"Former Prime Minister Helen Clark has described the departure of former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern from politics as “devastating for women around the world”."
Not this one.
But then very little devastates me beyond the loss of a loved person or pet. Or dwelling on the suffering of some New Zealand babies born into dysfunctional dumps.
Clark's comments relate to the abuse that women politicians have to endure and how they must stick together and build networks to protect themselves.
When I had a brief fling with political advocacy, and later campaigning for ACT in 2005 and 2008, not many women wanted to stick together with me. In fact I was labelled as a misogynist for attacking the DPB. I'd get interrupted by hostile female audience members and derided over factual research. Marilyn Waring heckled me for citing the work of Australian professor Bob Gregory showing how long single mothers would spend reliant on welfare over the course of their lives. "You're including women on Super!" she yelled out causing much laughter and snickering. She was wrong.
When I asked to be included as a speaker at a feminist-organised meeting to counter my activity, I was barred.
My mail box would constantly fill up with letters using language intended to shut me up. Not all, but most, were from women.
Now I am not complaining about this. You take it on the chin. But don't tell me that woman can't be just as threatening as men. They just use different methods.
The problem is feminine tribalism precludes dispassionate discourse. I believe that on balance the DPB has been - and continues to be - bad for children. Feminists believe the DPB is a non-negotiable right for women. Period.
I took a petition out to gather signatures calling for reform, and women would say that they actually agreed with me BUT felt guilty signing my petition because they had a friend or female relative dependent on the DPB. That's what tribalism does. Induces emotional guilt in anyone with a non-tribal impulse. Emotional guilt overrides a rational response.
By saying, "women in politics need to develop strong networks to withstand abusive sexism," and not including male politicians in her concerns, Clark strongly implies men are the problem.
I'm sure some of them are. Just as I am sure some women can also be highly effective bullies.
Whether tribalism is along gender or ethnic lines it discourages, if not extinguishes, freedom of thought and speech.
Threats and coercion are what we actually need to combat. Together. As like-minded individuals.
Lindsay Mitchell is a welfare commentator who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
Clark's comments relate to the abuse that women politicians have to endure and how they must stick together and build networks to protect themselves.
When I had a brief fling with political advocacy, and later campaigning for ACT in 2005 and 2008, not many women wanted to stick together with me. In fact I was labelled as a misogynist for attacking the DPB. I'd get interrupted by hostile female audience members and derided over factual research. Marilyn Waring heckled me for citing the work of Australian professor Bob Gregory showing how long single mothers would spend reliant on welfare over the course of their lives. "You're including women on Super!" she yelled out causing much laughter and snickering. She was wrong.
When I asked to be included as a speaker at a feminist-organised meeting to counter my activity, I was barred.
My mail box would constantly fill up with letters using language intended to shut me up. Not all, but most, were from women.
Now I am not complaining about this. You take it on the chin. But don't tell me that woman can't be just as threatening as men. They just use different methods.
The problem is feminine tribalism precludes dispassionate discourse. I believe that on balance the DPB has been - and continues to be - bad for children. Feminists believe the DPB is a non-negotiable right for women. Period.
I took a petition out to gather signatures calling for reform, and women would say that they actually agreed with me BUT felt guilty signing my petition because they had a friend or female relative dependent on the DPB. That's what tribalism does. Induces emotional guilt in anyone with a non-tribal impulse. Emotional guilt overrides a rational response.
By saying, "women in politics need to develop strong networks to withstand abusive sexism," and not including male politicians in her concerns, Clark strongly implies men are the problem.
I'm sure some of them are. Just as I am sure some women can also be highly effective bullies.
Whether tribalism is along gender or ethnic lines it discourages, if not extinguishes, freedom of thought and speech.
Threats and coercion are what we actually need to combat. Together. As like-minded individuals.
Lindsay Mitchell is a welfare commentator who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
12 comments:
Clark"s comments about her proselyte are up there with "I didn't know I was speeding".One only needs to look at the free pass that Jacinda and Tori (her local authority equivalent) where given by the media, as opposed to the way Luxon, Seymour and Wayne Brown have been treated. When female politicians do face sexism, it is almost always the conservative ones and the perpetrators are almost always other women. Just look at Andrea Vance.
I agree entirely Lindsay. The DPB is far too giving to unmarried mothers. It was meant to offer a short term hand up, not a long term hand out.
With all the time Helen and Jacinda spent in power, surely we don't have child poverty any more? Or are they just grandstanding, pretending they care, when they did nothing when they had to power to do so.
Extending voting rights to women was strongly opposed by women as well as men.
There remains among many women an entrenched view that men and women have different roles in society and therefore occupy different domains.
I do not personally have any firm stance with regard to this issue but I can see where the proponents of this argument are coming from. Having said that, what matters to me is that people are making free choices, and I recognise the fact that this will not always lead to 50:50 M:F outcomes.
Although I respect Helen Clark. Her views on Ardern are delusional. Ardern was the worst PM we have had in my lifetime closely followed by Jenny Shipley. You see that as a woman there is just so much Clark hasn't done with her life.For example , have children and raise them, start and run a business from scratch,build a house, go overseas cap in hand and search out employment, learn a language other than English make a life in another country without ANY financial support.I could go on but i have listed my own achievements in life and why I do not need to be lectured by any woman on what it takes to be one.
So, is this departure from politics and "devastation for women around the world" the same woman who allowed a pregnant NZ journalist to be left stranded offshore, who then had to rely on Taliban support? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/29/taliban-helps-pregnant-new-zealand-journalist-stranded-by-quarantine-rules
good comment. says it all really .
This is the key point:
“By saying, "women in politics need to develop strong networks to withstand abusive sexism," and not including male politicians in her concerns, Clark strongly implies men are the problem.”
Woke progressive/intersectional social justice (call it what you like) depends on women for core support. If you can get half the population at loggerheads with each other, and throw-in racial, religious and gender “oppressed” identity groups, then that is a working majority.
Regularly highlighting real or perceived “abusive sexism” helps keep women within the intersectional framework, and the whole woke progressive/intersectional social justice show on the road.
One thing I didn't notice at the time, listening to the 1pm covid broadcasts, was how often JA would exhort her 'team of 5 million' to persecute and bully each other to achieve compliance. It was kind of government policy. Still seems in action but protected by the silence that must be maintained around what really went on during the years NZ was isolated from the world.
Ardern was devastating for democracy. !
Can't Clark see that ?
Helen Clark has been back on the airwaves lately, pushing her husband’s keffiyeh-draped soapbox and clutching Jacinda Ardern’s legacy like a relic from Lourdes.
According to Clark, Ardern was a luminous leader cut down by trolls, misogyny and the brutishness of New Zealand public life.
It’s a lovely fairy tale. It just has nothing to do with reality.
Ardern’s decline didn’t come from Twitter. It came from the ground up: ram raids at dairies, nurses burnt out, inflation chewing through pay packets, and KiwiBuild turning into the punchline of a nation. By the end, her “transformational” government was so light on delivery it could have been mistaken for an empty filing cabinet.
Then came He Puapua. A document supposedly “visionary” in intent, but in practice a political hand grenade. It mapped a future of co-governance and parallel sovereignty that plunged the country into a spin cycle of division and mistrust from which it may never recover. Some would say The country was sacrificed on the altar of decolonisation and ‘indigenous’ rights.
Clark never mentions that. She prefers to pretend that the nation turned on Ardern because New Zealanders couldn’t cope with brilliance in a dress.
Clark is replaying her own greatest hit: when voters don’t like the message, blame the voters.
If you didn’t adore Ardern, you were either dim, cruel, or infected by online hate. Anything but the more mundane explanation—that people simply tired of a government that promised everything and delivered very little.
Yes, Ardern lit up magazine covers abroad. Yes, she spoke well in crises. But here, at home, her legacy is a ledger of overreach and underdelivery.
Clark may wish to canonise the Dame as well, but the public verdict is less forgiving. History won’t record her as a saint felled by sexism. It will record a leader who overpromised, underdelivered, and detonated a document that divided the nation.
Clark calls it misogyny. Most NZers (judging by the slowed down sales of ardern’s memoirs) call it memory.
As I reach languidly for the remote to change channels whenever HC is asked to comment, it comes to mind that we are asking a person no longer on the political spectrum for advice? She was voted out. Labour is not in power. Why ask her?
Ardern basically "snotted us all" with her Thunder Dome of Truth and we are glad to see the back of her. Now that she and her co- complicit MPs have dodged the Royal Commission bullet, the only small piece of gratification is that Ardern will no longer be able to walk the streets of NZ without being heckled.
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