An unusual sort of press conference
Today I tuned into something strange: a press conference that didn’t make my stomach churn or the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Which was strange, because it was about the torture of children.
It was the announcement by Erica Stanford — on her own, unusually — for compensation for the torture victims at Lake Alice as recognised by the UN.
It was not a particularly remarkable announcement (although Stanford is correct that it’s a world first). It was businesslike yet empathetic, with a minister and a room of journalist running through the many dull details of the scheme to iron out the full package that the government is presenting to the long-suffering survivors, interrogating specifics like dates and figures and access to the scheme. Discounting the details, it could have been any other press conference on any other subject.
And yet, it could not have been. Not under this coalition government. Erica Stanford’s solo presser was unlike every other press conference this government has held in the past year. Notably so.
I tried to put my finger on why. Was it that her calm, compassionate, female voice was so similar to Jacinda Adern’s reassuring COVID pressers of 2020? Maybe. Was it the way the journalists were not shouting over each other, not playing “gotcha!” with the government over their latest mistruths and distruths, but were instead empowered to ask clear and purposeful questions designed to find answers for stakeholders and the public? Perhaps a little. Was it the strange, pervasive sense that this was an initiative being directed by a Minister who maybe actually cared about the issue and the citizens she was working on behalf of?
Almost certainly.
Erica Stanford today stood behind a press pulpit and announced the financial package that would be available to our government’s own torture victims, and for the first time in over a year, it felt like someone was standing up there actually gave a damn about anyone other than themselves.
It’s hard to put my finger on Stanford, mostly because she doesn’t have any clear and obvious links to corrupting and external influences to make it extremely easy for me.
Costello’s simple to figure out, as she cancels our world-leading incremental smoking ban and then passes the most outrageous and unjustifiable tax breaks for big tobacco you could possibly imagine.
There’s nothing clever about cronyism. Many people on the right who actually understand politics and economics are just wealthy; they aren’t here because they believe what the right are doing is right and good, but because they have assets and businesses and a status quo that it benefits them to protect. Even more of them see an opportunity to make money through the positions and connections they can gain.
This makes it much easier for them to ignore bad economic policy from their party or to buy into partisan politics, finding justifications that make them feel less guilty, less of a weight on their conscience — it’s not that they’re racist or anti-environment or only out for their own profit, it’s that they’re defending New Zealand against the perceived and promoted structural racism that gives iwi rights that they personally don’t have. Everyone knows that’s the definition of segregation — if you ignore the surrounding context.
And because they’ve dismissed social justice as “woke”, civil rights as already won, and history as a “useless” subject, the audience of the right have very little indication that there might actually be a lot more involved in this iceberg of oppression than simple moralisms divorced from any context.
This and the influence of neoliberalism has made the right a haven for corruption.
But Stanford, I realised recently while writing about the upcoming sex ed pitfall, has done relatively little to alarm or annoy me. Where she has, it has been her pushing the usual government line — not something she can divorce responsibility from entirely, but it hardly makes her different from anyone else in Luxon’s cabinet.
In this three-way coalition where every party and person has their own angle and means of achieving it, and where bribery and bias is welcome and encouraged, a public servant working for the public is really something of note.
Our Education System Will Be The Battlegrounds For The New Culture War
“Great,” says Christopher Luxon, an evangelical Christian who isn’t good at politics and thinks sex shouldn't even be taught about in schools.
“Great,” says Erica Stanford, who wants to improve education.
“Great,” says Simeon Brown, an evangelical Christian who is good at politics and who wants Luxon’s job.
“Great,” says David Seymour, who gets votes from this sort of strife and also needs a distraction from his charter schools.
“Great,” says Winston Peters, who made the PM chase him halfway across the country in order to get this concession.
Great.
I agonised when writing this little excerpt over what Stanford’s motivations were, before deciding to be uncharacteristically and unfunnily kind to her and have her play the role of the straight (wo)man. As a young minister who has just picked up her portfolios, it wasn’t as easy for her to come into the role with a hidden agenda as her colleagues — not that that stopped Costello — and in so far as I can tell, it does seem largely be the case that she has picked profiles she’s passionate about and her intentions are mostly just the party’s intentions.
She‘s unfortunately doomed in her attempts to fix the system, given her remit isn’t wide enough and it’s broken at a much deeper level than she is addressing. Plus she’s got Seymour there to sabotage her if ever she gets too good a result. But credit to her, she does at least seem to want to try.
It’s alarmingly refreshing.
What this press conference lacked that created such a distinctly different vibe was agendas. Unhidden, unspoken, uninspiring, insipid agendas that everyone in this government seems to be disguising at all times. The private-profit, cat-fighting, cover-it-up-at-all-costs attitude that has characterised this coalition was not in the room today, and it was refreshing.
Without Luxon to “say” things to us in this presser, it became easy to understand what this government were trying to communicate. Without Seymour’s smug smirk to assure us he’s got his own unspoken plan and it’s proceeding just fine, the conference had an atmosphere of authenticity and authority. Without the tension of a government trying to cover their tracks and cracks and unauthorised back-scratches, the press conference felt professional and hopeful and like justice was being done, or at least like someone was actually trying a little to make it happen.
A feature that’s been sorely missed lately.
Oh, the announcement wasn’t perfect. There are upsides and downsides to this compensation scheme — the biggest of which being that, despite generational damage outlined in the report and acknowledged by this government, Cabinet have decided to continue with the precedent that compensation payments can only be accessed by living survivors.
I expect this will be questioned a great deal in the coming months — probably by me, maybe by others — as the government has quite deliberately and openly attempted to limit costs by delaying claims for as long as possible over decades, with the exact intention of there being fewer survivors remaining to pay out. If the government does not at some point announce a scheme that compensates families of those who died before they could receive payments, suspect we’ll see extended court action over the issue.
Our justice system is built on ideas of equity, and this has lead to various doctrines and precedents intended to stop people from benefitting from their own misdeeds — from exemplary damages, to estoppel, to the law that says if you murder someone, you shouldn’t get anything they leave you in their will. I would be absolutely amazed if the families of deceased survivors don’t have a case to bring against this government, as Lake Alice has delivered epigenetic harm and generational trauma to the families and descendants of victims, and the government then worked to deliberately bar potential claimants from receiving recompense for this, which had the (intentional or unintentional) effect of time barring their claims due to the limits of the average human lifespan. Between those two culpabilities, it seems hard for the Crown to argue that its actions were anything other than unjust.
But this sort of detail and drawback is a normal part and parcel of announcing compensation packages such as this; I would expect any government to make similar questionable calls in their decisions that need a similar level of interrogating by the media to determine that they are, in fact, doing their duty by the people that have been harmed.
That is what press conferences are supposed to be for; holding the government to account for the things that they’re saying. Not for listening to politicians spewing lies at such a volume it becomes ineffective to question them.
That this presser was so clearly about matters of genuine governance and not covering up corruption and concealing the true causes of budget cuts and doing damage control for whatever latest thing Luxon or Seymour or Winnie are being criticised for has only drawn attention to how unusual, uncomfortable, and unhelpful our press conferences have become under this coalition government.
I don’t think there’s such thing as an honest person, let alone an honest politician. But some of them do possess some amount of integrity and empathy and a purpose greater than indulging their own ego.
It was unsettling to witness it today, hidden amongst this cabinet of corporate puppets.
But I’m glad it’s there.