Mess with the census + suppress votes: "undercount & obstruct"
Degrade the census, re-draw district boundaries, and make voting harder and more exclusionary: it's a powerful international recipe for success.
Dr Paul Spoonley and I talked recently about National’s new announcement to kill the NZ census as we know it.
Instead of a physical canvassing of the country, a hands-on head-count of every NZer, it will become an online administrative exercise, using things like driver’s licenses and voting records to create a guess-timate of the NZ population and its characteristics. Why does it matter? Because an accurate census tells us who NZ is, which neighbourhoods have shrunk or grown, who is precarious vs sorted, and what groups we’re all members of and in what proportions. Are you disabled, a woman, or moved house: these details affect, among a mulitude of other things, how much Health NZ money your neighbourhood will be alloted for hospitals, aged care and primary care.
The census helps determine your community’s sliver of the pie. If you don’t get counted, your sliver goes somewhere else. And if recent history is any indication, perhaps it will go to Philip Morris tobacco company, a property investor, or an oil-and-gas corporation.
Might we lose a great deal of detail about NZ’s residents now that they’ve booted the traditional census we’ve used for more than a hundred years? Yes, that’s certainly a risk.
The benefit, say National, is the amount of money saved.
Why the sudden interest in saving money? Govt just set aside 2.9 billion for landlords and 300 million for tobacco companies. The cost of the census is trifling compared to these schemes.
The other benefit for rightwing parties is that an “administrative” census conveniently risks losing track of all the people that don’t have driver’s licenses, don’t vote, and don’t have great online or administrative presences. The invisible people will likely come from the ranks of the unemployed, homemaker spouses, immigrants, homeless people, and other groups that a “real” census has a better chance of capturing.
Now, these groups are known to be less likely voters for our coalition rightwing parties. So undercounting them works out conveniently for decreasing the progressive vote. Sadly it’s a double whammy, as they lose their voice, and they risk losing their benefits: the census is an important way governments allocate and distribute aid, investment, and benefits. If you’re invisible and undercounted, your community may not get that hospital, school, or that small business support it desperately needs.
Combine that with voter suppression, and you’ve got a recipe that’s playing out in the UK, US, and other countries where the rightwing populists are having a resurgence.
In NZ, voter suppression is taking a slightly slower course than in the US, with its heady steps to disenfranchise the poor, young and old, and minority voters.
https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/voter-suppression
New Zealand’s coalition government policies are Trumpian, but with a time-delay. We’re certainly sinking in that direction, but we’re starting from a slightly higher starting point. If we don’t awaken and unify, we’ll arrive there sooner or later.
So far though, instead of erecting the full panoply of voting barriers like restricted registration, stringent voter ID laws, cutting early voting times, aggressively purging voter rolls, and reducing numbers and hours of polling places in minority communities (making them difficult for workers and public-transport dependent people to get after work), NZ coalition govt politicians are starting with just a couple smaller trump-steps.
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Banning same-day voter registration. Requiring 13 day advance registration. Eliminating prisoner voting. Eliminating food and even drinking water from being provided to voters at polling places.
[Voters, for ages, have been able to turn up to the voting booth and register, with their vote being counted as a special vote. But not any longer. In 2023, 450,000 voters enrolled in the period after voting began. In 2023 they were considered “legal voters”, now they’re termed “dropkicks” by politicians like Mr Seymour.]
Who do these Election Law changes hurt? Anyone shifting accomodation, specifically students, low-income people, and minorities.
The publicly-stated reason for the voter suppression: it takes 2 weeks to count special votes. Govt politicians say that’s too long. (And therefore they’ve got to pass this voter suppression law.)
If democracy and vote counting takes 2 weeks, or even 3, that’s fine. Much better than stripping perhaps 350,000 people of their votes because of paperwork problems, in effect telling people their address details are correct some 13 days before election day, they won’t get the privilege of voting”.
Who are these people? Why, people more likely to be non-National/ACT/NZF voters of course. Again: students, migrants, and Māori and Pacific peoples. People returning to NZ after extended periods abroad, new residents, and people released from prison. Plus a portion of the the 97,000 people who registered for the first time during the voting period in 2023, and the 134,000 people who changed electoral districts during the last voting period.
But hey, in all of this voter registration, they still had time to look out for the donors: the Electoral Amendment Act will make hiding your name when you donate $5,000 to a political party a little easier, by raising the limit for “anonymous” donations to $6,000. Ha! This current govt thinks it’s good to match inflation for a donor to their campaign, but not for the nurse taking care of their grandmother.
It’s indecent. And it’s where we’ve ended up by not completely eliminating the role of big money donations in elections. The political campaign donors are now taken better care of than the actual NZ voters.
If it walks like a govt for the 1%, and quacks like a govt for the 1%, it is a govt for the 1%. And it’s only going to get worse if it’s not contained.
—Gary Payinda
We cannot allow the disaster to happen. If everyone helps their family and friends to register to vote and then ensure they vote at the right time we will win.
Yes, the CoC are not even trying to hide their MAGA'fuckation importation. Same policy within days.
https://bsky.app/profile/thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lvspddn4hk2u