I wish it didn’t matter, but here we are.
On the day that Labour launched their election campaign, with all sorts of important changes happening in NZ politics including the performance of Labour’s new leader, the shift to more green politics, the huge crowds that the event attracted, and Labour’s remarkable recovery in the polls, this is what Gareth Morgan had to say yesterday,
In case it’s not clear, in Morgan’s tweet Labour are the pig and Jacinda Ardern is merely lipstick. Pigs are pretty intelligent so I don’t consider this an insult to Labour as such, which leaves us with the sexist bits.
Maybe Morgan wants to say that Labour don’t have good policy and that having a charismatic leader doesn’t make up for that. Which would make sense if Ardern were not competent on so many levels that she’s just reset the whole election. I have Labour policy criticisms of my own, but Ardern being useless isn’t one of them, not even close. Even if she were, I’d still know how to address that without promoting sexist culture, and I’d value that because at the most basic level women matter.
The insult is not simply suggesting that an intelligent, media savvy, policy wonk leader like Ardern is merely a figurehead with no substance in herself or her party, it’s that the comment happened in the context of a society where women are routinely dismissed as lesser because they are women.
This kind of sexism corresponds with real life impacts for women from pay equity to rape culture to who even goes into politics in the first place. Not everyone has a fortune behind them to parachute them in. Attitude matters, especially in those who hold power, because what we say, and whether it perpetuates damaging stereotypes, reinforces the actions that are still shaping society.
Today as Morgan doubles down, he would like us to believe he would have used the same insult against Muldoon. I’m sure he would have but we’re not in the 1970s now and using people’s body shape to attack them is also a form of bigotry that is bizarre to have to explain in 2017.
None of this is news to women. For many women the reaction to the insult is instinctive because we live with this sexism on a daily basis. It’s hard to know if Morgan is really that socially incompetent that he doesn’t understand the sexism, or if he just doesn’t care. I’m guessing both, but either way, I don’t want any more dinosaurs in parliament.
Leaving aside the massive irony of Morgan trying to say that personality doesn’t matter when a) he is attacking an opponent’s character and b) his personality seems to be the main reason he gets attention on social media, there are other ironies here.
Probably the most important for me is that Morgan has a strong history of trying to institutionalise his personal anti-welfare values, and while he does seem to be getting on board with the fact that you can’t just toss groups of vulnerable people under a bus for policy expediencies’ sake, his inability to listen to what people are saying to him about important issues is a core part of his personality.
The thing that stands out most consistently for about TOP policy is that Morgan has some good ideas but when you start to scratch the surface you hit all sorts of problems in how the policy has been developed. This wouldn’t happen if the personality was less important and he was able to listen with good intent to what people are saying about his ideas.
It’s also important to understand that the rich white man said these things in the context of an election where the power holders just politically assassinated a Māori woman who pulled herself out of poverty and then used both her vulnerability and her power to call attention to the plight of people that Morgan has only just begun to recognise exist. Double bonus irony points because the system that Morgan is actively gaming for his own political ends was incapable of focussing on the policy that the Greens presented and instead spent weeks going after the figurehead. I must have missed Morgan standing up for policy at that point.
Let’s pretend for a moment that Morgan wasn’t playing macho, sexist politics and instead wanted to just say ‘all that matters is policy’. Someone can link me to TOP’s policies on gender equity or ending sexism but in the meantime here are the things that matter to me in politics in addition to policy. In no particular order because this isn’t a hierarchy it’s a set of relationships,
In some ways, I wish I’d just stuck up a post saying Gareth Morgan is being a dick, again. Because here we are reacting to the priorities of a 1%er with a massive ego underpinning his personality. And here we are seeing a rich, white man trying to assert his personal values into politics already overladen with white men of privilege.
I’ve avoided writing posts about TOP policy thus far because while I have serious concerns about both some of the policy and the ethos that underpins it, I haven’t wanted to amplify Morgan’s personality driven voice. But policy isn’t all that matters, values matter just as much. This election is actually about those values and the battle going on right now is over who has power and whether NZ will choose to place people at the centre of politics again.
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