No kids

by frog

Let’s make fun of Helen because she doesn’t have any kids!

Yep, National’s dusting off as tactic which singularly failed in both 1999 and 2002: by claiming that Helen Clark’s lack of children makes her unsuited to leading New Zealand. Mother of two Jenny Shipley and father of six Bill English both tried to say, “We have kids, you don’t, so you can’t lead our country”, but both were thwarted by a public deciding they’d rather the politician with the best grasp of policy than the one with the most offspring.

But, hell, perhaps it’ll be third time lucky, right? In the House this past week, and in press releases (here and here), National has none-too-subtly raised Clark’s childlessness again (though, not their own leader’s adultery, which perhaps makes him unsuitable as a moral leader?). This time, it’s been in the context of John Tamihere’s comments about childless members of Labour being clueless about the reality of family life.

National and Act MPs have been making out all week, using Tamihere soundbites as evidence, that the influence that women, gays, the childless, and Maori have on this government means it’s out-of-touch with “ordinary New Zealanders”. If you don’t have kids, you can’t run a government that understands what it’s like to be a parent and juggle family life. If you have too many advisors who happen to be gay, you’ll run a government that is obsessed with gay rights. If you have too many women in high places, you won’t be able to run a government that understands men. Etc, etc, etc.

The proportion of gays, women, childless adults and Maori in the Labour caucus, the Clark Ministry, and the Prime Minister’s Office is actually significantly lower than the proportion of each of these groups in the general population but, as is often the case with lame morally conservative ‘backlashes’, that’s doesn’t stop National attempting to claim otherwise.

But, even worse than this intellectual emptiness is the sheer hypocrisy of National lambasting Labour for somehow being unrepresentative of New Zealand society. If National is offering itself as more representative of New Zealand society, more in line with mainstream Kiwi values, then there sure must be a hell of a lot of balding, white men in New Zealand. Because, really, that’s what National has to offer. Old white men, and a lot of them. In a National’s caucus of 27 MPs, almost 80 percent are men (with no women on the frontbench), 93 percent are Pakeha, and 93 percent are over 40. The future of the party seems just as old, just as male, and just as white (see David Farrar and Greg Stephens).

Yes, the major concern for New Zealand, in terms of being governed by an unrepresentative lot, should have nothing at all to do with too many women, too many gays, or too many childless adults. The groups that are over-represented in Parliament are the old and the male. The 40 percent of voters who are under 40 are represented by 8 percent of MPs. The half of the population that’s female is represented by 28 percent of MPs and about a fifth of Ministers.

One thing we can be very sure of is that a National-led government would entrench, not dismantle, these particular troubling statistics.

UPDATE: spanblater has an interesting post and comments thread on the PM-has-no-kids issue here.