How we do politics (Patreon)

I find it really sad. Golriz is a friend of mine so this one is personal too. What she is accused of doing is definitely bad, and it is definitely not behaviour we expect from MPs.

I don't want to relitigate this specific incident, other than to say that I think the Greens, and Aotearoa's parliament is worse off for not having Golriz involved anymore.

But I want to ask if we are doing politics the right way.

I've done a bunch of reading about how western political theatre is set up in a way to benefit men (or rather the way we socialise men), in that it's adversarial, fighty, punishing, etc.

Dame Jacinda said she wanted to bring kindness back into politics and it worked to an extent. But then she was on the receiving end of probably some of the worst vitriol and abuse any NZ politician has faced.

Golriz would be the only one who would be within coo-ee of the amount of threats Jacinda faced. Ever since she got in to Parliament Golriz has faced death threats, sexual violence threats, racism, etc. She's had to get security protection due to the credible nature of those threats. There is no way that being exposed to that sort of abuse regularly wouldn't have an impact.

Before that there was the unreal harassment that Metiria faced too, for admitting she had to commit a crime to feed her whānau.

This ain't it.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, I did an interview with the Guardian where I said the following:

"A huge reason that our politics is not so extremely polarised and so far out there is because we no longer have Murdoch-owned press in New Zealand, and it’s never taken a foothold"*

Smug old me thought that NZ had managed to avoid the worst excesses of American politics, and I thought that was because we had a media that, by global standards, was pretty solid, and straight up and down.

It turns out we hadn't avoided it. We were just a few years behind.

The way that politics seems to take good people, chew them up, and spit them out just ain't it. It means that the people who do get into politics will need to be a very specific type of person to survive and thrive, and I don't think that homogeneity of politicans is healthy for a democracy. It's supposed to be representative. There are plenty of kind, decent, softer people in New Zealand. And Parliament just doesn't seem like it's designed for them.

It's become increasingly acceptable to talk about the mental health burdens we face - I've spoken about my own battles with anxiety frequently - and I think we should commend MPs for being open and frank about it. Todd Muller, Kiri Allan, and now Golriz in recent times.

But we also need to ask why are MPs facing these sorts of crises - does politics attract the sort of person who is vulnerable to mental health issues, or is politics something that exacerbates, or creates, those issues?

I don't really have a solution. But I think we need to think long and hard about it. Yes I know that politicians earn a lot of money (relatively speaking), and so one may argue that they are paid to weather it, but other than maybe sport, there is no other vocation where it seems ok to bay for blood and demand someone resign/be fired like we do for politicans (and I've been guilty of this myself). What's that going to do to your sense of self when you are individually being attacked constantly?

Social media certainly has a role to play - it has enabled people to have a direct line to politicians who are silly enough to be on platforms like X or Instagram (note to politicians, get off social media. No good comes of it). But I don't think this is the root cause of the problem, it's just a way of making it worse.

I hope that Golriz is ok. I hope she's looking after herself. I hope she's surrounded by good people. I hope that the rest of the public give her space to get better. And I hope we figure out a better way to do politics. Because the current system seems like it's failing most of us.

*that quote is probably the most successful thing I'll ever do in my career. It absolutely took off and went viral all round the world. Steve Kerr (coach of the Lakers [edit: it's the Warriors, not the Lakers]) tweeted it out, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about it on a live-stream she did on Twitch, it was massive. It ended up being paraphrased and erroneuously attributed to Jacinda Ardern which was hilarious (there is even a Snopes article debunking that it was JA who said it!). It still periodically shows up on Twitter, usually attributed to Jacinda. Sorry!