds itself as being a forerunner of this, the first country to give women the vote, this was many years after of course democracy had been established. But I think a lot about the Māori seats and how Māori are represented in a westernised version of what is a democratic constitution that we hold. And so I just wanted to make a little bit of interesting observations about some of the things that are occurring inside this election. So traditionally Māori were only allowed to move between the general roll and the Māori electoral roll every three years. That changed this year, the legislation changed, but actually Māori should have the right to be able to move roll whenever they feel like it, and they can up until three months prior to an election. So here's some statistics about what happened this year. Between the 31st of March and the 13th of July nearly 40,000 voters of Māori descent changed electoral rolls or updated their details. Fourteen and a half thousand changed roll types. 8,109 moved from the general roll to the Māori roll and 6,478 moved from the Māori roll to the general roll. So only about a change of about one and a half thousand, so we had nearly just over 8,000 moved from the general roll to the Māori roll and six and a half thousand moved from the Māori roll to the general roll. And there were just over 2,000 new enrolments within the voting system. The National Party for the first time in 20 years is standing candidates in two Māori electorates. National has only ever had two Māori seat MPs and the last one was in 1943. Fifteen years ago National said they wanted to abolish the Māori seats altogether and here they are in 2023 standing two people in those Māori electorates. Te Pāti Māori is standing a candidate in the general electorate for the first time. So traditionally Te Pāti Māori stands candidates for the Māori seats but this year for the first time Rotorua general electorate will be able to vote on a candidate for Te Pāti Māori. And then we have MPs that move electorates. We've had local MPs that move from general roll to representing the Māori electorate to now representing a different general electorate. We've had members of parties change sides, cross the floor so to speak, people who've stood for Labour now standing for Te Pāti Māori, people who've resigned, people who've changed. And I think about politics really is often a game of moving deck chairs. People align with their values, align with their beliefs. So I think instead of thinking about politics as about being voting for a party or even about voting for a person, what is it that is the policy that these, that's being offered that we should really be voting for because it is the policy that impacts our community, that impacts our lives. Do we even know what these parties stand for? How do we know what the people who are representing these parties really believe? And does it align with what we believe? Because being engaged in democracy is really important. It's often the most disenfranchised that don't engage in the political system. It is the people who often need the most support that have a voice that is not heard. It is people who are most impacted that actually don't represent. And I wonder how do we enable people to be more self-determining? Because again, we often have the educated, the wealthy, articulate, powerful people, the lobbyists who are influencing these policy decisions, influencing our political system. And ultimately these policy decisions are impacting the rest of the community whose voice has not been heard. Of course, the biggest change in our political system has been MMP, which sought to improve representation within Parliament. But I wonder, has that gone far enough? Because how do we engage people in this system, which is a system that has fundamentally been designed to serve wealthy European men, right? They were the first to be allowed to vote. They were the people that were allowed to vote secretly, privately. They were the ones that decided how many seats somebody got. So I wonder how we have any wonder that we have a whole group of people who are apathetic about voting, that we have a system that doesn't feel representative, and then we wonder why people don't participate in it. Rotorua had the higher than average turnout for our last local elections. We recently voted in our local government and our turnout was 46% higher than the national average. 46% of people, eligible voters, came out to vote. That's less than half. Less than half of our eligible voters decided to participate in this democratic process. To me, in my mind, that means that more than half of our community, our eligible voter community, don't have a voice in our current local government. And I'm not saying that the people in government shouldn't be the right people. I'm not making any judgment on that. And people chose or made the decision or took the action to not vote and not participate. And so that's how democracy works. If you don't vote, then we count the votes from the people who did. But how does half of our community not have representation? How does half of our community feel not engaged enough to not even bother to vote? And as we head into this next election on the 14th of October, what will voter turnout be like? We have some pretty significant issues going on inside our community that are driven by policy decisions. I'm not interested in debating which party first came up with the policy decision that drives the outcomes that we're now experiencing. This is about how do we move forward? What are the decisions we're making in this next election that are going to impact us, our children, our grandchildren? Because some of these policy decisions, we're still living the consequences of five years, 10 years, 20 years later. So what does it mean to have representation that actually wants to address some of the issues that we're facing? We know that housing is clearly a hot topic. We hear it talked about all the time. We are in a cost-of-living crisis. There's poverty. Rotorua has the second highest statistics of family harm in the country behind South Auckland. Addictions, gangs, violence, the list goes on for what people are talking about as the issues that are facing our community. So what does our community think are some of the answers to these issues? What does our community want policy to look like that actually drives us forward to be able to find solutions that upholds mana of people, that upholds people's ability to be self-determining in their own right and to address issues around equity, fairness, access to services, resources. These issues that we face on a daily basis as social workers because as social workers we work with the individual, we work with whanau, but we work with community. We work on both the micro and a macro level. We work with that one whanau who's living inside a system where they're trying to access resources, food, benefits, a safe place to live, basic needs that everybody should be entitled to and yet we can't access. It's almost impossible to register with a GP currently in Rotorua because we just don't have the capacity. So how do we get basic health care? How do we access education? How do we feel safe in our home? These are some of the very real situations that we're working with and that we're facing and that are all driven by policy makers, decision makers that sit in government there to represent our voice. So for the rest of the episode I'm hopefully going to be talking to some people who are willing to share a little bit, to talk about what it's like for them because everybody's opinion is valid, everybody's perspective is valid because that is democracy. We embrace what people have to say and what they think about things and it's important to have the conversation because by talking to others not only do I learn about them but I learn about myself. What do I really think? What's really important to me? And how do I galvanise action? How do I actually make sure that I have agency in my own life to make a decision, to go out and vote and participate in a system, whether the system is what I want it to be, whether the system is representative or not, it is the system that we have. So how do I participate in that system from a perspective of what is right for my community, my social responsibility, how do I make decisions when I stand in that voting ballot box that actually uphold my beliefs, uphold my values and makes me a participant in this system. So we're going to talk to some people and hopefully they're going to share with us honestly and openly how they feel about it and I'd love to hear from anyone listening what they think about it too. So let's explore this topic, let's talk politics.